ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — “Zombie” mammalian cells that may function better after they die have been created by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico (UNM). The simple technique coats a cell with a silica solution to form a near-perfect replica of its structure. The process may simplify a wide variety of [...]
Category Archives: Materials Science
‘Zombie’ replica cells may outperform live ones as catalysts and conductors
February 7, 2013 – 5:00 am
Students painlessly measure knee joint fluids in annual Sandia contest
September 26, 2012 – 9:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Texas Tech University repeated last year’s victory in the novel design category of Sandia National Laboratories’ annual competition to design new, extraordinarily tiny devices, while Carnegie Mellon University won the educational microelectromechanical (MEMS) prize for the second year in a row. This year’s contest attracted engineering students from nine universities, nearly double [...]
Sandia solar researcher chosen as one of continent’s ten most brilliant scientists
September 24, 2012 – 9:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia researcher Greg Nielson is “one of the 10 most promising young scientists working today,” says Popular Science magazine. Nielson garnered one of the magazine’s “Brilliant 10” awards for helping lead the Sandia effort to create solar cells the size of glitter. Past Brilliant 10 honorees have gone on to win the [...]
Dry-run experiments verify key aspect of Sandia nuclear fusion concept
September 17, 2012 – 5:00 am
Scientific “break-even” or better is near-term goal ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Magnetically imploded tubes called liners, intended to help produce controlled nuclear fusion at scientific “break-even” energies or better within the next few years, have functioned successfully in preliminary tests, according to a Sandia research paper accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters (PRL). To exceed scientific [...]
Sandia explosives legend Paul Cooper hangs up his teaching hat
August 27, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Paul Cooper, one of the world’s foremost explosives experts, retired from Sandia National Laboratories more than a decade ago but continued his labor of love, teaching a new generation of engineers everything they needed to know about blowing things up. Cooper taught explosives safety and technology to about 1,000 people at Sandia [...]
Solar nanowire array may increase percentage of sun’s frequencies available for energy conversion
June 18, 2012 – 5:00 am
Sandia nanowire template permits flexible energy absorption ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researchers creating electricity through photovoltaics want to convert as many of the sun’s wavelengths as possible to achieve maximum efficiency. Otherwise, they’re eating only a small part of a shot duck: wasting time and money by using only a tiny bit of the sun’s incoming [...]
Sandia Labs’ unique approach to materials allows temperature-stable circuits
May 31, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M — Sandia National Laboratories researcher Steve Dai jokes that his approach to creating materials whose properties won’t degenerate during temperature swings is a lot like cooking — mixing ingredients and fusing them together in an oven. Sandia has developed a unique materials approach to multilayered, ceramic-based, 3-D microelectronics circuits, such as those used [...]
Sandia paper on flat-panel displays is one of Applied Physics Letters’ 50 greatest hits
May 7, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, NM — A paper by Sandia National Laboratories researchers with implications for early flat panel televisions is one of the 50 most cited papers from the prestigious journal Applied Physics Letters in the last 50 years, according to a listing made public by that journal. The 1996 paper shows that zinc oxide (ZnO) will [...]
Innovation Celebration spotlights teamwork between science and business
May 1, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A kick in the teeth got Delano Romero thinking about mouth guards. An Albuquerque martial artist, Romero was sparring in Brazilian jiu-jitsu when his mouth took a hit. His over-the-counter mouth guard didn’t do its job, and his teeth fractured. Romero decided to develop a better mouth guard, started a business, Albuquerque Delicate [...]
ER doc, Sandia engineer join forces on better trauma shears
April 23, 2012 – 8:05 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An Albuquerque physician teamed with a Sandia National Laboratories engineer to improve the doctor’s trauma shears design so emergency personnel can get to the injuries they need to treat more quickly. “Sometimes seconds count. This product will make a difference for the medical community,” said Mark Reece of Sandia’s Multiscale Metallurgical Science [...]
Miniature Sandia sensors may advance climate studies
April 10, 2012 – 5:00 am
Self-sealing valves also increase data reliability for airborne industrial and battlefield gas detection and point-of-contact medicine ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An air sampler the size of an ear plug is expected to cheaply and easily collect atmospheric samples to improve computer climate models. “We now have an inexpensive tool for collecting pristine vapor samples in the [...]
Sandia’s Ion Beam Laboratory looks at advanced materials for reactors
March 26, 2012 – 1:20 pm
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M — Sandia National Laboratories is using its Ion Beam Laboratory (IBL) to study how to rapidly evaluate the tougher advanced materials needed to build the next generation of nuclear reactors and extend the lives of current reactors. Reactor operators need advanced cladding materials, which are the alloys that create the outer layer of nuclear [...]
Sandia seeks better neural control of prosthetics for amputees
February 18, 2012 – 7:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M — Sandia National Laboratories researchers, using off-the-shelf equipment in a chemistry lab, have been working on ways to improve amputees’ control over prosthetics with direct help from their own nervous systems. Organic materials chemist Shawn Dirk, robotics engineer Steve Buerger and others are creating biocompatible interface scaffolds. The goal is improved prosthetics with [...]
Sandia National Laboratories researchers find energy storage “solutions” in MetILs
February 17, 2012 – 8:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Sandia researchers have developed a new family of liquid salt electrolytes, known as MetILs, that could lead to batteries able to cost-effectively store three times more energy than today’s batteries. The research, published in Dalton Transactions, might lead to devices that can help economically and reliably incorporate large-scale intermittent renewable energy sources, [...]
Anthrax-killing foam proves effective in meth lab cleanup
February 16, 2012 – 5:00 am
Sandia’s decontamination foam is now also a meth eraser Sandia’s decontamination foam, developed more than a decade ago and used to decontaminate federal office buildings and mailrooms during the 2001 anthrax attacks, is now being used to decontaminate illegal methamphetamine labs. Mark Tucker, a chemical engineer in Sandia’s Chemical & Biological Systems Dept. and co-creator [...]
Sandia chemists find new material to remove radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel
January 23, 2012 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste. The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. “This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine [...]
Sandia’s Annular Core Research Reactor conducts 10,000th operation
October 31, 2011 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – With a muffled “pop,” a flash of blue light and a few ripples through 14,000 gallons of deionized water, Sandia National Laboratories’ Annular Core Research Reactor (ACRR) recently conducted its 10,000th operation. “The ACRR has been a real workhorse for Sandia, and labs leadership and the nation rely on these experiments and [...]
High-quality white light produced by four-color laser source
October 26, 2011 – 5:00 am
Tests show new kid on block – diode lasers – eventually could challenge LEDs for home and industrial lighting supremacy ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories. Both [...]
Sandia National Labs completes final scan of space shuttle program
July 25, 2011 – 2:27 pm
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Nine engineers from Sandia National Laboratories helped ensure Atlantis’ safety from Mission Control at Johnson Space Center as the shuttle made its final flight, marking the end of NASA’s 30-year space shuttle program. For the past 22 missions — every one since NASA’s 2005 return to space — Sandia Labs’ engineers have [...]
Dust-size dragonflies and microvalves make mark at annual MEMS student design contest
June 17, 2011 – 10:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A dragonfly as small as a dust mote, its four tiny wings beating like it had momentarily alit on a lily pad, and a highly sensitive microvalve were the big winners in this year’s student design contest for extraordinarily tiny devices at Sandia National Laboratories. The winners — Texas Tech University for [...]
Z researcher Dan Sinars awarded $2.5 million DOE Early Career grant
May 25, 2011 – 3:32 pm
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Pursuing a fruitful line of inquiry, Sandia National Laboratories researcher Dan Sinars has been awarded a $2.5 million, five-year “Early Career Research Program” award for measuring fundamental instabilities in magnetically driven Z-pinch explosions. Sinars’ team was the first to capture, in a series of 3-D images separated by nanoseconds, the undesirable but [...]
Sandia National Laboratories unlocks secrets of plague with stunning new imaging techniques
May 16, 2011 – 9:40 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a super-resolution microscopy technique that is answering long-held questions about exactly how and why a cell’s defenses fail against some invaders, such as plague, while successfully fending off others like E.coli. The approach is revealing never-before-seen detail of the cell membrane, which could open doors [...]
Second Z plutonium “shot” safely tests materials for NNSA
May 11, 2011 – 7:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that researchers from Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories have completed their second experiment in the past six months at Sandia’s Z machine to explore the properties of plutonium materials under extreme pressures and temperatures. The information is used to keep the U.S. nuclear [...]
Sandia and UNM lead effort to destroy cancers
April 18, 2011 – 4:00 am
Boosting medicine with nanotechnology strengthens drug cocktail many times over ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Melding nanotechnology and medical research, Sandia National Laboratories, the University of New Mexico, and the UNM Cancer Research and Treatment Center have produced an effective strategy that uses nanoparticles to blast cancerous cells with a mélange of killer drugs. In the cover [...]
Local college receives a piece of Sandia/California history
March 23, 2011 – 9:29 am
LENS machine to assist future generations of welders LIVERMORE, Calif. — Las Positas College, located just a few short miles away from the Sandia/California campus, might be a close partner of Sandia’s in the near future as the lab continues to pursue academic and industry collaborators on its new open campus. But even with an [...]
LAMMPS supercomputer code developer earns special recognition
March 3, 2011 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories researcher Steve Plimpton, who led development of a widely used computer code that models how materials behave, has been invited to present a keynote lecture at the Feb. 27-March 3 Minerals, Materials & Materials Society (TMS) meeting in San Diego. Plimpton developed the LAMMPS molecular-dynamics software code. The acronym [...]
World’s smallest battery created at CINT nanotechnology center
December 9, 2010 – 12:10 pm
Snake-like “Medusa front” offers “a view never before seen” to improve lithium batteries ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A benchtop version of the world’s smallest battery — its anode a single nanowire one seven-thousandth the thickness of a human hair — has been created by a team led by Sandia National Laboratories researcher Jianyu Huang. To better [...]
Registration open for Sandia-sponsored 4th International Conference on Integration of Renewable and Distributed Energy Resources
November 19, 2010 – 5:00 am
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Registration is open for the 4th International Conference on the Integration of Renewable and Distributed Energy Resources, the premier event for technical discussion of electric integration of new energy resources. Jointly sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories, the U.S. Department of Energy, Natural Resources Canada, Public Service Company of New Mexico, the Solar [...]
Water’s interaction with platinum demands closer examination, Sandia researchers find
October 13, 2010 – 12:52 pm
Unexpected results found at wetting layer could aid future devices ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.— Basic assumptions about water’s adsorption to platinum do not hold true, Sandia researchers have found. “The way that water molecules prefer to arrange themselves on platinum has always been largely a matter of speculation,” Sandia researcher Peter Feibelman said. Accurate knowledge is important because [...]
Tom Friedmann awarded NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal
July 12, 2010 – 3:00 am
Diamond-like thin film offers hard data for solar models ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories researcher Tom Friedmann was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal (EEAM) at a ceremony June 15 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. He received the award for the quality of the diamond-like carbon thin films he contributed [...]
Sandia Labs reports first successful integration of a terahertz quantum-cascade laser and diode mixer into a monolithic solid-state transceiver
June 29, 2010 – 2:03 pm
Improved control of “neglected middle-child” frequency range offers potential benefits ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories researchers have taken the first steps toward reducing the size and enhancing the functionality of devices in the terahertz (THz) frequency spectrum. By combining a detector and laser on the same chip to make a compact receiver, the researchers [...]
Sandia paper on steric confinement of proteins published in PNAS journal
April 14, 2010 – 5:00 am
LIVERMORE, Calif. — A paper authored by Sandia National Laboratories researchers Jeanne Stachowiak, Carl Hayden and Darryl Sasaki is featured in the April 13 edition of PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, “Steric confinement of proteins on lipid membranes can drive curvature and tubulation,” presents a new scientific understanding about [...]