Friday, June 12, 2009


Agilent, Los Alamos, UCLA team up on pathogen detection tool


An artist's representation of how a High-Throughput Laboratory Network might look when fully developed. LANL illustration.

Agilent Technologies announced today that it is working with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health to develop an automated genotyping system for quickly identifying pathogens such as the influenza A H1N1 virus.
Read more here.





Panel hears eco-park proposal


Dr. Nate McDowell of Los Alamos National Laboratory. (U.S. House of Representatives photo)

In a statement at the [Congressional] hearing, Nate McDowell, director of the Los Alamos Environmental Research Park, said the seven [National Environmental Research Parks] represented six major vegetative zones and that they can play a valuable role in understanding the relationships between the terrestrial environment and the changing climate. See the
whole story here.







What did we learn from the swine flu scare?

Dr. Tim Germann, the LANL scientist responsible for the EpiCast pandemic mapping system, tells SFR that predictions were made too early to be reliable and only now is data emerging that will help researchers adapt their computer models to H1N1.

"The big uncertainty is how many people have been exposed without becoming sick," Germann says. "It may be that there are a lot more people who have been exposed and developed resistance that we don't know about." Read more here.






A helmet of sensors maps brain function

Physicist Robert Kraus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has helped develop a helmet of sensors that can be used with a technique called magnetoencephalography to observe tiny electrical currents in the brain. Listen to the webcast here.





NNSA favors continued operation of Los Alamos accelerator


NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino.

A top federal nuclear official this week endorsed continued operation of a Los Alamos National Laboratory research complex, splitting with Obama administration budget officials who had said the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center was no longer needed.

Tom D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, told members of a Senate subcommittee that the Neutron Science Center is important to maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons. Read the
whole story here.






Brachytherapy software enables precise dose calculation with high speed

New brachytherapy software enables clinicians to rapidly calculate patient doses for brachytherapy treatments, a form of radiotherapy, with an extremely high level of accuracy.

A significantly more accurate way of calculating the dosimetry of cancer treatments, the BrachyVision Acuros, was presented by Varian Medical Systems, Inc. at the GEC-ESTRO exhibition in Porto, Portugal.

“The release of BrachyVision Acuros marks the culmination of decades of research, first at Los Alamos National Laboratory and then at Transpire. . . .”


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