LAsteNERD

In 1955, Mary Tsingou helped run a computational experiment at Los Alamos that revealed unexpected behavior in nonlinear systems—work that later became foundational to chaos theory and computational science.

This piece traces that history from early supercomputers and the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem to modern AI systems used to explore uncertainty in scientific research.

Neutrinos were originally proposed as a “desperate remedy” to fix missing energy in nuclear decay, but turned out to be real—just incredibly hard to detect. Tens of quadrillions can pass through matter before one interacts. Los Alamos physicists (Reines and Cowan) confirmed their existence in 1956 using a nuclear reactor as a source. Since then, neutrino experiments have repeatedly exposed gaps in the Standard Model—like neutrino oscillations, which proved they have mass, and ongoing hints at possible “sterile” neutrinos. What’s interesting is how detection capability drove the science: better detectors led to unexpected anomalies which led to new physics. Today, neutrinos are used as probes of everything from stellar processes to matter–antimatter asymmetry, and experiments are still chasing open questions like whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles.

Story about how Los Alamos is reinventing neutron imaging — think “x-rays with neutrons” — using new event-mode cameras that record each neutron interaction with nanosecond-level precision.

Traditional neutron imaging works like a long-exposure photo: useful, but blurry. The new system (based on a camera called LumaCam) timestamps every photon from neutron events and uses techniques like event centroiding and pulse-shape discrimination to clean up noise and sharpen images dramatically.

Why neutrons? Because they reveal things x-rays can’t — like light elements, isotopic composition, and crystal structure. This is especially powerful for materials science and nuclear diagnostics, where understanding what something is made of (not just where it is) really matters.

Article from Los Alamos is about the ICE House, a facility where they test electronics by blasting them with neutrons that mimic what you’d get flying at 35,000 feet for decades. One hour of testing = 100 years of cosmic radiation.

It’s part of a larger effort to make electronics rad-hard — so that microchips don’t randomly glitch or die in flight (or in orbit). Especially relevant as chips shrink and transistor counts hit hundreds of billions (i.e. more chances for failure).

Some highlights:

Neutrons from space can flip bits or cause “latch-ups” (think: permanent short circuits).

These upsets can lead to weird bugs, BSODs, or worse — especially at altitude.

The ICE House runs ~24/7 and still can’t keep up with demand from avionics and chip companies.

They’re now planning a third beamline to expand testing capacity, and even working on proton-based testing for space use cases.

If you’re into hardware reliability, aerospace, or just cosmic-ray horror stories for computers, this is worth the read.