Friday, July 10, 2015



Saving West’s iconic landscapes from wildfires, one steppe at a time

The Valles Caldera, LANL image.

Valles Caldera is a nearly 14-mile-wide crater of an ancient volcano in New Mexico's Jemez Mountains. Its forested rim rings a expanse of trees, meadows, and summits inside the crater.

Beyond its ecological value, Valles Caldera represents an important watershed influencing the Rio Grande River, notes Richard Middleton, a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)




Using particle physics to map what’s inside Fukushima

Worker at the destroyed Fukushima plant, from Popular Mechanics.              

Cleanup efforts at Fukushima have a boost from halfway around the world, thanks to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. So how do you map the series of pipework to find potential faults? You use particles. Specifically muons.

As the naturally occurring particles pass through a part of Fukushima, a series of detectors map their movements and notice whether they change direction. (Full Story)



Technology out of Los Alamos may help better diagnose diseases

Harshini Mukundan, LANL photo.     

A serious and highly contagious disease recently made a comeback in New Mexico. Just last month, health officials out of Clovis had to test more than 100 Curry County residents after a man came down with Tuberculosis. Doctors still don’t have effective ways of testing for it, but that could change with new technology out of Los Alamos.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Lab were looking for a tool that could diagnose TB early on, and one that could tell the difference between active and inactive TB. (Full Story)




Perovskites will power new low-cost & highly efficient solar cells

Perovskite crystals, LANL image.

Since we’re celebrating Independence Day this weekend over here in the USA, we’re sharing this fireworksy image of perovskite crystals emailed to us by the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  The lab has been hot on the trail of next-generation, super-efficient solar cells, and it looks like perovskite is the name of the game, partly because they are “more than a thousand times” less expensive than those fancy multi-junction solar cells. (Full Story)




Eddies pull carbon emissions into deep ocean, new model simulates

A three-dimensional spatial structure of mixing in an idealized ocean simulation, LANL image.

To better understand how carbon dioxide (CO2) moves around the globe, scientists need to know what happens as the ocean circulates. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) computer models clarify the complex ocean mixing process occurring in mesoscale eddies across the open ocean, and what they show will help prioritize responses to climate change. (Full Story)




Video: How Seagate collaborates with LANL on HPC

Kyle Lamb from the Infrastructure Team at Los Alamos National Lab describes the unique challenges he faces at a facility known for being at the forefront of technology. Kyle addresses the future of storage for High Performance Computing and the ways LANL is partnering with Seagate to tackle the changes on the horizon. (Full Story)

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