LAB REPORT

Just weeks after the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires became the costliest in U.S. history, with insured losses exceeding $37 billion and total economic damage estimates ranging from $95 billion to $164 billion, new research from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) offers insights into one of the most dangerous and least understood wildfire phenomena: multi-ignition fire complexes.

In a study published in Science Advances, researchers at LLNL and the University of California, Irvine examined how separate fire ignitions merge into larger, more destructive events. Their findings reveal that multi-ignition fires account for just 7% of California’s total fires but contribute to 31% of the state’s burned area.

“Multi-ignition fires have a disproportionate effect on the burned area,” said LLNL atmospheric scientist Qi Tang, a co-author of the study in a release. “Although they are quite rare, their influence is large compared to single-ignition fires.”

The largest fire on record in California, the 2020 August Complex fire, exemplifies the phenomenon. It grew from the coalescence of 10 separate ignitions into a single massive blaze.

A car wash chain with locations across Indiana and Minnesota ranks as the best place to work in the U.S., according to employee reviews on job site Glassdoor.

Indianapolis-based Crew Carwash scored the top spot on Glassdoor's 100 Best Places to Work in 2026. Crew, a family-owned business that last year earned the second spot on the list, employs about 1,000 part- and full-time workers across its 55 locations in the Midwest.

Glassdoor bases its rankings on insiders' takes on criteria that can determine a good job, ranging from opportunities for career growth to satisfaction with compensation and benefits. Its proprietary awards algorithm analyzed anonymous reviews of U.S.-based employers posted on the site from October 2024 through October 2025.

“Flexibility is extremely important for employees right now, and that doesn't just mean remote work,” Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao told CBS News. “Some companies are willing to be flexible on hours or give more autonomy to workers in terms of how they manage their careers.”

The 20 best companies to work for, according to Glassdoor, rank Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at 12th.

Next-generation technology requires next-generation materials that can be tailored to exact mission requirements. Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, has already revolutionized industries like aerospace engineering by enabling previously unthinkable component designs. However, this technique has been largely limited to pre-existing metallic alloys. This is due to the inherent complexity of the process that leads to far-from-equilibrium microstructures and results in mechanical properties that are hard to predict.

In a new study, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and their collaborators demonstrate a method to overcome the challenges of the traditional additive manufacturing process. By adjusting the speed of the laser in a compositionally complex alloy (also called a high-entropy alloy), the team discovered a method to guide how the atoms settle as the metal solidifies, controlling the material's properties directly at the atomic scale.

The paper is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

In the predawn hours of Jan. 11, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life at Santa Barbara County’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, lifting 40 small satellites, including the Pandora SmallSat developed in part by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), into orbit.

Led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in collaboration with LLNL, NASA’s Ames Research Center and other institutions, the Pandora mission looks to investigate stellar activity and search the atmospheres of exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — for water.

In its observations of known exoplanets, Pandora will attempt to tease apart the signatures of planet atmospheres from those of their host stars.

“Pandora does this, in part, by taking long duration measurements of the star by itself — Pandora characterizes the stellar behavior before and after an exoplanet transits in front of the star, thereby allowing us to have higher confidence in the data we take,” Jordan Karburn, LLNL engineer and Pandora deputy project manager, previously told The Independent. “These long duration baselines allow us to better characterize the data we take during exoplanet transit.”

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) computer scientist Peter Lindstrom recently received a 2025 IEEE VIS Test of Time Award for his 2014 paper on near-lossless data compression, recognizing its lasting influence on the field of scientific visualization and high-performance computing.

Presented annually at the IEEE VIS Conference, the Test of Time Award honors papers published at least ten years earlier that have made a sustained impact on visualization research and practice. Lindstrom’s paper, which introduced a new method for compressing numerical simulation data with high efficiency and precision, continues to shape how scientists handle the immense data volumes produced by modern supercomputers.

The paper, “Fixed-Rate Compressed Floating-Point Arrays,” describes a fixed-rate, near-lossless compression scheme that allows scientists to store and access floating-point data more efficiently, reducing storage demands and data movement while preserving numerical accuracy. The technique enables random access to compressed arrays, making it well suited for simulation, analysis and visualization tasks that require frequent data reads and writes.