Artificial intelligence nails predictions of earthquake aftershocks

An earthquake and its aftershocks rocked Japan's

Kumamoto prefecture in 2016, causing 48 deaths.

Credit: Aflo/REX/Shutterstock

A machine-learning study that analysed hundreds of thousands of earthquakes beat the standard method at predicting the location of aftershocks.

Scientists say that the work provides a fresh way of exploring how changes in ground stress, such as those that occur during a big earthquake, trigger the quakes that follow. It could also help researchers to develop new methods for assessing seismic risk.

The findings are a good step towards examining aftershocks with fresh eyes, says Daniel Trugman, a seismologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “The machine-learning algorithm is telling us something fundamental about the complex processes underlying the earthquake triggering,” he says. (Full story)

Also reported in Scientific American

Smoked out: Researchers develop a new wildfire smoke emissions model

Chemical engineering researchers from Brigham Young University have developed an advanced model that can help predict pollution caused by wildfire smoke.

The research, sponsored by the USDA Forest Service and the Department of Energy, provides a physical model that can more reliably predict soot and smoke emissions from wildfires over a range of conditions.

"The smoke that you see from wildfires is a combination of evolved gases and soot," said Alex Josephson, a Ph.D. student in BYU's chemical engineering program who also works on the project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "When we look at smoke as far as health effects, typically we care about those soot particles; and that's what we're modeling." (Full story)

High-impact Los Alamos innovations honored as R&D 100 award finalists

Ten Los Alamos National Laboratory innovations are finalists for the 2018 R&D 100 Awards, including the Universal Bacterial Sensor developed by the team led by Harshini Mukundan. The sensor mimics biological recognition of bacterial pathogens to identify infections even before the patient’s symptoms are evident.

This year’s finalists also exhibit the importance of external partnerships in developing technical solutions to serve the country and enhance the nation’s industrial competitiveness. - John Sarrao, principal associate director of Science, Technology & Engineering. (Full story)

Simple Device Takes Imaging with Sound to a New Level

A research team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed an inexpensive method for generating a high-power, low-frequency, collimated sound beam. In addition to penetrating deeply, this beam can create high-resolution images for applications such as biomedical diagnosis, borehole monitoring, evaluating explosives threats, and underwater communications. The new technique, dubbed Acoustic Collimated Beam (ACCObeam), is a major advance over ultrasound imaging tools. These current tools cannot image deeply into cement, rock formations, or bone and the human body. That’s because high frequencies attenuate significantly in solids. (Full story)

Reusing CO2 cuts fossil-fuel footprint

With new incentives from the federal tax code,

capturing carbon and permanently storing it

underground increases U.S. energy security.

Fossil fuels continue to drive our economy as well as most of our cars. So it’s worth pursuing a new approach with economic and environmental benefits: using carbon dioxide (CO2) as a fracturing fluid, incentivized by a new development in the federal tax code. This technique creates a win-win-win: increased domestic oil and natural gas production with lower environmental impact, including permanently sequestering CO2 underground, which helps maintain earth-system balance.

Recent research by the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory has demonstrated that using CO2 for carbon capture, utilization, and storage can be commercially viable under the recently revised 45Q tax regulation. This carbon sequestration technique involves catching CO2 waste emitted by sources like fossil fuel plants, using it in another industrial process like energy extraction, then storing it underground. The Los Alamos research studied applying this technique to what’s known as enhanced oil recovery, or extracting resources from wells that have become unproductive through conventional drilling. (Full story)

Also, in the Albuquerque Journal:

New Mexico plateau named for birds is seeing them die off

Scientists believe a New Mexico plateau named for birds is seeing them die off because of climate change.

Jeanne Fair, a Los Alamos National Laboratory ornithologist, and other scientists at the laboratory recently released the results of a 10-year bird study on the Pajarito Plateau which shows “a 73 percent decrease in abundance and a 45 percent decrease in richness (variety of species) from 2003 to 2013,” the Santa Fe New Mexican reported last week.

Scientists believe a massive pinon tree die-off on the plateau may be a harbinger of things to come throughout the high-desert Southwest, where pinon trees — and the birds that frequent them — are potential markers for the effects of global warming. (Full story)

Italy’s famous dome is cracking, and cosmic rays could help save it

Florence's famed Il Duomo has been plagued by cracks for centuries, photo from Ars Technica.

The soaring dome atop the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower justly dominates the Florence skyline and has stood for centuries, ever since Filippo Brunelleschi designed it in the early 15th century. But scholars aren't quite sure how this goldsmith with no formal architectural training managed to construct it. Brunelleschi built a wooden and brick model of his plan but deliberately left out crucial details and left no comprehensive blueprints so his rivals could not steal his secrets.

Elena Guardincerri, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who grew up in a nearby town in Italy, thinks she can help resolve part of the mystery with the aid of a subatomic particle called a muon. (Full Story)

Removing hydrogen gas with silicone-based getters

3D hydrogen removal fabrication, from ASN.

Water covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface and is vital to support life. In the nuclear industry, decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen can occur inside waste containers, leading to explosion. Removal of hydrogen gas is necessary to address this issue.

In their paper in Advanced Functional Materials, Dr. Denisse Ortiz-Acosta and colleagues from Los Alamos National Laboratory fabricate and evaluate 3D silicone materials for hydrogen removal.

Getters, materials used to aid hydrogen removal, were fabricated using a 3D printer. Additives were incorporated into a silicone resin to optimize the rheological properties, getter capacity, and pot life. (Full Story)

D-Wave demonstrates large-scale quantum simulation of topological state of matter

Quantum computer, from D-Wave.

"D-Wave’s quantum simulation of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition is an exciting and impactful result. It not only contributes to our understanding of important problems in quantum magnetism but also demonstrates solving a computationally hard problem with a novel and efficient mapping of the spin system, requiring only a limited number of qubits and opening new possibilities for solving a broader range of applications," said Dr. John Sarrao, principal associate director for science, technology, and engineering at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)

New method of genome editing

Said the paper's lead author, Dean Morales, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, "As a basic research tool, with spatiotemporal control each cell can become an experiment. Imagine you'd like to study the function of a certain gene and how it alters that cell's behavior or its behavior with a close neighbor. Using the plasmonic nanoparticles as an antenna we can either turn on or turn off a gene of interest and observe in real-time the ramifications of its activity." (Full Story)

Los Alamos lab researching algae to convert to affordable fuel

Amanda Barry with a small algae farm. New Mexican photo.

Molecular biologist Amanda Barry and a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Bio-energy and Biome Sciences group are trying to determine whether one particular strain of algae can be produced at low cost and in short periods of time so that it could economically compete with fossil fuels.

“Algae hold great potential as a source of renewable fuel due to their ability to produce refinery-compatible diesel and jet fuel precursors,” Barry said in an interview last week at the New Mexico Consortium’s lab in Los Alamos. (Full Story)

Editor's Note: This story originally appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Supercomputers to be used in 13 manufacturing projects

Dow, GE and 3M are among 12 companies awarded $3.8 million for 13 industrial research projects – ranging from gas turbine combustor optimization, to manufacturing solid-state lithium-ion batteries, to improving insulating foam – under the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s High Performance Computing for Manufacturing  (HPC4Mfg) Program.

GE Global Research Center will partner with Los Alamos National Laboratory to improve the Truchas code for single crystal casting in a project titled “Highly Parallel Modeling Tool to Drive Casting Development for Aerospace and Industry Gas Turbines (IGT) Industries.” (Full Story)

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How nuclear weapons are sparking a digital revolution

Researchers say we’ve reached a technological turning point like the one that transformed pipeline processors into massively parallel machines two decades ago. It can’t come soon enough for nuclear weapons scientists and researchers. John Sarrao oversees some 700 nuclear weapons researchers as associate director for theory, simulation and computation at Los Alamos. He says scientists already have problems that only an exascale computer can solve.

Bob Webster, who runs Los Alamos’ weapons program, says real-life testing had made it comparatively easy to study bombs at the right temperature, density, pressure and more. So even with computer-only blasts, they’d need physical experiments — including explosives and multibillion-dollar laser facilities — to feed real numbers into their simulations, and to use as a check on their results. (Full Story)

Bird population plummets in piñon forests pummeled by climate change

Pinyon Jays help piñon forest regenerate, photo from Audubon.

On a June day in the piñon pine and juniper woodlands that lace the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, the only sound is the hot breeze wending through the trees and the occasional twitter of a Bewick’s Wren or House Finch. Fifteen years ago at this time of year, these mesas and canyons were alive with a raucous chorus of birdsong. But that was before the pines began to die.

Many wildlife species—including Pinyon and other jays, Clark’s Nutcrackers, Wild Turkeys, squirrels, and bears—gorge on piñons’ nutritious pine nuts, and little is known about how these die-offs affect them. New research published in Biological Conservation from scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) suggests that birds, at least, are not faring well in these parched woodlands. (Full Story)

Also from PhysOrg

Laser ‘license plate’ could improve identification of cubesats

Prototype device developed at Los Alamos, LANL photo.

A technology using a tiny laser tracker could help resolve one of the major challenges involved with the launching of cubesats: identifying individual satellites after their deployment.

"Cubesats are being launched in larger and larger groups, and, for most cubesat operators, they have no way of telling which object is theirs immediately after launch," said Rebecca Holmes of Los Alamos National Laboratory. She noted there are other cases where it can be difficult to identify an individual cubesat, such as a lapse in tracking or an unexpected orbital change. (Full Story)

Two Los Alamos scientists named American Geophysical Union Fellows

S. Peter Gary and Geoffrey D. Reeves, LANL photos.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) named two Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists fellows in recognition of their leadership and excellence in Earth and space sciences.

Geoffrey D. Reeves and S. Peter Gary are among 62 new fellows who will be honored at AGU’s annual conference in December in Washington, D.C. Only 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000-plus member scientists are named fellows each year, according to the international organization. (Full Story)

Also from the Daily Post this week:

Los Alamos National Laboratory scholarship winners

2018 Scholarship winners honored during an Aug. 8 reception at the LANL Foundation.

Northern New Mexico Tribal Business Scholarships support Native students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business-related fields. Regional College/Returning Student (RCRS) Scholarships are awarded to nontraditional students seeking a two-year degree or certification after a significant gap in formal education. 
 
The first Abiquiú Land Grant – Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Scholarship winner was also honored during the reception. This new award is specifically designated for descendants of an Abiquiú Land Grant family pursuing a bachelor's degree, two-year degree or professional certificate in any field of study. (Full Story)


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Laser “license plate” could improve identification of cubesats

Cubesat, NASA image.

A technology using a tiny laser tracker could help resolve one of the major challenges involved with the launching of cubesats: identifying individual satellites after their deployment.

“Cubesats are being launched in larger and larger groups, and, for most cubesat operators, they have no way of telling which object is theirs immediately after launch,” said Rebecca Holmes of Los Alamos National Laboratory. She noted there are other cases where it can be difficult to identify an individual cubesat, such as a lapse in tracking or an unexpected orbital change. (Full Story)

New approach yields high-purity radium for medical applications

Isotope production facility at Los Alamos, LANL photo.

Producing radium isotopes to treat cancer could get easier. Researchers developed a method to recover medical radium isotopes. The process begins with the dissolved proton-irradiated thorium target solution. The process then takes the solution through a series of columns. In each column, different isotopes bind to the different substrates the column contains. With the anticipated scale-up to large thorium targets, dozens of patient treatment doses would be available for recovery from a single production process. Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Isotope Team devised the method with collaborators from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Full Story)

LANL researchers show how computers can predict spread of HIV

HIV attacks a T-Cell.

In a recently published study in the journal Nature Microbiology, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory show that computer simulations can accurately predict the transmission of HIV across populations, which could aid in preventing the disease.

The simulations were consistent with actual DNA data obtained from a global public HIV database, developed and maintained by Los Alamos. The archive has more than 840,000 published HIV sequences for scientific research. (Full Story)

Also from the Monitor this week:

Directors talk of past, future of lab

LANL directors who attended the discussion included Kerr, Browne, Kuckuck, Anastasio, and  McMillan. LANL photo.

In 1942, America’s scientists and military leaders were locked in a race with the Axis Powers to create an atomic weapon, a weapon that in theory would be the most powerful and destructive weapon ever conceived by man.

Seventy-five years later, a panel of the lab’s five out of 10 past lab directors and the lab’s 11th Director Dr. Terry Wallace Jr. met for a public discussion at LANL’s campus, at the Pete V. Domenici Auditorium, July 31 to discuss the unique concept of a national laboratory, a once untried concept that has become the norm. (Full Story)

Lab directors worried about info-wars, education

Current Lab director Terry Wallace, LANL photo.

Get six people who have run Los Alamos National Laboratory together for a chat and ask them about today’s national security threats, and they don’t talk much about the lab’s central subject – nuclear weapons.

Collectively, the current lab director and five men who have been in charge of the nation’s pre-eminent weapons lab in the past say they’re most afraid of economic, cyber or information warfare, or problems in education.  (Full Story)

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Stemming the spread of HIV by accurately predicting its spread

Examining evolutionary relationships in HIV’s genetic code allows researchers  to evaluate how HIV is transmitted, LANL image.

One of the challenges with stemming the spread of HIV lies in understanding how it is spread. Because HIV mutates so rapidly, it has historically been difficult—if not impossible—to trace exactly who transmitted the virus to whom. Without that understanding, it’s easy for the disease to run unfettered through a population—with devastating results. Each year, HIV infects approximately 1.8 million people worldwide. All told, nearly 37 million people are currently estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS. But that might be changing.

In a study published this week in the journal Nature Microbiology, my colleagues and I demonstrate that computer simulations can accurately predict the transmission of HIV across populations, which could aid in preventing the disease. (Full Story)

Also from United Press International and Technology Networks

LANL researching algae to convert to affordable fuel

Amanda Barry with mini-ponds of algae, New Mexican photo.

Molecular biologist Amanda Barry and a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Bio-energy and Biome Sciences group are trying to determine whether one particular strain of algae can be produced at low cost and in short periods of time so that it could economically compete with fossil fuels.

“Algae hold great potential as a source of renewable fuel due to their ability to produce refinery-compatible diesel and jet fuel precursors,” Barry said in an interview last week at the New Mexico Consortium’s lab in Los Alamos. (Full Story)

Also from Green Car Congress

Software can model how a wildfire will spread

Photo from The Economist.

Rod Linn of Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, who helped design yet another piece of modelling software, FIRETEC, describes this as “engineering” the behaviour of wildfires. FIRETEC is so sophisticated that it even models how the flames of a planned burn, intended to clear vegetation in a controlled way, will be fed by the wind they generate. This lets users (who include the forest services of Canada and France, as well as the United States) design precise patterns for planned burns, in order to clear surface vegetation without destroying tree canopies. (Full Story)

AI stumbles in the spotlight

Artificial intelligence experts — concerned about reported blunders with high-stakes AI systems from makers like Amazon and IBM — are urging more oversight, testing, and perhaps a fundamental rethinking of the underlying technology.

Wall Street, the military, and other sectors expect AI to make increasingly weighty decisions in the future — with less and less human involvement. But if the systems behave inaccurately or display biases, the consequences outside the lab could cause harm to real people.

Garrett Kenyon, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in an interview that deep learning can’t grasp abstract concepts, or even reliably count or compare objects. (Full Story)

Also from Axios:

The impending war over deepfakes

Kim Jong-Un with Elvis? Photoshoped image from Axios.

Los Alamos researchers are creating a neurologically inspired system that searches for invisible tells that photos are AI-generated. They are testing for compressibility, or how much information the image actually contains. Generated images are simpler than real photos, because they reuse visual elements. The repetition is subtle enough to trick the eye, but not a specially trained algorithm.

AI might never catch 100% of fakes, said Juston Moore, a data scientist at Los Alamos. "But even if it’s a cat-and-mouse game," he said, "I think it’s one worth playing." (Full Story)

You can't just nuke Mars

Mars' south polar cap, ESA photo.

Roger Wiens, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, leads the team behind ChemCam, an instrument aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover. This instrument fires laser pulses at Martian rocks and analyzes the chemical composition of what comes out. He says that Curiosity has seen few carbonate bearing rocks at Gale Crater — the sort of calling card of adsorbed CO2.

“Carbonates are generally not that abundant on Mars,” Wiens says. “When you think about sediments on Earth, you think about carbonates because they’re everywhere.” (Full Story)

Also in Astronomy

Scientists test tiny labels for sorting out space debris

Space junk illustration, ESA image.

David Palmer, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, and his colleagues are working on a way to keep tabs on the growing space traffic. Palmer normally studies pulsars -- distant celestial bodies that emit regular pulses of radio waves -- but he realized that their low-power signals could be a model for tracking human-made objects in space. This inspired Palmer and his colleagues to develop postage stamp-sized beacons for satellites that are uniquely identifiable, like license plates in space. These devices, if successful, could become ubiquitous in the industry and help address the worsening problem of proliferating space junk. (Full Story)

Wallace and five former LANL Directors participate in panel for 75th anniversary celebration

Terry Wallace, right, and Donald Kerr, John Browne, Robert Kuckuck, Michael Anastasio and Charlie McMillan, with Ellen Tauscher during Tuesday's event. LANL photo.

Current LANL Director Terry Wallace said the Lab has a rich history expressed by the former directors on stage and as he introduced each one, he referred to the different challenges they faced during their terms. He said today’s challenges don’t look like those faced in 1943 by J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1945 by Norris E. Bradbury or in 1970 by Harold M. Agnew but that they are just as compelling and continue to be framed by world events. (Full Story)

Also from the Daily Post this week:

LANL sponsors back to school drive for students

Last year LANL collected 1,000 backpacks filled with school supplies, LANL photo.

Backpacks and supplies can be dropped off at Smith's in Los Alamos, branches of Del Norte Credit Union in Los Alamos, White Rock and Española, or at the Lab’s Community Partnerships Office at 1619 Central Ave., downtown. Look for the boxes decorated like yellow school buses at those locations (lists of suggested supplies are also available at the boxes).

The Laboratory is working with 12 school districts and the Bureau of Indian Education schools in Northern New Mexico to make sure the backpacks and supplies go to the children that need them most. (Full Story)

Italian scientists first to become citizens at new CIS office

Four-year-old Giulia D'Angelo waves a U.S. flag during the naturalization ceremony for her parents, Journal photo.

At Thursday’s opening of the new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Albuquerque, Milena Veneziani and Gennaro D’Angelo took the oath and became naturalized citizens. They both work at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Jesse Mendez, the director of the Albuquerque field office, said “I think having the special luck to naturalize these two citizens who have contributed not only to the community but the nation as a whole with the work they do as scientists, it was a tremendous opportunity.” (Full Story)


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