For LANL, preserving our state is a personal mission
A meadow along the Rio Cebolla in the Santa Fe National Forest, Journal photo.
In the past 25 years, the lab has been very successful in environmental stewardship, despite public perception to the contrary. The truth is, Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the most closely monitored places in New Mexico, with reporting requirements under more than two dozen different federal and state environmental laws, permits and other orders. With that kind of accountability, our achievements and challenges in environmental stewardship are transparent for all to see. That includes the good news and the bad: cleaning the past, being successful today, and planning to create a sustainable future. (Full Story)
Also from the Albuquerque Journal this week:
Speeding up the development of new materials
A platinum nanoparticle simulated with the EXAALT code, LANL image.
Using exascale computers efficiently will be no simple feat as they will carry out billions of operations simultaneously. Writing codes that can harness so much computing power requires fundamentally new ways to arrange the calculations, which often requires rethinking algorithms from the ground up.
The Exascale Atomistic capability for Accuracy, Length, and Time project, or EXAALT – led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville ... aims to develop a new generation of algorithms that would let researchers use very large computers in new and more flexible ways. (Full Story)
Los Alamos National Lab report projects post-Thanksgiving COVID-19 data
Nov. 30 Weekly growth rate shows cases decreasing (blue shades) in most of the state. LANL image.
The Los Alamos National Lab modeling team issued its December forecasting report, projecting daily number of cases to range between 1,768 and 3,899 in the next two weeks. According to the Department of Health, the state’s latest seven-day rolling average for daily cases sits around 1,494, down about 350 cases from the week before. However, that data is all pre-Thanksgiving.
The modeling team at LANL notes in its report that when case rates go up, people’s protective behaviors tend to improve, resulting in some transmission drop. It took New Mexico more than three months to get from its first confirmed COVID-19 case to 10,000 cases. (Full Story)
NASA’s plutonium tours U.S. before heading to Mars
Plutonium-238 heat sources at TA-55, LANL photo.
The plutonium-238 that powers NASA’s rovers on Mars crisscrosses the United States first on a tour of national laboratories. The journey begins at Idaho and then Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
The Pu-238 then heads 1,400 miles west to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where technicians press it into ceramic pellets, heat it in a kiln, encapsulate it in the iridium cladding, and test it to NASA’s standards.
“It's silver in color, it's kind of round, about an inch tall, and it's fairly heavy because it is a dense material,” said Jackie Lopez-Barlow, LANL’s radioisotope power systems program manager. “So if you were to hold it in the palm of your hand, it would take up about half the size of your palm of your hand. You wouldn't want to hold it in your hand, because it's extremely hot, about 400º Celsius.” (Full Story)
Voyager probes spot previously unknown phenomenon in deep space
Voyager, NASA image.
“The study is unique in that it looks at several large solar storms that punch through the bubble that the Sun carves out of the interstellar medium and extends far beyond Pluto,” Herbert Funsten, a space scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who’s not involved with the new study, explained in an email. “The Voyager spacecraft are in the interstellar medium and are therefore looking into the bubble — and the shocks that cross the bubble boundary — from the outside, providing a unique, quiet observation location that we cannot observe from inside the bubble.” (Full Story)
Quantum Dot paint could make airframe inspection quick and easy
Colloidal quantum dot depicting inner core (pink), outer shell (yellow), and polymer ligands (black lines), AFIT/ACS image.
Technicians of the future might be able to test airplane fuselages for airworthiness, check a bridge’s structural integrity, or inspect an intricate 3D-printed part for defects with only a quick scan from a camera.
Researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a paint containing quantum dots that could allow just that. Manufacturers could apply this paint to the surfaces of objects including vehicles, infrastructure, and spare parts, the researchers say. An inspector or a quality assurance specialist could rapidly gauge strain on those surfaces—how much they’ve been deformed—by analyzing light emitted by that paint. (Full Story)
Lightning ‘superbolts’ have a unique formation mechanism, satellite studies suggest
Superbolt observed by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper covers much of Tennessee, from Physics World.
Normally when lightning is viewed from space, cloud cover makes it appear dimmer than it would appear on the ground. However, Michael Peterson, an atmospheric scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory points out that “sometimes the satellite is in just the right place to see the source with little-to-no cloud in the way, and this causes the flash to appear brighter than normal. This usually happens when the satellite is closer to the horizon and can see below the upper anvil cloud surrounding the storm core.”
In two new studies done at Los Alamos, Peterson, Erin Lay and Matt Kirkland analysed data collected by optical sensors aboard the Fast On-Orbit Detection of Transient Events (FORTE) and GOES-16 satellites to determine the brightness of superbolt events. FORTE provided twelve years of lightning observations, while two years of data gathered by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) aboard GOES-16 were analysed. (Full Story)
Also from SyFy Wire
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