Mars may have had hot springs millions of years ago
We have only ever seen Martian frost directly at relatively high latitudes, where the air tends to be colder and more humid. “If we were able to squeeze all the atmospheric water vapour onto the ground and make it liquid, we would form a layer of about 50 micrometres,” says Germán Martinez at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas. That’s about 1000 times less water than Earth’s atmosphere has.
In their LPSC paper, Martinez and his colleagues used the ChemCam on the Curiosity rover to look for signatures of extra hydrogen on the ground early in the Martian mornings. After three years of trying, they found some, indicating an extremely thin layer of frost. (Full Story)
Constant speed of light: Einstein's theory of special relativity survives a high-energy test
"How relativity behaves at very high energies has real consequences for the world around us," co-author Pat Harding, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a member of the HAWC scientific collaboration, said in a statement.
"Most quantum gravity models say the behavior of relativity will break down at very high energies," Harding added. "Our observation of such high-energy photons at all raises the energy scale where relativity holds by more than a factor of a hundred."
HAWC data could push those limits out further in the future, providing even more stringent tests of special relativity, Harding said. (Full Story)
Also from PhysOrg and the Los Alamos Daily Post
New type of bond is the first to defy actinide contraction trend
A team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US has now found two new types of bonding in actinide metallacycles that are the first to challenge this trend. They are versions of δ and φ bonds, covalent interactions between the metal’s occupied four-lobed d orbitals or six-lobed f orbitals and unoccupied ligand orbitals.
While quite rare, δ and φ bonds are have been reported before, but only in complexes in which the metal is not in the same plane as the ligands. Here, the orbitals of the metal and ligand, respectively, adopt head-to-head and side-to-head geometries. (Full Story)
Quantum networks use particles of light photons to send messages which are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Instead of encrypting a message using mathematical complexity, says Ray Newell, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we would rely upon the peculiar rules of quantum physics. With quantum information, "you can't copy it or cut it in half, and you can't even look at it without changing it." In fact, just trying to intercept a message destroys the message, as Wired magazine noted. That would enable encryption that would be vastly more secure than anything available today. (Full Story)
Ordinary people, extraordinary times
Emergency surgeries haven’t stopped in the time of COVID-19. Neither have Eva Birnbaum and her team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is ensuring medical isotopes, critical forpositron emission tomography scans and other medical imaging, remain available.
Every year, more than a million patients benefit from medical isotopes like strontium-82, used for heart scans, and germanium-68, for cancer diagnostics. The chemicals have short half-lives, meaning they’re impossible to stockpile — half of any strontium-82 produced is gone within 25 days. (Full Story)
Science of controlling pandemics
A team led by Jeanne Fair, a biosecurity and public health expert at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, modelled the spread of influenza virus.
Social distancing was effective in containing the spread of the infection and reduced symptoms by an average of 16 per cent, the team said in a study published in the International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management in 2012.
The concept of social distancing found support recently as well.
Social distancing — both self-imposed and enforced by the government — was important, said researchers from the UK and the Netherlands, in an opinion published in The Lancet on March 2020. (Full Story)
Los Alamos National Laboratory employees donate more than $20,000 to Santa Fe’s Food Depot
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