LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

May 19, 2017


heart-on-a-chip

Through “heart-on-a-chip” technology, Lawrence Livermore researchers hope to ensure potentially lifesaving new drugs are safe and effective while reducing the need for human and animal testing. Image by Ryan Chen/LLNL

Getting to the heart of it

Prescription drugs have enabled millions of Americans with chronic medical conditions to live longer and have more fulfilling lives, but many promising new drugs never make it to the human trials stage due to the potential for cardiac toxicity.

Through “heart-on-a-chip” technology — modeling a human heart on an engineered chip and measuring the effects of compound exposure on functions of heart tissue using microelectrodes — Lawrence Livermore researchers hope to decrease the time needed for new drug trials and ensure potentially lifesaving drugs are safe and effective while reducing the need for human and animal testing.


Daniel McCartt

Daniel McCartt, a Lawrence Livermore postdoc, helped build the laser-based tabletop device to measure radiocarbon. Photo by Kate Hunts/LLNL

Tracking nutrients through the body

Lawrence Livermore researchers have developed a laser-based tabletop device to measure carbon-14 (radiocarbon) in biological systems.

In biological systems, carbon-14 can be used as a biochemical tracer to track micro-doses of nutrients, toxins and therapeutics in humans and animals. For example, the carbon-14 can be tacked on to a vitamin. When a human ingests the vitamin, researchers can track how much of the vitamin metabolizes and how much is excreted through urine analysis.

Typically, acclerator mass spectrometry is used for this type of research, however, cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) has emerged as a laser-based method capable of carbon-14 measurements. Livermore scientists developed a CRDS spectrometer capable of measuring carbon-14 for biology research.


clouds

Lawrence Livermore scientists studied low-level stratocumulus clouds to identify their effects on global warming.

Cloudy outlook on global warming

There are several factors, including natural and human, that influence climate change. One of the harder influences to pin down has been changes in clouds. As the world warms, more water vapor ends up in the atmosphere — and water vapor is an important greenhouse gas. But the bright, low clouds that water vapor can form reflect sunlight, shading and cooling the Earth.

It turns out the net result of increased water vapor enhances warming rather than limiting it. A new study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Chen Zhou, Mark Zelinka and Stephen Klein reveals an interesting interaction that makes this even more complicated.

It’s not enough to figure out what clouds will do in general — there’s not some single number that you can get to stand in for clouds. Instead, there are spatial patterns to clouds’ effects, and they vary over time. This has some interesting implications for understanding the last few decades and what’s coming in the future.


test

“Baker Shot," part of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear test by the United States at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

Scenic boom

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist Greg Spriggs has an important mission. He’s working with film preservation expert Jim Moye to save decades-old films of nuclear blasts that are among the last best sources of real-world information about nuclear explosions.

From 1945 to 1963, the U.S. detonated 210 nuclear devices in the air. Scientists captured the massive fireballs and mushroom clouds on camera —  preserving the data in at least 10,000 films. The films were then analyzed to determine key details like the energy unleashed by the blast, or its yield.

Those measurements, however, were done without computers — and Spriggs discovered that some of that data wasn’t quite right. So he decided to find all 10,000 of those films to reanalyze them from scratch. Lawrence Livermore recently published 60 of the declassified nuclear test films on YouTube.


paper

This image depicts a simulation of pressure applied to felt used to absorb water in a paper drying process. Photo courtesy of David Trebotich/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Pushing paper toward efficiency

If you had to name the industries in the United States that use the most energy, paper manufacturing probably wouldn't immediately come to mind. In fact, the paper-making industry ranks third among the country's largest energy users, behind only petroleum-refining and chemical production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories are using the national labs' supercomputing capabilities to look at more energy efficient and cost-saving ways to make paper, targeting "wet-pressing," the stage where water is removed by mechanical pressure from the wood pulp into press felts that help soak up water before it is sent through a drying process.

The researchers hope to develop a model for flow and deformation of the wet porous paper during the process, saving both energy and money. The project is one of the seedlings for the Department of Energy's HPC4Mfg initiative, a multi-lab effort headed by LLNL to use high-performance computing to address complex challenges in U.S. manufacturing.

Computer with email graphic

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The Lab Report is a weekly compendium of media reports on science and technology achievements at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though the Laboratory reviews items for overall accuracy, the reporting organizations are responsible for the content in the links below.