The World’s most powerful non-destructive magnet screams like a banshee

Magnet Lab Director Chuck Mielke (center) and colleagues celebrate their 100T shot. LANL photo.

You don’t normally associate any kind of sound with a magnet. But apparently that’s because the ones stuck to your fridge aren’t two million times as powerful as the Earth’s magnetic field — like the one the Los Alamos Laboratory just created.

For over a decade and a half the lab has been trying to create a magnet with a strength of 100 Tesla that doesn’t destroy itself in the process. And when they finally succeeded in hitting that level — at around the 1:36 mark in the video — the magnet emits a haunting scream instead of the electric hum you’d expect. If I worked in that lab I’d have nightmares every night. (Full Story)


World record magnetic field 100T

Scientists jump for joy at the new World Record. LANL video.

Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory campus of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have successfully produced the world's first 100 Tesla non-destructive magnetic field. The achievement was decades in the making, involving a diverse team of scientists and engineers.

A YouTube video of the world-record pulsed, non-destructive magnetic field generated at LANL’s National High Magnetic Field Lab went viral during the week, generating more than 100,000 views since it was posted late Thursday (March 22). Watch the video here.

Read the full news release for even more!


Lab reaches magnet milestone

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s biggest magnet facility Thursday met the grand challenge of producing magnetic fields in excess of 100 tesla, while conducting six different experiments. “This is our moon shot, we’ve worked toward this for a decade and a half,” said Chuck Mielke, director of the Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos. (Full Story)


Additional stories from the Los Alamos Monitor this week:

Los Alamos conference reaches out to girls

Harshini Mukundan, center, of C-PCS shows girls how DNA can be extracted from cheek cells. LANL photo.

“Pulling out DNA from your own cheek cells!,” “Ooey, Gooey, Polymers” and “Minerals in Makeup” were just some of the hands-on classes to choose from during the 33rd annual Expanding Your Horizons conference in Los Alamos.

Empowering young women to pursue learning in science and math was the goal of the conference and approximately 100 high school girls from all over Northern New Mexico piled into the Crossroads Bible Church to attend. (Full Story)

The man behind the photograph

Jack Aeby with his Perfex-44 35mm camera. From the Monitor.

Jack Aeby witnessed the first atomic bomb test in the United States on July 16, 1945. Not only did he witness this history-making event, he was permitted to take photographs with his personal 35mm camera. (Full Story)


NNSA makes progress on PF-4 upgrades

A letter written by NNSA’s Donald Cook, which details the technical basis, actions taken to improve safety and plans for safety improvements from operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4).

Cook wrote, “Our immediate assessment of the situation concluded that the additional risk from the continued operation of PF-4 remained small compared to other risks faced by the public, so no emergency actions were warranted. (Full Story)


More grapes, less wrath: Hybrid antimicrobial protein protects grapevines from pathogen

Photo by Petr Kratochvil.

A team of researchers has found a way to ensure that your evening glass of wine will continue to be available, despite the potential attack of Xylella fastidiosa, a bacterium that causes Pierce's Disease and poses a significant threat to the California wine industry's valuable grapevines.

Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California at Davis, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service have created specially engineered grapevines that produce a hybrid antimicrobial protein that can block Xf infection. (Full Story)


LANL expands security checks

Canine handler Matthew Nguyen and his dog Dawson practice an inspection. LANL photo.

People passing through Department of Energy land at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are now subject to the same security checkpoints and vehicle searches in use deeper within the lab.

Jack Killeen, the security services division leader, said last week the searches, which use bomb-sniffing dogs, require drivers to step out of their cars and open their glove boxes and trunks to the lab’s Protective Force. (Full Story)

Also from the Journal this week:

557 workers accept lab buyout

Los Alamos National Laboratory announced Monday that 557 employees will leave the lab as part of a voluntary separation program announced last month.

That’s enough to make it “much less likely we will need to file a plan for an involuntary reduction” in the lab’s permanent workforce via layoffs, said spokesman Fred deSousa. (Full Story)


Coalition wants more funding for LANL

The Coalition of LANL Communities sent representatives to Washington earlier this month to meet with a New Mexico congressional delegation. Currently the group is seeking an increase in the nuclear weapons agency environmental management account. (Full Story)


NNSA achieves major milestone in radioactive source security

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced this month the recovery of the 30,000th disused and unwanted radioactive source. The NNSA s Global Threat Reduction Initiative's (GTRI) milestone of 30,000 sources represents a total of more than 825,000 curies of radioactivity.

These sources were recovered in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory and the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors from sites throughout the United States. (Full Story)


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Curiosity, NASA’s laser-blasting Mars robot

Sometime this August, a six-wheeled, sedan-size mars rover named Curiosity should begin rolling across the surface of the Red Planet. The vehicle, carried to its destination aboard the Mars Science Laboratory, will start its journey on the floor of Gale Crater.

Each time ChemCam’s infrared laser hits rock, the impact point will erupt into a tiny ball of plasma, explains principal investigator Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (full story)

Magnetic field researchers shatter world record during six-experiment pulse

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory's biggest magnet facility today met the grand challenge of producing magnetic fields in excess of 100 tesla while conducting six different experiments. The hundred-tesla level is roughly equivalent to 2 million times Earth's magnetic field.

"This is our moon shot, we've worked toward this for a decade and a half," said Chuck Mielke, director of the Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos. (full story)

Scientist: North Korea likely has more nuclear facilities

North Korea has more uranium enrichment facilities than it has admitted to previously, a U.S. scientist charged Thursday.

Prof. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of Los Alamos National Laboratory, now at Stanford University, told CNN his conclusion is based on his study of recent satellite images and other research, and what he saw when he was invited by North Korea to visit its Yongbyon nuclear power plant in 2010 to see its secret uranium enrichment program. (full story)

Postdoc or not?

A postdoctoral fellowship at federal labs in Europe and the United States may sometimes lead directly to a full-time permanent position. Mary Anne With, a postdoctoral adviser at Los Alamos National

Laboratory in New Mexico, says that 80–90% of the lab's technical positions are filled by former postdocs. (full story)

LANL scholarships aid returning students

Avery May's getting some help from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation to pay some of her costs. May is one of 10 "non-traditional" students to receive a $1,000 scholarship from the foundation.

May, now 27, is studying for an associate's degree in biological science at Santa Fe Community College and plans eventually to go to medical school. (full story)

Will space battles be fought with laser weapons?

For certain niche scenarios, lasers might prove themselves ideal. It seems unlikely, however, that they will ever outright replace missiles and bullets, as they do in so much sci-fi warfare.

"No conventional weapon is a panacea," said Douglas Beason, former associate lab director at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Why would we expect directed-energy weapons to be any different?" (full story)

Los Alamos conference reaches out to girls

“Pulling out DNA from your own cheek cells!,” “Ooey, Gooey, Polymers” and “Minerals in Makeup” were just some of the hands-on classes to choose from during the 33rd annual Expanding Your Horizons conference in Los Alamos.

Empowering young women to pursue learning in science and math was the goal of the conference and approximately 100 high school girls from all over Northern New Mexico piled into the Crossroads Bible Church to attend.

Conference Registrar Georgia Pedicini said the conference not only encourages young women to attend, but also invites young men to attend. She said Los Alamos is one of the only EYH organization in the state to do so. However, Pedicini said the two young men that registered this year did not attend. “It’s a time when they realize life is approaching,” she said. (full story)

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Guarding grapevines with genes

Dying grapevines. Auburn University photo.

By using genes from humans and insects, scientists created a hybrid gene that can identify the bacteria and kill it, ridding the vine of Pierce's disease before infection. The team inserted the hybrid gene into grapevines, and sap from those vines killed the bacteria in a lab test.

“Due to the synergy of the two functions, you can recognize a pathogen and clear it instantly,” said Goutam Gupta of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which worked on the program with researchers from UC Davis and the USDA. (Full Story)


Could a nuke stop an asteroid after all?

PC Magazine Illustration.

The ongoing debate about how best to deflect an Earth-bound space rock has taken another turn—it seems a targeted nuclear explosion may just do the trick after all.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have been using the Cielo supercomputer to work on various nuclear weapons physics problems in recent months. Most are classified, but some are being shared with the public, like the model of what would happen if a one-megaton nuclear blast impacted a granular asteroid that's detailed in a video. (Full Story)

This story also appeared in Space.com, Discovery News, and HPCwire


LANL reveals Saturn finding

Saturn’s moon, Dione. NASA image.

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, along with an international research team, have announced the discovery of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere of Dione, one of Saturn’s 62 moons.

The finding could have implications for how life couldform on other celestial bodies.

Robert Tokar, a lab scientist who worked on the project, said NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, a nuclear-powered craft the size of a school bus launched in 1997, detected the oxygen ions on a flyby of the small, 700-mile wide moon. Cassini buzzed the moon in 2010, according to a statement from the lab. (Full Story)


IX Power to develop new water, energy tech with LANL

From left, Marcus Lucero, John R. Grizz Deal, Kathleen McDonald, Randall Wilson, Otis (Pete) Peterson, and David Pesiri, LANL Tech Transfer division leader. LANL photo.

IX Power LLC signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop and commercialize new water and energy-related technologies.

Under the agreement, IX Power (pronounced “Nine Power”) will provide funding to evaluate and further develop LANL inventions that it hopes to take to market, said IX Power CEO John “Grizz” Deal. (Full Story)

This story also appeared in the Los Alamos Monitor


Panasas and Los Alamos National Lab to examine big data I/O requirements for exascale computing

Dr. Garth Gibson, Panasas co-founder and CTO, and Gary Grider, high performance computing division deputy leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory, will take part in the "Faster Memory, Faster Compute" panel at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference to be held in New York, NY, March 21 and March 22, 2012. (Full Story)


The new algae economy

Randy Grissom, the dean of economic and workforce development at Santa Fe Community College and director of thecollege’s Sustainable Technologies Center, highlights Eldorado Biofuels, headquartered in Santa Fe, a company that is currently involved in a project funded through Los Alamos National Laboratory. “They’re taking used water from the oil and gas industry and using it to grow algae.” (Full Story)


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Bird flu debate continues

On March 6, four papers were published in the open access journal mBio offering a range of perspectives on whether the strains of H5N1 bird flu that are transmissible in ferrets should be published and studied.

“It would be beneficial to err on the side of caution,” argues Lisa Murillo of Los Alamos National Laboratory in a letter to the editors. Murillo argues that, it is better to be safe than sorry and not publish the results (full story).

Saturn’s frigid moon holds wisps of oxygen

There’s oxygen around Dione, a research team led by scientists at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory announced on Friday. The presence of molecular oxygen around Dione creates an intriguing possibility for organic compounds — the building blocks of life — to exist on other outer planet moons.

One of Saturn’s 62 known moons, Dione (pronounced DEE-oh-nee) is 698 miles (1,123 km) in diameter. It orbits Saturn at about the same distance that our Moon orbits Earth (full story).

The news was covered widely around the world, including in this article, among many others:

Saturn's icy moon Dione has oxygen atmosphere

May potentially be created by solar photons, high-energy particles or geologic processes

A NASA spacecraft circling Saturn has discovered a wispy oxygen atmosphere on the ringed planet's icy moon Dione, but you wouldn't want to live there. For one thing, you wouldn't be able to breathe — Dione's atmosphere is 5 trillion times less dense than the air at Earth's surface, scientists say.

Dione's atmosphere was detected by NASA's Cassini Spacecraft, which spotted an ultra-thin layer of oxygen ions so sparse that it is equivalent to conditions 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth. On Dione, there is just one oxygen ion one for every 0.67 cubic inches (or one ion for every 11 cubic centimeters) of space, but it's still enough to qualify (full story).

Historic, unique Manhattan Project footage from Los Alamos

In 1943, the top scientists from the United States and other nations gathered in Los Alamos, NM for the Manhattan Project. Among them was physicist Hugh Bradner. With informal permission from the U.S. Army, he shot a collection of home movies of life in a place that officially didn't exist, and of people working on a project that ultimately changed history. His footage represents the only look at life in the Los Alamos area during that time (watch the YouTube video or read the full story).

1953: The year that revolutionized life, death, and the digital bit

While the computer was still under construction, a small team from Los Alamos, led by Nicholas Metropolis and Stanley Frankel, quietly took up residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

The new machine was christened MANIAC (Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer) and put to its first test, during the summer of 1951, with a thermonuclear calculation that ran for sixty days nonstop (full story).

Book also reviewed this week by . . .

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson – review

An unusual, wonderful, even visionary account of the early years of computers

The Nucleus of the Digital Age

In pursuit of hydrogen bombs, a math genius and a brilliant tinkerer in Princeton developed the modern computer

The mathematician John von Neumann, born Neumann Janos in Budapest in 1903, was incomparably intelligent, so bright that, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner would say, "only he was fully awake." One night in early 1945, von Neumann woke up and told his wife, Klari, that "what we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left. Yet it would be impossible not to see it through." Von Neumann was creating one of the first computers, in order to build nuclear weapons. But, Klari said, it was the computers that scared him the most.

Von Neumann had come to New Jersey from Hungary in 1931, toward the beginning of the great scientific exodus from Europe. A decade and a half later, with the U.S. military frantically studying whether a hydrogen bomb thousands of times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima was possible, von Neumann got funding to build a computer—the first that could store its program in memory (full story).

Laser fusion nears crucial milestone

Would success mean that the US Department of Energy will be ready to develop NIF into an economically viable energy source? And if so, is NIF’s laser-based approach the best one? An interim report released on 7 March by a US National Academies panel concludes that it is still too early to tell.

Glen Wurden, a plasma physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, agrees, saying that scientists working on inertial confinement should be wary of putting all their eggs in the laser basket (full story).

Strange effects: the mystifying history of neutrino experiments

More often than not, neutrino experiments throughout history have turned up perplexing results. While most of these experiments didn’t get the high-profile attention that disputing Einstein provides, they've challenged scientists and helped them learn ever more about the natural world.

In this gallery, we take a look at some of the strangest historical neutrino results and the findings that still have scientists scratching their heads.

In 1993, scientists constructed the Liquid Scintillator Neutron Detector (LSND) experiment at Los Alamos National Lab. Their aim was to figure out if neutrinos can oscillate from one type to another. (Results from the Homestake and proton decay experiments weren't yet conclusive.)

LSND remains famous among scientists because it saw a small excess of electron antineutrinos appear seemingly from nowhere. The best explanation for this odd anomaly required completely new physics (full story).

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