How does this turn into this? Or how does this become
this, or this, turn into this? All of these leaps, and many
more, actually have one thing in common. Oh, really one place in
common. And we're looking at it. Since it was founded 70 years
ago, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been at the
forefront of science and technology innovation, producing
research that has changed the world in ways you've probably
never heard of, but that you're probably holding in the palm of
your hand right now. Your electronic device starts with a
chip. These channel electricity through transistors, which act
as little gates, turning electric current on or off in
specific patterns. On the most fundamental level, that's what
lets your tech do stuff like this. But as phones and other
electronic devices have gotten both smaller and more powerful,
we've had to fit even more transistors on even smaller
chips. We can do that because of extreme ultraviolet lithography.
EUVL means using lasers to produce extreme ultraviolet
light that etches transistors into a silicon chip. LLNL, along
with two other national labs, developed some of the original
tools and techniques that have made EUVL what it is today, which
is what allows there to be powerful microchips inside
pretty much every device in your life. EUVL is what's made it
possible for 10 billion transistors to fit on a chip the
size of a fingernail, meaning your phone can do this instead
of just this. Speaking of lasers, LLNL has also been
instrumental in birthing entire new eras of astronomy. The Lab
developed a mirror with small movable segments for use in
telescopes. Pair this with the laser beam and you've got
yourself a laser guide star. This seemingly simple tool takes
the twinkle out of starlight. It sounds like something from Star
Trek, but it's a real thing that solves a real problem. See, when
astronomers look at the night sky they have to look through
layers of Earth's atmosphere and that causes distortion. But this LLNL-
developed laser guide star technology made outerspace more
clearly visible from Earth than ever before. And it's widely
used today in observatories all around the world. We have this
advancement to thank for images of continents made of ice on the
moon Titan, infrared photos of storms on Jupiter, and photos of
the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Out of this world
discoveries aren't just confined to the realms of outer space. In
the 1970s, Lab researchers refined a tool that has changed
biological science forever. It's called flow cytometry. It's a
technique that allows scientists to rapidly and accurately sort,
count and image microscopic structures like cells, and even
the chromosomes that carry our genetic information.
This is a typical kind of picture that we may get on the
machine when we're running. And what we're seeing here are the
chromosomes that exist in a typical human being.
The advancements in flow cytometry made at LLNL were
necessary to launch the Human Genome Project, which gave us
the first ever map of all of the genes that make humans human.
Flow cytometry is an essential part of many different fields
today, it's used in cancer biology, fertility testing,
diagnosing diseases, understanding the immune system,
marine biology, plant biology, microbiology, pharmaceutical
testing, and so much more. But when it comes to things that are
even smaller than your chromosomes, how do we know how
things like atoms move? The field of science dedicated to
understanding how atomic-level structures behave is called
molecular dynamics and it was born at LLNL. It combines really
powerful computers and really cool math. Lab scientist Berni
Alder created this field when he first used LLNL's computers to
understand molecular movement. That's because everything around
us, all the matter in the world is made up of atoms. So
predicting how these vast quantities of particles will
move and affect one another with their movement is impossible to
predict by hand. You need a lot of computing power to do it.
Fortunately, LLNL has always had some of the fastest and most
powerful computers in the world from its founding in 1952 up
until now. These computational methods have evolved throughout
the past 70 years, and still help us understand some of the
trickiest problems today in material science, physics,
chemistry, and more. And speaking of modeling, did you
know that behind your car's modern safety features is just
one 5,000 line piece of code. That code is called a Dyna3D.
And it was written by Lab scientist John Hallquist to
model extreme impacts. John realized just how important this
could be to so many fields so he made it open source, that
means freely available to read and adapt by any member of the
public. And now it's used by companies all over the world to
simulate everything from aerosol behaviors to battery cooling, to
aerodynamics, and maybe most commonly, to simulate vehicle
crashes to test their design and safety without ever having to
actually crash the car. It's been used to test the design of
seatbelts, airbags, and many other safety improvements that
helps your car go from this to this. But if any change has been
most notable and important in the past 70 years of science,
it's our evolving understanding of our climate. In 1989, the Lab
founded the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and
Intercomparison. or the PCMDI. Since its birth, it has been one
of the world's most powerful programs for comparing,
evaluating and improving climate models to help us understand
what's going on, and why. In fact, in an early report from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, PCMDI scientist
Ben Santer was the lead author of a hallmark section that stated,
"the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on
global climate." This was one of the first explicit statements of
humanity's linkage to the climate crisis. Lab scientists
have been leading contributors to every IPCC Climate Report
since, improving computer models and conducting key studies with
collaborators and providing modeling and analysis tools for
all to use. Because the Lab is dedicated to using its broad
expertise to look forward and find solutions, scientists at
the National Ignition Facility, for example, are working towards
fusion ignition. That's the point at which we get more
energy out of a nuclear fusion reaction than we put into it.
Nuclear fusion could be the future of clean energy, and in
2021, the NIF achieved a record breaking 1.3 mega joules of
energy output from a fusion experiment, putting researchers
at the threshold of fusion ignition. Future experiments
will help us learn more about nuclear fusion and high energy
physics and perhaps unlock the possibility of fusion energy.
And that's just seven of the ways that Lab science has
changed the world. So far. The most exciting part is that the
Lab is still going strong, with the most recent advancements
showing us the promise of the Lab's current efforts, who knows
what the next 10 years will give us? What discoveries, inventions
and what progress will come next. If you want more info like
this, you can check out the Lab's timeline website to explore many
more of the amazing science and tech projects that have come out
of the Lab during its past 70 years. And if you have questions
or want us to cover another achievement from the Lab's past,
present, or future, let us know in the comments. Thanks so much
for watching.