Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “ERL”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

97 records · Page 6

Final Reports of the 2019 Los Alamos National Laboratory Computational Physics Student Summer Workshop

The Los Alamos National Laboratory Computational Physics Workshop is intended to educate select students in problems of computational physics, while exciting them about problems of particular interest to LANL. The long term goal is to train a cadre of future researchers with strong connections to LANL and both interest and expertise in the problems LANL faces. This year’s workshop ran from June 10 – August 16, 2019 and once again attracted a phenomenal group of students, whose work is presented in the following pages. The students worked with LANL staff mentors in teams of two, doing original research. In addition, they attended a lecture series focusing on both the basics and the cutting edge challenges of computational physics (Table 1). A new item this year was a modification to our Meet LANL series of brown-bag lunch session, moving from focusing on individual researchers to panel presentations from the different groups within XCP. As always, the mentors were drawn from across disciplines and divisions. Projects looked physics ranging from quantum interactions, up to solar system development.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Comet showers as a cause of mass extinction

Three independent pieces of evidence supporting a connection between comet showers and clustering in terrestrial cratering and mass extinctions are presented. The temporal profile of a comet shower triggered by a star passing through the Oort cloud is calculated. Four weak peaks are found in the age of distribution of impact craters over the past 100 Myr, as well as two compact clusters of ages of impact glass broadly coincident with crater-age peaks. Recent paleontological observations are reviewed that indicate a stepwise character for some well-documented mass extinctions in the past 100 Myr which roughly coincide with three of the four peaks in crater ages and which have a duration compatible with comet shower predictions.

Hut, Piet↗

Elemental abundance anomalies in the late Cenomanian extinction interval - A search for the source(s)

Measurements of elemental abundances by neutron activation methods across the Cenomanian-Turonian extinction interval in samples collected from 16 sites in the Western Interior Basin of North America from 12 widely separated locations around the globe, including six ODP/DSDP sites, are reported. In most Western Interior Basin sites, in Colombia, and in Western Europe, two closely spaced elemental abundance peaks occur in the upper Cenomanian (about 92 m.y.), spanning the ammonite zones of Sciponoceras gracile through Neocardioceras juddii. Elements with anomalously high concentrations include Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Ir, Pt, and Au. The lower peak coincides with the disappearance (extinction) of the foraminifer Rotalipora cushmani. In North American sections R. greenhornensis also disappears at or just below this horizon, but in Europe it disappears considerably earlier than R. cushmani. Although the weak geochemical signal from comet impact(s) could be masked by the strong terrestrial-like overprint, these anomalies more likely resulted in the large late Cenomanian through early Turonian eustatic rise and deep-water opening of the South Atlantic.

Orth, Charles J.↗

Mechanisms of insulin action on sympathetic nerve activity

Insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia may contribute to the development of arterial hypertension. Although insulin may elevate arterial pressure, in part, through activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the sites and mechanisms of insulin-induced sympathetic excitation remain uncertain. While sympathoexcitation during insulin may be mediated by the baroreflex, or by modulation of norepinephrine release from sympathetic nerve endings, it has been shown repeatedly that insulin increases sympathetic outflow by actions on the central nervous system. Previous studies employing norepinephrine turnover have suggested that insulin causes sympathoexcitation by acting in the hypothalamus. Recent experiments from our laboratory involving direct measurements of regional sympathetic nerve activity have provided further evidence that insulin acts in the central nervous system. For example, administration of insulin into the third cerebralventricle increased lumbar but not renal or adrenal sympathetic nerve activity in normotensive rats. Interestingly, this pattern of regional sympathetic nerve responses to central neural administration of insulin is similar to that seen with systemic administration of insulin. Further, lesions of the anteroventral third ventricle hypothalamic (AV3V) region abolished increases in sympathetic activity to systemic administration of insulin with euglycemic clamp, suggesting that AV3V-related structures are critical for insulin-induced elevations in sympathetic outflow.

Muntzel, Martin S.↗

Implementing Journaling in a Linux Shared Disk File System

In computer systems today, speed and responsiveness is often determined by network and storage subsystem performance. Faster, more scalable networking interfaces like Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet provide the scaffolding from which higher performance computer systems implementations may be constructed, but new thinking is required about how machines interact with network-enabled storage devices. In this paper we describe how we implemented journaling in the Global File System (GFS), a shared-disk, cluster file system for Linux. Our previous three papers on GFS at the Mass Storage Symposium discussed our first three GFS implementations, their performance, and the lessons learned. Our fourth paper describes, appropriately enough, the evolution of GFS version 3 to version 4, which supports journaling and recovery from client failures. In addition, GFS scalability tests extending to 8 machines accessing 8 4-disk enclosures were conducted: these tests showed good scaling. We describe the GFS cluster infrastructure, which is necessary for proper recovery from machine and disk failures in a collection of machines sharing disks using GFS. Finally, we discuss the suitability of Linux for handling the big data requirements of supercomputing centers.

Preslan, Kenneth W.↗

Radar Soundings of the Subsurface of Mars

The martian subsurface has been probed to kilometer depths by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter. Signals penetrate the polar layered deposits, probably imaging the base of the deposits. Data from the northern lowlands of Chryse Planitia have revealed a shallowly buried quasi-circular structure about 250 kilometers in diameter that is interpreted to be an impact basin. In addition, a planar reflector associated with the basin structure may indicate the presence of a low-loss deposit that is more than 1 kilometer thick.

Mars Express orbiter↗