Since February 2002, scientists at Sandia Laboratories have worked in secrecy to determine if anthrax that killed five people in the autumn of 2001 came from a terrorist group or foreign state. Now that the FBI has decided anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins — who committed suicide July 29 — was responsible, it has given those Sandia scientists permission to talk,  and they’ve laid out the chronology of their research to the Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck.
 
Charged with determining if the sample the FBI sent them had been "weaponized" — converted in a lab to make it more lethal — Sandia’s Joseph Michael and Paul Kotula quickly determined it was not weaponized, then watched for years "as the claim the anthrax was weaponized continued to linger in public discussion of the case," Fleck says.
 
Eventually, the FBI sent about 200 anthrax samples to Sandia for analysis as they pursued new leads, including  a sample from Ivins’ lab, the story continued.

Not only was New Mexico State University in Las Cruces host to retiring Sen. Pete Domenici’s Policy Conference this week, NMSU is getting papers and memorabilia the senator accumulated over his 36 years in Congress, the Las Cruces Sun-News reports and which the Independent noted yesterday.

This is a coup by NMSU over the University of New Mexico, Domenici’s alma mater and hometown college, the paper says, explaining: "Apparently, NMSU made  better pitch."
 

 "They were more committed to what they would do with them and what they would do with them after they got them there — in terms of trying to make some annual events built around it," said Domenici during a phone interview last week. "Without question, they were enthusiastic about providing facilities over time to house them and keep them in perpetuity."

Analysis of June’s 17-acre Ancho fire near a weapons test facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory has led to some changes to prevent recurrence, the Los Alamos Monitor reports.

Jay Dallman, who heads the division in charge of detonation testing at the laboratory, said one of the changes is that future tests during “extreme” or “red flag” conditions must be specifically approved at a higher management level and the Los Alamos County Fire Department must be on site, the paper reported.

Dallman told a meeting of the Community Radiation Monitoring Group at Northern New Mexico College that the experiment on June 11 involved the Large-Bore Power Gun Assembly, during which a fast-closing valve failed to shut properly. The story continues:

Hot gases unexpectedly sprayed from the test equipment and ignited some grasses several feet away outside the test shelter. Under windy conditions, the incipient wildfire quickly exceeded the fire-fighting capability of the test employees.