The research reactor at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is back in action and better than ever.

After $70 million in renovations and more than a year of meticulous system checks, ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor was restarted this week, taken to 10 percent power, and reached its peak power of 85 megawatts Wednesday.

Combining statistics and chemistry, researchers are challenging the evidence for the lone-gunman theory in the 1963 assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy.

Texas A&M University professor of statistics Cliff Spiegelman recently teamed with former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent and forensic scientist William A. Tobin of Forensic Engineering International in Virginia and William D.

Physicists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a new form of matter that melds the characteristics of lasers with those of the world’s best electrical conductors. The work introduces a new method of moving energy from one point to another as well as a low-energy means of producing a light beam like that from a laser.

A lethal fish virus in the Great Lakes and neighboring waterways is approaching epidemic proportions, according to Paul Bowser, Cornell professor of aquatic animal medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine. The viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV), which causes anemia and hemorrhaging in fish, has now been identified in 19 species and poses a potential threat to New York’s $1.2 billion sport-fishing industry.

"It’s pretty obvious this is an epidemic even if it isn’t official," said Bowser. "There are just so many species affected and so many mortalities."

When it comes to estimating the intelligence of various animal species, it may be as simple measuring overall brain size. In fact, making corrections for a species' body size may be a mistake. The findings were reported by researchers at Grand Valley State University and the Anthropological Institute and Museum at the University of Zürich, Switzerland.

"It's long been known that species with larger body sizes generally have larger brains," said Robert Deaner, assistant professor of psychology at Grand Valley and the first author on the study. "Scientists have generally assumed that this pattern occurs because larger animals require larger nervous systems to coordinate their larger bodies. But our results suggest a simpler reason: larger species are typically smarter."

A team of University of Georgia researchers has developed a new biofuel derived from wood chips. Unlike previous fuels derived from wood, the new and still unnamed fuel can be blended with biodiesel and petroleum diesel to power conventional engines.

"The exciting thing about our method is that it is very easy to do," said Tom Adams, director of the UGA Faculty of Engineering outreach service. "We expect to reduce the price of producing fuels from biomass dramatically with this technique."

New evidence may help explain the brute strength of the tyrannosaurid, says a University of Alberta researcher whose finding demonstrates how a fused nasal bone helped turn the animal into a "zoological superweapon."

"Fused, arch-like nasal bones are a unique feature of tyrannosaurids," said Dr. Eric Snively, a post doctoral research fellow at the University of Alberta. "This adaptation, for instance, was keeping the T. rexes from breaking their own skull while breaking the bones of their prey."

Scientists have observed the first evidence that the Southern Ocean's ability to absorb the major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has weakened by about 15 per cent per decade since 1981.

In research published today in Science, an international research team – including CSIRO's Dr Ray Langenfelds – concludes that the Southern Ocean carbon dioxide sink has weakened over the past 25 years and will be less efficient in the future. Such weakening of one of the Earth's major carbon dioxide sinks will lead to higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the long-term.

Scientists supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) at the National Institutes of Health have created two mouse strains that will permit researchers to trace, in a live animal, the activity of an enzyme believed to play a crucial role both in the normal immune response as well as autoimmunity and B cell tumor development.

Researchers at the University of Illinois have constructed the first global family tree of metabolic protein architecture. Their approach offers a new window on the evolutionary history of metabolism.

Their work relies on established techniques of phylogenetic analysis developed in the past decade to plot the evolution of genes and organisms but which have never before been used to work out the evolutionary history of protein architecture across biological networks.