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