Promise of technology
Theoretical biologist Bette Korber, Journal photo.
Bette Korber had to fight intense pushback when she first proposed her idea for an HIV vaccine designed on a computer. The theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory was trying to garner support for her “mosaic” vaccine design. Her idea was that with access to hundreds of thousands of different HIV sequences from around the world, a computational code could design synthetic proteins to fight the virus.
Her method “evolves” sequences to solve a particular problem – with a small set of proteins, can science develop the best possible immunological coverage for the global diversity of HIV? In other words, can a vaccine be created that targets HIV generally, despite its massive number of variations? (Full story)
Healthy forests depend on balancing fire and water
Los Alamos scientists used data collected before and after the 2011 Las Conchas fire, LANL photo.
To unravel exactly how fire influences moisture in burned soil, hydrologists and other environmental scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a sophisticated computer model.
The initial experiment using the Los Alamos model indicated that that soil moisture generally increases following fire with the exception of high-severity-burn areas that experience greater surface runoff — the soil is much drier after a really intense wildfire. If heavy or frequent rainstorms follow a fire, the chance of flooding increases, but the soil winds up drier than it was before the fire, despite all that flowing water. (Full story)
New reactor-liner alloy material offers strength, resilience
Interior of a magnetic confinement reactor, from ITER.
A new tungsten-based alloy developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory can withstand unprecedented amounts of radiation without damage. Essential for extreme irradiation environments such as the interiors of magnetic fusion reactors, previously explored materials have thus far been hobbled by weakness against fracture, but this new alloy seems to defeat that problem.
"This material showed outstanding radiation resistance when compared to pure nanocrystalline tungsten materials and other conventional alloys," said Osman El Atwani, the lead author of the paper and the principal investigator of the "Radiation Effects and Plasma Material Interactions in Tungsten Based Materials" project at Los Alamos. (Full story)
Handling trillions of supercomputer files just got simpler
Gary Grider, left, and Brad Settlemyer discuss the new Los Alamos and Carnegie Mellon software product, LANL photo.
A new distributed file system for high-performance computing being distributed today via the software collaboration site GitHub provides unprecedented performance for creating, updating and managing extreme numbers of files.
“We designed DeltaFS to enable the creation of trillions of files,” said Brad Settlemyer, a Los Alamos computer scientist and project leader. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University jointly developed Delta FS. “Such a tool aids researchers in solving classical problems in high-performance computing, such as particle trajectory tracking or vortex detection.” (Full story)
Mercury is every planet’s closest neighbor
You probably learned in school — or space camp — that Venus is Earth’s closest planetary neighbor. Ready to get your mind blown? A new model of the planets’ orbit shuffles things around, calculating that Earth’s closest neighbor, on average, is actually Mercury.
Sure, Venus comes closer to Earth than Mercury, but it also spends a lot of time on the opposite side of the sun. Scientists from NASA, Los Alamos National Lab, and the U.S. Army put together a new model published Tuesday in Physics Today that breaks down the average distance among planets — and it turns out that they’re all, on average, closest to Mercury. (Full story)
Research predicts size, magnitude, timing of lab earthquakes
Earthquake simulation apparatus at Penn State, PSU photo.
For the first time, the magnitude, time and duration of earthquakes in a laboratory setting were predicted by a team of researchers from Penn State and Los Alamos National Laboratory. This research improves our understanding of earthquakes and could eventually lead to prediction measures in real-life scenarios, according to the researchers who published their results in a recent issue of Nature Geosciences.
Claudia Hulbert, Bertrand Rouet-Leduc, Paul Johnson and Christopher Ren, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Jacques Rivière and David Bolton, of Penn State, contributed to this research. (Full story)
Quantum dots offer stable light
Quantum dots in solution, LANL photo.
A team of researchers from Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory found that dots capable of stable light emission can be achieved by intentionally squashing colloidal quantum dots during chemical synthesis. Moreover, the squashed dots are fully comparable with the light produced by dots made with more complex processes and emit spectrally narrow light with a highly stable intensity and a non-fluctuating emission energy.
The team suggests that the strained colloidal quantum dots are a practical alternative to presently employed nano-scale light sources and can be used as single-particle, nano-scale light sources for optical quantum circuits, ultrasensitive sensors, and medical diagnostics. (Full story)
