News

Researcher receives 'Millennial Leader' award

Monica Moya, an early career biomedical engineer researcher in the Materials Engineering Division, was recognized with a Millennial Leader Award at the EmpowHer Institute’s Rising Stars Awards event held last month in Hollywood, California.This prestigious award acknowledges women under 40 who demonstrate promise as future decision-makers, have demonstrated excellence in their professional...

Despite heavy storms and rough seas, Laboratory team captures missile flight data

"Everything was very successful, but this was the toughest mission we’ve ever supported." That was the assessment of Steve Yakuma, LLNL’s ICBM flight test director, when asked to sum up his team’s support of the recently completed GT214 and GT215 missile flight tests off of Saipan in the South Pacific.ICBM test flights are regularly launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base to a target location...

NuSTAR provides explosive evidence for supernova asymmetry

New results from the NASA NuSTAR telescope show that a supernova close to our galaxy experienced a single-sided explosion.A team of scientists including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers found that X-ray emissions taken with the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) show that the Supernova 1987A explosion was highly asymmetric. The results appear in the May 8 edition...

Energy secretary honors LLNL climate scientist

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has awarded LLNL climate scientist David Bader with a DOE Secretarial Honor Award for his leadership of the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project.The Secretarial Honor Awards are the department's highest form of non-monetary employee recognition. Individual and team awardees are selected by the Secretary of Energy.William Collins of Lawrence...

Students enjoy 'phenomenal' day at the Lab

The Laboratory hosted 14 students, ranging in age from middle school to college, from Green Technical Education and Employment (Green Tech) last week for a full day of presentations and tours.Green Tech is a non-profit community-based organization in Sacramento charged with providing middle and high school students and young adults from economically disadvantaged communities quality workforce...

Congressman Swalwell visits Lab to witness experiment at National Ignition Facility

Congressman Eric Swalwell visited the Laboratory Monday to witness an experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF).After an initial overview by NIF Director Mark Herrmann, Swalwell was greeted by Lab Director Bill Goldstein, Livermore Field Office Manager Nicole Nelson-Jean and NIF & Photon Science Principal Associate Director Jeff Wisoff.The group moved to the facility’s Control Room...

Implantable electrode coating good as gold

A team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore and UC Davis have found that covering an implantable neural electrode with nanoporous gold could eliminate the risk of scar tissue forming over the electrode’s surface.The team demonstrated that the nanostructure of nanoporous gold achieves close physical coupling of neurons by maintaining a high neuron-to-astrocyte surface coverage ratio. Close...

Lara Leininger named director of Laboratory's Energetic Materials Center

Lara Leininger has been selected to lead Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Energetic Materials Center (EMC).Created 25 years ago, the EMC’s mission is to integrate state-of-the-art capabilities in high explosives, propellants, thermites and pyrotechnics for the benefit of the Stockpile Stewardship Program and other National Nuclear Security Administration programs, the...

Students visit Lab for Job Shadow Day

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Office of the Chief Information Officer and Livermore Information Technology (LivIT) hosted 60 students and teachers for the third annual Information Technology (IT) Job Shadow Day on Wednesday. It was a fun-filled day for 60 high school students from schools in Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, Alameda and one student from South Lake Tahoe. The students...

Researchers toss around rugby-shaped hohlraums for ignition experiments

For several years, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has pursued an indirect drive approach to ignition, using cylindrically shaped gold cans known as hohlraums.In this configuration, all of NIF’s 192 laser beams enter the hohlraum through a pair of laser entrance holes and deposit their energy on the gold (or depleted uranium) interior...

Promising new X-ray microscope poses technical challenges

You may think the aisles in your neighborhood convenience store are crowded, but they’d look positively spacious compared to the passageways in the NIF target bay.The target bay bristles with dozens of instruments needed for NIF experiments, ranging from inserters that hold NIF targets in place to cameras and other diagnostics that record the results of NIF shots. Fitting a new diagnostic...

Unlocking the secrets of star creation

On April 1, 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, captured the famous images of the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. Twenty years later to the day, the NIF Team conducted the first experiment in a new Discovery Science campaign aimed at finding clues to the mystery of how stars are born in these spectacular cosmic formations."This project underlines...

Remembering Dick Post's life and career

Livermore scientist Dick Post had some of the most productive years of his career after he reached 90 years of age — long after the vast majority of researchers retire.Few scientists have had a career as long as Post's. He joined a national laboratory within weeks of its founding and then worked faithfully, day in and day out, for 63 years — the Laboratory’s entire history.Even fewer...

First lady recognizes efforts to hire veterans

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was in the spotlight Thursday at an event celebrating the fourth anniversary of the Joining Forces Initiative, where new commitments were announced to ensure that every veteran and military family has an opportunity to achieve their career aspirations.Approximately 100 people attended the event held at Micron Technology in Manassas, Virginia...

Comatose galaxies shocked back to life

Galaxies are often found in clusters, which contain many "red and dead" members that stopped forming stars in the distant past. Now an international team of astronomers, including Will Dawson of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has discovered that these comatose galaxies can sometimes come back to life. If clusters of galaxies merge, a huge shock wave can drive the birth of a new...

Thinner capsules yield faster implosions

In National Ignition Facility (NIF) inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments, the fusion fuel implodes at a high speed in reaction to the rapid ablation, or blow-off, of the outer layers of the target capsule. To reach the conditions needed for ignition, the fuel must implode symmetrically at a peak velocity of about 350 kilometers per second— without producing hydrodynamic instabilities...

3D-printed aerogels improve energy storage

A new type of graphene aerogel will make for better energy storage, sensors, nanoelectronics, catalysis and separations.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have made graphene aerogel microlattices with an engineered architecture via a 3D printing technique known as direct ink writing. The research appears in the April 22 edition of the journal, Nature Communications.The 3D...

Lawrence Livermore instrument prompts researchers to rethink how Mercury formed

A versatile instrument developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and riding on the first spacecraft to ever orbit Mercury is causing researchers to rethink their theories on the planet’s formation.Known as the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer, or GRS, the instrument is part of a suite of seven instruments onboard NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER (short for MErcury Surface, Space...

30 years and counting, the X-ray laser lives on

More than 50 years ago, when the laser was a mere 5 years old, laser physicists dreamed of the development of an X-ray laser to expand the frontier of knowledge.The concept goes back to the mid-1960s, when scientists realized that laser beams amplified with ions would have much shorter wavelengths than beams amplified with gas.Instead of trying to make a laser oscillator, they sought to...

Georgetown students visit Lawrence Livermore for training in emergency management

Several dozen Georgetown University graduate students acquired a small part of their education during a recent visit to LLNL.Participating in Georgetown’s one-year master’s program in emergency and disaster management, the students spent a week at Lawrence Livermore and found the Lab’s programs and technologies to be educationally helpful and valuable to the nation."The type of work we...