Why top scientists are pretending an asteroid is headed for Earth

Cathy Plesko speaks with Wired Magazine

from the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference

in College Park, Maryland.

Some of the world's best scientists are running drills to practice for a near earth object collision. WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez spoke with Cathy Plesko from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to find out how we would respond to an incoming collision. Would nuclear detonations work? What does a "City Killer" look like? Would impact in the water be worse than impact on land? Find out more from Plesko. (Full story)

Mars doesn't need our microbes

A topological map of Mars (blues represent

low areas; reds, high) NASA image.

When humans do make it to Mars, they’re going to take a few trillion tiny friends along for the ride, no matter what. 

Even if the current protocols don’t need to change, not everyone is as careful as NASA. “I think it’s fantastic that [private] companies are pushing the limits and pushing the ideas and are getting people excited,” says Nina Lanza, a planetary geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. But she’s also afraid that as those companies seek to be the first to land humans on Mars, the competition will overshadow and even hurt the scientific process. “That’s awesome, but it’s not as careful as we really need to be thinking,” she says. (Full story)

 

Machine learning in geoscience: Riding a wave of progress

Illustration from EOS.

The geosciences are data rich, with petabytes of readily and publicly available data. This availability, combined with the complexity of unsolved problems in the field, has motivated vigorous interest in the application of machine learning (ML) techniques. ML offers a new “lens” for viewing data and scientific hypotheses that differs from the perspective of traditional domain expertise. Initial uses of ML have tended to be limited in scope and isolated in application, but recent efforts to promote benchmark geoscientific data sets and competitions promise to propel broader, deeper, and increasingly coordinated and collaborative efforts. (Full story)

 

The loudest places you can’t hear

Infrasonic hot spots, LANL image.

“Any kind of mechanical process is going to generate energetic waves, said Omar Marcillo, staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Some of that goes through the atmosphere as acoustic waves, and some goes through the ground as seismic waves.” Marcillo’s work focuses on the seismic.

When researchers track seismic activity, they’re sensing the waves that make the Earth roll and rumble, of course. But those waves aren’t that much different than what we hear as sound. Some kinds of waves produced by earthquakes have even been known to generate sounds that people can hear before the ground starts to shake beneath them. (Full story)

New HeSpaDDA algorithm distributes parallel workloads on LANL supercomputers

Adaptive resolution situation (AdResS)

simulation of an atomistic protein,

from Inside HPC.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Lab have developed new software to distribute computation more efficiently and across increasing numbers of supercomputer processors. This new decomposition approach for molecular dynamics simulation is called the heterogeneous spatial domain decomposition algorithm, or HeSpaDDA. Areas of different density were assessed and rearranged to distribute the processing workload. (Full story)

The plan to dodge a killer asteroid—Maybe even good ol’ Bennu

Cathy Plesko speaking at the 2019 PDC, LANL photo.

Plate tectonics and erosion have swept most dings, dents, and saucer-shaped depressions neatly away, leaving only the artifacts of bigger collisions—like Meteor Crater in Arizona. “If that had happened in modern times, it would have taken out the entire city of Flagstaff,” says Cathy Plesko, a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Nobody’s getting out of that one alive.”

In the early 20th century, a space rock hundreds of feet wide exploded over the Siberian taiga. The impact blast was so bright “you could read by the afterglow of the trail,” says Plesko—in London. It knocked the forest flat for miles. (Full Story)

Measles outbreak hits 25-year high

The nationwide measles outbreak hit an alarming milestone, as the number of cases hit a 25-year high. The CDC said 78 new cases were reported over the past week. That brings this year's total to 704 in 22 states.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Sara Del Valle speaks to CBS News about how scientists at the Laboratory are using social media to track and sometimes predict disease outbreaks worldwide. (Full Story on YouTube)

Was that a small nuclear test…or just a football game?

Image from Defense One.

How do we know a seismic reading is an underground nuclear test and not a mining explosion, an earthquake, or something else? It’s harder to determine than you might think. Dale Anderson is a mathematician specializing in seismology at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Take, for example, the earthquake that was recorded last summer when soccer fans all across Mexico City cheered their team’s goal in a World Cup match. The initial assertion was that their collective jump-up-and-down energy shook the ground. It might have, but the energy was too dispersed. That earthquake measurement was caused by, well, an actual earthquake. (Full Story)

Scientists are mapping the industrial hums that travel through the Earth

Map of industrial vibrations, LANL image.    

Across the U.S., industrial machinery creates a constant underground hum that sends vibrations through the surface of the Earth. Scientists are now mapping that subterranean humming.

The industrial “hum” is much like a hum you hear when you walk into a room where a fan is running—a persistent signal, but much lower in frequency. Wind turbines and turbines in hydroelectric systems can produce these hums, which can get in the way when you’re trying to study earthquakes, said Omar Marcillo from Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)

Also from PhysOrg

Helping health workers understand unfolding disease outbreaks

Alina Deshpande, LANL photo.

A quick tool to help develop actionable information is the plan for a web-based disease-outbreak tool developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a quick analysis resource called AIDO (“I-do”) for Analytics for Investigation of Disease Outbreaks.

Unlike traditional epidemiological models, this tool can be used by diverse group of users, such as analysts, scientists, practitioners, decision makers and the public, at no cost. The website provides historic information for key outbreaks of nearly 40 different diseases and it helps responders select the historic similarities to each new situation, even as an outbreak evolves over the first hours and days. (Full Story)

SuperCam one step closer to Mars

The SuperCam has completed testing and is on its way to JPL for full system integration. LANL photo.              

The SuperCam instrument – designed, built and tested at Los Alamos National Laboratory in partnership with the French Space Agency – and destined for the exploration of Mars – has completed testing and evaluation at Los Alamos and is on its way to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for full system integration.

The SuperCam instruments left Los Alamos Monday, April 29. SuperCam will be one of two* Los Alamos instruments on the next rover, called Mars 2020, an upgraded version of the current rover on Mars, Curiosity. (Full Story)

LANL faces of innovation: David Funk

Dave Funk leads Enhanced Capabilities for Subcritical Experiments, LANL photo.      

Dave Funk has a complicated job. He leads a multi-lab effort to design and build a linear induction accelerator that can take x-rays (radiographs) of the late stages of implosion experiments at NNSS. Not only that, his team has to assemble the accelerator in a tunnel 960 feet underground.

Funk, of the Laboratory’s Accelerator Development Program Office, is the senior director of the Advanced Sources and Detectors (ASD) Project, part of the Enhanced Capabilities for Subcritical Experiments (ECSE), a federally directed portfolio to enable studies of what happens to plutonium during the late stages of its implosion (compression) inside a nuclear weapon. (Full Story)
 
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This is the first-ever simulation of an entire gene

Largest simulation an entire gene of DNA, LANL image.

Given just how important genes are, it’s somewhat surprising that we have very little direct imagery of them functioning. The problem is that genes are so small and work so quickly that taking any photos or videos of them is nearly impossible. That’s why a group of researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory turned to a computer simulation as the next best thing.

Using the Trinity supercomputer at Los Alamos, the researchers created a simulation of a single nanosecond of a gene. If one nanosecond sounds short to you—that’s about a billionth of a second—remember that the simulation contains over a billion atoms. For the researchers to simulate this gene, they have to not only simulate those individual atoms but also the electrical and chemical interactions between each pair of them. That’s an enormous amount of calculation. (Full story)

LANL researchers simulate billion-atom biomolecule  HPCwire

Detail of the billion atom DNA model, LANL image.

Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Japan, the New Mexico Consortium, and New York University have successfully created the first billion-atom simulation of an entire gene using a new approach they devised that reduces computational costs for such large simulations.

“It is important to understand DNA at this level of detail because we want to understand precisely how genes turn on and off,” said Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist at Los Alamos and author of the paper. “Knowing how this happens could unlock the secrets to how many diseases occur.” It’s worth noting there is enough DNA in the human body to wrap around the earth 2.5 million times, which means it is compacted in a very precise and organized way. (Full story)

See the video

Also from United Press International and PhysOrg

The hidden seismic symphony in earthquake signals

Many of the recent headline-grabbing developments in machine learning hinge on an approach called deep neural networks. Yet a simpler and more transparent form of machine learning called decision trees is unlocking impressive new scientific discoveries. In the case of our earthquake research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a machine-learning process involving decision trees has revealed previously unsuspected physics principles that a deep neural network would have obscured and humans poring over data sets probably never would have noticed. To our surprise—and delight—this approach has led to a breakthrough in probing the mechanics of earthquakes, which will certainly advance our pursuit of the holy grail of geoscience: earthquake forecasting. (Full story)

Could machine learning be the key to earthquake prediction?

Earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher between

1900 and 2013, USGS image.

Five years ago, Paul Johnson wouldn’t have thought predicting earthquakes would ever be possible. Now, he isn’t so certain. “I can’t say we will, but I’m much more hopeful we’re going to make a lot of progress within decades,” the Los Alamos National Laboratory seismologist says. “I’m more hopeful now than I’ve ever been.”

The main reason for that new hope is a technology Johnson started looking into about four years ago: machine learning. Many of the sounds and small movements along tectonic fault lines where earthquakes occur have long been thought to be meaningless. But machine learning—training computer algorithms to analyze large amounts of data to look for patterns or signals—suggests that some of the small seismic signals might matter after all. (Full story)

 

Seeing the quantum

Light generated by spontaneous parametric

down-conversion, from Aeon.

I spent a lot of time in the dark in graduate school. Not just because I was learning the field of quantum optics – where we usually deal with one particle of light or photon at a time – but because my research used my own eyes as a measurement tool. I was studying how humans perceive the smallest amounts of light, and I was the first test subject every time. Author Rebecca Holmes is a physicist and staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full story)

SuperCam developed in Los Alamos to be used on rover in 2020 mission to Mars 

SuperCam undergoing final preperations.

On Monday, a camera developed here in New Mexico makes its first stop on its mission to Mars. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory say the SuperCam will be a key feature on the 2020 Mars rover. It will be attached to the rover currently at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. before heading to space next year.

"SuperCam is like a geological observatory on Mars," said Roger Wiens, principal investigator on the SuperCam at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The future of space exploration is in the works -- and it's happening right here in New Mexico with the development of the SuperCam. (Full story)

In the Lab: Building the next generation of experts

John Kramer, LANL photo.

In a woodsy part of the Los Alamos National Laboratory where elk linger outside his building, John Kramer is guiding the next generations of high explosives experts.

The lab’s esteemed explosives enclave has been Kramer’s turf since he was 19, mopping up water in big bays and growing accustomed to the shaking, rumbling world around him. Now, 37 years later, Kramer is a revered R&D engineer who holds two patents and keeps the lab’s detonator powder production plant humming to meet growing demands. (Full story)