Friday, June 1, 2012


Saturday Chat: Manvendra Dubey

If climate change skeptics can be described as a bunch of geezers with marginal scientific standing, their opposite might be someone like Manvendra Dubey, a well-established and widely recognized climate scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

As he discussed in a recent interview, much of his work at the laboratory has involved remote measurement and attribution of climate-related substances and air pollutants (full story).


ORCID scheme will give researchers unique identifiers to improve tracking of publications

Just as barcodes at the supermarket allow the till to distinguish a tomato from a turnip, ORCID aims to reliably attribute research outputs to their true author.

Herbert Van de Sompel at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who is a long-standing proponent of author identifiers, hopes that the system might be used to generate alternative metrics by linking authors to their outputs in “less traditional venues of scholarly communication, such as tweets, blog posts, presentations on Slideshare and videos on SciTV” (full story).


Lab selected for ultrasonic technology

The National Alliance for AdvancedBiofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB) has selected the lab’s Ultrasonic Algae Harvesting technology for Phase II development. The technology is based on LANL’s R&D 100 Award-winning Ultrasonic Algal Biofuel Harvester. Research and development to refine the technology at lab-scale has been in progress through NAABB since April 2010 (full story).

Also from the Monitor this week:

Glowing partnership for LA, Sandia BioTech

Sandia Biotech is using a biological technology licensed from Los Alamos, the split green fluorescent protein (sGFP), as a detecting and tracking tool for the protein and peptide industry, valuable in the fields of Alzheimer’s research, drug development and other biotechnology fields using protein folding to understand protein expression and mechanisms of action (full story).

See the YouTube video:




Opinion: Nuclear Weapons—Something We Can All Agree On

By James Acton and Edbridge Colby — We are two nuclear experts who disagree on a lot, including whether the UnitedStates should pursue the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. In spite ofthese differences, however, we both agree the U.S. nuclear enterprise must be modernized and additional arms control measures should be pursued. And what we can agree on, if implemented consistently, would provide some much needed stability in the U.S. approach to the weighty issues of nuclear weapons (full story).

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