LAB REPORT
Science and Technology Making Headlines
July 22, 2016
Simulating star nurseries
A collaboration between scientists at Lawrence Livermore and the University of California at Berkeley has created first-of-its-kind 3D simulations that show 700,000 years in the life of space, depicting the process that leads to the birth of protostellar clusters.
The scientists took advantage of the newly upgraded Pleiades supercomputer at NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing facility, which can now perform 6.28 petaflops, or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Which, in layman’s terms, means it’s really, really fast.
The simulation extrapolates its molecular cloud from observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and other orbiting observatories. It shows how gravity causes sections to collapse and form eddies of interstellar gas that then collapse into stellar clusters and cores, ultimately creating individual stars.
Supersize it
Lawrence Livermore scientists have developed a way to upsize nanostructures into light, flexible 3D printed materials.
This achievement opens the door to super-strong, ultra-lightweight and flexible metallic materials for aerospace, the military and the automotive industry.
The team reached unprecedented scalability in 3D-printed architectures of arbitrary geometry. They built multiple layers of fractal-like lattices with features ranging from the nanometer to centimeter scale, resulting in a nickel-plated metamaterial with a high elasticity not found in any previously built metal foams or lattices.
Clouds come out, come out wherever you are
The world’s clouds are in different places than they were 30 years ago.
In a new study, Lawrence Livermore scientists say they have for the first time thoroughly documented one of the most profound planetary changes yet to be caused by a warming climate: The distribution of clouds all across the Earth has shifted.
It has shifted in such a way — by expanding subtropical dry zones, located between around 20 and 30 degrees latitude in both hemispheres, and by raising cloud tops — that makes global warming worse.
Clouds are very difficult to study as the satellites are designed to take measurements that would help short-term weather predictions. Previous analysis of the data has multiple flaws that could have been due to orbit shifts and instrument degradation.
Turning methane into fuel the natural way
In many operations, methane is vented or flared and has a much lower market value. This is partly because of the difficulty in storing and transporting methane — especially when compared with other hydrocarbons.
But now — thanks to Mother Nature combined with the advances in 3D printing — the world might soon have a method that can cheaply and efficiently reduce the amount of methane wasted.
A team of Lawrence Livermore scientists has devised a method using biology and 3D printing to convert methane to a product that is easily stored and transported in remote or ‘stranded’ situations (sources that are small, temporary or not close to a pipeline).
A happy rat is a live rat
Developing new prescription drugs and antidotes to toxins currently relies extensively on animal testing in the early stages. That is not only expensive and time consuming, but it can give scientists inaccurate data about how humans will respond to such agents.
But new research by Lawrence Livermore scientists and engineers means that doctors could predict the impacts of potentially harmful chemicals, viruses or drugs on human beings without resorting to animal or even human test subjects.
The team is developing a “human-on-a-chip,” a miniature external replication of the human body, integrating biology and engineering. The team is combining microfluidics (networks of tiny tubes and channels) and multi-electrode arrays (devices that connect neurons to electronic circuitry).