Los Alamos, New Mexico, consists of a series of rust-colored mesas that form a picture-postcard setting: snow-capped Jemez Mountains in the distance and vast swathes of undisturbed wilderness that belie its history-making role in US defense.
Los Alamos is, of course, the place where 30 scientists gathered in 1943 to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Physicists recruited to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) with nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, worked feverishly in the race to develop a nuclear weapon before the Germans. Their top-secret crusade transformed this bucolic southwest community and its acres of pine trees into a nerve center for US military weapons research.
Seven decades later, the LANL campus still looks a bit like a frontier outpost. Single-story modular units—like those found at construction sites—are laid out like a maze and are surrounded by acres of federally-owned forest that remain largely off-limits to the public.
It is here that theoretical biologist Bette Korber and her team of 13 multi-disciplinary scientists track, with exquisite detail, the evolution of one of the most diverse and peripatetic viruses ever identified. They do this with a vast network of super-computer systems—some occupying a space equivalent to half a football field—that can crunch data at speeds of up to 10 to the 15th power, or a quadrillion calculations per second, roughly in the blink of an eye...