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FireLab

Wildfire closes Los Alamos National Laboratory

Update at 7 a.m. PT: The fire now covers more than 40,000 acres. The threat level to Los Alamos National Laboratory remains the same.

A large, fast-moving wildfire threatens one of the most important and well-known national laboratories in the United States.

Los Alamos National Laboratory will be closed for all nonessential personnel on Monday in the wake of a raging blaze called the Las Conchas fire that started about 12 miles southwest of the town of Los Alamos and quickly swelled to more than 3,500 acres, or more than 5.4 square miles.

Flames and huge plumes of thick, black smoke shot into the sky Sunday from New Mexico's Jemez Mountains, where the famous lab was originally located atop arid mesas west of Santa Fe to better hide the top-secret Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb.

On Sunday afternoon, the fire started in the nearby forest and spread quickly. High winds and weeks without moisture in the Southwest have sparked a number of massive fires throughout Arizona and New Mexico.

The fire can be seen from the Pajarito Mountain ski area Webcam. … Read more

Road Trip 2009 hits 4,000 miles in Glacier National Park

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont.--I'm kind of awestruck. For four years I've been doing CNET Road Trip projects, and every time I've hit a new thousand-mile milestone, I've stopped, photographed the odometer and the surroundings, and then blogged about the spot.

In almost every case, that new set of zeroes on the odometer has come at some nondescript location. There have been a couple cases where it happened near something incredible, but I'll be honest: I've cheated a little bit and, say, driven back and forth across a parking lot to have the milestone … Read more

At FireLab, studying how fire works in order to battle it

MISSOULA, Mont.--If you're going to decide how to fight fire, then you'd better know as much as possible about how it works.

That's the idea behind FireLab, a U.S. Forest Service program at the Rocky Mountain Research Station here, where scientists spend their days studying, among other things, the dynamics and behavior of fire, as well as ways to better predictively model how fire might spread.

And while, as scientists, the folks here don't set policy, it is their job to give those whose jobs is to set policy the best data possible. The … Read more