Scientific research can be vexing and tiring at times, but for Bianca Haberl, the euphoria of discovery is the ultimate reward.
The summertime temperatures in the North Slope and Seward Peninsula of Alaska rarely reach higher than 50 degrees F and the perpetually dark winters fall below minus 20 F. It is a brutal environment for any researcher studying the Arctic ecosystem, much less a supercomputer modeler who should be inside writing simulation code for the Titan supercomputer, not probing permafrost patterns on the tundra.
Yet that is exactly what Peter Thornton does.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have received seven R&D 100 Awards in recognition of their significant advancements in science and technology. The honorees were recognized on Nov. 3 at the 54th annual R&D 100 Conference, sponsored by R&D Magazine.
A multinational team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory Climate Change Science Institute has found the first positive correlation between human activity and enhanced vegetation growth.
Designing a 3-D printed structure is hard enough when the product is inches or feet in size. Imagine shrinking it smaller than a drop of water, smaller even than a human hair, until it is dwarfed by a common bacterium.
It is a bright, hot morning in mid-May on the Oak Ridge Reservation. A wildlife camera trap is hidden in the tall grass, passively waiting for a passerby, when a thin, exotic-looking bird walks into the frame.
It is covered in a patchwork of bright colors, with rich purple-blue feathers blending into an iridescent green on its back, a distinctive pale blue spot on its forehead and a bright red beak tipped in yellow. The camera snaps a picture and there it is: The first ever confirmed sighting of a purple gallinule on the Oak Ridge Reservation.
I talked to a few people about why they weren’t interested in robotics. The majority responded with apathy. Robots were too sci-fi, too nerdy. They had no reason to care. Robots didn’t directly affect their personal lives and they didn’t think they ever would. I was struck by how misinformed, how blind they were to the role robotics play in our world every day...
While we are a long way off from truly “curing” HIV/AIDS, the small victories show the fight is far from impossible, and breakthroughs are not just potential but inevitable...
Imagine passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets flying the skies over the United States. See Tasmanian tigers running through the Australian outback, Caribbean monk seals swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, and the dodo waddling around the islands of the Indian Ocean. Can’t picture it? That’s because all of these animals are extinct — for now...
The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN Initiative, is an effort to move scientific progress forward into the 21st century, and if it goes through, it will lead to one of the largest scientific endeavors in history.
Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence also opens up discussions of philosophical and ethical issues that help humanity define itself in the grand scale of the universe...
Our overuse of artificial lighting poisons the night sky without us even realizing it...
Scientific discovery can come from anywhere, but few researchers can say the answers to their questions would come from the pea-sized bones in the head of a six-foot-long, 200-pound prehistoric freshwater fish.