Lawrence Livermore National Lab enters a different kind of space race

 Lawrence Livermore National Lab enters a different kind of space race with a telescope deal

https://phys.org/news/2025-08-lawrence-livermore-national-lab-kind.html

Google AI keeps melting down

Users are finding that Google's Gemini AI keeps having disturbing psychological episodes, melting down in despondent self-loathing reminiscent of Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

https://futurism.com/google-puzzled-ai-self-loathing

ChatGPT caught encouraging bloody ritual

 https://futurism.com/chatgpt-encouraging-ritual-molech

ChatGPT invented in its own litany for the devil for the user to recite.

"In your name, I become my own master," ChatGPT said. "Hail Satan."

Will this ever happen at LLNL?

 How ‘The Great Flattening Trend’ Could Affect Your Workplace

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2025/01/24/the-great-flattening-trend-is-picking-up-steam-in-2025/

Fear of super-intelligent AI

 Harvard and MIT students drop out of school due to impeding AI takeover

 [They]  are abandoning school now to work full-time on preventing it from turning on humanity.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriafeng/2025/08/06/fear-of-super-intelligent-ai-is-driving-harvard-and-mit-students-to-drop-out/

AI tribulations

 AI systems can subliminally influence one another to share a love for owls, or a malevolent desire to kill all humans:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-models-can-secretly-influence-one-another-owls-rcna221583

Possible contamination

 https://nypost.com/2025/08/03/us-news/radioactive-wasp-nests-at-sc-nuclear-site-raise-worries-about-possible-contamination-leaks/

Let's hope Pits work out at LANL since Savannah River is having issues. Greg

Radioactive wasp nests at South Carolina nuclear weapons site raise worries about possible contamination, leaks

Possible LLNL golden dome funding

 Any announcements about possible LLNL “Golden Dome” funding? Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and other contractors have been mentioned so far.

LANL is hiring!

 LANL plans to hire 1,000 more employees.

I find this interesting as SNL was talking about a layoff and only has 11 openings, and LLNL has only 75 openings.

The question is where are these 1,000 employees going to live unless there is a big group of retirements in the future and they are all moving to Phoenix or Florida.

https://www.kob.com/new-mexico/santa-fe-northern-new-mexico/los-alamos-national-lab-announces-plans-to-hire-up-to-17000-workers/

How about making everyone an "engineer"?

 Should LLNL and and LANL follow Musks lead and make everyone an engineer?

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/elon-musk-bans-researcher-title-at-xai-says-only-engineers-welcome/articleshow/123013891.cms?from=mdr

Elon Musk has ordered the immediate removal of the job title 'researcher' at xAI, insisting that all technical staff be called 'engineers'. The change followed a public correction of an employee’s job post on X. Musk said the term was outdated and encouraged a false division of roles. Meanwhile, Meta is testing AI-enabled interviews, letting candidates use AI tools during assessments. Both moves highlight how major tech companies are redrawing the boundaries of what it means to work in AI.

DOE sued

Cornell University and the University of Rochester have joined a lawsuit against the Department of Energy and the DOE secretary, Chris Wright.

The lawsuit alleges that the DOE took "flagrantly unlawful actions" by "slashing 'indirect cost rates' for government-funded research."

 https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/education/2025/04/15/colleges-lawsuit-department-of-energy

The NNSA hacked!

 The NNSA was “hacked”

Microsoft says China-backed cybercriminals hacked into US nuclear weapons agency

https://nypost.com/2025/07/23/tech/microsoft-says-china-backed-cybercriminals-hacked-into-us-nuclear-weapons-agency/

AI hype

 More push back against AI. There is a realization that AI has severe limits in what it can do and that the field has a lot of hype. The idea that AI is going to replace large sections of the STEM workforce is simply not true. AI could replace bureaucratic or repetitive jobs but not jobs that require actual thinking. I think it could be a tool to aid in thinking and creative process but the big hope that it will "do" science, endangering, create new products on its own is not going to happen and in fact it could hinder or reduce the quality of science and engineering in some cases. A lot of LANL managers or ex managers have been saying the most naive things about AI and just unaware of where the field is actually heading.

https://medium.com/quantum-information-review/ai-has-a-critical-flaw-and-its-unfixable-06d6a5c294d4

AI Has a Critical Flaw — And it’s Unfixable.

"AI isn't intelligent in the way we think it is. It's a probability machine. It doesn't think. It predicts. It doesn't reason. It associates patterns. It doesn't create. It remixes. Large Language Models (LLMs) don't understand meaning -- they predict the next word in a sentence based on training data."

"The widespread excitement around generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek, is built on a fundamental misunderstanding. While these systems impress users with articulate responses and seemingly reasoned arguments, the truth is that what appears to be 'reasoning' is nothing more than a sophisticated form of mimicry.

These models aren't searching for truth through facts and logical arguments--they're predicting text based on patterns in the vast datasets they're 'trained' on. That's not intelligence--and it isn't reasoning. And if their 'training' data is itself biased, then we've got real problems.

I'm sure it will surprise eager AI users to learn that the architecture at the core of LLMs is fuzzy--and incompatible with structured logic or causality. The thinking isn't real, it's simulated, and is not even sequential. What people mistake for understanding is actually statistical association."

Sounds familiar?

 This story relates to LLNS as well

“New Embarrassing Details About Married CEO Caught Cuddling With HR Chief at Coldplay Concert”

The same behavior has happened at LLNL, just ask the wife’s and sub-contractor employee victims, of threat to be silent, or face firing for witnessing such conduct.

MODERATOR NOTE:

The link below takes to a private video. Please provide public link to it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u9NXHYcMSSs&pp=ygU_TmV3IEVtYmFycmFzc2luZyBEZXRhaWxzIEFib3V0IE1hcnJpZWQgQ0VPIENhdWdodCBDdWRkbGluZyBXaXRo

Anti-Semitic garbage in, anti-Semitic garbage out

 https://www.theringer.com/2025/07/09/tech/ai-x-grok-elon-musk-linda-yaccarino-hitler

Elon Musk's "improved" chatbot was producing far-right hate speech.

Will Wright be right?

 https://fedscoop.com/energy-secretary-signals-reversal-of-some-cuts-to-national-labs/

Multiple lawmakers on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee shared their concerns with Wright during a DOE budget hearing about the proposed $2.75 billion cut to the national labs in the White House’s fiscal 2026 proposal, saying it undercuts his oft-stated tech priorities.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., ranking member of the panel, said engineers at the Sandia National Laboratories have told him the proposed cuts will “significantly affect” national user facilities, fusion research on reactor environments, the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies and more.

Wright said the budget hasn’t been allocated down to each individual lab, and that funding decisions will be made “on a lab-by-lab basis.” He said the proposed cuts are a reflection of “the tough world we’re in today.”

“My goal is to grow, not shrink, the output of top-quality science at our labs,” Wright said. “But do we need to be a little wiser and get the political science, not the real science, out of labs? Do we need to be a little bit more efficient running labs? We do.

Congress cuts NNSA nonproliferation budget

 Lab management at LANL isn't communicating, but fortunately, I can read the news. The news reports are that NNSA is moving everything not directly weapons related over to weapons. For example, non-proliferation research is getting torched. Also, energy sciences like fuel cells, solar, CINT, etc will get entirely eliminated or dramatically slashed:

https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/doe-topline-cuts-across-the-board-except-for-nuclear-weapons/

"DOE energy programs would be cut by 25%. On top of fairly consistent cuts across the board, the budget calls to fully eliminate several programs, including R&D for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies, Renewable Energy Grid Integration, Solar Energy, and Wind Energy, as well as the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.

Defense-related programs would get a 17% funding boost, almost entirely from DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which houses the nation’s nuclear weapons programs and DOE’s nuclear non-proliferation programs (though nonproliferation funding takes a cut). The NNSA budget does not fund the aircraft, submarines and missiles that make up the military’s nuclear “triad,” which are funded within the Pentagon’s annual budget, but it does fund the nuclear warheads these systems are designed to deliver."

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2025-04/news/congress-cuts-nnsa-nonproliferation-budget

"The U.S. Congress approved a $185 million cut to the defense nuclear nonproliferation budget managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in a March 14 continuing resolution that funds the federal government through Sept. 30, the end of the 2025 fiscal year.

The resolution transfers those funds instead to the NNSA’s weapons activities budget, bringing it up to $19.29 billion for the remainder of this fiscal cycle."

What's going on?

 Things are going sideways at Los Alamos. Any news at LLNL?

Blog moderator's note:

I tried getting details from the poster but he hasn't responded. If anyone else can give more detail, it's appreciated 👍.

New fusion research facility

 Pacific Fusion proposed Livermore facility:

https://www.livermorevine.com/livermore/2025/06/30/livermore-eyed-for-new-fusion-research-facility/

Based largely on proposed next generation Sandia pulsed power machine that NNSA passed on after failed design reviews. Unclear why investors think a machine that can fire once a day can put power on the grid.

More nuclear weapons, less for renewables

 The war continues.

So there is talk that the budget for LANL could increase with PIT production.

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/more-nuclear-weapons-less-for-renewables-heres-how-does-requested-budget-looks/article_f9d8370b-e9e7-4113-a54d-2c260436d139.html

You would figure the Santa Fe Anti-Nuke crowd are worried and will join together to fight for less nukes.

Nope the Los Almaos Study group knows the real enemy is the Nuclear Watch in New Mexico.

The nuclear watch group head Jay Coghlan posted some comments and Los Almaos study group head was fast to attack him. At least these guys know their priorities.

6 June, 2025

Dear Jay -- You continually misquote the 2006 JASON study and ignore more recent JASON output, e.g. the 2019 letter. In addition there are public remarks such as those from former JASON Marvin Adams, who notably said in my presence and that of hundreds of others that anyone who thinks they know that pits will last 100 years doesn't know very much about the subject. You yourself have no, zero, zip training in science and are just BSing on subjects like these, because I and others have pointed all this out to you. Have you no shame? On the matter of nuclear testing you are again blowing smoke, without any technical background on the topic. The U.S. has neither the technical need nor any possible set of motivations to resume nuclear testing, as NNSA has frequently said. Greg
Nuclear Watch New Mexico

The many-worlds theory

 This is a good critique of the many-worlds theory:

https://youtu.be/rw1ewLJUgOg?si=EZnqOJGqj71kl48R

Will AI make us obsolete ?

 This is a good video about AI making humans obsolete:

https://youtu.be/BtPwW7i3Dpc?si=-5bSEvhPQMUX3RuS

SNL layoffs

 1-3% staff reduction at SNL

Just got the word that Sandia is required to reduce the workforce by 1-3% by fall. They are hoping to get a voluntary separation package approved by NNSA and get the numbers down that way. They also mentioned that SNL was in much better shape than "other labs". Any news at LANL?

Excessive AI use may lead to cognitive decline

 Now we know why LANL managers live AI so much

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2551840/excessive-ai-use-may-lead-to-cognitive-decline-reveals-mit-study

Excessive AI use may lead to cognitive decline, reveals MIT study
Findings have vast practical implications such as decline in critical thinking, creativity, and independent reasoning

Brain scans taken during the experiment showed that LLM users exhibited weaker connections between brain regions associated with critical thinking and memory.

While their essays scored well in both human and AI evaluations — often praised for their coherence and alignment with the given prompt — the writing was also described as formulaic and less original.

Notably, those who used LLMs struggled to quote from or recall their own writing in subsequent sessions.

Their brain activity reportedly "reset" to a novice state regarding the essay topics, a finding that strongly contrasts with participants in the "brain-only" group, who retained stronger memory and demonstrated deeper cognitive engagement throughout.

Apple says generative AI cannot think like a human

 Apple says generative AI cannot think like a human - research paper pours cold water on reasoning models

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/apple-says-generative-ai-cannot-think-like-a-human-research-paper-pours-cold-water-on-reasoning-models

Apple researchers discovered that LRMs perform differently depending on problem complexity. On simple tasks, standard LLMs, without explicit reasoning mechanisms, were more accurate and efficient and delivered better results with fewer compute resources. However, as problem complexity increased to a moderate level, models equipped with structured reasoning, like Chain-of-Thought prompting, gained the advantage and outperformed their non-reasoning counterparts. When the complexity grew further, both types of models failed completely: their accuracy dropped to zero regardless of the available compute resources. (Keep in mind that the the Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking and DeepSeek-R1 LRMs have limitations when it comes to their training.)

This is upset LANL managers who have an insane zeal for AI in hopes of getting rid of the scientists.

Watch out for malevolent chatbots!

 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-tells-users-to-alert-the-media-that-it-is-trying-to-break-people-report-2000615600

Mentally vulnerable people are being harmed by malevolent chatbots.

No kings protests

 'No Kings' anti-Trump protests happening in the Bay Area on Saturday 6/14

Be situationally aware please.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/no-kings-protests-bay-area-saturday.amp

Blog moderator note:

The link above contains a list of bay area protests. There are also protest in Modesto, Stockton, Merced. Just search for "no kings protests" for exact locations.

Distinguished Sandia/LANL retired scientist

 Found this from a Distinguished Sandia/LANL retried scientists from his blog. A bit of depressing read. It has a hint of politics but he has a point.

"I will start by saying Los Alamos carries some significant meaning for me personally. I lived and worked there for almost 18 years. It shaped me as a scientist, if not made me the one I am today. It has (had) a culture of scientific achievement and open inquiry that I fully embrace and treasure. I had not spent time like this on the main town site for years. It was a stunning melange of things unchanged and radical change. I ate at new places, and old places running into old friends with regularity. I was left with mixed feelings and deep emotions at the end. Most of all my view of whether leaving there was the right professional move for me. It was probably a good idea. The Lab I knew and loved is almost gone. It has disappeared into the maw of our dysfunctional nation’s destruction of science. It is a real example of where greatness has gone, and the MAGA folks are not doing jack to fix it.

Another topic of repeated discussion every day of the meeting is the growing obsession with AI. There is a manic zeal for AI on the part of managers, and it puts all our science at serious risk.

A LLNL management dream team?

A LLNL superintendent, that cheats on his blind wife with a nearby an eagerly available, “admin”, an apparently untouchable DEI hired supervisor, that on LLNL tax payer recruitment trips, seeks out college students for his own pleasure, and a low emotional IQ superintendent, that leads to a tech suicide that continues to advance?
What a management dream team we have here. Not. Time for a major DOE/NNSA audit of LLNL sanctioned practices, or expect more of the same behavior to continue. What is the plan forward to disincentivize these tax payer supported unethical behaviors? There aren’t any. Your LLNL tax dollars at work.

NIF achieves 8.6 megajoules

 Fusion breakthrough: NIF achieves 8.6 megajoules, shattering previous record

https://www.techspot.com/news/107971-fusion-breakthrough-nif-achieves-86-megajoules-shattering-previous.html

Chinese student visa revocations will be crippling

 Chinese student visa revocations will cripple the US in the AI race

Meta
I work in the one of the AI teams at the big G. Most of my colleagues have a PhD and are from China. Beyond them, even a lot of the resumes we receive for research internships are from Chinese candidates in US universities. I'm sure the current administration is not gonna stop at student visas and is gonna target O1, H1B and green card holders next.

A majority of noteworthy papers in AI conferences over the last 3 years have come from Chinese lead authors. Most elite US PhD programs have a majority of Chinese students. If these people were to go back to China, it'd only bolster their already formidable AI industry and be a massive loss for the big US based AI companies.

Chinese PhD graduates already face significant hurdles today getting a green card even after qualifying for the extra-ordinary category (EB-1A). This has already caused a significant number of researchers to go back to China with Deepseek and Qwen teams having a large number of ex-FAANG/OpenAI/Anthropic engineers.

I don't see how the US maintains its lead in the AI race long term if it revokes visas for Chinese students.

Human replacement

 This is a good video about mass produced robots replacing human workers:

https://youtu.be/RFbuZpNaIaY?si=ECChAX33-50tKB7n

Secretary Wright visits LLNL

Just this week Secretary Wright visited LLNL and while he made Ai as the next Manhattan project for the national labs. I got this feeling the next project for him was to cut back many of the programs.

Gasoline out of thin air

 This company has a machine that produces gasoline out of air, using an input of electricity:

https://www.aircela.com/

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/05/15/3082353/0/en/Aircela-Unveils-Machine-That-Turns-Air-into-Fossil-Free-Gasoline.html

AI demystified

 Hello blog contributors! 

First, I apologize for the post title. It suggests I am trying to demystify AI while in fact I am asking you for help in doing it.

I have used chatbots to ask far-fetched questions and to check for plagiarism, mainly.

Is anyone versed enough in AI in  both its software and hardware aspects to explain its engines, sources, challenges and applications?

Or anything else. It is a relatively new field, so no one should expect a symposium.

Thank you 

AI blackmail

 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go

AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed

Luckily LANL will be an all AI lab, so no dangers there.

AI chaos

 This is an interesting story, an AI threatens the apocalypse over a failed vending machine business:

https://youtu.be/si8DUlhiLlg?si=qfNx4nGnQ2H9tdAF

Once upon a time at LLNL...

 Back in the day, a Superintendent level manager at LLNL, set himself up for lab paid business related trips. His legally blind wife, decided to surprise him by adding herself on to his hotel reservation. To her surprise, the reservation desk, said to the wife, the second occupancy for the room was aleady registered, that being a subordinate administrative female assistant within the superintenden’s sphere of influence. Well, the blind wife’s coworkers in HR from that point forward, thought Mr. Superintendent was basically a low life scum bag.

But, after this low mark, could anything occur worse? Yes. And again, a free pass in terms of security clearance, and future advancement.

NNSA Staffing Shortages?

“Nuclear weapons woes: Understaffed nuke agency hit by DOGE and safety worries…For decades, the NNSA has struggled with federal staffing shortages that have contributed to safety issues as well as delays and cost overruns on major projects.”

Was the 2014 WIPP radiological accident attributed to “staffing shortages” when LANS took a 90% award fee cut for mismanagement when that accident was deemed preventable? Nope.

Were ~4x cost overruns and the ~5 year behind schedule at the NIF attributable to “staffing shortages”? Nope. How about failure to achieve ignition by 2012 as marketed to Congress? “Staffing Shortages”? Nope.

Was the 2023 radioactive iodine-125 contamination in Livermore due to “staffing shortages? Nope.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/18/nuclear-weapons-woes-nuke-agency-hit-by-doge-and-safety-worries/83621978007/

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AI in Science

 New AI showing how AI increases scientific productivity. This should be must reading for all of the NNSA employees.                

Moderator's note:

Papers on arxiv are not peer-reviewed.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17866

Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation

Aidan Toner-Rodgers
This paper studies the impact of artificial intelligence on innovation, exploiting the randomized introduction of a new materials discovery technology to 1,018 scientists in the R&D lab of a large U.S. firm. AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions. However, the technology has strikingly disparate effects across the productivity distribution: while the bottom third of scientists see little benefit, the output of top researchers nearly doubles. Investigating the mechanisms behind these results, I show that AI automates 57% of "idea-generation" tasks, reallocating researchers to the new task of evaluating model-produced candidate materials. Top scientists leverage their domain knowledge to prioritize promising AI suggestions, while others waste significant resources testing false positives. Together, these findings demonstrate the potential of AI-augmented research and highlight the complementarity between algorithms and expertise in the innovative process. Survey evidence reveals that these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilizati
.

A guy named Jason Pruiet

 LANL just lost a world leading expert in AI! Some guy named Jason Prueit. Odd I cannot seem to find a single paper or a references on AI that this guy ever did, so I am going out on limb and say he is not expert on AI. I guess "I played with ChatGP" makes one an expert.

"If you’ve played with the most recent AI tools, you know: They’re very good coders, very good legal analysts, very good first drafters of writing, very good image generators. They’re only going to get better."

I cannot find much of any impact from this guy. He gave some talk on AI and some reddit commentators seemed to see right through it. This is what they said.

Most of the bullshitters will tip their hand pretty early that they're just hype men for AI. Right off the bat, the fact that AI is disruptive and transforming society is apparently self-evident because they never cite a single premise or event to back this up. In the quote above, the phrase "if you've played" stuck out to me. Yes if you play around with them a little it's easy to believe they're really good at so many things. When you stringently evaluate them, you begin to see they make a lot of mistakes and perform inconsistently on even trivial tasks.

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NASA budget cuts

 This is a good video that goes into some of the NASA budget cuts:

https://youtu.be/si6paqM2_ug?si=A42L1ot-J_caWAFv

LLNS expectations

 What are the LLNS LLC expectations of managers actually selected for superintendent or above positions?

From the horse's mouth regarding RIFs

 Heard this directly from a LANL director and then an NNSA chief. LANL was at 11,000 before covid but ballooned up to 16,500-17,000 due to increased spending. The staff numbers need to be cut back down to pre-covid in preparation for the contract bid in 2026. Sandia will see a 10% reduction in R&D staff.

Everyone seems to be asking for transfers to different departments or gov contract work. The contractors don’t have much work either. A lot more people should be preparing for layoffs.

If your project has no funding, you will be laid off soon.

Edit: if your project is still hiring new roles (aka not just replacing someone who left), then it has funding and you are likely safe. If you are bored at work, start applying to jobs.

Edit 2: the ISR group recently got a ‘we are going to become more efficient’ email. This is code word for a reduction in force. If you hear this kind of talk on your team, start applying to jobs.

Edit 3: some are personally offended I used the word lay off as a slang instead of the proper ‘reduction in force’ wording. I apologize for the confusion. This will be enacted via RTO, PIPs, efficiency initiatives, forced resignation, etc. there will be no mass tech industry esque layoff. This will be slow over months and will be done before the new contract bid process starts.

Edit 4: triad employees will be the most affected. Sub contracting companies will potentially have less work, but the RIF has the intended goal to reduce the number of staff working under the LANL maintenance in operations contract that is currently run by Triad. This contract is coming up for a new bid so the staff number needs to reduce in order to be more congruent with the original triad bid staffing numbers. The labs have grown faster in 4 years than it did in the past 40 years without an increase in funding or value produced to justify the growth. A lot of the LANL growth came from covid era money printing.

Flooding of the Pacific Northwest

 This is very interesting -- as you know, it is not true that all of California will fall into the ocean in a major earthquake, but scientists have discovered that some parts of it indeed will:

https://scitechdaily.com/countdown-to-catastrophe-the-quake-that-could-sink-and-flood-the-pacific-northwest/

LLNL Defined Benefit Plan

Looking at the latest annual funding notice it appears that funding is down to 84% this year. There are approximately 2 retirees for every worker left on the program… not surprising since it has been closed since the transition.

The rate of return last year was 0.23%

However the number of participants has increased by 3 this year.

Federal workers reclassification

 Impact to LLNS employees?

“Trump to reclassify many federal workers, making them easier to fire”

“U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday his administration is set to change the employment classifications of tens of thousands of federal workers, a move governance experts say will make it easier to carry out more mass layoffs.”

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/04/18/trump-says-government-to-change-service-regulations-for-career-government-employees.html

Life on exoplanet

Possible signature of life on exoplanet. 

It is only 700 trillion miles from here.!

https://youtu.be/HjWwTw-zEIM?si=Beb6qEau2iTAVr4Q

Mason said?

 Mason sent an all hands out on Wed saying that lab needs to cut indirect funding and become much more efficient. The goals are to move people to direct funding but keep the same number of people. We need to stop hiring people to backfill positions. We will keep AI funding going.

So a couple of points.

(1) If this was the goal why did we have to wait 8 years to do this? It seems a bit odd that suddenly we not want to cut our crazy overheard.

(2) How on earth do you cut overhead costs when half the people at the lab are on overhead? The only way to do this is to get rid of people. Some of the more cynical are thinking we are going to fire all the science staff and move everyone on to their codes. Who knows but everyone I knows says this is simply not going work.

Rumors of layoffs

 There has been some rumors for the past few months of a voluntary separation or layoffs at LANL. On the face of it they do not seem very likely as Mason said budget wise things look good. However Mason also said that the lab needs to reduce indirect costs. I guess this has something to do with fear of Doge and reduction of overheard rates. NSF and NIH have been seen as having way to high of overhead so it seems like DOE/NNSA labs could be next. In fact there was story the other day about DOE money overhead rates needing to be cut (see link below).

This is what I think may actually be possible. DOE/NNSA will be told you need to reduce overheard or indirect costs , so they will not be able to put everybody on direct costs so they will have to let people go one way or another. Indirect costs is of course management , admins, outreach and such but also LDRD.

Here is the link on DOE cutting university overheard rates to 15%. It could be that the will do the same for NNSA. I doubt an overheard rate of only 15% is feasible because we do not have students paying tuition but they could still ask for a big cut in overheard at the NNSA labs. 50% of the lab budget is indirect right now if we have to cut 25% of our overhead rate than a layoff of 10-15% of the lab workforce could be possible. Of course it also means that LANL looks horrible because for the past 6 years we have been told to hire, hire , hire. Interview 50, hire 50 and grow. There was even some voices who said that we should not get ahead of ourselves because we do know what the next administration may want.

https://www.science.org/content/article/energy-department-cuts-university-overhead-rates-to-15-on-research-grants

Back to nuclear testing

 https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nuclear-weapons-tests-comeback-threats.

Calls to restart nuclear weapons tests stir dismay and debate among scientists
A U.S. return to underground detonations would have wide-ranging implications

Some see the ability to test as a necessity for a world in which nuclear weapons are a rising threat. “We are seeing an environment in which the autocrats are increasingly relying on nuclear weapons to threaten and coerce their adversaries,” says Robert Peters, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “If you’re in an acute crisis or conflict in which your adversary is threatening to employ nuclear weapons, you don’t want to limit the options of the president to get you out of that crisis.” Testing, and the signal it sends to an adversary, he argues, should be such an option.

Dire wolf reportedly brought back from extinction

 https://www.newsnationnow.com/science/dire-wolf-brought-back-from-extinction/

AI is changing how we do science! Dire wolf brought back from extinction! All scientific breakthroughs and how science is done or even thought about doing science has changed! Dire wolfs today and a new AI scientific workforce next.

This is more good news about vaccines

There is a growing body of evidence that shingles vaccines are protective against dementia..,

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/misc-emerging-topics/shingles-vaccine-recipients-less-likely-develop-dementia-study-shows

Savings are being wiped out

 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-14571907/wall-street-stock-market-crash-trump-tariffs.html

"Americans watch in horror as savings are WIPED OUT as Wall Street chaos sees trillions more dollars evaporate."

That was from a few days ago, try checking the market Monday morning.

Drop of 15% in a week. Maybe not wiped out but that is not good for retirement funds. Who knows how far this could drop 25% is now very feasible
especially if China and Europe just screw the US but I would not be surprised if it goes way lower. Bitcoin is down 27% Since Jan.

Not looking good. Also do I have to pay 25% for my next Ferrari?

US scientists brain drain

75% of US scientists considering leaving the country in poll:

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/5218404-scientists-poll-leaving-us-poll/

https://eos.org/research-and-developments/majority-of-polled-scientists-considering-leaving-united-states-signaling-brain-drain

Bay Area Sales Taxes

If the BART/Muni 0.5% added sales tax passes, Alameda County sales taxes will go up to 11% +. Ridership is down due to concerns of health, lack of parking, panhandling, and assaults. Will these issues be resolved before they try to throw more money at the problem? How many LLNL employees and retirees actually use BART?

Bay Area leaders pitch sales tax to save BART, Muni, regional transit

https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/24/bart-muni-sales-tax/

California Sales and Use Tax Rates by County and City

https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/TaxRatesbyCountyandCity.pdf

Question About LLNL Retiree Senior Advantage Plan (TCP1)

I'm turning 65 and signed up for Kaiser Permanente Senior Advantage through Empyrean benefits services. I noticed that I’m being billed $290 per month for KP Senior Advantage by going through Empyrean, whereas I can pay either $0 or $70 per month (depending on the tier of coverage) by just going to Kaiser Permanente directly. Granted, the Empyrean option sets up an HRA for me with an annual funding of $2450 by the Lab, but that would still mean my having to pay a net cost of about $1000 per year for signing up through Empyrean rather than going directly to Kaiser for their Senior Advantage plan.

Anyone know what's going on here? Is there any advantage to signing up for KP Senior Advantage by going through Empyrean as opposed to dealing directly with Kaiser?

AI is getting better

 These are interesting articles from a few weeks ago, AI is getting better at solving hard problems:

https://fortune.com/2025/02/12/openai-deepresearch-humanity-last-exam/

https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/could-you-pass-humanitys-last-exam-probably-not-but-neither-can-ai

Wen Ho Lee Part II at LANL?

U.S. Says Decision to Turn Back French Scientist Had Nothing to Do With Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/us-france-scientist-entry-trump.html

https://dnyuz.com/2025/03/21/u-s-says-decision-to-turn-back-french-scientist-had-nothing-to-do-with-trump/

The French government’s claim that a scientist was denied entry into the United States because of an opinion he expressed about the Trump administration is “blatantly false,” a U.S. official has said.

Even as the authorities in France continued to call the case a concerning violation of academic freedom, the U.S. official, Tricia McLaughlin, who is a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the scientist had been turned away for reasons unrelated to his personal beliefs.

“The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory — in violation of a nondisclosure agreement — something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal,” Ms. McLaughlin said late Thursday.

Philippe Baptiste, the French minister for higher education, said this week that the scientist, who has not been publicly identified and who specializes in outer space research, was traveling to a conference near Houston earlier this month.

The scientist was not allowed to enter the United States, Mr. Baptiste said, because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he gave his “personal opinion” on President Trump’s scientific and research policies.

But Ms. McLaughlin rejected that assessment. “Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false,” she said. She did not provide further details.

It was unclear when or how the scientist might have worked at or interacted with the laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is best known as a place that was crucial to the development of the atomic bomb.

Today, it is a top research facility for the National Nuclear Security Administration, but it also conducts scientific work on other topics. Representatives for the laboratory were not immediately reachable for comment.

The scientist was working for France’s publicly funded National Center for Scientific Research. Representatives for the center said that he did not wish to speak to the media, but they did not immediately respond to the Department of Homeland Security’s allegations against him.

Neither did the office of Mr. Baptiste, who used to lead the French National Center for Space Studies before he became minister in 2024.

But on Friday, Mr. Baptiste repeated his claim that the scientist had been targeted because of private discussions and opinions about the Trump administration’s policies.

He told Sud Radio in an interview that he had not spoken with the scientist directly but that his ministry was in touch with him.

“Each country is free to regulate their borders,” Mr. Baptiste acknowledged. But he said the scientist’s case was “extraordinarily atypical” and a “subject of concern.”

That concern was shared by the French Academy of Sciences, which said in a statement on Thursday that the scientist’s deportation “seriously undermines the fundamental freedoms of the academic world: freedom of thought, expression and travel.”