How big data can help save the world
Sara Del Valle, LANL photo.
As a data scientist for Los Alamos National Laboratory, I study data from wide-ranging, public sources to identify patterns in hopes of being able to predict trends that could be a threat to global security. Multiple data streams are critical because the ground-truth data (such as surveys) that we collect is often delayed, biased, sparse, incorrect or, sometimes, nonexistent.
For example, knowing mosquito incidence in communities would help us predict the risk of mosquito-transmitted disease such as dengue, the leading cause of illness and death in the tropics. However, mosquito data at a global (and even national) scale are not available. (Full story)
New system to check for dangerous natural gas leaks
Manvendra Dubey with the gas detection
system mounted on a drone, LANL photo.
A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Aeris Technology and Rice University has developed the Autonomous, Low- cost, Fast Leak Detection System (ALFaLDS) to detect, locate and quantify leaks quickly, safely and inexpensively.
Three subsystems make up the overall system: a small methane and ethane sensor, an anemometer that measures wind, and a trained neural network (which some would call artificial intelligence) that ingests and analyzes all the data to find leaks rapidly – almost in real time. (Full story)
“Any icy satellite or planetary interior is intimately connected to the object’s surface,” said Arianna Gleason-Holbrook, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a visiting scientist in Stanford University’s Extreme Environments Laboratory. “Learning about these icy interiors will help us understand how the worlds in our solar system formed and how at least one of them, so far as we know, came to have all the necessary characteristics for life.”
“These experiments with water are the first of their kind, allowing us to witness a fundamental disorder-to-order transition in one of the most abundant molecules in the universe,” said Gleason, a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full story)
More trees dying in New Mexico
Forest mortality increased nearly 50 percent across New Mexico in 2018, the first jump in five years, according to an annual report on the health of the state’s forests.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have said it is highly likely New Mexico will lose the vast majority of its forests by 2050.
The U.S. Forest Service said in a report issued in 2013 that the Santa Fe and Carson national forests were at risk of losing a combined total of nearly 900,000 acres of trees by 2027. (Full story)
