Labs Search for Unexploded Ordnance

It’s a local twist to a nationwide problem: Potential unexploded ordnance (UXO) at old bombing ranges.

Several intact 250-pound bombs recently discovered during a construction project at the old Kirtland bombing range near Double Eagle Airport on Albuquerque’s west mesa have since been safely removed from the area.

A complete site survey was conducted by a team from Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The excavation was part of an expansion of the Eclipse Aviation facility near Double Eagle Airport for installation of water and power lines. The survey of the Kirtland site, one of the national Wide Area Assessment (WAA) sites, was initiated and funded by the Department of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP).

The survey showed no evidence of any target areas south of the runways.

“This southern portion of the site completely encompasses the area in which Eclipse Aviation is expanding, so good news for them,” says Sean McKenna, Sandia project team leader. “We did identify several other potential target areas north of the airport; some of these turned out to be geological noise such as magnetic rocks. About three of them turned out to be legitimate potential ordnance target areas.”

The team used LiDAR (light detection and ranging) imagery to remotely characterize the Kirtland site and the imagery revealed several features indicative of UXO targets. The LiDAR provided a high-resolution topographic map of the area and focused on old targets such as concentric circles, a ship outline, and other areas of interest, McKenna says.

Overall, as much as 20 million acres of land in the United States —that’s about half the size of Maine— could possibly contain UXO. The unexploded ordnance is left over from wars as well as from decades of live-fire training and practice in the United States.

“UXO presents a discrete and acute health hazard, but not the same as the land-mine problem,” says Barry Roberts, a member of the team. The Kirtland site was used for training during and after WWII.

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Googling Brain Proteins With 3-D Goggles

The Allen Brain Atlas, a genome-wide map of the mouse brain on the Internet, has been hailed as "Google of the brain." The atlas now has a companion of the brain's working molecules, a sort of pop-up book of the proteins, or proteome map, that those genes express.

The protein map is "the first to apply quantitative proteomics to imaging," says Richard Smith, Battelle fellow at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who led the mapping effort with Desmond Smith of UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine.
"Proteins are the lead actors, the most important part of the picture," PNNL's Smith says. "They are the molecules that do the work of the cells."

Fine-tuning such proteome maps will enable comparisons of healthy brains with others whose protein portraits look different. Contrasts in location and abundance of proteins may display the earliest detectable stages of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological diseases. They hope such diseases might be curbed if caught and treated early enough.

The National Institutes of Health-funded study, performed at DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on PNNL's campus, is published in the advance online edition of Genome Research and featured in current Nature online Neuroscience Gateway.

To produce the map, the team characterized center-brain slices as scores of 1 millimeter cubes, or "voxels," to "show us where proteins appear in the brain and where they vary in abundance," PNNL's Smith says. "We labeled all the proteins so we would have reference points so we know we're looking at the same protein between different parts of the brain and from one mouse to another."

Until now, proteomics, which enlists a specially modified instrument called a mass spectrometer for the task of identifying proteins and tallying them, has been akin to flying blind over a lake of proteins. The abundance and protein type could be discerned from a given sample, but "knowing their location and how the abundances change in different cases is important for understanding what they do," PNNL's Smith says.

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