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A New Mexico jury recently awarded Shawn Carpenter $4.3 million in a wrongful termination lawsuit against his former employer Sandia National Laboratories. The former network intrusion detection analyst was fired in January 2005 after he shared information relating to an internal network compromise with the FBI and the U.S. Army. Sandia alleged that Carpenter had inappropriately shared confidential information he had gathered in his role as a security analyst for the laboratory. Carpenter said he had done so only for national security reasons. He said his independent investigations of a May 2004 breach had unearthed evidence showing that the intruders...

A jury delivered a strong— and expensive— message to Sandia National Laboratories on Tuesday, awarding more than $4 million to a cybersecurity analyst who was fired after going "over the fence" to the FBI with information about national security breaches. The 13-person state district court jury determined that Sandia's handling of Shawn Carpenter's termination was "malicious, willful, reckless, wanton, fraudulent or in bad faith." "If they (Sandia) have an interest in protecting us, they certainly didn't show it with the way they handled Shawn," said juror Ed Dzienis, a television editor. The verdict was a "clear and unambiguous" message to...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia’s Z machine, by creating pressures more than 10 million times that of the atmosphere at sea level, has turned a diamond sheet into a pool of liquid. The object of the experiment was to better understand the characteristics of diamond under the extreme pressure it would face when used as a capsule for a BB- sized pellet intended to fuel a nuclear fusion reaction. The experiment is another step in the drive to release enough energy from fused atoms to create unlimited electrical power for humanity. Control of this process has been sought for 50 years....

Desalination roadmap seeks technological solutions to increase the nation’s water supply 07.06.2006 Sandia researchers ready to complete research roadmap After one last meeting in San Antonio in April, Sandia National Laboratories researchers Pat Brady and Tom Hinkebein are putting the final touches on the updated Desalination and Water Purification Roadmap -- "Roadmap 2" -- that should result in more fresh water in parts of the world where potable water is scarce. The updated roadmap is the result of three previous meetings -- two in San Diego and one in Tampa -- and the last held in April where many government...

Sandia: The Other weapons lab. Engineers reflect on 50 years of bomb making in the shadow of Los Alamos, Livermore labs. LIVERMORE — Inside the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, the rivalry between Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore weapons labs — for H-bomb designs, money and prestige — is legendary. But a third H-bomb lab, Sandia, operates inside that competition, with branches in California and New Mexico as two houses of defense science divided by geography and assignment if united by a single manager. What began 50 years ago as a team of ordnance engineers dispatched from New Mexico to help...

The explosives stolen from a West Side storage area were powerful enough to have blown shrapnel more than a half-mile along the highways the thieves drove after stealing the material, a federal agent testified Wednesday. None of the suspects apparently had any training in dealing with explosives, said agent Gary Ainsworth of the BATF. When recovered, he said, the explosives and detonators were packed together— a distinctly bad idea with things that go bang. An air unit helped locate the metal shed where the stolen magazines— steel boxes with wooden interiors made specifically for explosives— were being stored. According to...

Thieves who stole 400 pounds of explosives from a location west of Albuquerque also apparently took a Wells Cargo trailer used to store them and a truck to haul them, according to a papers unsealed in federal court this morning. The advertised $50,000 reward led a confidential informant to a lawyer's office in Durango on Friday with information about the stolen items and the men who took them, an affidavit reveals. But the documents failed to shed any light on how the thieves knew about the explosives or what they planned to do with them. Information from a confidential source...

Nothing more...just posted on the MSNBC website.

No guards. No lights. No cameras. No alarms. A barbed-wire fence, a gate, a few warning signs and some locks are what guarded several hundred pounds of explosives, enough to blow up a large building. The security measures, which meet federal regulations, are what a thief faced sometime last week when the plastic explosives, 2,500 blasting caps and explosive detonator cords were stolen from a Bernalillo County storage depot. The explosives belonged to Cherry Engineering. The company is owned by Chris Cherry, one of the nation's most respected bomb experts and a Sandia National Laboratories employee. The security measures protecting...

Officials Fret Over Disappearance Of Explosives 150 Pounds Of Explosives Missing From Sandia-Affiliated Company POSTED: 2:10 pm MST December 19, 2005 UPDATED: 2:17 pm MST December 19, 2005 ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Officials discovered hundreds of pounds of explosives stolen in Albuquerque on Sunday. One hundred fifty pounds of c4, 250 pound deta sheet, and 2,000 blasting caps were taken from a Sandia Labs employee's company. Officials are very concerned about these thefts. The items were stolen from a facility in Southwest Albuquerque. Burglars apparently cut through steel bars to get at the goods. C4 is a plastic explosive. A deta...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That's a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories. The research has captured the interest of chemists around the world pursuing methods of producing hydrogen from water. Sandia researchers John Shelnutt and Zhongchun Wang gaze upon the glow of porphryin nanotubes caused by the nanotubes’ intense resonance light scattering activity. (Photo by Chris Burroughs) "The broad objective of the research is to design and fabricate new types of nanoscale devices," says...

N.M. Lab Finds Missing Classified Disk ASSOCIATED PRESS ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - A classified floppy disk reported missing from a government nuclear weapons lab was found Friday, but officials were tight-lipped about details surrounding the incident. The disk was listed as missing during a June 30 inventory at Sandia National Laboratories. The lab said the floppy disk came from a military organization. "The disk was always under the control of individuals authorized to possess it," said Ron Detry, Sandia's vice president of integrated security and chief security officer. Detry cited a procedural error in the disk's transfer between lab organizations,...

Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico have developed a new way of mimicking photosynthetic proteins to manipulate platinum at the nanoscale. The method has the potential of deliver a form of energy manufacture. The idea for the technique is similar to photosynthesis, in which plants use the energy from sunlight to produce sugar. But instead of manufacturing sugar, the new method changes a platinum ion to the neutral metal atoms. The photosynthetic protein mimicks this repeatedly, allowing metal to be deposited as desired at the nanoscale. The method involves putting porphyrins...

Source: Sandia National Laboratories Date: 2004-02-05 Sandia-developed Foam Likely Would Stop SARS Virus Quickly, Sandia/Kansas State Team Shows ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Researchers at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration's Sandia National Laboratories and Kansas State University have shown that chemical formulations previously developed at Sandia to decontaminate chemical and biological warfare agents are likely effective at killing the virus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). Cecilia Williams (left) and Jill Bieker, two members of the Sandia/K-State research team, inject Sandia’s decontamination formulation into a flask containing a surrogate of the SARS virus. The team has demonstrated the formulation’s ability...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — That computer on your desk is just your helper. But soon it may become a very close friend. Now it sends your e-mails, links you to the Web, does your computations, and pays your bills. Soon it could warn you when you’re talking too much at a meeting, if scientists at Sandia National Laboratories’ Advanced Concepts Group have their way. Or it could alert others in your group to be attentive when you have something important to say. Aided by tiny sensors and transmitters called a PAL (Personal Assistance Link) your machine (with your permission) will become...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A new type of "smart" machine that could fundamentally change how people interact with computers is on the not-too-distant horizon at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories. Over the past five years a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember experiences with users and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions. "In the long term, the benefits from this effort are expected to include augmenting human effectiveness and embedding these cognitive models into systems like robots...

A group of Sandia National Laboratories scientists have accidentally tripped, and broken the laws of physics. While improving a labs-developed energy technology, scientists Shawn Lin, Jim Bur and Jim Fleming discovered that they had made the technology so efficient that it crashed through the walls of a century-old physics law called Planck's Law of Blackbody Cavity Radiation. The technology - called a tungsten photonic lattice - and its stunning new properties in the next year could lead to solar cells and batteries that are from four to 10 times more efficient than today's, Lin said. "We were just making an...

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have re-created a star's fire. In a series of experiments using the lab's Z machine over the past nine months, they demonstrated the ability to generate tiny bursts of nuclear fusion, the same energy that fuels H-bombs and stars, the researchers said at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia. "We're trying to create a star in the laboratory," said Jeff Quintenz, head of Sandia's fusion research program. The research is driven by a need to duplicate the conditions on a nuclear battlefield. But it also means Z's unique technological approach has demonstrated...

ALBUQUERQUE—A New Mexico scientist who served as a weapons inspector says Iraq's primary roadblock in building nuclear weapons has been in getting core materials. Retired Sandia National Laboratories scientist Paul Stokes took inspection teams into Iraq while Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the United Nations in 1994 and 1995. "We could go anywhere, anytime, unannounced," Stokes said. Stokes knows that Iraq had some computer-controlled machine tools that could be used for cut precision parts and plans for nuclear weapons in 1995. But years later, he says the country still might have trouble getting core nuclear materials and tools. "They certainly...