PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, March 2015

2015-03-13
(Press-News.org) BUILDINGS -- Shielding against energy loss ...

Air seeping from buildings is responsible for a large amount of wasted energy each year. To combat the problem, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory collaborated with the Dow Chemical Company to develop a sprayable liquid flashing that is more cost-effective than traditional sealing materials such as peel-and-stick tapes. The new technology can be used in residential and commercial construction, and its ease of use results in increased energy savings and decreased labor and installation costs. Additionally, the liquid sealing performs well on substrates that are difficult for tapes to adhere to such as masonry blocks and exterior grade drywall. Dow introduced the LIQUIDARMOR technology to the U.S. market in September. [Contact: Morgan McCorkle, (865) 574-7308; mccorkleml@ornl.gov]

TECH TRANSFER - Innovations showcase ...

Business leaders, entrepreneurs and community members will get a chance March 25 to see emerging technologies available for licensing from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee. The Fifth Annual Spark! Technology Forum will feature innovations in biotechnology, computational and cyber security, materials and materials processing, and sensor and detector systems. One innovation is a seed-coating treatment shown to increase soybean and snap bean yields while reducing seedling diseases in snap beans. On the cyber security front, researchers will demonstrate a technology that can recognize malicious software even if the specific program has not been previously identified as a threat. Other technologies to be showcased include a new process for separating and purifying rare earth elements needed for electronics and an off-axis iris recognition system with potential uses for identification and verification. Registration information is available at http://www.ornl.gov/connect-with-ornl/for-industry/partnerships/events-and-conferences/spark-2015. [Contact: Ron Walli, (865) 576-0226; wallira@ornl.gov]

MANUFACTURING - GE Appliances, ORNL sign agreement ...

GE Appliances will be working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to test the waters for innovative products before making multi-million dollar investments. GE's FirstBuild business model takes advantage of advanced technologies and manufacturing techniques to perform rapid prototyping and low-volume production and validation of concepts through low-volume sales. Success at these volumes -- 20 to 30 units -- will enable GE Appliances to justify the significant investment needed to move graduates of the FirstBuild process to full production. The arrangement, which will take advantage of ORNL's Building Technologies Research and Integration Center and the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, was finalized with the recent signing of a memorandum of understanding. [Contact: Ron Walli, (865) 576-0226; wallira@ornl.gov]

CYBER - Security focus of conference ...

Hundreds of the nation's premier cyberspace researchers will gather at Oak Ridge National Laboratory April 7-9 to participate in the 10th Annual Cyber and Information Security Research Conference. The event will bring together cyber security researchers, program managers, decision makers, security vendors and practitioners to discuss challenges and novel solutions related to cyber security. "Cyberspace is fundamental to our national prosperity as it has become critical to commerce, research, education and government," said Joe Trien, co-general chair. Additional information is available at http://www.cisr.ornl.gov/cisrc15/. [Contact: Ron Walli, (865) 576-0226; wallira@ornl.gov]

MATERIALS - Better innovation through imaging ...

Researchers should not have to rely on mere trial and error to create materials for energy applications. To accelerate discoveries that underpin economically important innovations, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory institute takes a new approach by bringing together atomic-scale imaging and computation to find a needle of new knowledge in a haystack of data. "Microscopy gives us eyes to peer into matter more closely than ever before to gain unprecedented insight. Big data allows us to comprehend what we are seeing and use that new knowledge to predict the properties of materials we design," said Sergei Kalinin, director of ORNL's Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials. Since the institute's launch in June, its researchers have submitted several reports of accomplishments to journals, and its first publication is forthcoming in Nature Communications. [Contact: Dawn Levy, (865) 576-6448; levyd@ornl.gov]

CLIMATE -- Monitoring changes in Alaskan permafrost ...

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory-led team is observing how thawing of permafrost, or frozen soil, affects the carbon cycle in the Alaskan Seward Peninsula. Trees, shrubs and grasses are creeping northward, and new lakes are appearing as permafrost thaws due to warming. Team members traveled to the peninsula several times in 2014 as part of the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments Arctic project to corroborate satellite and sensing data with field observations. They are using the information to improve the representation of ecological processes that drive the carbon cycle in climate models. In particular, they are developing specialized parameters for different types of Arctic vegetation to avoid "green sponges" in climate models, or the uniform modeling of diverse plant processes and their unique contributions to the carbon cycle, which can lead to over- or underestimating future greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. [Contact: Morgan McCorkle, (865) 574-7308; mccorkleml@ornl.gov]

MATERIALS - Better innovation through imaging ...

Researchers should not have to rely on mere trial and error to create materials for energy applications. To accelerate discoveries that underpin economically important innovations, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory institute takes a new approach by bringing together atomic-scale imaging and computation to find a needle of new knowledge in a haystack of data. "Microscopy gives us eyes to peer into matter more closely than ever before to gain unprecedented insight. Big data allows us to comprehend what we are seeing and use that new knowledge to predict the properties of materials we design," said Sergei Kalinin, director of ORNL's Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials. Since the institute's launch in June, its researchers have submitted several reports of accomplishments to journals, and its first publication has just been issued in Nature Communications. [Contact: Dawn Levy, (865) 576-6448; levyd@ornl.gov]

INFORMATION:

To arrange for an interview with a researcher, please contact the Communications staff member identified at the end of each tip. For more information on ORNL and its research and development activities, please refer to one of our media contacts. If you have a general media-related question or comment, you can send it to news@ornl.gov.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

NCCN publishes new guidelines for smoking cessation

2015-03-13
COLUMBUS, OHIO and FORT WASHINGTON, PA -- Tobacco-related diseases are the most preventable cause of death worldwide; smoking cessation leads to improvement in cancer treatment outcomes, as well as decreased recurrence. According to the American Cancer Society, in 2015, nearly 171,000 of the estimated 589,430 cancer deaths in the United States--more than 25 percent--will be caused by tobacco smoking. To meet the needs of patients who are smokers at the time of a cancer diagnosis, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) has published the NCCN Clinical ...

New quality measures approved for childhood sleep apnea

2015-03-13
A work group of physicians from leading academic medical centers across the country, including NYU Langone Medical Center, has developed new quality measures for the detection and treatment of childhood obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a potentially morbid, life-altering condition that affects hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents nationwide. The measures, commissioned and endorsed by the American Association of Sleep Medicine (AASM), are published on March 15 in a special section of The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. Several different practice guidelines ...

Publication of sleep medicine quality measures promotes value-based care

2015-03-13
DARIEN, IL - Today the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) published new quality measures for five common sleep disorders, which represents a landmark achievement in the promotion of high quality, patient-centered care in the medical subspecialty of sleep medicine. The summary paper, "Measurement of Quality to Improve Care in Sleep Medicine," is published in the March issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine along with five workgroup papers presenting outcome and process measures to aid in evaluating the quality of care of restless legs syndrome, insomnia, ...

Organisms can keep gene expression in check: York U biologist

2015-03-13
TORONTO, March 13, 2015 - York University researchers have learned how living beings can keep gene expression in check -- which might partly explain the uncontrolled gene expression found in many cancers. "Using yeast as a model organism, we studied the Tup1 protein, a negative regulator of gene expression," says Biology Professor Emanuel Rosonina, adding, "This protein binds to some genes and blocks their expression, helping to ensure genes that shouldn't be turned on remain inactive." The current study, jointly conducted by York University and Columbia University ...

New technology may double radio frequency data capacity

New technology may double radio frequency data capacity
2015-03-13
New York, NY--March 23, 2015--A team of Columbia Engineering researchers has invented a technology--full-duplex radio integrated circuits (ICs)--that can be implemented in nanoscale CMOS to enable simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency in a wireless radio. Up to now, this has been thought to be impossible: transmitters and receivers either work at different times or at the same time but at different frequencies. The Columbia team, led by Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, is the first to demonstrate an IC that can accomplish ...

NASA spacecraft in Earth's orbit, preparing to study magnetic reconnection

NASA spacecraft in Earths orbit, preparing to study magnetic reconnection
2015-03-13
Following a successful launch at 10:44 p.m. EDT Thursday, NASA's four Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft are positioned in Earth's orbit to begin the first space mission dedicated to the study of a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. This process is thought to be the catalyst for some of the most powerful explosions in our solar system. The spacecraft, positioned one on top of the other on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 421 rocket, launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. After reaching orbit, each spacecraft deployed from the rocket's upper ...

Tropical Cyclone Nathan crawling in NASA satellite imagery

Tropical Cyclone Nathan crawling in NASA satellite imagery
2015-03-13
Tropical Cyclone Nathan has made its cyclonic loop in the Coral Sea near Queensland, Australia's Cape York Peninsula, and is headed away from land. However, satellite imagery reveals that Nathan's movement away from Queensland is a slow crawl. On March 13 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT), Tropical Cyclone Nathan's maximum sustained winds were near 55 knots (63 mph/102 kph). It was centered near 13.1 south latitude and 145.5 east longitude, about 229 nautical miles (263 miles/424 kph) north of Cairns, Australia. Nathan has slowed down and was moving to the east-northeast at 2 ...

Invasive species use landmarking to find love in a hopeless place

2015-03-13
Tiny populations of invasive species such as Asian carp start their domination of new ecosystems by hanging out at local landmarks, according to a new study published in the journal Theoretical Ecology this week. Understanding how species use these local hotspots can play a key role in how officials approach population control for conserving endangered species and controlling invasive ones. "We recently found that only ten Asian carp are needed to establish a population in the Great Lakes," said Kim Cuddington, an ecology professor from the University of Waterloo. "But ...

Chitin, a structural molecule associated with allergy response, is identified in vertebrates

2015-03-13
(Seattle, WA - March 12, 2015) Scientists at Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI) have made an unexpected discovery that overturns a longstanding belief in the biological sciences. Research, led by Chris Amemiya, PhD, a member at BRI, and primarily conducted by Joyce Tang, was published online in today's issue of Current Biology. The research demonstrates that chitin, a molecule that was previously thought to be absent in vertebrates and that has been shown to trigger an allergy/immune reaction in mammals, is endogenously produced in fishes and amphibians. ...

Tropical Storm Bavi moving through Northwestern Pacific Ocean

Tropical Storm Bavi moving through Northwestern Pacific Ocean
2015-03-13
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Bavi as it continued on a west-northwesterly track through the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. Bavi has already generated a typhoon watch for Guam, Rota, Tinian and Saipan. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of Bavi on March 13. The image showed the eastern two-thirds of the storm and revealed strong thunderstorms around the center of circulation and a thick band of thunderstorms north of the center. On March 13 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT), Tropical Storm Bavi ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Corpse flowers are threatened by spotty recordkeeping

Riding the AI wave toward rapid, precise ocean simulations

Are lifetimes of big appliances really shrinking?

Pink skies

Monkeys are world’s best yodellers - new research

Key differences between visual- and memory-led Alzheimer’s discovered

% weight loss targets in obesity management – is this the wrong objective?

An app can change how you see yourself at work

NYC speed cameras take six months to change driver behavior, effects vary by neighborhood, new study reveals

New research shows that propaganda is on the rise in China

Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds

Novel genes linked to rare childhood diarrhea

New computer model reveals how Bronze Age Scandinavians could have crossed the sea

Novel point-of-care technology delivers accurate HIV results in minutes

Researchers reveal key brain differences to explain why Ritalin helps improve focus in some more than others

Study finds nearly five-fold increase in hospitalizations for common cause of stroke

Study reveals how alcohol abuse damages cognition

Medicinal cannabis is linked to long-term benefits in health-related quality of life

Microplastics detected in cat placentas and fetuses during early pregnancy

Ancient amphibians as big as alligators died in mass mortality event in Triassic Wyoming

Scientists uncover the first clear evidence of air sacs in the fossilized bones of alvarezsaurian dinosaurs: the "hollow bones" which help modern day birds to fly

Alcohol makes male flies sexy

TB patients globally often incur "catastrophic costs" of up to $11,329 USD, despite many countries offering free treatment, with predominant drivers of cost being hospitalization and loss of income

Study links teen girls’ screen time to sleep disruptions and depression

Scientists unveil starfish-inspired wearable tech for heart monitoring

Footprints reveal prehistoric Scottish lagoons were stomping grounds for giant Jurassic dinosaurs

AI effectively predicts dementia risk in American Indian/Alaska Native elders

First guideline on newborn screening for cystic fibrosis calls for changes in practice to improve outcomes

Existing international law can help secure peace and security in outer space, study shows

Pinning down the process of West Nile virus transmission

[Press-News.org] Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, March 2015