The plan to dodge a killer asteroid—Maybe even good ol’ Bennu
Cathy Plesko speaking at the 2019 PDC, LANL photo.
Plate tectonics and erosion have swept most dings, dents, and saucer-shaped depressions neatly away, leaving only the artifacts of bigger collisions—like Meteor Crater in Arizona. “If that had happened in modern times, it would have taken out the entire city of Flagstaff,” says Cathy Plesko, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Nobody’s getting out of that one alive.”
In the early 20th century, a space rock hundreds of feet wide exploded over the Siberian taiga. The impact blast was so bright “you could read by the afterglow of the trail,” says Plesko—in London. It knocked the forest flat for miles. (Full Story)
Measles outbreak hits 25-year high
The nationwide measles outbreak hit an alarming milestone, as the number of cases hit a 25-year high. The CDC said 78 new cases were reported over the past week. That brings this year's total to 704 in 22 states.Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Sara Del Valle speaks to CBS News about how scientists at the Laboratory are using social media to track and sometimes predict disease outbreaks worldwide. (Full Story on YouTube)
Was that a small nuclear test…or just a football game?
Image from Defense One.
How do we know a seismic reading is an underground nuclear test and not a mining explosion, an earthquake, or something else? It’s harder to determine than you might think. Dale Anderson is a mathematician specializing in seismology at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Take, for example, the earthquake that was recorded last summer when soccer fans all across Mexico City cheered their team’s goal in a World Cup match. The initial assertion was that their collective jump-up-and-down energy shook the ground. It might have, but the energy was too dispersed. That earthquake measurement was caused by, well, an actual earthquake. (Full Story)
Scientists are mapping the industrial hums that travel through the Earth
Across the U.S., industrial machinery creates a constant underground hum that sends vibrations through the surface of the Earth. Scientists are now mapping that subterranean humming.
The industrial “hum” is much like a hum you hear when you walk into a room where a fan is running—a persistent signal, but much lower in frequency. Wind turbines and turbines in hydroelectric systems can produce these hums, which can get in the way when you’re trying to study earthquakes, said Omar Marcillo from Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)
Also from PhysOrg
Helping health workers understand unfolding disease outbreaks
A quick tool to help develop actionable information is the plan for a web-based disease-outbreak tool developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a quick analysis resource called AIDO (“I-do”) for Analytics for Investigation of Disease Outbreaks.
Unlike traditional epidemiological models, this tool can be used by diverse group of users, such as analysts, scientists, practitioners, decision makers and the public, at no cost. The website provides historic information for key outbreaks of nearly 40 different diseases and it helps responders select the historic similarities to each new situation, even as an outbreak evolves over the first hours and days. (Full Story)
SuperCam one step closer to Mars
The SuperCam has completed testing and is on its way to JPL for full system integration. LANL photo. The SuperCam instrument – designed, built and tested at Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with the French Space Agency – and destined for the exploration of Mars – has completed testing and evaluation at Los Alamos and is on its way to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for full system integration.
The SuperCam instruments left Los Alamos Monday, April 29. SuperCam will be one of two* Los Alamos instruments on the next rover, called Mars 2020, an upgraded version of the current rover on Mars, Curiosity. (Full Story)
LANL faces of innovation: David Funk
Dave Funk has a complicated job. He leads a multi-lab effort to design and build a linear induction accelerator that can take x-rays (radiographs) of the late stages of implosion experiments at NNSS. Not only that, his team has to assemble the accelerator in a tunnel 960 feet underground.
Funk, of the Laboratory’s Accelerator Development Program Office, is the senior director of the Advanced Sources and Detectors (ASD) Project, part of the Enhanced Capabilities for Subcritical Experiments (ECSE), a federally directed portfolio to enable studies of what happens to plutonium during the late stages of its implosion (compression) inside a nuclear weapon. (Full Story)
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