Dear Readers, cont.
Sandia’s mission requires expertise across a wide
range of disciplines and the nation continues to
turn to the Labs to extend that expertise. For the
past few years, a Sandia team has found itself doing
vital work in the Arctic and elsewhere around the
globe to better understand climate change issues.
Among the other highlights:
- Our cover story reveals how detecting dental
disease is now as simple as taking a small sample
of the patient’s saliva and quickly analyzing
it. The technology, which follows Sandia’s
lab-on-a-chip research, both detects disease and
determines the extent of the disease’s progress.
- Predicting the properties of materials by better
understanding their electronic structure is the
goal of several Sandia/California scientists
and engineers. They are making a hard-to-use
theoretical approach from 1965 amenable to
computerization.
- Sandia’s contributions to the U.S. Nuclear
Detonation Detection System — a network of
Global Positioning System and Defense Support
Program satellites with multiple detectors and
a handful of fixed and mobile ground stations
— include the ICADS software system, which
helps the U.S. Air Force quickly recognize
nuclear detonations and other like-phenomena
on a worldwide basis.
Finally, we take a look at the past, present, and
possibly the future of microelectromechanical
machines, or “small smart things” we call MEMS
for short. Sandia has been at the forefront of MEMS
development since the 1980s and this article takes
stock of the successes and the problems inherent in
the field.
Will Keener, Sandia Technology Editor
A quarterly research and development magazine.