Why top scientists are pretending an asteroid is headed for Earth
Cathy Plesko speaks with Wired Magazine
from the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference
in College Park, Maryland.
Some of the world's best scientists are running drills to practice for a near earth object collision. WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez spoke with Cathy Plesko from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to find out how we would respond to an incoming collision. Would nuclear detonations work? What does a "City Killer" look like? Would impact in the water be worse than impact on land? Find out more from Plesko. (Full story)
Mars doesn't need our microbes
A topological map of Mars (blues represent
low areas; reds, high) NASA image.
When humans do make it to Mars, they’re going to take a few trillion tiny friends along for the ride, no matter what.
Even if the current protocols don’t need to change, not everyone is as careful as NASA. “I think it’s fantastic that [private] companies are pushing the limits and pushing the ideas and are getting people excited,” says Nina Lanza, a planetary geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. But she’s also afraid that as those companies seek to be the first to land humans on Mars, the competition will overshadow and even hurt the scientific process. “That’s awesome, but it’s not as careful as we really need to be thinking,” she says. (Full story)
Machine learning in geoscience: Riding a wave of progress
Illustration from EOS.
The geosciences are data rich, with petabytes of readily and publicly available data. This availability, combined with the complexity of unsolved problems in the field, has motivated vigorous interest in the application of machine learning (ML) techniques. ML offers a new “lens” for viewing data and scientific hypotheses that differs from the perspective of traditional domain expertise. Initial uses of ML have tended to be limited in scope and isolated in application, but recent efforts to promote benchmark geoscientific data sets and competitions promise to propel broader, deeper, and increasingly coordinated and collaborative efforts. (Full story)
The loudest places you can’t hear
Infrasonic hot spots, LANL image.
“Any kind of mechanical process is going to generate energetic waves, said Omar Marcillo, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Some of that goes through the atmosphere as acoustic waves, and some goes through the ground as seismic waves.” Marcillo’s work focuses on the seismic.
When researchers track seismic activity, they’re sensing the waves that make the Earth roll and rumble, of course. But those waves aren’t that much different than what we hear as sound. Some kinds of waves produced by earthquakes have even been known to generate sounds that people can hear before the ground starts to shake beneath them. (Full story)
New HeSpaDDA algorithm distributes parallel workloads on LANL supercomputers
Adaptive resolution situation (AdResS)
simulation of an atomistic protein,
from Inside HPC.
Researchers at Los Alamos National Lab have developed new software to distribute computation more efficiently and across increasing numbers of supercomputer processors. This new decomposition approach for molecular dynamics simulation is called the heterogeneous spatial domain decomposition algorithm, or HeSpaDDA. Areas of different density were assessed and rearranged to distribute the processing workload. (Full story)
