Oak Ridge National Laboratory

New Capabilities

Partner on six Phase II awards, leads one

The Energy Department moved $159 million into 12 new AI science projects on Oct 8, its second round of Genesis Mission awards. It also released eight 'priority applications' to steer its quantum computing push. AI company Anthropic has committed $150 million over three years to the mission.

Updated 6 days ago

New Capabilities

Demonstrated AI-built artificial graphene lattice

Multi-agent AI systems now design, run, and analyze materials experiments with minimal human input. In January 2026, China's Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology published MARS, coordinating 19 large language model agents with robots. A September 2026 paper in Nature Machine Intelligence introduced MatBrain, a lightweight system that generated 30,000 candidate crystal structures in 48 hours.

Updated Sep 27

New Capabilities

Provided neutron imaging capability

Scotty, the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on record, died 66 million years ago with a broken rib that was still healing. The rib holds a dense network of mineralized blood vessels that formed as the dinosaur's body worked to repair the fracture.

Updated Sep 24

New Capabilities

Led the study; hosts the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

Hybrid quantum optimization has a cost problem: each subproblem needs a custom circuit tuned by trial and error, often hundreds of runs. IonQ, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), NVIDIA, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT) showed a trained generative model can write those circuits directly. That removes the tuning loop.

Updated Sep 23

New Capabilities

Patent pending; process listed for licensing

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory team has turned polyethylene, the most common plastic in shopping bags and cutting boards, into gasoline and diesel by stirring it into molten aluminum chloride salts at under 200°C. The reaction yields about 60% gasoline and runs at the heat of a kitchen oven, not a blast furnace.

Updated Sep 21