Labs historian Rebecca Ullrich presents 70 years of Sandia
As part Sandia’s 70th anniversary celebration, Labs employees were treated to an insightful, humorous and engaging presentation, “70 years of Sandia: How did we get here?” by Sandia historian Rebecca Ullrich. During the presentation, Rebecca described the Labs’ path from its beginnings as part of Los Alamos National Laboratory to the launch of Sandia Corporation and the Albuquerque campus to the expansion of the Labs to its current state.
Exceptional service in the national interest
Two dates are well known to Sandians: the day President Harry Truman wrote a letter calling for “exceptional service in the national interest” and the day Sandia (previously Z Division) separated from its parent, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and became the entity we know it as today.
Strategic Priority No. 7
Sandia's Strategic Priority No. 7 is a call to action to identify better, easier ways to do our job on behalf of the nation. We need to be more agile, make more focused decisions to create and sustain an exceptional institution and remove organizational barriers that are slowing us down and reducing our impact.
AI center to combine hardware, software for practical gains
Sandia and Pacific Northwest national laboratories and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta are launching a research center that combines hardware and software design and development to improve artificial intelligence technologies that will ultimately benefit the public.
Advanced microscopy reveals unusual DNA structure
An advanced imaging technique reveals new structural details of S-DNA, ladder-like DNA that forms when the molecule experiences extreme tension. This work conducted at Sandia and Vrije University in the Netherlands provides the first experimental evidence that S-DNA contains highly tilted base pairs.
Sandia health educator invited to speak at Virgin Pulse HERO forum
Virgin Pulse invited Sandia health educator and program coordinator Callie Lovato to speak at HEROForum19 in early September. A national non-profit, the Health Enhancement Research Organization has a mission to identify and share best practices in employee health and well-being.
Security in a heartbeat
Sandia is collaborating with a New Mexico small business to test and develop a biometric security system based on the human heartbeat. Sandia signed an agreement with Albuquerque-based Aquila Inc. to develop and test a wearable prototype that can stream in real time an identifying signature based on the electrical activity of a person’s heart.
Engineering success through predicting failure
Around the world, materials scientists and engineers are trying different ways to predict fractures in ductile metals, but it’s not clear which approach is most accurate. To compare the different methods, Sandia researchers have presented three voluntary challenges to their colleagues: Given the same basic information about the shape, composition and loading of a metal part, could they predict how it would eventually fracture?
Lowering the bar for hydrogen-powered technology
The Hydrogen Materials Advanced Research Consortium, or HyMARC, a multilab collaboration co-led by Sandia, is developing two types of hydrogen storage materials to meet challenging energy density targets set forth by DOE. The newly expanded collaboration is using the most promising strategies to optimize the materials for future use in vehicles.
MESA fabs get an upgrade
Sandia has completed phase one of an anticipated three-year upgrade at its plant responsible for making integrated circuits, similar to computer chips. The facility is now fully compatible with industry-standard, 8-inch silicon wafers — thin, round starting materials used for making chips.