In 1995 hundreds of Tokyo subway rescuers were exposed to the deadly nerve gas sarin hours before police confirmed its identity. Earlier this year, soldiers in Iraq worried about a similar fate. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists have now come up with a way to warn commuters, emergency crews and troops about a toxic gas release. A device called a high resolution infrared spectrometer can be pointed at a suspect cloud to read light emitted and absorbed. Thanks to PNNL's highly precise catalog of chemical-agent spectral signatures, the instrument detects from the light the presence of sarin, soman, VX, mustard gas and other common nerve and blistering agents. National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers collaborated on recent tests of the PNNL system at Utah's Dugway Proving Ground.
Replicating cellular tissues
Petrified wood is formed over millions of years, creating basically a negative replica of the wood structure. Now, scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have found not only a way to mimic the mineralization process within a few hours, but to modify it in ways that may prove useful.
Instead of a solid rock-like copy, they have produced an exact replica with pores and channels. This process creates a "positive" replica of the living tissue in just a matter of hours. The microstructure provides enormous surface area -- about one football field per gram of material.
PNNL researchers have now coated these positive replicas with carbon, which could speed chemical reactions and thereby increase the yield of many industrial products, or serve as a separations platform to filter hazardous chemicals, like mercury, from the environment.
Genetic sleight-of-wing
Gnat-like flies called midges thrive in a healthy stream; in polluted water, their numbers diminish. Ecologists have come to rely on midge-species counts for an inexpensive snapshot of stream health. But raw numbers reveal nothing about changes-in-progress that portend environmental peril.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers wondered whether they could quickly identify pollutants by using the midge genome to scan for cell damage. There was one tiny hitch: There is no midge genome map. Undaunted, they substituted that of a distant relative, the thoroughly mapped fruit fly Drosophila.
Sure enough, it turns out, material on a fruit fly gene chip will bind to protein-precursor RNA from ground-up midge larvae to yield a pattern specific to the pollutant -- heavy metal, radionuclide, hormone analogue or pesticide -- to which the midges were exposed.
Balancing the water and growth equation
Nationwide, municipalities struggle to maintain the balance between managing growth and preserving natural resources. In King County, Wash., home to the expansive Seattle metropolitan area, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers are assisting the county's Department of Natural Resources and Parks by developing an integrated computational modeling system that simulates the potential impacts of urban activities, including population growth, on the area's watersheds, rivers, lakes and estuaries.
When complete in 2005, the Integrated Water Resource Modeling System will enable King County planners to evaluate diverse scenarios such as drinking water withdrawal from urban lakes, or the effects of changes in the urban growth boundary. The system will include models of water resources as well as those used to evaluate ecological and human health risks.
PNNL researchers hope to develop a system that can be applied in other municipalities wrestling with complex growth and natural resource management issues.