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)
