Employee / Community Communications
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Seeing is believing: LLNL Postdoc reveals wonders of the protist world
No matter how sophisticated instruments have become, or how data intensive results may be, there is still something satisfying and frequently informative about seeing what a researcher is studying. Sometimes samples are so small, or so large, or so far away that it's almost impossible to get a visual perspective that makes any sense or reveals any insight. /more
Dick Post: A life in service to the country
On Dec. 7, 1941, Dick Post was at work. He had earned his bachelor's degree from Pomona College the previous year and was spending some time as a graduate assistant, putting together enough money to start his graduate work. On that sleepy Sunday, he was setting up a classroom for Monday's physics class and listening to a shortwave radio he had built and tuned to an amateur band.
Then life began to change. /more
LVEF spans gap between school budget and program needs
Twenty years ago the families of two Lab employees, Bill Dunlop and David Conrad, faced a challenge: School budget cuts gutted many of the music and sports programs that their kids participated in and loved. What to do?
Dunlop and Conrad decided to lead the way and work to span the difference between what the school budget was able to fund and what the programs needed to continue. That's how the Livermore Valley Education Foundation (LVEF), one of the agencies listed in the HOME Campaign, was founded. /more
Lab biophysicist invents improvement to Monte Carlo technique
Jerome P. Nilmeier, a biophysicist working in computational biology, is willing to bet his new research will provide a breakthrough in the use of the Monte Carlo probability code in biological simulations. /more
Charlie Westbrook: Red Cross blood donation hero
Twenty gallons. According to best estimates, that's probably how much blood Charlie Westbrook has donated to the American Red Cross since his first donation during a blood drive at the Lab back around 1970. And for that, Westerbrook has earned the title Official American Red Cross Blood Donation Hero. /more
Lab employees celebrate 'Flying Tigers'
In early 1941, it didn't take a psychic to know the United States was going to join the war in the Pacific. Many in the U.S. had long believed the war as inevitable and were taking steps very similar to those taken before the Great War.
Before the U.S. entered The Great War, some of our young flyers joined the Lafayette Escadrille and flew fighter airplanes on behalf of the French. And in the year before Pearl Harbor, 90 members of the army, navy and marine air corp arrived in Assam, India and began operations flying supplies into China and taking the fight to the Japanese. The group, the 1st American Volunteer Group, quickly relocated to Burma (now Myanmar) to be closer to the action. While they were changing their base of operations, they picked up a nickname, The Flying Tigers, and the Walt Disney Company created the distinctive design for the nose of their P-40 fighters. /more
Success of DHS was built on relationship with Lab
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Parney Albright already had spent 16 years working in national security. That morning, on a military base just outside Washington, D.C., Albright and several highly trained members of the Army's Special Operations Force were involved in a dress rehearsal of a new technology that would give U.S. snipers a dramatic operational advantage.
Sept. 11 was the rehearsal; Sept. 12 would be the debut to a group of Pentagon VIPs. At the time, Albright was working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), after many years of service at the Institute for Defense Analyses.
"We were getting everything ready for our first dry run of the day when a soldier comes tearing up in a truck to tell us the first airplane had hit the World Trade Center," Albright recalled. "We all listened to events unfold on the radio, all of us except for the snipers. They were already packing up and checking their ammo locker. They already knew they were needed somewhere else and, soon enough, they were off to D.C. /more
Lab bioscientist looks into origin of viruses
Monica Borucki, a scientist in the Lab's Biosciences and Biotechnology Division has won a 1-year contract from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The $415,000 contract will fund a research project staffed by a team of six Lab scientists that will study how to better determine the origin of a virus. /more
Lab delegation explores China's supercomputing power
China's advances in building science and technology infrastructure, especially supercomputing, has been in the news lately. Last week, National Public Radio aired a piece documenting the country's achievements in supercomputing including its six-month reign as the home of the world's fastest supercomputer. As recently as 2001, China did not appear at all on the current Top500 list. According to the current list, China has 61 of the Top500 supercomputing sites in the world, second only to the United States.
And supercomputing is only one of several areas where China is making dramatic progress. /more
Network security innovation center kicks off lecture series
On July 14, the Department of Defense announced a foreign government hacked into Pentagon computers and compromised more than 24,000 documents.
On July 15, one of the worldwide leaders in the field of information security spoke to about 200 Lab employees about top strategic security imperatives. /more
