So Long TNT, There's a New Explosive in Town
Courtesy photo.
The chemistry of explosives is a delicate matter. A little less carbon, a little more nitrogen, and the right amount of oxygen can transform a relatively inert substance into quite the showstopper.
For more than 100 years, TNT has been the premier mixture of chemicals for blowing things up, and it's even used as a metric to measure the yield of nuclear explosions and other monumental blasts. But new research out of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Army Research Laboratory has discovered a new chemical, bis-oxadiazole (C6H4N6O8), that has many of the advantages of TNT, is thought to be less toxic to produce, and makes a bigger bang.
"It would be about 1.5 times the power of TNT," says David Chavez, an explosives chemist at Los Alamos who worked on the new molecule. "So fairly energetic, quite a nice improvement compared to TNT." (Full story)
Making Outer Space Smell Like Fresh Cut Grass
Credit: NASA.
Nina Lanza expected Antarctica to be cold. After all, she and her seven fellow meteorite hunters weren’t allowed to board their transport in New Zealand until they’d proved they’d packed all the necessary gear. And she’d been warned about the endless daylight at their location smack dab in between McMurdo Station and the South Pole. But, as she says, “People try to tell you what it’s like, but it’s hard to describe because it’s so different from your everyday life.”
Lanza, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who works on the Mars Curiosity rover team, was in Antarctica with this group as part of NASA’s Antarctic Search for Meteorites Project. Antarctica is like the solar system’s asteroid landfill. Pieces of the Moon, Mars, the asteroid Vesta, and fragments of the solar system’s formation are buried under the ice. For five weeks, Lanza would hunt for meteorites, sleeping in close-quarter tents around a group of like-minded explorers. (Full story)
Bringing ‘Doctor Atomic’ to the Birthplace of the Bomb
The test bomb in the Santa Fe production will
not be an exact replica of the original, but a
reflective sphere. Credit: NYT.
The lights of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, can be seen at night from the idyllic open-air theater of Santa Fe Opera. So around here, John Adams and Peter Sellars’s “Doctor Atomic,” about the bomb and its creators, is not just a meditation on the invention of a weapon that changed the world.
It is also very much a local story — a complicated one.
“One of the most powerful things about doing ‘Doctor Atomic’ here is to make a history from New Mexico,” said Mr. Sellars, who assembled the opera’s libretto from historical sources, directed its premiere in 2005 and is rethinking aspects of it for the new Santa Fe production he is creating, which opens on July 14 and runs through Aug. 16. (Full story)
LANL marks 75 years of discovery
Laboratory Director Terry Wallace
speaks at the 75th Anniversary celebration.
Credit: Los Alamos Monitor.
When J. Robert Oppenheimer invited the world’s top scientists, physicists, engineers and technicians to Los Alamos in 1943 to build the world’s first nuclear weapon, no one really knew what the results were going to be.
What they did know however, was that they had to succeed at all costs, as intelligence reports told them the Axis Powers were working toward the same goal. Seventy-five years later, just yards away from where plans for the first nuclear bomb were developed, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s 11th director, Terry Wallace, talked about what Oppenheimer’s plans meant to the world, and New Mexico’s future.
“Over a series of lectures, they came up with a plan, and that plan was to do something they had never done before,” Wallace said. “… They weren’t going to be just physicists, they weren’t going to be just chemists, they weren’t going to be just engineers they had to be able to have the world’s best technicians, they had to be able to have the world’s best craft to be able to build the facilities around us.” (Full story)
