Are we doing enough to protect Earth from asteroids?

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will try to alter the course of a space rock, NASA illustration.

 

No federal organization is specifically tasked with deflecting asteroids. But people are working on it anyway. One agency steeped in the effort is the Department of Energy.  At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cathy Plesko does asteroid mitigation research. She got into planetary defense by studying impact craters on Mars using computer models. 

 

“But how do you stop making a crater?” she wondered. One day a senior astrophysicist at the lab said he thought the same sorts of code she used to model the craters could be used to model asteroid mitigation: They would show how an asteroid would react if something impacted it—rather than if it impacted something. This was the very stoppage she was wondering about. (Full Story)

 

Study plucks rare quasicrystal from wreckage of first atomic bomb test

 

Rare red trinitite, from SciAm.

 

Terry C. Wallace, director emeritus of Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-author of the paper, says that quasicrystals might one day be able to be used to piece together information about old nuclear tests.

 

“Understanding another country’s nuclear weapons requires that we have a clear understanding of their nuclear testing programs,” says Wallace. “We typically analyze radioactive debris and gases to understand how the weapons were built or what materials they contained, but those signatures decay. A quasicrystal that is formed at the site of a nuclear blast can potentially tell us new types of information—and they’ll exist forever.” (Full Story)

 

Shining a light against hackers

 

Ray Newell, LANL photo.

 

One of the issues Ray Newell thought he might face in describing his current project as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory was to get people interested in it.Then, hackers gained control of the Colonial Pipeline’s operating computers and, all of a sudden, Newell’s project gained very real-world emphasis.

 

The shutdown in early May disrupted gas supplies along the East Coast and caused panic buying, 1970s-like gas lines and empty fuel stations. “We have seen with the Colonial Pipeline attack, how impactful these issues can be on our daily lives,” Newell said. Newell and his team have been concentrating on protecting electrical grids, with technology already in use at the lab and the connecting Los Alamos grid. (Full Story)

 

The pebbled path to planets

 

Possible newfound planet near the star CoKu Tau 4, NASA/JPL illustration

 

A study published this past February showed how planetesimal collisions could have produced Jupiter, no pebble accretion needed. Gennaro D’Angelo at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues authored the work. Their new paper doesn’t rule out pebble accretion; it just shows that it may not be the only explanation for planets. Scientists still need to explore other possibilities.

 

Pebble accretion helps explain conditions under which big planets can form, D’Angelo says. But that process depends on getting the timing and temperature just right. Without that, the pebbles might drift too quickly through the disk, he says, and the growing planet “might not have time to accrete them.” (Full Story)

Podcast: Where did Mars’s water go?

 

Mars crater filled with water, NASA illustration.

 

Perseverance’s rover predecessor, Curiosity, had a laser too. The very first time Curiosity fired that laser into the Martian dirt, it saw that the dusty clay the rover was driving through had water in it. Not much, but water all the same. Here’s Roger Wiens —he’s managed the laser instruments on both rovers.

 

Roger Wiens: It’s a very interesting thing because the amount of water in that soil and dust on Mars is just about equivalent to, say, a soil in southern New Mexico during the summer, which, while it may be a bit of a desert, is not one of the driest places on Earth at all. (Full Story)

 

Three Los Alamos scientists honored by American Nuclear Society

 

Mark B. Chadwick, left, Stuart A. Maloy, center,and D.V. Rao, LANL photos.

 

Two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory were named fellows of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) and a third was recognized with a special award. Mark B. Chadwick, chief scientist and chief operating officer of Weapons Physics, and Stuart A. Maloy, deputy group leader for Materials Science at Radiation and Dynamic Extremes, were named fellows, while D.V. Rao, program director for the Laboratory’s Civilian Nuclear Program, earned a special award for making advanced nuclear energy systems a reality.

 

“The meticulous work of D.V., Mark, and Stu as they deliver advances vital to our national security mission is inspiring,” said Laboratory Director Thom Mason. “The American Nuclear Society’s decisions to designate two Los Alamos National Laboratory employees as fellows and to give a special award to D.V. are evidence of this trio’s sizable contributions to nuclear security and clean energy.” (Full Story)

 

Also from the Reporter this week:

 

Three LANL postdocs invited to 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting

 

From left, Abolt, Bartlow and de Souza Zanotta Dumit, LANL photos.

 

Last month, the University of California announced its second class of UC President’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Fellows, an extraordinary group of 30 young scientists selected from the 10 UC campuses and three national laboratories to attend invitation-only lectures and small seminars with about 40 Nobel laureates from around the world.

 

Three LANL postdocs have been selected for the Meeting, which takes place this summer. Chuck Abolt: Computational Earth Science, Andrew Bartlow: Biosecurity and Public Health, and Sara de Souza Zanotta Dumit: Radiation Protection. (Full Story)

 

And:

 

LANL Foundation launches 2021 Bright Futures fundraising campaign

The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of its 2021 Bright Futures Fundraising Campaign, with the goal of raising $100,000 additional dollars for its scholarship program. Throughout the campaign, the Foundation will share the stories of current LANL Scholars and alumni who reflect on how the LANL Foundation Scholarships have helped them build brighter futures. The Foundation will also share donors’ stories, through which they explore why they are inspired to give to the LANL Foundation Scholarships. (Full Story)

 

 

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A newfound quasicrystal formed in the first atomic bomb test

Red trinitite was formed from melted sand, copper wires and other debris in the aftermath of the Trinity nuclear test. From Science News.

 

Trinitite takes its moniker from the nuclear test, named Trinity, in which the material was created in abundance (SN: 4/8/21). “You can still buy lots of it on eBay,” says geophysicist Terry Wallace, a coauthor of the study and emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

 

But, he notes, the trinitite the team studied was a rarer variety, called red trinitite. Most trinitite has a greenish tinge, but red trinitite contains copper, remnants of the wires that stretched from the ground to the bomb. Quasicrystals tend to be found in materials that have experienced a violent impact and usually involve metals. Red trinitite fit both criteria. (Full Story)

 

Newly discovered quasicrystal was created by first atomic bomb test

 

A discovery made by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory may someday help scientists better understand nuclear explosions and control nuclear proliferation. According to a news release from LANL, a newly discovered quasicrystal was first created by the initial nuclear explosion at Trinity Site on July 16, 1945.

 

The quasicrystal that was formed by the Trinity explosion in a sample of red trinitite reportedly has a five-fold rotational symmetry which scientists say isn’t possible in a natural crystal. The quasicrystal’s symmetry group is the same as the regular 20-sided icosahedron solid. (Full Story)

 

Also from Newswise and LiveScience

 

Nanostructure thermalization process reveals surprising behaviors of nanoparticles

 

Thermalization of an ensemble of nanoparticles, UNM illustration.

 

A collaboration between scientists from the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Institute of Optics (Spain) has developed a framework that enables the efficient and simple description of the thermalization dynamics of systems that are made up of even thousands of nanoparticles. The work delivers insight into the way that collections of nanoparticles radiatively exchange heat with one another and their environment.

 

Radiative heat transfer occurs as the sun emits light (electromagnetic radiation) that travels to Earth and heats an object that absorbs it. Radiative heat transfer is also the mechanism behind thermal cameras; every hot object, including humans, emits light, allowing the object to release heat and thermalize to the environment. (Full Story)

 

The singing neutrino Nobel laureate who nearly bombed Nevada

 

Reines, left, and Cowan, at the controls of the Savannah River experiment, LANL photo.

 

Frederick Reines joined the Los Alamos laboratory in 1944 to work on the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop an atomic bomb led by some of the world’s top physicists. Most left Los Alamos after the war; not Reines. He continued to work on the radiation emissions of nuclear bombs — above-ground atomic tests were still taking place, in Nevada and on remote atolls in the Pacific Ocean

 

In the early 1950s, Reines and his colleague Clyde Cowan designed an experiment to detect neutrinos, the tiniest and most elusive of subatomic particles. Theorists were convinced that neutrinos must exist — and that they would be untraceable. And Reines liked nothing better than a challenge. (Full Story)

 

Historic ‘#IfThenSheCan – The Exhibit’ featuring woman in STEM from New Mexico

 

Harshini Mukundan, an #IfThenSheCan ambassador, LANL photo.

 

Designed to activate a culture shift among young girls by inspiring them to pursue STEM careers, Lyda Hill Philanthropies®’ IF/THEN® Initiative presents ‘#IfThenSheCan – The Exhibit’, a monumental exhibit of the most women statues ever assembled in one location.

 

The Exhibit celebrates the contributions of more than 120 AAAS IF/THEN® Ambassadors, including microbiologist Dr. Harshini Mukundan, a team leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory, her work focuses on developing diagnostics of infectious diseases. She leads and participates in projects aimed at developing rapid detection and diagnostics assays for breast cancer, influenza, toxic panels, and others. In addition to her research, she mentors the future minds of science and advocates for women and underrepresented groups in STEM. (Full Story)

 

Guest Column: Affordable, attainable technical degrees open the door at LANL and across the nation

 

Radiological Control Technicians, LANL photo.

 

Currently, the Radiation Control and Protection Competitive Academic Opportunity program at Northern’s Española campus is open for enrollment. This is a competitive program that selects up to 10 students. For the full-time students chosen, tuition and fees will be covered by the Laboratory. 

 

They will also be given a paid internship that will pay the student/intern while they are in class (based on standard NNMC contact hours), and through the beginning of the security clearance process and the move to full-time employment upon graduation with an associate’s degree, providing the student meets all Los Alamos National Laboratory eligibility requirements. In addition to paid internships and paid tuition, students are also eligible for Laboratory benefits. The starting salary for RCTs is in the $50,000/year range. (Full Story)

 

 

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Forget herd immunity! Winter COVID surges will bring lockdowns, travel bans, crammed ICU

Bette Korber, LANL photo.

 

To attribute the uncertainty about the next year or two of the pandemic to this or that variant is to miss the complex and dynamic nature of our battle with the virus.  The important question is, which ones should we worry about?

 

Answering that question falls in part to Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. Prior to the pandemic, she worked for decades on AIDS, the ailment caused by HIV, a virus that mutates far more readily than SARS2; a result of these efforts is an AIDS vaccine now in clinical trials. When the pandemic struck, Korber put her retirement plans on hold and instead now works long days sifting through the influx of SARS2 genomes. (Full Story)

 

Quantum machine learning hits a limit, LANL research shows

 

Information run through a scrambler reaches a point where nothing can unscramble it.  LANL image.

 

A new theorem from the field of quantum machine learning has poked a major hole in the accepted understanding about information scrambling. “Our theorem implies that we are not going to be able to use quantum machine learning to learn typical random or chaotic processes, such as black holes. In this sense, it places a fundamental limit on the learnability of unknown processes,” said Zoe Holmes, a post-doc at Los Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor of the paper describing the work published today in Physical Review Letters.

 

“Thankfully, because most physically interesting processes are sufficiently simple or structured so that they do not resemble a random process, the results don’t condemn quantum machine learning, but rather highlight the importance of understanding its limits,” Holmes said. (Full Story)

 

Also from Science Daily

 

LANL scientists explain why sounds are different on Mars

 

What would a person’s voice sound like on another planet? Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently got to find out.

 

“Sounds sound different on Mars,” said planetary scientist Nina Lanza. “The air on Mars is really different than the air on Earth, so it vibrates really differently. The air on Mars is a lot less dense and it’s made entirely of carbon dioxide.”

 

The SuperCam onboard the Mars rover Perseverance has a microphone, which has been used to record wind and the rover moving around. However, Lanza also got to hear her own voice projected on the red planet. The SuperCam was developed at Los Alamos. (Full Story)

 

Artificial intelligence helps solve the most complex problems beneath our feet

 

Cascadia region of the Northwest. LANL image.

 

We haven’t yet reached the point where machines can think for themselves. So when we speak of artificial intelligence, or AI, it’s about the capacity for computer algorithms to take in massive amounts of data and uncertainty and then identify patterns, learn from those patterns, and make predictions thousands of times faster than a human can.

 

Los Alamos National Laboratory applied AI to (acoustic wave data) and discovered it was hiding a trove of information about seismic behavior and earthquakes. For instance, two years ago, a Los Alamos study trained an AI algorithm on slow slips along the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest. (Full Story)

 

Antarctica remains the wild card for sea-level rise estimates

 

Antarctic ice. 

 

A massive collaborative research project covered in the journal Nature this week offers projections to the year 2100 of future sea-level rise from all sources of land ice, offering the most complete projections created to date.

 

“This work synthesizes improvements over the last decade in climate models, ice sheet and glacier models, and estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions,” said Stephen Price, one of the Los Alamos scientists on the project. “More than 85 researchers from various disciplines, including our team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, produced sea-level rise projections based on the most recent computer models developed within the scientific community and updated scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions,” said Price. (Full Story)

 

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Antarctica remains the wild card for sea-level rise estimates through 2100

Antarctica's Getz Ice Shelf, NASA image.

A massive collaborative research project covered in the journal Nature this week offers projections to the year 2100 of future sea-level rise from all sources of land ice, offering the most complete projections created to date.

 

"This work synthesizes improvements over the last decade in climate models, ice sheet and glacier models, and estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions," said Stephen Price, one of the Los Alamos scientists on the project. "More than 85 researchers from various disciplines, including our team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, produced sea-level rise projections based on the most recent computer models developed within the scientific community and updated scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions," said Price. (Full Story)

 

Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thom Mason holds virtual community meeting

 

Director Mason, LANL image.

 

Answering some 26 questions and speaking for almost 90 minutes Thursday evening, Los Alamos National Laboratory Thom Mason addressed everything from plutonium pits to the pandemic during a Webex community meeting attended by more than 100 people.

 

Mason said that as a national laboratory, LANL is primarily a national security lab. “That’s the mission that we’re given by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and Congress through the authorizations and appropriations and we are making excellent progress on the work we do supporting deterrent – we call that stockpile stewardship,” he said. “This includes efforts to develop new supercomputers, such as what will be our next supercomputer that we are in the process of procuring called Crossroads. That will enhance our capability to assess and certify the nuclear stockpile without needing to resort to underground testing.” (Full Story)

 

HPC simulations show how antibodies quash SARS-CoV-2

 

Covid-19, LANL illustration.

 

The team, led by researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, simulated two variants of SARS-CoV-2. First was the dominant variant of SARS-CoV-2, known as D614G. Over the course of the last year, this variant usurped the original form of the virus, which was also simulated and which is known simply as D614 (leading the new form to be termed the “G form” of the virus). The researchers ran these multiple atomic-level simulations at the microsecond scale.

 

These detailed simulations were run on supercomputers at Los Alamos National Lab, which operates under the umbrella of the National Nuclear Security Administration, itself tasked with ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. (Full Story)

 

Tweet analysis uncovers how COVID conspiracy theories evolved

 

Building a machine learning model to filter analyze 120 million tweets showed researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory how COVID-19 conspiracy theories evolved over time. The tool could someday help public health officials combat misinformation online, lab representatives said.

 

“We wanted to create a more cohesive understanding of how misinformation changes as it spreads,” said Courtney Shelley, a postdoctoral researcher in the Information Systems and Modeling Group at the lab. “Because people tend to believe the first message they encounter, public health officials could someday monitor which conspiracy theories are gaining traction on social media and craft factual public information campaigns to preempt widespread acceptance of falsehoods.” (Full Story)

 

LANL data scientists provide assistance to local organizations

 

Working with Los Alamos National Laboratory on Data Sprint is the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, LANL photo.

 

A new Los Alamos National Laboratory program is pairing local nonprofit and social good organizations with LANL data scientists to solve data-related problems to benefit Northern New Mexico.

 

Work on the first Northern New Mexico Community Data Sprint started in February with a call for interested community organizations who had a collection of data and a question or problem they would like to answer or solve. There is no charge for organizations to participate in the project.

 

Eleven community organizations applied to take part, and the two chosen partners were the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, and a joint project from Northern New Mexico College and Santa Fe Community College. (Full Story)

 

This old programming language is suddenly hot again

 

Fortran is the oldest commercial programming language, designed at IBM in the 1950s. And even though, for years, programmers have been predicting its demise, 64 years later it's still kicking, with users including top scientists from NASA and the Department of Energy using it on the world's most powerful supercomputers. 

 

It even recently – and very unexpectedly – popped up again in a ranking of the most popular programming languages, albeit in 20th place. Ondřej Certik, a scientist at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), is on a mission to resurrect Fortran via two key projects. LANL was key to the US's World War 2-era Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bombs, and is also home to the Cray XC40-based Trinity, the world's 13th fastest supercomputer. (Full Story)

 

Ultra-high-energy gamma rays originate from pulsar nebulae

 

HAWC observatory, HAWC photo.

 

The discovery that the nebulae surrounding the most powerful pulsars are pumping out ultra-high-energy gamma rays could rewrite the book about the rays' galactic origins. Pulsars are rapidly rotating, highly magnetized collapsed stars surrounded by nebulae powered by winds generated inside the pulsars.

 

"We took advantage of the wide field-of-view and survey capabilities at the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) to search around a collection of powerful pulsars. We found significant evidence that ultra-high-energy gamma-ray emission is a universal feature found near these objects," said Kelly Malone, an astrophysicist in the Nuclear and Particle Physics and Applications group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the HAWC Collaboration's new study of gamma radiation from pulsars. (Full Story)

 

Also from the Los Alamos Daily Post

Hidden History with LANL's Alan Carr

 

The focus of this video podcast episode is the Lab’s history since the Manhattan Project.  The main themes are the Cold War, emerging weapons technologies, non-weapons technologies of the era, and that the Lab is still doing amazing national security science and stockpile stewardship. (Watch the video podcast here)

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