Lack of sleep could be a problem for AIs

 

Image from SciAm.

 

One of the distinguishing features of machines is that they don’t need to sleep, unlike humans and any other creature with a central nervous system. Someday though, your toaster might need a nap from time to time, as may your car, fridge and anything else that is revolutionized with artificial intelligence technologies. At least that’s the implication of new research that we are conducting in Los Alamos National Laboratory to understand systems that operate much like the neurons inside living brains. Our realization came about as we worked to develop neural networks that closely approximate how humans and other biological systems learn to see. (Full Story)

 

Los Alamos examines impact of vaccines

 

A possible COVID-19 vaccine, photo from the Journal.

 

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are using computer models to study how the timing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines might shape the course of the pandemic – work that may influence policymakers in New Mexico and across the country.

 

The researchers say wearing masks and taking other steps to limit the spread of the disease will remain critical for months to come, even as the first vaccines reach New Mexico, perhaps next week.

 

“People don’t realize how much power they have in what’s going on,” mathematical epidemiologist Sara Del Valle said in a Journal interview. “It’s up to us as individuals. Our collective behavior has a great impact on how we fight this disease.” (Full Story)

 

How long will it take for the COVID-19 vaccine to reach New Mexicans?

 

New Mexico ordered more than 17,000 doses of Pfizer’s vaccine which could be authorized next week. Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists are using a unique type of modeling to figure out when life in New Mexico could start going back to normal. 

 

“To understand how to distribute [sic] vaccine, so that we can measure the impact on the healthcare system and also analyze when we can reopen the schools safely and the overall impact on the population including cases, how we can reduce cases and deaths,” said Mathematical Epidemiologist Sara Del Valle. (Full Story)

 

State officials provide more details about vaccine distribution plan

 

Pending FDA approval, 17,550 vaccine doses will come to New Mexico in a little more than a week. Researchers at Los Alamos National Labs are working to map out the path. 

 

"This project is about using mathematical models and computation simulations to understand how to distribute the vaccine,” said Sara Del Valle, a mathematical epidemiologist at LANL.  Scientists like Del Valle are working to identify the most effective and efficient way to stop the spread with a vaccine. (Full Story)

 

Also from the Santa Fe Reporter

Los Alamos National Lab chronicles its multifaceted computing battle against COVID-19

 

Covid-19, NIH image.

 

Well before COVID-19 struck New Mexico, New Mexico was striking COVID-19. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) began its research on COVID-19 in late January, one of several national labs to position itself as an early mover in fighting the pandemic research with high-performance computing.

 

Some LANL researchers, like scientist Dave Osthus, had an easy pivot to COVID-19 thanks to ongoing virus research that preceded the pandemic. Osthus and his colleagues provide weekly infection forecasts during flu season using a model so successful that it had won awards in previous flu seasons.  (Full Story)

 

Breakthrough material makes pathway to hydrogen use for fuel cells under hot, dry conditions

 

Proton conductor for fuel cells based on polystyrene phosphonic acids, LANL graphic.

 

Acollaborative research team, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Stuttgart (Germany), University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Laboratories, has developed a proton conductor for fuel cells based on polystyrene phosphonic acids that maintain high protonic conductivity up to 200 C without water. 

 

They describe the material advance in a paper published this week in Nature Materials. Hydrogen produced from renewable, nuclear, or fossil fuels with carbon capture, utilization, and storage can help to decarbonize industries and provide environmental, energy resilience and flexibility across multiple sectors in the economy. (Full Story)

AI reveals first direct observation of rupture propagation during slow quakes

 

Using a trained neural network and data from the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey, a research team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory revealed the first direct observation of rupture propagation during a slow earthquake. 

 

“The deep-learning approach we developed makes it possible to automatically detect the small and transient deformation that occurs on faults with unprecedented resolution, paving the way for a systematic study of the interplay between slow and regular earthquakes, at a global scale,” said Bertrand Rouet-Leduc, a geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and leader of the research team. (Full Story)

 

‘Let’s talk exascale’: storing and managing exa-class data volumes

 

Jim Ahrens, LANL photo.

 

In this new edition of “Let’s Talk Exascale” from the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, the ECP’s Scott Gibson talks with Jim Ahrens of Los Alamos National Laboratory about the project’s data and visualization portfolio.

 

As Ahrens said in this interview, “We can compute much faster than we can save and store data these days – specifically, exascale system concurrency is expected to grow by five or six orders of magnitude, yet system memory and IO bandwidth is only expected to grow by one or two orders of magnitude. And this discrepancy is really front and center for us to address. We need to figure out methods to address this issue.” (Full Story)

 

Breakthrough of the Year finalists: Thin-film perovskite detectors slash imaging dose

 

Perovskite thin-film X-ray detector, LANL image.

 

To Wanyi Nie and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory for using thin-film perovskites to create an extremely sensitive X-ray detector. Using a synchrotron beamline to characterize their thin-film perovskite detectors, the researchers found that the X-ray absorption coefficients of the perovskite materials were on average 10 to 40 times higher than that of silicon for higher-energy X-rays. They also demonstrated that the new X-ray detectors are 100 times more sensitive than conventional silicon-based devices. This new type of solid-state X-ray detector could enable medical and dental imaging at extremely low radiation dose, enabling the same quality image to be generated using a much-reduced X-ray dose, making scans safer for patients. (Full Story)

 

James Owen: From Peñasco to leader of weapons engineering

 

James Owen, LANL photo.

 

Growing up in Peñasco, in rural Taos County, Los Alamos seemed like a far-off world to James Owen and his friends. But a school field trip to the Bradbury Science Museum when he was a high school sophomore abruptly changed all that.

 

“A Los Alamos National Lab staff member presented to us and introduced this concept of implosion and it absolutely caught my attention,” James remembers. “It’s a relatively easy concept to understand now, but as a high school sophomore, I was really perplexed by this idea of implosion versus explosion. I became interested and really enthralled with Los Alamos from that point forward.” (Full Story)

 

Also from the LA Reporter this week:

 

Bioscience Division teams up with a New Mexico small business to test antibacterial face masks

 

Chris Cooper of Green Theme Technologies assesses the treated masks that are ready for distribution, LANL photo.

 

Around the country scientists and business leaders are thinking creatively about out-of-the-box ways to tackle the coronavirus, but closer to home a former Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist and a Bioscience Division staff member are applying known concepts to the simple face mask.

 

While seeking to develop a face mask that could not only block, but kill both bacteria and viruses, Gary Selwyn needed to have the antibacterial and antiviral assessments done independently.  An NMSBA coordinator connected Selwyn with Laverne Gallegos-Graves of the Bioenergy and Biome Sciences group at Los Alamos to test the antibacterial properties, while staff at University of New Mexico handled the viral work. (Full Story) 

 

LANL Spotlight: Derrick Key … caught In the camera eye

 

Photo by Derrick Key.

 

Among the lowrider aficionados enjoying the bright colors and hopping rhythms during a summertime car show in Española, Derrick Key, a fabrication technician at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wanders about the many “low and slow” vehicles on display.

 

But Key isn’t really at this event to check out the custom cars. A tell-tale camera in his hand, Key is here to take in the people and the lowrider culture that began with Mexican-American youths in the late 1940s and has since spread into other cultures, including African-American hip-hop culture and Japan’s custom-car scene. (Full Story)

 

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For LANL, preserving our state is a personal mission

 

A meadow along the Rio Cebolla in the Santa Fe National Forest, Journal photo.

 

In the past 25 years, the lab has been very successful in environmental stewardship, despite public perception to the contrary. The truth is, Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the most closely monitored places in New Mexico, with reporting requirements under more than two dozen different federal and state environmental laws, permits and other orders. With that kind of accountability, our achievements and challenges in environmental stewardship are transparent for all to see. That includes the good news and the bad: cleaning the past, being successful today, and planning to create a sustainable future. (Full Story)

 

Also from the Albuquerque Journal this week:

 

Speeding up the development of new materials

 

A platinum nanoparticle simulated with the EXAALT code, LANL image.

 

Using exascale computers efficiently will be no simple feat as they will carry out billions of operations simultaneously. Writing codes that can harness so much computing power requires fundamentally new ways to arrange the calculations, which often requires rethinking algorithms from the ground up.

 

The Exascale Atomistic capability for Accuracy, Length, and Time project, or EXAALT –  led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville ... aims to develop a new generation of algorithms that would let researchers use very large computers in new and more flexible ways. (Full Story)

 

Los Alamos National Lab report projects post-Thanksgiving COVID-19 data

 

Nov. 30 Weekly growth rate shows cases decreasing (blue shades) in most of the state.  LANL image.

 

The Los Alamos National Lab modeling team issued its December forecasting report, projecting daily number of cases to range between 1,768 and 3,899 in the next two weeks. According to the Department of Health, the state’s latest seven-day rolling average for daily cases sits around 1,494, down about 350 cases from the week before. However, that data is all pre-Thanksgiving. 

 

The modeling team at LANL notes in its report that when case rates go up, people’s protective behaviors tend to improve, resulting in some transmission drop. It took New Mexico more than three months to get from its first confirmed COVID-19 case to 10,000 cases. (Full Story)

 

NASA’s plutonium tours U.S. before heading to Mars

 

Plutonium-238 heat sources at TA-55, LANL photo.

 

The plutonium-238 that powers NASA’s rovers on Mars crisscrosses the United States first on a tour of national laboratories. The journey begins at Idaho and then Oak Ridge National Laboratories. 

 

The Pu-238 then heads 1,400 miles west to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where technicians press it into ceramic pellets, heat it in a kiln, encapsulate it in the iridium cladding, and test it to NASA’s standards.

 

“It's silver in color, it's kind of round, about an inch tall, and it's fairly heavy because it is a dense material,” said Jackie Lopez-Barlow, LANL’s radioisotope power systems program manager. “So if you were to hold it in the palm of your hand, it would take up about half the size of your palm of your hand. You wouldn't want to hold it in your hand, because it's extremely hot, about 400º Celsius.” (Full Story)

 

Voyager probes spot previously unknown phenomenon in deep space

 

Voyager, NASA image.

 

“The study is unique in that it looks at several large solar storms that punch through the bubble that the Sun carves out of the interstellar medium and extends far beyond Pluto,” Herbert Funsten, a space scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who’s not involved with the new study, explained in an email. “The Voyager spacecraft are in the interstellar medium and are therefore looking into the bubble — and the shocks that cross the bubble boundary — from the outside, providing a unique, quiet observation location that we cannot observe from inside the bubble.” (Full Story)

Quantum Dot paint could make airframe inspection quick and easy

 

Colloidal quantum dot depicting inner core (pink), outer shell (yellow), and polymer ligands (black lines), AFIT/ACS image.

 

Technicians of the future might be able to test airplane fuselages for airworthiness, check a bridge’s structural integrity, or inspect an intricate 3D-printed part for defects with only a quick scan from a camera.

 

Researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a paint containing quantum dots that could allow just that. Manufacturers could apply this paint to the surfaces of objects including vehicles, infrastructure, and spare parts, the researchers say. An inspector or a quality assurance specialist could rapidly gauge strain on those surfaces—how much they’ve been deformed—by analyzing light emitted by that paint. (Full Story) 

 

Lightning ‘superbolts’ have a unique formation mechanism, satellite studies suggest

 

Superbolt observed by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper covers much of Tennessee, from Physics World.

 

Normally when lightning is viewed from space, cloud cover makes it appear dimmer than it would appear on the ground. However, Michael Peterson, an atmospheric scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory points out that “sometimes the satellite is in just the right place to see the source with little-to-no cloud in the way, and this causes the flash to appear brighter than normal. This usually happens when the satellite is closer to the horizon and can see below the upper anvil cloud surrounding the storm core.”

 

In two new studies done at Los Alamos, Peterson, Erin Lay and Matt Kirkland analysed data collected by optical sensors aboard the Fast On-Orbit Detection of Transient Events (FORTE) and GOES-16 satellites to determine the brightness of superbolt events. FORTE provided twelve years of lightning observations, while two years of data gathered by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) aboard GOES-16 were analysed. (Full Story)

 

Also from SyFy Wire

 

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Evidence builds that an early mutation made the pandemic harder to stop

 

A Covid-19 intensive care ward in Italy, early in the pandemic, NYT photo.

 

The mutation, known as 614G, was first spotted in eastern China in January and then spread quickly throughout Europe and New York City. Within months, the variant took over much of the world, displacing other variants.

 

For months, scientists have been fiercely debating why. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued in May that the variant had probably evolved the ability to infect people more efficiently. 

 

But a host of new research — including close genetic analysis of outbreaks and lab work with hamsters and human lung tissue — has supported the view that the mutated virus did in fact have a distinct advantage. (Full Story)

 

 

Los Alamos scientists say their new technology could cut methane emissions By 90%

 

Image from Forbes.

 

Lead scientist Manvendra Dubey and his two Los Alamos team members, Bryan Travis and Jeremy Sauer, have already spoken with several potential commercial partners interested in working with them to commercialize the technology. The team hopes that their software — a type of machine learning code called a “neural net” — will be adopted widely by the energy industry. 

 

“This is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve worked on since graduate school,“ said Dubey in a phone interview, recalling his days as a PhD student in atmospheric chemistry at Harvard, where he studied stratospheric ozone depletion. (Full Story)

 

Also from Shale Magazine

Novel chemical process a first step to making nuclear fuel with fire

 

Microscopic image of cerium nitride foam, LANL photo.

 

Anew "combustion synthesis" process recently established for lanthanide metals—non-radioactive and positioned one row above actinides on the periodic table—could be a guide for the production of safe, sustainable nuclear fuels.

 

"Actinide nitride fuels are potentially a safer and more economical option in current power-generating systems," said Bi Nguyen, Los Alamos National Laboratory Agnew postdoc and lead author of research recently published in the journal Inorganic Chemistry, which was selected as an American Chemical Society Editors' Choice Featured Article. (Full Story)

 

Also from Lab Manager Magazine and Engineering and Technology Magazine

 

'Superbolts' are real, and they flash up to 1,000 times brighter than regular lightning

 

Photo from Live Science.

 

"We focused on superbolts that are substantially brighter than normal lightning — at least 100 times more energetic — and then looked at the top pulses above that threshold, said Michael Peterson, lead author on both studies and a remote-sensing researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

 

The brightest superbolts tended to cluster in geographic regions where large thunderstorms are common, and superbolt appearance was associated with "long-horizontal lightning flashes that can span hundreds of kilometers, which have been recently termed 'megaflashes,'" Peterson said. (Full Story)

 

Also from Science Alert

Tracking and fighting fires on earth and beyond

 

The 2011 Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos, USFS photo.

 

Ateam from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, introduced new developments to a computational fluid dynamics model that can incorporate fuels of varying moisture content. Many existing environmental models average the moisture of all the fuels in an area, but that approach fails to capture the variations found in nature, said chemical engineer Alexander Josephson, a postdoctoral researcher who studies wildfire prediction at Los Alamos. As a result, those models may yield inaccurate predictions in wildfire behavior, he said.

 

"If you're walking through the forest, you see wood here and grass there, and there's a lot of variation," said Josephson. Dry grasses, wet mosses, and hanging limbs don't have the same water content and burn in different ways.  (Full Story)

 

AAAS and LANL announce 2020 Fellows

 

New Fellows, from left, David Chavez, Chris Fryer, Pat Fitch, Bob Williams and Marcelo Jaime. LANL photos.

 

Five Los Alamos scientists have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. Members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

 

“The range of science contributions that this year’s Fellows have made is an excellent example of the high quality and extensive impact of our national security science at Los Alamos,” said John Sarrao, Deputy Director for Science, Technology & Engineering. “We are honored to have these five researchers among the Laboratory community.” (Ful Story)

 

Also from the Reporter this week:

 

DisrupTECH features superior plastics recycling, smart software, predictive mapping

 

Winners of the LANL DisrupTECH awards, clockwise from top left, Juan Leal, Eric Davis, Tony Shin, and Neil Loychik, LANL photos.

 

Cutting-edge technologies ranging from more effective plastics recycling to using AI for systems monitoring were recently showcased by a select group of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists to businesses and investment groups as part of the Laboratory’s annual DisrupTECH event.

 

“Part of the mission of Los Alamos National Laboratory is to transition technology that was developed here to the commercial sector so the public can benefit from it,” said Kathleen McDonald, acting director of the Feynman Center for Innovation, which is the tech-transfer division of the Laboratory and host of the event.  (Full Story)

 

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