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Sandia scientists are helping train Iraqi scientists and technicians to clean up radioactively contaminated sites and safely dispose of the radioactive wastes as part of the Iraqi Nuclear Facility Dismantlement and Disposal Program. The Sandia work is a technical transfer of skills and knowledge that the Labs use day to day, says Sandia principal investigator John Cochran. As an example of this, Sandia has transferred its Rad Worker II training materials to the government of Iraq.

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That's why a new electroplating process that simultaneously joins many silicon nanowires to many prepatterned electrodes was selected for a 2008 Nano 50 Award by Nanotech Briefs.

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Sandia's work for the FBI demonstrated the anthrax letters sent to two senators and to news agencies in the Fall of 2001 contained a non-weaponized form of bacillus anthracis.

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Cells are expected to respond defensively when an antigen lands on a cell membrane and prepares to cause mischief. But to activate a response, a cell must become aware of the presence of the intruder on its membrane, just as a human first must become aware of a mosquito on a forearm in order to slap it.

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Living a greener life by conserving and using alternative energy sources will be the focus of the first-ever Earth, Wind and Sun conference July 23-24 sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories' Environmental Planning Department and Energy Management Team. Media are welcome.

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Sandia National Laboratories will demonstrate a new hyperspectral confocal fluorescence microscope Friday, Aug. 8 from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. MDT in Bldg. 897 on Kirtland Air Force Base. This patent-protected and patent-pending technology has been combined with Sandia's unique and proprietary multivariate algorithms and software to form a complete system for the extraction of quantitative image information from hyperspectral images.

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Imagine you're in charge of a collection of sensors, flying in formation on one of 31 U.S. Air Force satellites in medium Earth orbit. The satellite itself is part of the Air Force's Global Positioning System, which lets truckers, hunters, and lost city drivers know exactly where they are. But from your point of view, the satellites are perfect platforms for a collection of sensors to detect and triangulate airborne or space-based nuclear explosions anywhere they may occur.

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In an effort aimed at building technical capacity, resource sustainability, and regional stability, a team of scientists from Sandia National Laboratories spent the past year working with engineers and modelers from Iraq to build a computer model of the country's surface water and related systems.

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Sandia's Ed Baynes passion for gas-powered cars stays with him throughout the years.

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Every 12 months, teams of experts selected by Chicago-based R&D Magazine name their choices of the year's 100 most outstanding advances in applied technologies. Sandia National Laboratories researchers "” competing in an international pool that includes universities, private corporations, and government labs "” this year were selected for three of those 100 awards.

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Recent findings by medical researchers indicate that naturally occurring nanotubes may serve as tunnels that protect retroviruses and bacteria in transit from diseased to healthy cells "” a fact that may explain why vaccines fare poorly against some invaders. To better study the missions of these intercellular nanotubes, scientists have sought the means to form them quickly and easily in test tubes. Sandia National Laboratories researchers have now learned serendipitously to form nanotubes with surprising ease.

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Sandia National Laboratories researcher Georgianne Peek thinks a possible solution to high energy costs lies underground. And it's not coal or oil. It's compressed air energy storage (CAES).

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Nanotubes may protect retroviruses trying to infect human cells. This may explain why vaccines fare poorly against some invaders. Sandia researchers have learned to form similar nanotubes in test tubes to expedite study of the phenomenon.

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A mechanical micromuscle with nanoscopic movements and a micro-creep-and-stress tester, both designed by students, were the big winners in Sandia National Laboratories' fourth annual University Alliance Design Competition for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) designs.

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Carbon nanotubes, described as the reigning celebrity of the advanced materials world, are all the rage. Recently researchers at Rice University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute used them to make the "blackest black" "” the darkest known material, reflecting only 0.045 percent of all light shined on it.

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Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base may soon share a wind farm that will provide as much as one-third of the electricity used by the two entities.

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Materials researchers across the globe have fervently been working to find the ideal hydrogen storage material, one that will safely and efficiently provide the needed range and running time for fuel cell vehicles. But a separate issue "” hydrogen "embrittlement" "” is an equally challenging technical hurdle that has gone largely unnoticed by the general public.

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NASA has once again turned to Sandia's National Solar Thermal Test Facility "” aka the Solar Tower "” to help evaluate new technology for future space shuttle missions. NASA's most recent testing series in early March evaluated the HYpersonic AeroTHermodynamic InfraRed Measurements (HYTHIRM) systems.

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DOE photovoltaic funding for years has gone to programs that promise more efficient conversion of sunlight to electricity, or in aiding solar start-up companies. It's called "technology push." Now for something different. In the past year, an unusually innovative DOE program called Solar America Cities has focused on reaching out to formerly ignored, sometimes low-profile city decision makers who administer large chunks of urban real estate. It's called "technology pull."

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It was hard to understand how a graphene sheet "” a featureless, flat sheet of carbon atoms "” lying on an equally featureless iridium surface, somehow converted itself into a kind of muffin tin that formed "muffins" made from newly arrived iridium atoms. The muffins were equally spaced and of equal size.

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Sandia National Laboratories recently licensed its safer fuel air diversionary device technology to Defense Technology Corporation of America, located in Casper, Wyo. Diversionary devices "” also called stun grenades or flash-bangs "” are a less-than-lethal device used in a wide variety of law enforcement and military operations. Like a grenade, the device is activated by pulling a pin. When thrown, the flash-bang creates a loud sound and bright flash of light to temporarily distract or disorient an adversary.

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Dick Fate, a manager at Sandia National Laboratories, was diagnosed with soft tissue sarcoma about 13 years ago, Fate had undergone surgery after surgery to try to check the spread of the disease.

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Researchers in the Power Sources R&D group at Sandia National Laboratories have been driving nails into batteries, heating them to extreme temperatures, overcharging them, and putting them into some of the most adverse conditions possible to see how much abuse they can take before they blow up.

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A crisis is looming over water shortages worldwide. By 2025 more than half the nations in the world will face freshwater stress or shortages and by 2050 as much as 75 percent of the world's population could face freshwater scarcity. So say Mike Hightower and Suzanne Pierce, water experts at Sandia National Laboratories, in an article they wrote that appeared in a recent issue of Nature.

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Sandia National Laboratories Fleet Services Department has exceeded fuel and energy efficiency standards set by the Department of Energy, one of a few organizations to do so in the nuclear weapons complex. By making a conscious effort to reduce the use of petroleum fuels and increase the use of gasoline enhanced with ethanol and alternative fuel vehicles, Sandia has met "” and even exceeded "” requirements of a DOE executive order.

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The Scientist magazine, known for its statistical studies and life sciences orientation, has chosen Sandia National Laboratories as one of the top-10 U.S. work places for post-doctoral students in the life sciences. The results are published in its March issue.

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Russian researchers, wanting to reduce the number of accidents at nuclear materials facilities in their country, have teamed up with several human factors and cognition experts from Sandia National Laboratories to figure out ways to determine on any given day if workers are ready to perform critical operations.

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A small group of Sandia National Laboratories/California researchers have been operating the BioWatch Indoor Reachback Center. It's part of the Department of Homeland Security's BioWatch program, an early warning system designed to rapidly detect trace amounts of biological materials at various public facilities across the United States.

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The kilogram is losing weight and many international scientists, including some at Sandia National Laboratories, agree that it's time to redefine it. Scientists are hoping to redefine the kilogram by basing it on standards of universal constants rather than on an artifact standard. "The idea is to replace the single master kilogram with something based on physical constants, rather than an artifact that could be damaged accidentally," says mechanical engineer Hy Tran, a project leader at the Primary Standards Laboratory at Sandia.

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Preparing groundwork for an exascale computer is the mission of the new Institute for Advanced Architectures, launched jointly at Sandia and Oak Ridge national laboratories. An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a petaflop, itself a thousand times faster than a teraflop. Teraflop computers "”the first was developed 10 years ago at Sandia "” currently are the state of the art. They do trillions of calculations a second. Exaflop computers would perform a million trillion calculations per second.

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Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems (SES) have set a new solar-to-grid system conversion efficiency record by achieving a 31.25 percent net efficiency rate. The old 1984 record of 29.4 percent was toppled Jan. 31 on SES's "Serial #3" solar dish Stirling system at Sandia's National Solar Thermal Test Facility.

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Jess 7.1a3, a popular rule engine created by Sandia National Laboratories, has been licensed by Lockheed Martin Corporation to play a critical role in the Navy's DDG 1000 destroyer ships.

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Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot, and Vayl S. Oxford, director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, are confirmed keynote speakers for the American Nuclear Society Joint Topical Conference on Emergency Management and Robotics for Hazardous Environments to be held in Albuquerque March 9-12.

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Water and energy are inextricably linked. It takes large volumes of water to produce energy and significant amounts of low-cost energy to treat and distribute water. But the planning and management of these fundamental resources have historically been done independently of one another.

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The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations suggest.

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Using concentrated solar energy to reverse combustion, a research team from Sandia National Laboratories is building a prototype device intended to chemically "reenergize" carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide using concentrated solar power. The carbon monoxide could then be used to make hydrogen or serve as a building block to synthesize a liquid combustible fuel, such as methanol or even gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

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The belief among some archeologists that Europeans introduced alcohol to the Indians of the American Southwest may be faulty. Ancient and modern pot sherds collected by New Mexico state archeologist Glenna Dean, in conjunction with analyses by Sandia National Laboratories researcher Ted Borek, open the possibility that food or beverages made from fermenting corn were consumed by native inhabitants centuries before the Spanish arrived.

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What's the best way to solve a wicked problem "” by working in a large group sharing ideas via the intranet or as individuals? That's the question George S. Davidson and his research team at Sandia National Laboratories attempted to resolve this summer. The research, conducted by Davidson, Courtney Dornburg, Susan Stevens, Stacey Hendrickson, Travis Bauer and Chris Forsythe, had some surprising results.

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Almost everyone in the scientific community has heard of buckyballs, but no one until Sandia's Jianyu Huang has seen one being born.

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Sandia National Laboratories' California site has met the gold standard, at least according to the California Task Force on Youth and Workplace Wellness.

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Commercially available, fast-response bioaerosol detectors that can help guard against bioterrorist strikes in large public spaces face a significant hurdle: false alarms. Facility managers responsible for airports, train stations, sports arenas, and other venues will be loathe to install biodetection systems until they can be close to certain that the hardware won't alarm without cause and force unnecessary evacuations.

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In an effort to find an answer to the problem of identifying smuggled special nuclear material (SNM), researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in California say a neutron scatter camera they are developing may be able to detect radiation from much greater distances and through more shielding than current detection instruments.

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At Sandia National Laboratories autumn triggers Sandia's Christmas story "” the Shoes for Kids Program. What began as a holiday gift exchange between two scientists 51 years ago has become a tradition. Instead of giving gifts or cards to each other, they spent the money to benefit little children who needed shoes.

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Members of the media will get rare inside look at Sandia National Laboratories on Wednesday, Nov. 7, when several new large-scale testing facilities will be showcased.

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Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine, the world's largest producer of X-rays, shook the ground for several hundred yards in every direction for the first time since July 2006, when the 22-year-old facility was gutted to undergo a complete refurbishment at a total project cost of $90 million.

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Unexpected differences recently discovered between the elements niobium and tantalum may lead to more optimized electronic materials and photocatalysts. Sandia researcher May Nyman and colleagues reported on the new-found disparities in a cover story of the Oct. 28 Dalton Transactions, an international inorganic chemistry journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the British equivalent of the American Chemical Society.

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After more than a decade of research and development, a hydrogen sensor invented by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories is soon to find its way into petroleum refining, hydrogen production, chemical industries, chlorine production, nuclear waste monitoring and fuel cells.

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Police in Afghanistan are among the many to benefit from Sandia National Laboratories' co-sponsorship of the 6th annual Homeland Security Conference, set for Oct. 15-17 at the Albuquerque Marriott Hotel, 2101 Louisiana Boulevard N.E.

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Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in California have secured funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to design and engineer a small, portable microfluidic device that will offer rapid detection of biotoxin exposure in humans.

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The Sandia Pulsed Reactor (SPR) rides off into the sunset, headed toward Nevada. It leaves behind the operators who are sad to see such an important part of Sandia National Laboratories' work and history leaving the Labs. The SPRs provided intense neutron bursts for radiation effects testing of materials and electronics.