Science

Explore Science And Folklore Behind Winter Solstice At Los Alamos Nature Center Planetarium Tonight!

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Explore the science and folklore behind the Winter Solstice at 7 p.m. today in the planetarium at the Los Alamos Nature Center. The nature center also will show the full-dome film “National Parks Adventure” at 2 p.m. Saturday.

PEEC News:

Explore the science and folklore behind the Winter Solstice at 7 p.m. today in the Los Alamos Nature Center’s planetarium.

Astronomer Rick Wallace will discuss the astronomy of solstices as well as folklore, festivals and activities that are dedicated to celebrating this time of year.

Wallace will look at solstice celebrations from around the world in both Read More

UbiQD Hosts 2018 Ugly Sweater Christmas Party … R&D Chemist Andres Velarde Wins By Landslide

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The crowd cheers as UbiQD CEO Hunter McDaniel, left, pronounces R&D Chemist Andres Velarde the overwhelming winner in the company’s annual ugly sweater contest Wednesday evening at UbiQD’s Los Alamos headquarters at 134 Eastgate Dr. Photo by Carol A. Clark/ladailypost.com

UbiQD’s Chief of Product Matt Bergren, left, and Greenhouse Technology Engineer Damon Hebert are clearly contenders. Photo by Carol A. Clark/ladailypost.com

UbiQD CEO Hunter McDaniel is joined by his wife Los Alamos MainStreet Director Lauren McDaniel and their son Duncan at the company’s Read More

UA: Stellar Corpse Reveals Clues To Missing Stardust

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UA News:
 
TUCSON, Ariz. — Everything around you – your desk, your laptop, your coffee cup – in fact, even you – is made of stardust, the stuff forged in the fiery furnaces of stars that died before our sun was born.
 
Probing the space surrounding a mysterious stellar corpse, scientists at the University of Arizona have made a discovery that could help solve a long-standing mystery: Where does stardust come from?
 
When stars die, they seed the cosmos around them with the elements that go on to coalesce into new stars, planets, asteroids and comets. Most everything that makes up Earth,
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Exhibit On Human Immune System Opens At Bradbury

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The new exhibit at the Bradbury Science Museum includes an interactive touch table. Courtesy photo
 

LANL Director Thom Mason addresses the ctowd at the opening reception Tuesday at the Bradbury Science Museum. Courtesy photo

 
Laboratory Fellow and computational biologist Bette Korber cuts the ribbon on the new exhibit. Courtesy photo
 
BRADBURY News:
 
How the immune system works to fight diseases and viruses like HIV and influenza is the focus of a new exhibit at the Bradbury Science Museum.
 
“Building Immunity: How Fighting HIV and Other Viruses Helps Us Understand
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LANL: Machine Learning-Detected Signal Predicts Time To Earthquake … Fault Displacement ‘Fingerprint’ Forecasts Magnitude

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LANL researchers applied machine-learning expertise to predict quakes along Cascadia, a 700-mile-long fault from northern California to southern British Columbia that flanks cities such as Seattle. The results are published in two papers in Nature Geoscience. Courtesy photo
 
LANL News:
  • ‘Fingerprint’ of fault displacement also forecasts magnitude of rupture
 
Machine-learning research published in two related papers in Nature Geosciences reports the detection of seismic signals accurately predicting the Cascadia fault’s slow slippage, a type of failure observed to
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NIST: Fire-Breathing Dragon Helps Fight Ember Attacks On Thatched-Roof Structures

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The NIST Dragon showering firebrands (embers) onto a model of a water reed thatched roof. Courtesy/NIST
 
Workers build the thatched roof of a gassho-zukuri (‘constructed like hands in prayer’) style house in Japan. A new NIST study looks at the impact of firebrands on these and other thatched-roof structures. Courtesy/Bernard Gagnon via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA
 
NIST News:
 
Visitors to the historic mountain villages in central Japan marvel at the elegance of the steep thatched-roof farmhouses found there. Known as “gassho-zukuri,” Japanese
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LANL: Top 25 Stories Highlight Science Achievements

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LANL News:

Breadth and depth of Lab science reflected in top science reporting

From space missions to disease forecasting, particle physics to artificial intelligence, the biggest science news items from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2018 have been gathered in one place: It’s a collection that reflects the significant depth and breadth of national laboratory science.

“The range of technical and scientific capabilities in these stories, as reported by media outlets across the world, reflects the many ways Los Alamos National Laboratory serves the nation,” Laboratory Director Thom Read More

Study Finds Organic Food Worse For Climate

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The crops per hectare are significantly lower in organic farming, which, according to the study, leads to much greater indirect carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation. Courtesy/Yen Strandqvist/Chalmers University of Technology
 
Chalmers University of Technology News:
 
Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required.
 
This is the finding of a new international study involving Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, published in the journal Nature.
 
The researchers developed
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NOAA: Remote Coral Reefs In Better Condition Than Those Near Human Populations In U.S. Pacific

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Corals at Pagan Island, an uninhabited volcanic island in the Mariana Islands archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, seem to have fared much better than other areas. Here is a close-up of an Acropora coral, typically more susceptible to bleaching events, which appears to be doing just fine. Courtesy/NOAA
 
NOAA News:
 
Coral reefs in remote, uninhabited areas of the American Pacific are generally in good condition, while reefs in the regions that are closer to human populations show more signs of impacts, according to five status reports on reef ecosystems released Thursday by NOAA.
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