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A University of California scientist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory with collaborators from the University of Cambridge (England) and the World Health Organization National Influenza Center at Erasmus Medical Center, (Rotterdam, Netherlands) have developed a computer modeling method for mapping the evolution of the influenza virus. The method could soon help medical researchers worldwide develop a better understanding of certain mutations in influenza and other viruses that allow diseases to dodge the human immune system.

Zirconium may not be a girl's best friend, but by squeezing the metal with roughly the same pressure needed to make diamonds, scientists at the University of California's Los Alamos National Laboratory made a pure glass that may prove nearly as valuable as real diamonds.

Nearly five billion years ago, the giant gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn formed, apparently in radically different ways. So says a scientist at the Laboratory who created exhaustive computer models based on experiments in which the element hydrogen was shocked to pressures nearly as great as those found inside the two planets.

Research in the areas of desalination and removal of arsenic in water will step up at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories over the next few years, the result of a $6 million allocation in the FY2004 federal Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill.

For the past several years, a team of University of California astrophysicists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been using a cluster of roughly 300 computer processors to model some of the most intriguing aspects of the Universe.

A wireless nanodevice that functions like a fluorescent light - but potentially far more efficiently - has been developed in a joint project between the National Nuclear Security Administration's Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories.

University of California scientists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory with a colleague from Sandia National Laboratories have developed a new method for exciting light emission from nanocrystal quantum dots. The discovery provides a way to supply energy to quantum dots without wires, and paves the way for a potentially wider use of tunable nanocrystalline materials in a variety of novel light-emitting technologies ranging from electronic displays to solid-state lighting and electrically pumped nanoscale lasers.

Researchers have measured ultra-cold neutron production in a new source that will provide the highest density of UCNs in the world. By Fall 2004, Los Alamos expects to complete the most intense UCN source in the world. Measurements of UCN properties can advance the quest for new particles predicted by unified field theories, and provide insights into how matter began in the Big Bang.

Los Alamos researchers are using a proton accelerator to speed up potential circuit failure, battering circuits in a single hour with hundreds or thousands of years of the harmful neutrons created by cosmic rays. Aviation, computer and related companies, along NASA, are putting circuits through the rigors of the neutron testbed, which can generate essentially the entire neutron spectrum produced naturally by cosmic rays, but with neutrons a million times more intense than in nature.

Sandia National Laboratories scientists, engineers and technicians are performing critical experiments deep in the volcanic heart of Nevada's Yucca Mountain to provide information that will assist in a key decision as to whether to license the remote site as a permanent repository for these radioactive wastes. Our feature story looks at Sandia's role in the 20-year project.