Two variants have merged into heavily mutated coronavirus
People get tested for covid-19 in Los Angeles, from NewScientist.
Two variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes covid-19 have combined their genomes to form a heavily mutated hybrid version of the virus. The “recombination” event was discovered in a virus sample in California, provoking warnings that we may be poised to enter a new phase of the pandemic.
The recombinant was discovered by Bette Korber at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who told a meeting organised by the New York Academy of Sciences on 2 February that she had seen “pretty clear” evidence of it in her database of US viral genomes. Korber has only seen a single recombinant genome among thousands of sequences and it isn’t clear whether the virus is being transmitted from person to person or is just a one-off. (Full Story)
Also from Salon
The sounds of Mars: NASA's Perseverance rover will put ears on the Red Planet for the 1st time
Perseverance rover on Mars, NASA illustration.
Perseverance is equipped with two microphones, which will break new ground as well. Past rovers have seen, touched, tasted and smelled Mars in their own robotic fashion, but none has yet captured true audio on the Red Planet.
"Having a sound of another planet is another way that we can start to realize that it feels familiar," Nina Lanza, team lead for space and planetary exploration at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told Space.com.
"It will add a dimension that will make [Mars] more of a real place to us," said Lanza, who's on the science team for Perseverance's rock-zapping, microphone-equipped SuperCam instrument. (Full Story)
New Mexico scientists wait for Mars rover landing
Nina Lanza, from KRQE.
New Mexico scientists are preparing for the landing of the Mars rover. Roger Wiens who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory says he is waiting for the Perseverance Rover to send a photo back to them that it has landed safely.
Meanwhile, leading up to the landing Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at LANL talked about the differences in sound on Mars. “Because of the differences between Earth air and Mars air we would experience sound on the surface of Mars very differently than we would on Earth. The main difference is that it’s actually slower,” said Lanza. (Full Story)
Mars rover has New Mexico connection
NASA is hoping for its new rover, Preserverance, to land safely on Mars Thursday afternoon.
Scientists from Los Alamos National Lab will also be hoping everything goes smoothly — because part of New Mexico is on the rover.
"We built here at Los Alamos part of the instrument in this poster behind me, SuperCam, and it sits on top of the rover and it fires a laser beam at rock and soil anywhere about 25 feet away from the rover," said Roger Wiens, the SuperCam prinicpal investigator.
The SuperCam's goal is to analyze the minerals and see whether there is evidence of any past microbial life. (Full Story)
Latest Mars mission gets help from New Mexico
Perseverance Rover's complex landing system, NASA illustration.
The Mars rover will be using a key tool developed at Los Alamos called SuperCam, which sits on the rover’s mast and has a laser that can examine rocks 25 feet away, allowing Perseverance to study samples from a distance.
The technology, developed in partnership with the French space agency and academic partners in other several other counties, also will feature the first microphone to operate on Mars and provides another opportunity to understand the physical property of rocks on the planet.
“I’m really interested in how much wind noise we are going to get and how things are going to sound. There has got to be something unexpected there,” said Roger Wiens, the lead scientist on the SuperCam project. (Full Story)
Minnesota native played crucial role in designing Mars rovers
Roger Wiens (left) with his brother Doug in 1969, from the Star-Tribune
Roger Wiens is the principal investigator of the SuperCam instrument mounted on NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars at 2:55 p.m. Thursday.
The SuperCam is an updated and improved version of the ChemCam — of which Wiens was also the principal investigator — that was attached to the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012.
Wiens, who works out of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said he has been a space junkie for as long as he can remember. The Mountain Lake community where he grew up emphasized education and understanding the world around them, and that attitude has stuck with him throughout his career. (Full Story)
This ragtag crew are shaking up the world of earthquake prediction
Paul Johnson, a geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and lead author of the new study, thought that machine learning may be able to help with earthquake prediction. Instead of using equations designed around a human understanding of seismology, these codes would be starting afresh, consuming data and using that data alone to make predictions – and removing potentially erroneous or human assumptions from the mix.
An earlier study made use of an artificial quake-making machine in a laboratory. Steel blocks sandwiched a block of fault gouge, a rock typically found in natural faults. The blocks were mechanically moved around, pushing, squashing and pulling at the block. If the block cracks and there is a jolt forwards, voilà, you just made an earthquake. (Full Story)
‘Digital head’ helps diagnose traumatic brain injuries
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a computer modeling software that can simulate the brain and how it reacts to trauma. The model includes several unique factors that reveal what is happening to the brain at the cellular level and also pinpoint where injury has occurred. Knowing this can help alert medical professionals and identify the root cause of cognitive impairments a person may suffer, especially for an unconscious victim.
While computer models of the brain are not new, Los Alamos’ digital head takes into account a patient’s specific brain anatomy – a factor that is important in accurately determining the location of brain injury. Previous models have treated the brain as one solid object, rather than a complex organ made up of many different parts, and those models are restricted to the anatomy of an average adult. (Full Story)
Colloidal quantum dot lasers poised to come of age
Colloidal quantum dots change color with decreasing dot size. LANL photo.
Anew paper by authors from Los Alamos and Argonne national laboratories sums up the recent progress in colloidal-quantum-dot research and highlights the remaining challenges and opportunities in the rapidly developing field, which is poised to enable a wide array of new laser-based and LED-based technology applications.
“These tiny specs of semiconductor matter can generate spectrally tunable lasing light, opening tremendous opportunities in areas of photonic circuits, optical communications, lab-on-a-chip sensing, and medical diagnostics,” said Victor Klimov, lead author of the review article published in Nature Reviews Materials and leader of the team at Los Alamos National Laboratory that has pioneered a range of discoveries with colloidal quantum dots. (Full Story)
LANL spends big in Santa Fe
Santa Fe County accounted for about $41.5 million spent at about 125 small businesses, according to a news release from the lab.
“Last year’s increase in small business subcontracting was largely the result of our increased efforts to collaborate with small business partners and to bring in new business partnerships,” Mason wrote in an email. “We hit the ground running on that goal in FY19 and really saw the pace ramp up in FY20.”
When Triad National Security — a consortium composed of Battelle Memorial Institute, the Texas A&M University System and the University of California — took over management of the lab in 2019, it set clear priorities to strengthen the lab’s effect on economic growth in the region, Mason said. (Full Story)
Also from the New Mexican this week:
Editorial: LANL in Santa Fe? A boost in economic arm
LANL's new office space in downtown Santa Fe, from the New Mexican.
Los Alamos National Laboratory will be renting space in downtown Santa Fe — the first time in 58 years the laboratory will have a physical presence here.
In recent years, the lab has made a concerted effort to do more business with New Mexico companies, reporting last week that it spent a record $413 million in procurement contracts with small New Mexico businesses during the 2020 federal fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
Spending was up 43 percent from the $289 million that went to New Mexico small businesses in 2019, with lab Director Thom Mason indicating even more dollars will go to local businesses in 2021.
These are dollars Santa Fe desperately needs right about now. Welcome, Los Alamos National Laboratory employees. We’re glad to have you. (Full Story)
And:
Stamp honors woman who worked on Manhattan Project
A new “forever” stamp commemorates a Chinese American scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project during her groundbreaking career as a nuclear physicist who broke gender barriers.
“She wasn’t one to go around bragging about the honors she had gotten,” said Yuan, a nuclear physicist at the Los Alamos lab. “What would mean a lot to her would be all the work accomplishments, and whether they were recognized by her fellow citizens and people in the field.”
Born in 1912, Wu moved to the U.S. from China in 1936 and earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics in 1940 from the University of California, Berkeley. (Full Story)
Los Alamos National Laboratory staff recognized for outstanding response to pandemic
Los Alamos National Laboratory employees were recently recognized with Honor and Achievement Awards from the Department of Energy Secretary; 248 Laboratory employees on eight teams won the awards, which are the highest honor a DOE employee or contractor can receive.
“Congratulations to the recipients, many of whom innovated and persevered through a tough time in our global history,” said Thom Mason, Laboratory Director. “These awards reinforce the fact that our national laboratories’ most important asset is a skilled, dedicated workforce.” (Full Story)
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