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Microsystems + supercomputers = weapons support + industry interest: MESA -- Sandia's largest project ever -- wins DOE nod

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Grant and Award Announcement

The largest construction project ever proposed by Sandia National Laboratories — the $300 million Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Application (MESA) facility — has received DOE approval to proceed with a conceptual design.
Purpose: to join Sandia’s expertise in weapons, supercomputing, and microsystems into an immersive environment in which scientists can create better non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons and offer businesses and universities new advantages.

Funder: U.S. Department of Energy

A step toward fusion fire: Concept for rapid-fire thermonuclear explosions proposed by Sandia scientists

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A simple theoretical concept to solve the staggeringly difficult problem of maintaining intact electrical transmission lines to produce rapidly repeated thermonuclear explosions for peacetime purposes has been proposed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories The method is meant to advance the day of relatively cheap, clean, fusion-produced energy through machines like Sandia's Z accelerator.

Funder: Sandia Laboratory-Directed Research and Development
Meeting: Fusion Meeting

Sandia, General Atomics unveil new fine resolution synthetic-aperture radar system

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Lynx, a new fine resolution, real time synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) system, was unveiled here Saturday, Aug. 28 by the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories and General Atomics of San Diego. Designed to be mounted on both manned aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the 115- pound SAR is a sophisticated all-weather sensor capable of providing photographic-like images through clouds, in rain or fog and in day or night conditions, all in real time.

Funder: US Department of Energy

Help with 'screamingly radioactive' storage tanks: Nonradioactive substitute created to aid nuclear waste clean-up

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Synthetic goods are generally modeled on scarce but desirable materials -- diamonds, fine wools, even fruit juices. Jim Krumhansl’s offering to the world is a bit different. Krumhansl has created synthetic sludge.Unappetizing, perhaps? You thought there was enough of the real thing? But the unusual product, which harmlessly mimics the deadly sludge found in underground nuclear waste storage tanks, could save U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup costs.

Funder: US Department of Energy
Meeting: ACS 218th National Meeting

Sandia-developed remote sensor expected to analyze gases up to two miles away

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new remote sensor the size of a dime being developed by the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories should allow users to rapidly detect dangerous gases from up to two miles away.

Keeping one’s distance not always a bad thing: repulsion between quantum dots helps determine lasing characteristics, researchers find

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The term "quantum dots" has a nice ring to it, like "beanie babies" or a special version of connect-the-dots games that absorb the attention of children. But while the tiny entities may sound cuddly, they find each other repulsive, and in that just-discovered knowledge may lie the secret of forming the world’s most effective solid-state lasers.

Journal: Physical Review Letters
Funder: Deptartment of Energy/Office of Basic Energy Sciences
Meeting: Gordon Conference on Thin Film

"All my friends dream of artificial limbs": US, Russian nuclear labs work with prosthetics company to develop replacement knee

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A letter expressing "deepest gratitude" from a Russian landmine victim fitted with a newly developed artificial foot demonstrates one reason for the initiation of a second project, led by Sandia National Laboratories, to develop an advanced artificial knee. Strangely, technologies for the knee prostheses are being jointly developed by two nuclear weapons laboratories on opposite sides during the Cold War, who will work with a small Ohio company on the $1.4 million project.

Funder: US Department of Energy

Sandia researchers develop world's fastest encryptor

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The world's fastest encryption device, developed at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories, should soon be protecting data being transmitted from supercomputers, workstations, telephones and video terminals. It encrypts data at more than 6.7 billion bits per second, 10 times faster than any other known encryptor.

The dark side of telemedicine

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Illegal access and misuse of online medical or psychiatric data, whether in transit or stored, could lead to job turndowns, insurance refusals, blackmail, scandal and even death. Sandia National Laboratories researchers, interested in protecting Web-sent medical information during a natural disaster or terrorist-caused emergency, have devised a unique and inexpensive computer "architecture" to minimize hacking risks.

Sandia researchers push Z machine to new limits to test radiation effects

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories have pushed the Z machine, the world's most powerful X-ray source, to new limits using it to test effects of radiation on materials in experiments designed to mimic the response that would occur near a hostile nuclear explosion.