ACADEMIA

OAK RIDGE, TN -- Researchers and engineers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have won two R&D 100 Awards, pushing their national lab-leading total to 109 since the awards began in 1963. The awards, announced today by ORNL Director Bill Madia, are presented annually by R&D Magazine in recognition of the year's most significant technological innovations. ORNL's 109 R&D 100 awards place it first among DOE laboratories and second only to General Electric. "I'm proud of the award-winning work done at ORNL," Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham said. "These accomplishments demonstrate the value of government-funded research to our nation." The awards were for the following processes or inventions: Protein Structure Prediction and Evaluation Computer Toolkit (PROSPECT), developed and submitted by Ying Xu and Dong Xu of ORNL. The toolkit is a suite of computational tools designed to predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Knowledge of these highly specific three-dimensional structures is vital to the study of disease, the development of drugs and genome research. The employment of a new method called "threading" allows PROSPECT to determine a protein's geometry in a matter of hours, in contrast to the months or years required by current experimental approaches. Drop-In Residential Heat Pump Water Heater, developed by Van Baxter, Richard Murphy, John Tomlinson and Randall Linkous of ORNL. This is a joint winner with ECR International of Dunkirk, N.Y., and Arthur D. Little of Cambridge, Mass. The 50-gallon water heater uses one-third as much electricity as a conventional electric water heater. The energy reduction is accomplished through the use of a small heat pump to extract heat from the surrounding air - leaving it cool and dehumidified. The water heater is the first unit of its kind to be both economically attractive and easy to install, making it a viable replacement for traditional electric water heaters. ORNL researchers estimate that if one-half of America's existing electric water heaters were replaced by the new drop-in device, the nation's entire energy consumption would be reduced by one percent. ---------- DEAR READER: We at Supercomputing Online are aware that water pumps are not terribly on topic. However, as fans of scientific innovation, of all kinds, we felt obliged to leave it in the above story.