LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

April 3, 2020

LLNL

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In response to COVID-19, the Lab has transitioned to a Reduced Mission-Critical Operations state.

COVID-19 causes Lab to move to Reduced Mission-Critical Operations

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the Lab has reduced its staffing at sites 200 and 300 to that required for safety, security and the minimal maintenance of facilities. In addition, IT staff has been on site helping to support the enormous growth in telecommuting over the past month.

Small groups of employees have made themselves available at the Lab to respond without delay to questions about the stockpile that arise in the course of surveillance and dismantling, to maintain critical national response activities like NEST and NARAC and to engage in projects that have spun up to respond directly to the pandemic.

Thousands of employees have answered the call to shelter-in-place at home while carrying on their work through telecommuting.

The Lab’s planning for Minimum Safe Operations always included the continuation and resumption over time of a set of mission critical activities on site, a posture NNSA deems “Reduced Mission-Critical Operations.” Doing so is consistent with local shelter-in-place orders, which accept essential critical infrastructure to include the defense industrial base. Discussions over the past week with NNSA have identified specific mission-critical weapons activities that require access to the site for classified work. It also has been clear in these discussions that safety and health of the staff are paramount considerations in resuming and performing any work.

Beginning this week, a small number of employees returned to workstations at the Lab to support mission critical projects by performing classified computing and other work that cannot be accomplished remotely.


visual

This visualization depicts the 3D structure of an antibody candidate binding to the protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-1.

Supercomputers pack punch to fight COVID-19

Lawrence Livermore scientists are contributing to the global fight against COVID-19 by combining artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and supercomputing to help discover candidates for new antibodies and pharmaceutical drugs to combat the disease.

Backed by five high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and expertise in vaccine and countermeasure development, a COVID-19 response team of LLNL researchers from various disciplines has identified approximately 20 promising antibody designs from a nearly infinite set of potentials to examine millions of small molecules that could have antiviral properties.

“For several decades, the Laboratory has been at the forefront of protecting the country against biological threats of any type,” said Dave Rakestraw, who formerly ran LLNL’s biodefense programs and is coordinating the Lab’s COVID-19 technical responses. “We’ve been putting a large amount of focus for the last six years on using the computational resources at LLNL to try to accelerate the timescales for developing a response to an emerging biological threat.”

RT

asteroid

A NASA illustration of deflecting an asteroid hurling toward Earth. Image courtesy of NASA.

Just a matter of time

Lawrence Livermore scientists who protect Earth from the possibility of an enormous space rock smashing into our planet have run a vital test on defense strategy, and here’s what they learned.

If an asteroid is careening toward Earth, poised to wreak havoc, the planet’s best defense is to go into attack mode and divert its course. However, because it’s extremely hard to test this on real asteroids, running experiments is essential to understanding exactly how effective the tactic is and what would happen to the deflected asteroid.

The planetary defense researchers at LLNL say such an asteroid strike has a “very low probability” of happening in the coming decades but it would have “very high” consequences if it did come to pass.

“Time will be the enemy if we see something headed our way one day. We may have a limited window to deflect it, and we will want to be certain that we know how to avert disaster. That’s what this work is all about,” lead researcher Tané Remington said.


biomass

One of the sources of carbonyl sulfide is the burning of biomass (e.g., plants and peat). Carbonyl sulfide then gets taken up by plants alongside carbon dioxide, which allows for the measure of the photosynthetic activity of ecosystems.

Biomass off the mark as ‘missing source’

Carbonyl sulfide is a naturally occurring gas that can help scientists understand how much carbon dioxide plants take out of the atmosphere for photosynthesis.

In a new study, Lawrence Livermore scientists and collaborators looked at how much carbonyl sulfide (OCS) comes from forest fires and other burning biomass, as opposed to other sources.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) alone cannot provide estimates of photosynthesis (taking up CO2) because plants and ecosystems also respire (release CO2), so measuring CO2 only provides information on the small difference between these two large fluxes. In contrast, OCS is taken up like CO2, but is not respired, and therefore provides information on photosynthesis by itself. This is important for monitoring how ecosystems respond to stresses such as droughts and diseases.

Scientists have found that there is a "missing source" for OCS. When adding up the estimates for all the sources for OCS in the world that scientists know about, the total is less than their estimates for all the losses.

Biomass and forest fires missed the mark when it comes to discovering the missing source. In fact, the team found that biomass burning probably produces less OCS than previous estimates.

ENN

drought

Lab scientists are exploring the physical processes that can drive flash droughts.

Droughts in a flash

Lawrence Livermore scientists are exploring the physical processes that can drive flash droughts, the existing capabilities to predict them and what is needed to establish an effective early warning system.

Flash droughts are a type of extreme event distinguished by rapid intensification of drought conditions with severe impacts. They unfold on subseasonal to seasonal timescales (weeks to months), presenting a new challenge for improving predictions of when flash droughts occur.

In new research, a multi-institutional collaboration including LLNL climate scientist Celine Bonfils, explored current understanding of the physical processes that can drive flash droughts, the existing capabilities to predict them and what is needed to make progress to establish effective early warning of flash droughts.

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.