LAB REPORT

The U.N. created Asteroid Day in 2016, commemorating the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska event, when an asteroid exploded over Siberia, flattening trees and causing destruction as far out as 22 miles from the explosion's epicenter in what stands as the largest impact event in modern history.

The Tunguska asteroid's estimated size was about 130 feet in diameter, according to NASA. Today, scientists are scanning the sky in search of asteroids far larger.

“I think one of the biggest risks for us in planetary defense is that we don't know where all of these objects are,” said Katie Kumamoto, head of the planetary defense group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “And we're doing a lot of work to find them.”

For years, astronomers and space agencies struggled to locate and track asteroids. But with the development of programs like NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program in the late 1990s, planetary defense has evolved from simply tracking space rocks to modeling their paths, and even testing whether one could be pushed off course.

The World Cup is here, and thousands of fans are in the Bay Area to catch some of these big matches. You can expect heavy and visible law enforcement presence during the FIFA World Cup soccer matchups over at the San Francisco Bay Area Stadium. Now, plainclothes scientists, yes, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore Lab will be there as well.

As Today In the Bay's Bob Redell reports, members of NEST, the nation's Nuclear Emergency Support Team, will be in search of threats that we can't see, smell or hear with our own senses.

When Jessica Mintz arrives at Levi's on Saturday, this will be her ride: a black SUV outfitted with pods that can detect gamma and neutron radiation to sweep venues like the stadium. And someone like Jason Schnackenberg will roam the crowd with this similarly equipped backpack, staring at his smartphone, not scanning social media, but searching for something much more toxic.

Next to seemingly endless rows of bell peppers, sweet corn and leafy greens at B & T Farms stand thousand-gallon drums of nitrogen fertilizer, the cost of which has increased 125% since 2020 amid supply shocks and wars around the world.

As these costs have trickled down to consumers at grocery stores, an innovation from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seeks to cut California farmers’ reliance on global supply chains with a new type of agricultural alchemy that turns wastewater into nitrogen fertilizer — sometimes called “black gold” in the ag industry.

“Whether it was 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, or if it’s this year with the war in Iran, when those imports get disrupted, the cost of fertilizer just skyrockets,” said Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Jeremy Feaster. “That can really break the economics of a farm.”

At B & T Farms, co-owner Paul Mirassou estimated that his operation spends approximately $1 million per year on fertilizer.

“If we didn’t have (nitrogen), we’d have a tenth of the yield,” Mirassou said. “We wouldn’t be able to farm.”

The U.S. has unveiled a new cone-shaped nuclear test vehicle designed to endure the extreme heat and vibration experienced during high-speed nuclear weapon flights.

Called Aires Tide, the 11-foot (3.35-meter) smart prototype was built through a collaboration between Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Kansas City National Security Campus.

It is the first major achievement of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Genesis Mission. The initiative uses a network of advanced supercomputers and digital engineering tools to accelerate the design and testing of national security technologies.

Aires Tide is a flight-test platform built to collect critical data. The cone-shaped vehicle can measure the intense heat and vibration that a nuclear weapon would experience in the atmosphere as it travels toward its target.

It features integrated sensors and power buses to monitor the harsh conditions during flight. The information gathered will help researchers better understand the performance of future systems while improving testing efficiency.

Worker bees are the first line of defense when it comes to removing contamination in honeybee colonies, but a queen has her ways, too.

A honeybee queen facing chronic exposure to pesticides will take up that contamination and pass it along to her eggs, a process researchers call maternal offloading.

The findings, which document for the first time the extent a queen will go to survive, are published today in the journal Current Biology. Research was led by the University of California, Davis and made possible via a collaboration between the USDA, which provided unique expertise in honeybee biology and study design, and LLNL, which was able to measure radioactive tags down to the atomic level using a biological accelerator spectrometry, or BioAMS.

“With BioAMS, we can trace very low levels of a pesticide,” said Bruce Buchholz, an LLNL scientist and author on the paper. “The pesticide concentrations we used were not lethal and were environmentally relevant to that seen in nature.”