LAB REPORT

Some planets might produce their own water instead of relying on outside sources.

In laboratory experiments, researchers simulated extreme conditions found within certain exoplanets by blasting olivine — a mineral abundant in planetary interiors — with high-energy lasers in the presence of hydrogen gas. Hydrogen strips the minerals of their oxygen atoms, which then react with the hydrogen to form water, the team reports October 29 in Nature.

The discovery offers a viable explanation for water-rich exoplanets orbiting close to their host stars, the researchers say. The process might even account for the origin of some of Earth’s water, adding a new piece to a longstanding mystery.

Hundreds of exoplanets with sizes and masses between Earth and Neptune have been discovered, many of which orbit far closer to their stars than Earth orbits the sun. Their estimated densities suggest they possess rocky interiors covered by a thick layer of water or hydrogen. However, it’s unclear how these planets could be so water-rich.

The National Nuclear Security Administration says it has finished a major nuclear-weapons component 18 months ahead of schedule, marking a rare early milestone in the US effort to modernize its aging arsenal.

The agency announced that the first production unit of a “canned subassembly,” or CSA, for the W80-4 Life Extension Program was officially stamped and accepted at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the W80-4’s design agency, developed the physics and engineering plans that Y-12 uses to produce the CSA. The lab said the milestone reflects years of tightly coordinated work between scientists, engineers, and production crews.

“The CSA design must be built to very demanding tolerances,” said Peter Raboin, LLNL’s program manager for the W80-4. “Numerous subassemblies are produced at different sites and must fit together at Pantex with almost no margin for error.”

Raboin said Livermore teams worked side-by-side with Y-12, refining manufacturing tools, materials, and assembly procedures to ensure parts fit precisely and perform correctly.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Oden Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) on Nov. 20 were awarded the prestigious 2025 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize for developing a real-time tsunami early warning framework powered by the world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan.

Widely viewed as the highest recognition in high-performance computing (HPC), the Gordon Bell Prize recognizes innovations that push the limits of computational performance, scalability and scientific impact on pressing real-world problems. The Prize was announced at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC25) in St. Louis.

In their winning paper, the team demonstrated for the first time that true real-time, physics-based tsunami forecasting is computationally achievable at exascale, opening a path toward faster and more reliable early-warning systems for coastal communities.

“Our goal was to show that physics-based simulation can deliver near-instant results for critical applications like tsunami warnings,” said co-author and LLNL computational mathematician Tzanio Kolev.

Three national laboratories in the Bay Area will participate in the Genesis Mission, a federal program aimed at accelerating scientific innovation and discovery through the use of artificial intelligence.

Director of the AI Innovation Incubator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Brian Spears, says that Genesis Mission is something that the lab has been trying to get started for a long time. Spears is also the technical director for Genesis Mission and will be helping design the integrated AI platform.

"We're thrilled to see this long-term vision finally come to fruition," he said in an email.

The lab has already begun using AI to help solve complex scientific problems and bolster national security, background that Spears says will help contribute significantly to the project.

"We have decades of leadership in supercomputing, scientific code development and using data to drive extremely high-consequence decisions," he said. "We also have teams already applying AI to complex national security and energy problems."

The inside of giant planets can reach pressures more than one million times the Earth's atmosphere. As a result of that intense pressure, materials can adopt unexpected structures and properties. Understanding matter in this regime requires experiments that push the limits of physics in the laboratory.

In a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and their collaborators conducted such experiments with gold, achieving the highest-pressure structural measurement ever made for the material. The results, which show gold switching structure at 10 million times the Earth's atmospheric pressure, are essential for planetary modeling and fusion science.

"These experiments uncover the atomic rearrangements that occur at some of the most extreme pressures achievable in laboratory experiments," said LLNL scientist and author Amy Coleman.

Gold is a common reference material for high-pressure science. It is often used to calibrate static measurements of pressure because it is chemically stable and is easy to detect with X-rays. Its behavior at low pressure conditions is relatively well-understood, but there have been some historical discrepancies when it comes to extreme pressures.