A scientific instrument at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could help create a noninvasive cancer treatment derived from a common tropical plant.

Pancratistatin is a chemical compound found in the spider lily, a native Hawaiian flower. Unlike traditional treatments, it kills cancer cells while keeping healthy cells intact.

Environmental scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have recently expanded collaborations with minority-serving institutions and historically Black colleges and universities across the nation to broaden the experiences and skills of student scientists while bringing fresh insights to the national lab’s missions.

Joanna Tannous has found the perfect organism to study to satisfy her deeply curious nature, her skills in biochemistry and genetics, and a drive to create solutions for a better world. The organism is a poorly understood life form that greatly influences its environment and is unique enough to deserve its own biological kingdom: fungi.

The Spallation Neutron Source at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory set a world record when its linear accelerator reached an operating power of 1.55 megawatts, which improves on the facility’s original design capability.

Warming a crystal of the mineral fresnoite, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists discovered that excitations called phasons carried heat three times farther and faster than phonons, the excitations that usually carry heat through a material.

“Neutrons were ideal for exploring these sources of heat transport because they interact with both phasons and phonons,” said Michael Manley, who led the study with Raphael Hermann.