Fire danger: ExtremeStudents will meet with Bill Press on Tuesday
Bill Press, deputy director for science, technology and programs will meet with students at 3:30 p.m. next Tuesday. The hour long presentation will be broadcast live on Labnet from the Physics Auditorium.
Press will discuss the importance of students at the Laboratory and allow the audience a chance to ask questions or express concerns.
The meeting also will be shown through Labnet in the J. Robert Oppenheimer Study Center.
Director John Browne also will meet with student employees Aug. 10. The time and location will be announced later.
The Director's Office meets with students every summer, a tradition
started about four years ago by former Director Sig Hecker.
--C. Michael Carlson
Insurance information to assist Cerro
Grande Fire survivors
The Laboratory's Ombuds Program Office is presenting the third in a series of brown bag lunch sessions to assist those directly or indirectly affected by the fire, Thursday, July 13.
The meeting is from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Physics Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3.
Each of the brown bags have a specific topic and a subject-matter expert to provide information. The July 13 brown bag will discuss "Insurance Issues."
Peter Romero, a licensed independent public adjustor, will be the guest speaker for the meeting. The workshop includes discussions on working with the Internal Revenue Service and the federal government to offset almost all unrecovered insured and uninsured losses with tax deductions, how survivors may spend recovery money without taxable consequences and possible recovery from the federal government on unrecovered losses.
Also, there will be information on how to deal with insurance agencies and representatives to attempt to recover all possible insurance-policy monetary proceeds, including what is not shown on individual policies. For example, the costs relating to architectural and engineering services and how to retroactively reform and remove the fixed limits of coverage that are causing individuals to be underinsured.
How to best work with the local survivor group on sharing information and further recovery will be included in the discussion as will the role of the licensed independent public adjustor.
All meetings are open to the public but are geared to fire survivors. Some sessions will be narrowly focused, as is this one, to those returning to the workplace.
In the first brown bag session Tom Locke, director of Los Alamos' Employee Assistance Program (ESH-2) addressed coming back to work, coping skills and how co-workers can be supportive and how to let others help.
The second session representatives from the Environment, Safety and Health (ESH) Division talked about the Lab's environmental restoration project efforts and the Lab's Emergency Rehabilitation Team and its program to address potential impacts of increased runoff resulting from the fire.
Other brown bag meetings are being scheduled by the Ombuds Office and will be announced in the Daily Newsbulletin. The next brown bag, to discuss the Cerro Grande Assistance bill, is scheduled for July 17.
For more information, contact the Ombuds Program Office at 5-2837.
--Judy Goldie
Microbial Garden of Eden
Los Alamos researchers are identifying new bacterial kingdoms for further investigation and possible sequencing of their microbes' genomes as part of the Department of Energy's Microbial Genome Program, a spin-off of the U.S. Human Genome Project. Microbes possess extraordinary chemistry, tolerate extreme ranges of environments and are crucial to various biological and geochemical processes on Earth. The researchers are targeting microbes that cannot be cultured in a laboratory, yet make up about 99 percent of the bacterial organisms in the environment. By analyzing the "16S ribosomal RNA genes" (which all microbes possess) from DNA samples obtained from extreme soil environments in Arizona and New Mexico, researchers can identify new bacterial kingdoms and their roles in the environment; better understand the scope of microbial diversity; and isolate the environmentally important microbes for sequencing. The information derived from sequencing may have future applications in such fields as energy production, pharmaceuticals and environmental remediation.
Medicine, Biology take lesson from Los Alamos electronic physics archive
Paul Ginsparg of Elementary Particles and Field Theory (T-8), who started the world's first free-access electronic archive for physics research, will join leaders from the biomedical community at a conference in New York today and Friday to discuss how free access to biomedical research on the Internet will change biomedical science.
The conference, "Freedom of Information: The Impact of Free access on Biomedical Science," is organized by online publisher BioMed Central and will be held at the New York Academy of Medicine.
A key speaker at the conference is Dr. Harold Varmus, President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former head of the National Institutes for Health.
"Electronic communication is making dramatic changes in the way information is exchanged among scientists," Varmus said. "Within biomedicine the full potential of electronic communication has yet to be realized.
"Now we have the opportunity, and the imperative, to distribute scientific findings in a fashion that allows free access and serves the scientific community and the public in a highly responsible way," Varmus continued. "We need to know how this will change the way we, as scientists, go about our business."
The conference also will examine the impact of free access publishing on the working lives of scientists, publishers, librarians and the public, as well as its impact on science itself.
Influenced in part by the success of the e-print archives at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, Varmus last year proposed the creation of PubMed Central, an archive for research published in the biomedical sciences. The recently launched PubMed Central archive - it can be found at http://pubmedcentral.nih.gov online - and other open-access publishing initiatives promise to transform the biomedical landscape by making research available for free to all.
Initially, PubMed Central won't work the same way as the physics publishing model established by Ginsparg in his physics e-print archive, where research is submitted to the open-access archive before peer review and publication to encourage rapid distribution of research results. PubMed Central, by contrast, will only archive articles that have been peer-reviewed.
Ginsparg represents Los Alamos as a member of PubMed Central's national advisory committee.
"It is thrilling that the biomedical community is beginning to join the 1990s," Ginsparg said.
"The physics community was well ahead of the curve, having moved much of its informal communication to the internet by the mid-1980s. In the 1990s Los Alamos provided the resources needed to create a new model for research communication infrastructure, with the hope that it might eventually generalize to other forward-looking research disciplines," Ginsparg said.
Ginsparg launched the pre-print archive of physics research http://arXiv.org in 1991 at Los Alamos. Today the physics e-Print archive regularly processes between 1,000 and 2,000 electronic transactions per hour and has revolutionized the way physicists communicate research findings by allowing them to distribute articles rapidly, efficiently and before they are printed by a commercial publisher.
Another conference speaker, Jan Velterop, director of publishing at Nature magazine, said, "Not all publishers and librarians are adding enough value to the information they handle. If they are going to continue to earn their existence, they must find new ways to serve the scientific community. But does "freedom of information" mean information for free? This conference will be a very important forum to discuss this issue."
Open access publishing in biomedicine could also change the way science impacts on the general public who regularly interface with the produce of medical research in hospitals or when visiting their doctor or pharmacist.
Jean Hoffman-Anuta, a clinical pharmacist, will discuss the issue of access to research information in the light of her own experience as a member of the general public who turned to the latest medical research papers to improve her medical treatment. The conference also will include sessions on how publishing and librarianship are changing and on the technology shaping the open-access publishing initiatives of the future.
Full conference program and registration details are available on-line at http://www.biomedcentral.com/conference.asp online.
--Jim Danneskiold
Wanted: Suggestions for reducing administrative burden
Got a suggestion for how the Laboratory can reduce its administrative burden? If so, Lab management wants to hear from you. In his town-hall meeting welcoming employees back to work following the Lab's closure due to the Cerro Grande Fire, Laboratory Director John Browne discussed the importance of reducing the Lab's administrative burden and noted that reducing unnecessary and unproductive costs is an effort the entire Laboratory community can help with.
If you have a constructive suggestion or comment, write it down and send it to AdministrativeBurden@lanl.gov. Suggestions and comments will be forwarded to the Quality Improvement Office for integrating into ongoing Lab initiatives or, when appropriate, to "Ask the Director" for a response.
SCC facility construction update
Crews have begun constructing a mock-up of the exterior surfaces of the Strategic Computing Complex just inside the fence on the south side of the construction site at Technical Area 3. When completed in approximately two to four weeks, the crews will be moving the fence back so everyone can see what the building will look like on the outside.
The mock-up is letting design/build contractor Hensel Phelps fine tune some of the construction techniques and materials for the building's exterior and allow all involved to agree on the quality standard for these installations.
The first floor slab of concrete has been placed down. This
work is starting around
4:30 a.m. to get a good finish on the floor before the wind picks
up and kicks around sand and dirt. Temporary lighting has been
brought in to help illuminate the work area when these slabs are
being placed. More slabs will be placed about every other day
until the entire floor is complete.
Everything is proceeding as necessary to start the steel erection beginning the first week of August. All of the steel should be in place by around Christmas time. Two large cranes will support this part of the construction effort (one on the south side of the building and one on the north).
The sidewalk on the south side of Mercury Road is complete. Crews now will close the north sidewalk to improve safety (keeping pedestrian traffic away from the construction vehicular traffic that enters and leaves the site across the north sidewalk) and to take advantage of the extra space it gives for construction staging. Lab employees should follow the pedestrian safety signs and use the sidewalk on the south side of Mercury Road until the north sidewalk is open again.
The sidewalk on the east side of the construction site continues to shift further east in order for crews to complete the site work on the east side of the SCC. The elevation on the east side needs to be raised a few feet to properly manage the rain water that will flow from this site, therefore more space is needed.
A new sidewalk will be installed around the Public Affairs Building (SM-100) and the fence next to Public Affairs will be moved further in about eight to 10 feet. Crews are working with the site's traffic/pedestrian engineer to make sure that all of the needs and safety concerns regarding this change are addressed. This work should be completed in the next two to four weeks.
To report any concerns or for more information about the SCC project, call 5-5550. Additional information (including recent photos) about the project is available online at: http://int.lanl.gov/projects/asci/scc/.
--Ternel Martinez
A City Within
Each worker has a job to do at the construction site of the Strategic Computing Complex, slated for completion in 2001. The three-story, 267,000-square-foot facility is being built at Technical Area 3 off Pajarito Road. The complex will support the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, part of the stockpile stewardship program. Photo by Michael Carlson
Emergency Rehabilitation Team hosts second
public meeting tomorrow
ERT public meeting
David Gurule, area manager of the Department of Energy's Los
Alamos Area Office, is hosting the second Emergency Rehabilitation
Team public meeting this Friday at 10 a.m. Members of the media
and public will be able to ask questions, provide input and engage
in discussions with team members. This Friday's meeting will be
held in Room 100 at DOE LAAO, located at 528 35th Street, off
Trinity Drive.
Protect Laboratory facilities and infrastructure
Los Alamos and Pueblo Canyons
Not canyon specific
Minimize movement of contamination off Laboratory property
Projected BMP Implementation Schedule
The following table shows the number of PRSs, their locations
by technical area, start and completion dates for the implementation
of BMPs and the number completed:
| No. of PRSs | PRS locations | Start date | Completion Date | No. of PRSs Completed |
| 10 | TA-11 | 5/21/00 | 5/24/00 | 10 |
| 29 | TA-6, 14, 15, 22, 36, 40, 49 | 6/14/00 | 7/15/00 | 17 |
| 34 | TA-16, 46, 15 (R-44) | 5/29/00 | 7/15/00 | 15 |
| 18 | TA-4, 5, 42, 48 | 6/27/00 | 7/15/00 | 10 |
| Total: 91 PRSs | Total: 52PRSs |
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Research Library looking
for donations of books destroyed by fire
