Scientific Discoveries You’ve Never Heard Of

Extreme laser-made nanochips? Chromosome imaging? An experiment that brings us to the cusp of fusion ignition? These discoveries, and others, have opened up new domains in all areas of science. All were developed at Lawrence Livermore over the past seven decades.

Learn more  about Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Transcript

00:00:01 how does this turn into this how does this become this or this turn into this all of these leaps and many more actually have one thing in common oh really one place in common and we were looking at it since it was founded 70 years ago Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been at the Forefront of Science and

00:00:28 Technology Innovation producing research that has changed the world in ways you've probably never heard of but that you're probably holding in the palm of your hand right now your electronic device starts with a chip these Channel electricity through transistors which act as little Gates turning electric current on or off in specific patterns on the most

00:00:51 fundamental level that's what lets your Tech do stuff like this but as phones and other electronic devices have gotten both smaller and more powerful we've had to fit even more transistors on even smaller chips we can do that because of extreme ultraviolet lithography euvl means using lasers to produce extreme ultraviolet light

00:01:16 that etches transistors into a silicon ship lnl along with two other National Labs developed some of the original tools and techniques that have made euvl what it is today which is what allows there to be powerful microchips inside pretty much every device in your life euvl is what's made it possible for 10 billion transistors to fit on a chip the size of a fingernail meaning your phone

00:01:40 can do this instead of just this speaking of lasers lnl has also been instrumental in birthing entire new eras of astronomy the lab developed a mirror with small movable segments for use in telescopes pair this with the laser beam and you've got yourself a laser guide star this seemingly simple tool takes the twinkle out of Starlight it sounds like

00:02:09 something from Star Trek but it's a real thing that solves a real problem see when astronomers look at the night sky they have to look through layers of Earth's atmosphere and that causes Distortion but this lnl developed laser guide Star Technology made outer space more clearly visible from Earth than ever before and it's widely used today in observatories all around the world we

00:02:31 have this advancement to thank for images of continents made of ice on the moon Titan infrared photos of storms on Jupiter and photos of the black hole at the center of our galaxy out of this world discoveries aren't just confined to the Realms of outer space in the 1970s lab researchers refined a tool that has changed biological science forever it's called

00:02:58 flow cytometry it's a technique that allows scientists to rapidly and accurately sort count and image microscopic structures like cells and even the chromosomes that carry our genetic information this is a typical kind of picture that we may get on the machine when we're running and what we're seeing here are the chromosomes that exist in a in a for a typical human

00:03:20 being the advancements in flow cytometry made at lnl were necessary to launch the Human Genome Project which gave us the first ever map of all of the genes that make humans human flow cytometry is an essential part of many different fields today it's used in cancer biology fertility testing diagnosing diseases understanding the

00:03:42 immune system marine biology plant biology microbiology pharmaceutical testing and so much more but when it comes to things that are even smaller than your chromosomes how do we know how things like atoms move the field of science dedicated to understanding how Atomic level structures behave is called molecular Dynamics and it was born at lnl it

00:04:06 combines really powerful computers and really cool math lab scientist Bernie Alder created this field when he first used lnl's computers to understand molecular movement everything around us all the matter in the world is made up of atoms so predicting how these vast quantities of particles will move and affect one another with their movement is

00:04:30 impossible to predict by hand you need a lot of computing power to do it fortunately lnl has always had some of the fastest and most powerful computers in the world from its founding in 1952 up till now these computational methods have evolved throughout the past 70 years and still help us understand some of the trickiest problems today in Material Science physics chemistry and

00:04:54 more foreign speaking of modeling did you know that behind your car's modern safety features is just one 5000 line piece of code that code is called Dyna 3D and it was written by lab scientist John halquist to model extreme impacts John realized just how important this could be to so many fields so he made an open source

00:05:16 that means freely available to read and adapt by any member of the public and now it's used by companies all over the world to simulate everything from aerosol behaviors to battery cooling to aerodynamics and maybe most commonly to simulate vehicle crashes to test their design and safety without ever having to actually crash the car it's been used to test the design of seat belts airbags

00:05:39 and many other safety improvements that helped your car go from this to this but if any change has been most notable and important in the past 70 years of science it's our evolving understanding of our climate in 1989 the lab founded the program for climate model diagnosis and intercomparison or the pcmdi since its birth it has been one of the world's

00:06:04 most powerful programs for comparing evaluating and improving climate models to help us understand what's going on and why in fact in an early report for the intergovernmental panel on climate change pcmdi scientist Ben santer was the lead author of a Hallmark section that stated the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate this was one of the

00:06:25 first explicit statements of Humanity's linkage to The Climate crisis lab scientists have been leading contributors to every ipcc climate report since improving computer models and conducting key studies with collaborators and providing modeling and Analysis tools for all to use because the lab is dedicated to using its broad expertise to look forward and

00:06:48 find Solutions scientists at the national ignition facility for example are working towards Fusion ignition that's the point at which we get more energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than we put into it nuclear fusion could be the future of clean energy and in 2021 the nif achieved a record-breaking 1.3

00:07:08 megajoules of energy output from a fusion experiment putting researchers at the threshold of fusion ignition future experiments will help us learn more about nuclear effusion and high energy physics and perhaps unlock the possibility of Fusion Energy [Music] and that's just seven of the ways that lab science has changed the world so far

00:07:31 the most exciting part is that the lab is still going strong with the most recent advancements showing us the promise of the lab's current efforts who knows what the next 10 years will give us what discoveries inventions and what progress will come next if you want more info like this you can check out the lab's timeline website to explore many more of the amazing Science and Tech

00:07:51 projects that have come out of the lab during its past 70 years and if you have questions or want us to cover another achievement from the lab's past present or future let us know in the comments thanks so much for watching [Applause]