Los Alamos National Laboratory

As far as the budget and economy is concerned, Congress continues to kick the can down the road.

In the past week, the House of Representatives and Senate approved a new stop-gap measure to continue funding the federal government for the remainder of this fiscal year. President Barack Obama made it official Tuesday afternoon, signing the bill.

So how will the continuing resolution affect the Los Alamos National Laboratory?
Lab Director Charlie McMillan shed some light on the subject at a community leader’s breakfast meeting at Ohkay Owingeh Casino Tuesday.

But there still was quite a bit of uncertainty on how the numbers will play out.
McMillan said he expects that sequestration will result in reduction to lab funding, ranging between $100 million and $120 million.

“Having said that,” McMillan said, “this is not a surprise because we did not expect 2013 to be a big budget year for the lab. We have managed our budgets in the past year to minimize the cuts this year.”

He expects to see challenges in the cybersecurity front as well as in plutonium conversion. McMillan also foresees some possible cuts in the environmental program.

But he also said it could be worse.

When it comes to examining the surface of rocks on Mars with a high-powered laser, five is a magic number for Los Alamos National Laboratory postdoctoral researcher Nina Lanza.
During a poster session today at the 44th Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at The Woodlands, Texas, Lanza described how the laser-shooting ChemCam instrument aboard the Curiosity rover currently searching the surface of Mars for signs of habitability has shown what appears to be a common feature on the surface of some very different Martian rocks during Curiosity’s first 90 days on the Red Planet.
But exactly what that common feature is remains an intriguing mystery — and one that Lanza intends to solve.
The ChemCam instrument uses an extremely powerful laser to vaporize a pinpoint of rock surface. The instrument then reads the chemical composition of the vaporized sample with a spectrometer. The highly accurate laser can fire multiple pulses in the same spot, providing scientists with an opportunity to gently interrogate a rock sample, even up to a millimeter in depth. Many rocks are zapped 30 to 50 times in a single location, and one rock was zapped 600 times.
Members of the ChemCam team generally discard results from the first five laser blasts because of a belief that after the first five blasts.

The New Mexico Environment Department took final administrative action on a Class 2 permit modification request to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Hazardous Waste Facility Permit Wednesday.
NMED has approved the modification with changes regarding the mandatory testing of all mixed waste containers. This permit modification is not related to the recent news regarding an anticipated permit modification request for the Hanford tank waste.
The Department of Energy Carlsbad Field Office and Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC (the permittees) submitted a Class 2 PMR to the NMED on Dec. 12, seeking to revise the waste analysis plan waste characterization methods.
NMED did a review of the proposed changes on waste analysis plan waste characterization methods. This included the review of comments submitted during a 60-day public comment period, which began Dec. 19 and ended Feb. 18.

From a press release 

The search is all but over for a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe.

Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.

The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the “God particle.”

One Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist could not have been happier.

Michael Graesser has done extensive research on the Higgs boson particle and gave a series of lecture on the topic late last year.

Back in October, Graesser said, “A new particle was discovered last summer at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The Higgs boson gives mass to quarks and the electron but we don’t know yet if this new particle is the Higgs boson.”

But now, the rest of the science world knows the new particle is the Higgs boson.