Tag: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

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Zeno Power tests a new type of nuclear heat source

PNNL team removes heat source from transfer port
Team members at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory remove Zeno Power's heat source from a transfer port. (Zeno Power Photo)

Zeno Power says it has successfully completed its first demonstration of a new type of radioisotope heat source that could be used to generate off-grid power in settings ranging from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the moon.

The demonstration — performed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. — took advantage of the energy provided by the radioactive decay of strontium-90. Zeno said its tests confirmed that the company’s technology can increase the specific power of its heat source compared with previously available strontium-90 heat sources.

Zeno uses radioisotope heat sources as the building blocks for its power-generating systems, which are designed to convert constant thermal energy into electricity. Strontium-90, which is typically created as a byproduct of nuclear fission, is an abundant fuel for such systems — but existing strontium-based power systems tend to be bulky. Zeno’s design could generate more power with less bulk, opening the way for a wider range of applications.

The work at PNNL involved radioactive and non-radioactive activities, including chemical processing and fuel fabrication, materials handling and heat source characterization. The test data will support further development of heat sources.

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Could the Pacific Northwest become ‘Quantum Valley’?

Physicists adjust quantum hardware at PNNL
Christian Boutan and Jihee Yang adjust quantum hardware at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. (PNNL Photo / Andrea Starr)

California’s Silicon Valley may rule the roost for internet startups, and Kendall Square in the Boston area may set the pace for the biotech industry, but could the Pacific Northwest leap into the lead for quantum computing?

Experts who are exploring one of the computing world’s hottest frontiers say there’s a chance that Seattle could become the heart of a “Quantum Valley” — but it could take years for the promise of quantum computing to pay off.

“I’d say we’re on the order of a decade plus before we start to see this start to really materialize,” said Louis Terminello, associate laboratory director for physical and computational sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Terminello is among the authors of a recent commentary calling for increased public investment to solidify the Pacific Northwest as home of the nation’s top regional cluster for research and development in quantum information science — in short, Quantum Valley.

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Microbes could blaze a trail for farmers on Mars

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from its Florida launch pad. (SpaceX via YouTube)

An experiment that’s on its way to the International Space Station focuses on a subject that’s as common as dirt, but could be the key to growing crops in space.

The NASA-funded experiment — known as Dynamics of Microbiomes in Space, or DynaMoS — is being conducted by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. DynaMoS makes use soil and bacteria that were collected at a Washington State University field site in Prosser, Wash.

“Soil microbes are the hidden players of the life support system on planet Earth,” PNNL chief scientist Janet Jansson, the principal investigator for the DynaMoS experiment, explained during a pre-launch news briefing. The bacteria work to break down organic matter and make nutrients available for growing plants.

Space missions could extend the microbes’ reach beyond our home planet. “Soil microbes can help to make conditions on the lunar surface and Mars more favorable for plant growth,” Jansson said. “They can also be used to help grow crops on space stations and during long-term spaceflight.”

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Public-private partnership builds quantum supply chain

Barium ion chain
This photomicrograph shows a chain of barium ions in an IonQ quantum computing system. (IonQ Photo)

Dare we say it? Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has teamed up with IonQ to come up with a method for producing barium ions for quantum computing that could lead to … yes, that’s right, a quantum leap.

The public-private partnership could open up a new avenue for developing more resilient, more powerful hardware for trapped-ion quantum computers. The key technology involves using barium ions as the foundation for qubits, the quantum equivalent of binary bits in classical computing.

“IonQ’s work with PNNL to secure the domestic supply chain of IonQ’s quantum computing qubits is a fundamental step in the mass commercialization of quantum computing,” IonQ’s president and CEO, Peter Chapman, said today in a news release. “Qubits are at the core of our quantum computers, and this collaboration with PNNL lays the foundation for us to scale manufacturing of our systems.”

The partners say PNNL’s production process will provide a steady supply of barium-based qubits, using a microscopic smidgen of source material. That should make it possible for IonQ to reduce the size of core system components, which should in turn make it easier to network quantum computers.

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Northwest researchers get in on a quantum leap

Microsoft's Krysta Svore at AAAS
Krysta Svore, who leads the Microsoft Quantum – Redmond group at Microsoft Research, explains how quantum computing hardware works at a Seattle science meeting in February. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Microsoft, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Washington are playing supporting roles in the White House’s $1 billion effort to advance research into artificial intelligence and quantum information science.

Those three organizations have already been working together through the Northwest Quantum Nexus to develop the infrastructure for quantum computers, which promise to open up new possibilities in fields ranging from chemistry to systems optimization and financial modeling.

The initiatives announced today are likely to accelerate progress toward the development of commercial-scale quantum computers, Chetan Nayak, Microsoft’s general manager for quantum hardware, said in a blog posting.

“Today marks one of the U.S. government’s largest investments in the field,” he said. “It is also a noteworthy moment for Microsoft, which is providing scientific leadership in addition to expertise in workforce development and technology transfer.”

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Verizon teams up with PNNL on 5G applications

Cybersecurity is one of the issues that will be the subject of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s research into 5G applications. (Verizon / PNNL via YouTube)

Verizon says it’s bringing its 5G ultra wideband wireless network to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., and will collaborate with the lab on 5G applications that can benefit everything from chemistry research to electrical grid protection to the needs of first responders.

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PNNL plays role in new AI research center

Roberto Gioiosa
Roberto Gioiosa, a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, will lead a new research center focusing on challenges in artificial intelligence. (PNNL Photo)

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is joining forces with two other research powerhouses to pioneer a new $5.5 million research center created by the U.S. Department of Energy to focus on the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence.

The Center for Artificial Intelligence-Focused Architectures and Algorithms, or ARIAA, will promote collaborative projects for scientists at PNNL in Richland, Wash., at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, and at Georgia Tech. PNNL and Sandia are part of the Energy Department’s network of research labs.

ARIAA will be headed by Roberto Gioiosa, a senior research scientist at PNNL. As center director, he’ll be in charge of ARIAA’s overall vision, strategy and research direction. He’ll be assisted by two deputy directors, Sandia’s Rajamanickam and Georgia Tech Professor Tushar Krishna.

The creation of the new center is in line with the White House’s efforts to encourage partnerships in AI research. Last month, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced the establishment of the DOE Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office to serve as a coordinating hub for all the work that’s being done in his department.

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Cryptocurrency study sheds light on fake news

Svitlana Volkova, a data scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is part of a team of researchers who analyzed cryptocurrency discussions on Reddit. (PNNL Photo)

Computer scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have mapped the ebb and flow of Reddit’s discussions about cryptocurrency — not only to see how online chatter can predict market behavior, but also to gain insights into how disinformation goes viral.

“Cryptocurrency is a very good proxy program for disinformation,” said PNNL data scientist Svitlana Volkova, one of the authors of a study presented at the Web Conference 2019 in San Francisco.

The ups and downs of cryptocurrencies have been much in the news over the past couple of years, as have the controversies associated with disinformation campaigns like the ones orchestrated by Russian agents during the 2016 presidential campaign. And cybersecurity experts are seeing evidence that the disinformation battle is already ramping up for 2020.

Tracking disinformation scientifically can be a challenge, however, because the perpetrators tend to blend in with the crowd. On a broad topic like presidential politics, it’s hard to come up with an algorithm that focuses in on what’s true vs. what’s false.

It’s easier to look at how information gets passed along on well-defined Reddit discussion forums devoted to specific cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero. So Volkova and her co-authors — Emily Saldanha and Maria Glenski — conducted an analysis of tens of thousands of Reddit comments made on the forums for those three crypto coins between 2015 and 2018.

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Northwest pioneers team up on quantum frontier

PNNL reasearchers
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory plan to employ quantum computing to develop new materials for chemical applications. (Microsoft Azure via YouTube)

Experts in the weird and woolly field of quantum computing tend to concentrate on one slice of the challenge, whether it’s developing hardware, algorithms or applications — but in the region that’s home to Microsoft and Amazon, the University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a new consortium is going after the whole stack.

We’re not talking about pancakes or sandwiches here. We’re talking about the Northwest Quantum Nexus, which is aiming to widen a network of quantum connections for researchers, developers and business leaders. The group, led by Microsoft Quantum, PNNL and UW, was formally unveiled today in advance of its inaugural summit this week at the university.

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Scientists pull out protein data from single cells

NanoPOTS protein analysis
Ying Zhu, a chemist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, places a chip containing samples for analysis into the automated NanoPOTS system. (PNNL Photo / Andrea Starr)

Scientists have developed a technique that can analyze fluid from a single human cell to identify its proteins — which could open the way for tracking the progression of cancer one cell at a time.

The method is known as NanoPOTS, or “nanodroplet processing in one pot for trace samples.” It was developed by scientists at the the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and detailed in a study published in the German journal Angewandte Chemie.

“NanoPOTS is like a molecular microscope that allows us to analyze samples that are 500 times smaller than we could see before,” PNNL analytical chemist Ryan Kelly, the study’s senior author, said in a news release. “We can identify more proteins in one cell than could previously be identified from a group of hundreds of cells.”

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