Feature Articles

When a swat team trains multiple times a week, running repeated live-fire drills, the noise can be intense. Even with premium hearing protection, the sound and pressure can damage hearing over time, contributing to traumatic brain injuries for officers and disorienting civilians nearby. If only there were a way to curb that danger.

Those kinds of problems are exactly what the New Mexico Small Business Assistance program has helped tackle for 25 years with support from Sandia National Laboratories and, since 2007, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The program, created in the year 2000 helps small businesses solve critical challenges by providing technical assistance and expertise that they don’t have access to anywhere else, at no cost to them.

This year, two of the businesses Sandia helped aim to make the nation safer with their products: Ridgeline Engineering and Manufacturing, which is working to reduce hearing damage from firearms, and Aperi Computational Mechanics Consulting, which is making critical engineering simulations faster and more affordable.

A team of engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed ways to rapidly evaluate new thermal protection materials for hypersonic vehicles. Their three-year research project combined computer modeling, laboratory experiments and flight testing to better understand how heat shields behave under extreme temperatures and pressures, and to predict their performance much faster than before.

Much is still unknown about how quantum computers behave and what they might one day help humans achieve. But a team at Sandia National Laboratories has developed a process to understand how to use quantum systems more efficiently — using the analogy of a simple jukebox.

The Global Burst Detection system, developed by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, carries a suite of sensors and instruments capable of identifying signals from nuclear detonations and providing real-time information to the U.S. military and government. The final system in the current block of eight systems launched into space in May 2025. Meanwhile, the next series, scheduled for initial deployment in 2027, already has several units completed and ready to be integrated with host satellites.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have announced a more efficient way to generate and send temporary security codes.

While heliostats are used in the day, a scientist may have found a way to use them at night. 

Permanent bunkers and high-security facilities are standard tools for protecting the nation’s most sensitive assets. But in many environments, these options are not available where secure storage is needed most. To meet that challenge, a team at Sandia National Laboratories has developed a mobile, high-security vault that can be rapidly deployed to safeguard critical materials in remote or temporary locations.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have spent the last three years developing an ultra-low-power chemical sensor to detect sarin and other chemical warfare agents or gaseous industrial toxins, aiming to protect the public and warfighters.

Sandia National Laboratories serves a unique role in the nuclear security enterprise: lead systems integrator for the nuclear weapons program.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — What if plastics could self-destruct when their time as a useful product ends? Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories are exploring this concept in one of their latest projects.