MEDICAL -- Focusing on brain injuries
Using a focused beam of ultrasound waves to detect brain injuries, doctors can avoid using surgically implanted sensors while saving lives of people with head injuries. After an initial injury, bleeding may occur between the skull and brain, blocking blood flow through the brain. With conventional technology, doctors take CAT scans and monitor the patient's injury using surgically implanted sensors. The ORNL method uses a non-invasive, portable, easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive device to accomplish the same task. If a cut, clot or tumor is present, the symmetry of ultrasound echo patterns in the brain may be distorted, indicating an abnormality. [Contact: Tuan Vo-Dinh]
LAW ENFORCEMENT -- Semi-lethal force
Police officers armed with a weapon developed at ORNL will be able to dial up the velocity of the bullet depending on the situation and the intent of the shooter. Using a cartridge based on the standard shotgun shell, Rusi Taleyarkhan and colleagues have harnessed the power of vapor explosions to allow projectiles to stun, disable or kill. The propellant in the cartridge takes advantage of the explosive interaction between aluminum and water. Molten aluminum reacting with water can produce up to three times the energy of high explosives. The variable velocity projectile can be made of steel, lead or even fluid. [Contact: Rusi Taleyarkhan]
ENERGY -- New climate technology gets tryout
Although Los Angeles' Village Green is a new development of modestly priced homes, most will include cutting-edge climate control technology as part of a test coordinated by ORNL. The model homes will come equipped with natural gas-operated GAX air-conditioning units. The newly developed GAX (generator-absorber-heat exchange) AC units will eventually be combined with GAX heating units, which outperform conventional gas furnaces by one-third. They also emit no greenhouse gases. The California development, the first DOE field test of the fuel-frugal GAX system, includes numerous other energy-efficient and environmentally benign technologies, hence the name "Village Green." [Contact: Bob Devault]
BIOLOGY -- Predicting protein shapes
What a protein does depends on its shape, and this information is vital to development of new drugs. Although the amino-acid sequences of thousands of proteins have been determined, the three-dimensional structures of only a few hundred proteins are known. Because determining protein structures experimentally is time consuming and tedious, scientists are using computer modeling to predict these structures quickly from amino acid sequences. In a recent international contest involving 100 groups, ORNL's computer package, called the Protein Structure Prediction and Evaluation Computer Toolkit, scored in the top 5 percent because it can accurately predict an unknown protein's detailed shape and amino acid positions. [Contact: Ying Xu]
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