Sandia National Laboratories analyzes vulnerabilities to storms ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A Sandia National Laboratories team is gearing up for hurricane season, readying analyses to help people in the eye of a storm. The Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), jointly housed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, studies how hurricanes […]
Category Archives: Homeland security
Older posts | Newer postsSandia wounded warriors discover they were united in battle years ago
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Jason Shelton and John Bailon left a Sandia National Laboratories Military Support Committee meeting side by side, sharing stories of combat in Iraq. Bailon talked about a day in the summer of 2005 when his Marine unit was called to rescue a small Joint Special Operations team holed up and taking mortar and […]
Sandia wins three R&D 100 awards
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories researchers — competing in an international pool of universities, corporations and government labs — captured three R&D 100 Awards in this year’s contest. R&D Magazine presents the awards each year to researchers whom its editors and independent judging panels determine have developed the year’s 100 most outstanding advances in […]
Detecting homemade explosives, not toothpaste
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories researchers want airports, border checkpoints and others to detect homemade explosives made with hydrogen peroxide without nabbing people whose toothpaste happens to contain peroxide. That’s part of the challenge faced in developing a portable sensor to detect a common homemade explosive called a FOx (fuel/oxidizer) mixture, made by mixing […]
New instrument will quickly detect botulinum, ricin, other biothreat agents
LIVERMORE, Calif.— Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are developing a medical instrument that will be able to quickly detect a suite of biothreat agents, including anthrax, ricin, botulinum, shiga and SEB toxin. The device, once developed, approved by the Food and Drug Administration and commercialized, would most likely be used in emergency rooms in the […]
Sandia Cyber Research Lab formally opens in stressful times
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — An unusual urgency underlay the brief speeches noting the formal opening of Sandia’s Cyber Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) last month. A warning of “malicious cyber activity,” sent out one day earlier by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, accompanied a growing flood of news releases from major businesses and large […]
Keeping tabs on the world’s dangerous chemicals
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – In the chemistry labs of the developing world, it’s not uncommon to find containers, forgotten on shelves, with only vague clues to their origins. The label, if there is one, is rubbed away. Left alone for years, some chemicals can quietly break down into explosive elixirs, and what was once an innocent […]
Detecting tunnels using seismic waves not as simple as it sounds
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — You’d think it would be easy to use seismic waves to find tunnels dug by smugglers of drugs, weapons or people. You’d be wrong. Nedra Bonal of Sandia’s geophysics and atmospheric sciences organization is nearing the end of a two-year study, “Improving Shallow Tunnel Detection From Surface Seismic Methods,” aimed at getting […]
Northrop Grumman, GE partnerships tap wide range of Sandia Labs expertise
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Sandia National Laboratories has signed a pair of cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) that could broadly add to the Labs’ research into combustion, defense, energy and nuclear security. The umbrella CRADAs, which enable Sandia and its partners to pursue multiple projects in a variety of categories, are with Northrop Grumman Information […]
Sandia probability maps help sniff out food contamination
Uncovering the sources of fresh food contamination could become faster and easier thanks to analysis done at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC). The study, in the International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, demonstrates how developing a probability map of the food supply network using stochastic network representation might shorten the time […]
Sandia explosives legend Paul Cooper hangs up his teaching hat
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Paul Cooper, one of the world’s foremost explosives experts, retired from Sandia National Laboratories more than a decade ago but continued his labor of love, teaching a new generation of engineers everything they needed to know about blowing things up. Cooper taught explosives safety and technology to about 1,000 people at Sandia […]
“Toxic” political discussions limit climate response, says invited speaker at Sandia
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The inability of natural and social scientists to convince political leaders that “we’re spinning a roulette wheel over climate change” puts humanity at “extreme risk,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor Henry Jacoby, former co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, during a lecture […]
Predictions by climate models are flawed, says invited speaker at Sandia
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, a global warming skeptic, told about 70 Sandia researchers in June that too much is being made of climate change by researchers seeking government funding. He said their data and their methods did not support their claims. “Despite concerns over the last decades with the […]
Global warming unequivocal in its advance, says invited speaker at Sandia
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Global warming is unequivocal in its advance and will lead to more record-setting temperatures, said Warren M. Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in the seventh lecture of Sandia National Laboratories’ Climate Change and National Security series. The talk was given in mid-May. Washington, a pioneer in atmospheric […]
Sandia seeks commercial partners for revolutionary “SpinDx” medical diagnostic tool
Faster, less expensive device gives lab test results in 15 minutes at point-of-care LIVERMORE, Calif. — Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a lab-on-a-disk platform that they believe will be faster, less expensive and more versatile than similar medical diagnostic tools. Lab officials are seeking industry partners to license and commercialize the SpinDx technology, […]