June 24, 2010, 11:25 PM CT

Atomic Force Microscopy to Study Subsurface Structures

Over the past couple of decades, atomic force microscopy (AFM) has emerged as a powerful tool for imaging surfaces at astonishing resolutions-fractions of a nanometer in some cases. But suppose you're more concerned with what lies below the surface? Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have shown that under the right circumstances, surface science instruments such as the AFM can deliver valuable data about sub-surface conditions.

Their recently published* work with colleagues from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institute of Aerospace, University of Virginia and University of Missouri could be especially useful in the design and manufacture of nanostructured composite materials. Engineers are studying advanced materials that mix carbon nanotubes in a polymer base for a wide variety of high-performance applications because of the unique properties, such as superior strength and electrical conductance, added by the nanotubes. The material chosen by the research team as their test case, for example, is being studied by NASA for use in spacecraft actuators because it may outperform the heavier ceramics now used.

But, says NIST materials scientist Minhua Zhao, "one of the critical issues to study is how the carbon nanotubes are distributed within the composite without actually breaking the part. There are very few techniques available for this kind of non-destructive study." Zhao and colleagues decided to try an unusual application of atomic force microscopy......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

June 24, 2010, 10:57 PM CT

Improved telescope sees through atmosphere

A sharp view of the starry sky is difficult, because the atmosphere constantly distorts the image. TU/e researcher Roger Hamelinck developed a new type of telescope mirror, which quickly corrects the image. His prototypes are mandatory for future large telescopes, but also gives old telescopes a sharper view.

The atmosphere contains 'bubbles' of hot and cold air, each with their own refractive index, which distort the image. As a result, the light reaching ground-based telescopes is distorted. Hamelinck's system tackles this problem with a deformable mirror in the telescope. Under this ultrathin mirror there are actuators, which can wherever necessary quickly create bumps and dimples in the mirror. These bumps and dimples correct the continuously changing distortion created in the atmosphere. This is of crucial importance to the new generation of large telescopes in particular. Hamelinck: "In principle, larger telescopes also have a higher resolution, but attaining an optimal optical quality is hampered by the atmosphere. Therefore you absolutely need these corrections."

Modular

The principle of the 'adaptive deformable mirror' has been known some fifty odd years, but was limited particularly by the technology. Thus, the actuators of earlier systems generated much heat, which caused the systems themselves to become a source of distortion. "Contrary to the old systems, this new system has an ultrathin mirror, so that very little power is needed for its deformation ", Hamelinck explains. "In combination with the efficient, electromagnetic reluctance actuators, this reduces the heat generation of the system to a very low level. Thanks to this, no active cooling is required." Hamelinck's working prototype has a five-centimeter diameter. Given that the design is scalable and expandable with modules, the system is suited for very large telescopes, such as the future 42-meter-big E-ELT (European Extra Large Telescope). The E-ELT is fitted inter alia with an adaptive mirror of 2.4 meters......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

June 24, 2010, 10:43 PM CT

Delayed time zero in photoemission

When light is absorbed by atoms, the electrons become excited. If the light particles, so-called photons, carry sufficient energy, the electrons can be ejected from the atom. This effect is known as photoemission and was explained by Einstein more than hundred years ago. Until now, it has been assumed that the electron start moving out of the atom immediately after the impact of the photon. This point in time can be detected and has so far been considered as coincident with the arrival time of the light pulse, i.e. with "time zero" in the interaction of light with matter.

Using their ultra-short time measurement technology, physicists from the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ), the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Munich (LMU) along with collaborators from Austria, Greece, and Saudi Arabia, have now tested this assumption.

The physicists fired pulses of near-infrared laser light lasting less than four femtoseconds (10-15 seconds) at atoms of the noble gas neon. The atoms were simultaneously hit by extreme ultraviolet pulses with a duration of 180 attoseconds, liberating electrons from their atomic orbitals. The attosecond flashes ejected electrons either from the outer 2p-orbitals or from the inner 2s-orbitals of the atom. With the controlled field of the synchronised laser pulse serving as an "attosecond chronograph", the physicists then recorded when the excited electrons left the atom......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

June 22, 2010, 7:16 AM CT

Biosynthesis of Hydrocarbon Fuels

If concerns for global climate change and ever-increasing costs weren't enough, the disastrous Gulf oil spill makes an even more compelling case for the development of transportation fuels that are renewable, can be produced in a sustainable fashion, and do not put the environment at risk. Liquid fuels derived from plant biomass have the potential to be used as direct replacements for gasoline, diesel and jet fuels if cost-effective means of commercial production can be found.

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have identified a trio of bacterial enzymes that can catalyze key steps in the conversion of plant sugars into hydrocarbon compounds for the production of green transportation fuels.

Harry Beller, an environmental microbiologist who directs the Biofuels Pathways department for JBEI's Fuels Synthesis Division, led a study in which a three-gene cluster from the bacterium Micrococcus luteus was introduced into the bacterium Escherichia coli. The enzymes produced by this trio of genes enabled the E. coli to synthesize from glucose long-chain alkene hydrocarbons. These long-chain alkenes can then be reduced in size - a process called "cracking" - to obtain shorter hydrocarbons that are compatible with today's engines and favored for the production of advanced lignocellulosic biofuels......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 23:50:19 GMT

Samsung Galaxy S and comparison

First there was HTC Evo 4G, then came the iPhone 4 and now Samsung has launched its new Android smartphone known as the Samsung Galaxy S. Equipped with some high-end features, it is all set to compete directly with the HTC Evo 4G and iPhone4.

Samsung has already launched the device in the European market and it will soon be coming to the US market. So which device will conquer the smartphone market this summer? Well we will have to wait and find out. For folks who are looking to get a new smartphone this summer, we have compiled a comparison between the three devices to help you choose one.

Posted by: Kevin      Read more     Source

June 6, 2010, 8:43 PM CT

Removing Defects in Graphene

Graphene, a carbon sheet that is one-atom thick, appears to be at the center of the next revolution in material science. These ultrathin sheets hold great potential for a variety of applications from replacing silicon in solar cells to cooling computer chips.

Despite its vast promise, graphene and its derivatives "are materials people understand little about," said Vivek Shenoy, professor of engineering at Brown University. "The more we can understand their properties, the more (technological) possibilities that will be opened to us".

Shenoy and a team of U.S. scientists have gained new insights into these mysterious materials. The team, in a paper in Nature Chemistry, pinpoints the atomic configurations of noncarbon atoms that create defects when graphene is produced through a technique called graphene-oxide reduction. Building from that discovery, the scientists propose how to make that technique more efficient by outlining precisely how to apply hydrogen - rather than heat - to remove impurities in the sheets.

The sheets produced by graphene-oxide reduction are two-dimensional, honeycomb-looking planes of carbon. Most of the atoms in the lattice are carbon, which is what researchers want. But interwoven in the structure are also oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which disrupt the uniformity of the sheet. Apply enough heat to the lattice, and some of those oxygen atoms bond with hydrogen atoms, which can be removed as water. But some oxygen atoms are more stubborn......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

May 21, 2010, 6:50 AM CT

Healthier vegetable oil and tractor fuel to harvest it

Genetic discoveries from a shrub called the burning bush, known for its brilliant red fall foliage, could fire new advances in biofuels and low-calorie food oils, as per Michigan State University scientists.

New low-cost DNA sequencing technology applied to seeds of the species Euonymus alatus - a common ornamental planting - was crucial to identifying the gene responsible for its manufacture of a novel, high-quality oil. But despite its name, the burning bush is not a suitable oil crop.

Yet inserted into the mustard weed - well-known to scientists as Arabidopsis and a cousin to commercial oilseed canola - the burning bush gene encodes an enzyme that produces a substantial yield of unusual compounds called acetyl glycerides, or acTAGs. Related vegetable oils are the basis of the world's oilseed industry for the food and biofuels markets, but the oil produced by the burning bush enzyme claims unique and valuable characteristics.

One is its lower viscosity, or thickness.

"The high viscosity of most plant oils prevents their direct use in diesel engines, so the oil must be converted to biodiesel," explained Timothy Durrett, an MSU plant biology research associate. "We demonstrated that acTAGs possess lower viscosity than regular plant oils. The lower viscosity acTAGs could therefore be useful as a direct-use biofuel for a number of diesel engines"......... Posted by: Sarah      Read more         Source

May 21, 2010, 6:48 AM CT

'Scrubbing' chemical-contaminated buildings

Dhiren Barot was an al Qaeda operative involved in plots to blow up the London subway, among other targets. To maximize the damage and the terror, he planned to pack some of his bombs with toxic gas. Fortunately, in August 2004, British authorities nabbed Barot and his accomplices before they could carry out their attacks.

But the threat of a gas attack remains. Where Barot failed, at some point someone might succeed. The right response to such an attack could minimize exposure and save hundreds of thousands of American lives.

With funding and guidance from the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), chemists at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) are researching ways to help the nation respond to and clean up after potential chemical attacks. They have been studying decontamination techniques for almost a decade.

Cleaning up chemical-contaminated structures can be difficult, costly, and time-consuming. For one thing, most preferred methods employ other chemicals, like bleach solutions, which can be corrosive and aggressive. A number of building materialslike cement and brickare extremely porous and getting contaminants off such surfaces is difficult, as contaminants will seep into cracks and pores.

As per Donald Bansleben, program manager in S&T's Chemical and Biological Division, lasers could one day play a big role. "Lasers could help to scrub chemical-contaminated buildings clean and become a tool in the toolbox to speed a facility's return to normal operations"......... Posted by: Sarah      Read more         Source

March 19, 2010, 7:28 AM CT

Designer nanomaterials on demand

Composites are combinations of materials that produce properties inaccessible in any one material. A classic example of a composite is fiberglass - plastic fibers woven with glass to add strength to hockey sticks or the hull of a boat. Unlike the well-established techniques for producing fiberglass and other macroscale composites, however, there aren't general schemes available for making nanoscale composites.

Now, scientists at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, in collaboration with researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown how nanocomposites with desired properties can be designed and fabricated by first assembling nanocrystals and nanorods coated with short organic molecules, called ligands. These ligands are then replaced with clusters of metal chalcogenides, such as copper sulfide. As a result, the clusters link to the nanocrystal or nanorod building blocks and help create a stable nanocomposite. The team has applied this scheme to more than 20 different combinations of materials, including close-packed nanocrystal spheres for thermoelectric materials and vertically aligned nanorods for solar cells.

"We're just starting to understand how combining materials on the nanoscale can open up new possibilities for electronic properties and efficient energy technologies," said Delia Milliron, Director of the Inorganic Nanostructures Facility at the Molecular Foundry. "This new process for fabricating inorganic nanocomposites gives us unprecedented ability to tune composition and control morphology"......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

March 17, 2010, 7:53 PM CT

Turning proteins into glass

uke University scientists have devised a method to dry and preserve proteins in a glassified form that seems to retain the molecules' properties as workhorses of biology.

They are exploring whether their glassification technique could bring about protein-based drugs that are cheaper to make and easier to deliver than current techniques which render proteins into freeze dried powders to preserve them.

Duke engineer and chemist David Needham describes this glassification process as "molecular water surgery" because it removes virtually all the water from around a dissolved protein by almost magically pulling the water into a second solvent.

"It's like a sponge sucking water off a counter," said Needham, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, who has formed a company called Biogyali ("gyali" means glass in Greek) to develop the innovation. That firm has also applied to patent the idea of turning proteins into tiny glass beads at room temperature for drug delivery systems.

A report by Needham, graduate student Deborah Rickard and former graduate student P. Brent Duncan online in the Biophysical Journal describes how his team carefully controlled water removal during glassification by releasing single tiny droplets of water-dissolved protein into the organic solvent decanol with a micropipette. (View the abstract here: http://tinyurl.com/yfq9yk3)......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

March 15, 2010, 8:52 PM CT

Bracket seedings irrelevant

For the average college basketball fan looking for an edge in a March Madness office pool, a University of Illinois expert in statistics and data analysis has some advice on how to pick winners: After the Sweet Sixteen round of play, ignore a team's seeding, which is a statistically insignificant predictor of a team's chances of winning.

As per Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science and the director of the simulation and optimization laboratory at Illinois, picking the higher-seeded team to beat a lower-seeded opponent commonly works only in the first three rounds of the tournament. Once the tournament enters the Elite Eight round, a team's seed in the tournament is irrelevant.

"In the Sweet Sixteen round, the rankings still hold - but just barely," Jacobson said. "From the Elite Eight round and onward, you might as well pick names out of a hat".

Jacobson, who along with graduate student Douglas M. King wrote an article titled "Seeding in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament: When is a Higher Seed Better?" reported in the Journal of Gambling Business and Economics, said the impetus of the study was to see if a team's seeding was a good predictor of how far the team ultimately would go in the Big Dance.

"You would expect once you get deeper in the tournament that the higher seeds would continue to dominate," Jacobson said......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

March 8, 2010, 9:28 AM CT

New way of producing electricity

A team of researchers at MIT have discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that can cause powerful waves of energy to shoot through minuscule wires known as carbon nanotubes. The discovery could lead to a new way of producing electricity, the scientists say.

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, "opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare," says Michael Strano, MIT's Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The main author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave a moving pulse of heat traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

March 4, 2010, 9:40 PM CT

Exotic Antimatter Detected

An international team of researchers studying high-energy collisions of gold ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator located at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has published evidence of the most massive antinucleus discovered to date. The new antinucleus, discovered at RHIC's STAR detector, is a negatively charged state of antimatter containing an antiproton, an antineutron, and an anti-Lambda particle. It is also the first antinucleus containing an anti-strange quark. The results will be published online by Science Express on March 4, 2010.

"This experimental discovery may have unprecedented consequences for our view of the world," commented theoretical physicist Horst Stoecker, Vice President of the Helmholtz Association of German National Laboratories. "This antimatter pushes open the door to new dimensions in the nuclear chart - an idea that just a few years ago, would have been viewed as impossible".

The discovery may help elucidate models of neutron stars and opens up exploration of fundamental asymmetries in the early universe.

New nuclear terrain

All terrestrial nuclei are made of protons and neutrons (which in turn contain only up and down quarks). The standard Periodic Table of Elements is arranged as per the number of protons, which determine each element's chemical properties. Physicists use a more complex, three-dimensional chart to also convey information on the number of neutrons, which may change in different isotopes of the same element, and a quantum number known as "strangeness," which depends on the presence of strange quarks (see diagram). Nuclei containing one or more strange quarks are called hypernuclei......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

February 18, 2010, 9:43 PM CT

New algorithm to improve video game quality

Research presented in a paper by Morgan McGuire, assistant professor of computer science at Williams College, and co-author Dr. David Luebke of NVIDIA, introduces a new algorithm to improve computer graphics for video games.

McGuire and Luebke have developed a new method for computerizing lighting and light sources that will allow video game graphics to approach film quality.

Their paper "Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping" won a Best Paper award at the 2009 Conference on High Performance Graphics.

Because video games must compute images more quickly than movies, video game developers have struggled with maximizing graphic quality.

Producing light effects involves essentially pushing light into the 3D world and pulling it back to the pixels of the final image. The method created by McGuire and Luebke reverses the process so that light is pulled onto the world and pushed into the image, which is a faster process.

As video games continue to increase the degree of interactivity, graphics processors are expected to become 500 times faster than they are now. McGuire and Luebke's algorithm is well suited to the quickened processing speed, and is expected to be featured in video games within the next two years......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 28, 2010, 8:10 AM CT

Feul from biomass

A collaboration led by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass. Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the JBEI scientists engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids.

"The fact that our microbes can produce a diesel fuel directly from biomass with no additional chemical modifications is exciting and important," says Jay Keasling, the Chief Executive Officer for JBEI, and a leading scientific authority on synthetic biology. "Given that the costs of recovering biodiesel are nowhere near the costs mandatory to distill ethanol, we believe our results can significantly contribute to the ultimate goal of producing scalable and cost effective advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals".

Keasling led the collaboration, which was was made up of a team from JBEI's Fuels Synthesis Division that included Eric Steen, Yisheng Kang and Gregory Bokinsky, and a team from LS9, a privately-held industrial biotechnology firm based in South San Francisco. The LS9 team was headed by Stephen del Cardayre and included Zhihao Hu, Andreas Schirmer and Amy McClure. The collaboration has published the results of their research in the January 28, 2010 edition of the journal Nature. The paper is titled, "Microbial Production of Fatty Acid-Derived Fuels and Chemicals from Plant Biomass"......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 27, 2010, 8:24 AM CT

Diamond is one tough cookie

Most people know that diamond is one of the hardest solids on Earth, so strong that it can easily cut through glass and steel.

Surprisingly, very little is known about the strength of diamond at extreme conditions. But new research by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers shows that diamond becomes even stronger during rapid compression.

Using the Janus laser at LLNL and the Omega laser at the University of Rochester, Livermore researchers and Rochester and UC Berkeley colleagues showed that when shock waves are applied to diamond with powerful lasers, it can support almost a million times atmospheric pressure before being crushed.

The research has implications for the technological uses of diamond.

"It could also provide insights into the ancient history of natural diamonds found on Earth and in meteorites, where shock waves caused by impact are common," said Stewart McWilliams, main author of a paper appearing in the upcoming edition of the journal, Physical Review B.

McWilliams conducted the experiments as a graduate student at UC Berkeley while on a Student Employee Graduate Research Fellowship (SEGRF) at LLNL.

Most natural diamonds are formed at high-pressure, high-temperature conditions existing at depths of 87 to 120 miles in the Earth's mantle. Carbon-containing minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25 percent to 75 percent of the age of the Earth)......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 25, 2010, 8:02 AM CT

How 'random' lasers work

When University of Utah researchers discovered a new kind of laser that was generated by an electrically conducting plastic or polymer, no one could explain how it worked and some doubted it was real. Now, a decade later, the Utah scientists have found these "random lasers" occur because of natural, mirror-like cavities in the polymers, and they say such lasers may prove useful for diagnosing cancer.

"Nobody knew how it worked until now," says Z. Valy Vardeny, a distinguished professor of physics and senior author of the newly released study, published online Sunday, Jan. 24 in the journal Nature Physics "We succeeded in imaging the cavities. This is a big step in our understanding of this bizarre phenomenon, which not a number of people believed".

Materials or "gain media" that generate conventional lasers are put in an ordered structure known as "lossless resonators" often mirrors that generate light without losing much of it. Random laser materials, in contrast, are disordered and lose some light.

Or as Vardeny puts it: "You can get lasing out of junky materials if they contain molecules that glow. Out of disorder comes perfect order".

In the newly released study, Vardeny and his colleagues created images to reveal the natural cavities within a "pi-conjugated polymer film," which is a thin film of an organic polymer named DOO-PPV that conducts electricity even though it is a plastic-like material. ("Pi-conjugated" refers to the material's electronic structure.)......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:22:05 GMT

Sony TransferJet Technology

Move over Bluetooth, Sony is about ready to release a new technology that supposedly does everything Bluetooth promised only without the complication of recognizing like devices security difficulties.

Calling it TransferJet, the new wireless medium will allow wireless data transfer between gadgets and Sony says consumers should expect to see it appearing in a wide variety of products real soon. However unlike Bluetooth or 80211b/g, TransferJet works at a range of only up to 3 centimeters and its speed will rival USB cables.

Before you become suspicious of its usefulness at such a small range, Sony says the main benefit of the technology is that it will allow users to send photos or data from one device to another by just touching them together. Posted by: Jeff      Read more     Source

January 18, 2010, 8:13 AM CT

Organized chaos gets robots going

Even simple insects can generate quite different movement patterns with their six legs. The animal uses various gaits depending on whether it crawls uphill or downhill, slowly or fast. Researchers from Gottingen have now developed a walking robot, which - depending on the situation - can flexibly and autonomously switch between different gaits. The success of their solution lies in its simplicity: a small and simple network with just a few connections can create very diverse movement patterns. To this end, the robot uses a mechanism for "chaos control". This interdisciplinary work was carried out by a team of researchers at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Gottingen, the Physics Department of the Georg-August-University of Gottingen and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. (Nature Physics, January 17th, 2010, advanced online publication).

In humans and animals, periodically recurring movements like walking or breathing are controlled by small neural circuits called "central pattern generators" (CPG). Researchers have been using this principle in the development of walking machines. To date, typically one separate CPG was needed for every gait. The robot receives information about its environment via several sensors - about whether there is an obstacle in front of it or whether it climbs a slope. Based on this information, it selects the CPG controlling the gait that is appropriate for the respective situation......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:42:26 GMT

Digital camera protective bag with built-in tripod

There are quite a few of these digital camera protective bags with built-in tripods about the place, but Brando gives it to you on the cheap. The bag is actually a hard case and there’s room inside for a small sized point-and-shoot and a little pocket for a spare battery or memory card. The tripod can swivel 360 and tilt upwards to about 45. US$12

Bag can be become as a Tripod to take a self-photo! / Become a Tripod Stand / Protective Hard case / Standard 1/4 inch Screw / Dimension: 110 x 175 x 35 cm Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source

January 14, 2010, 8:17 AM CT

China as center for scientific research

Contrary to popular belief, China is doing much more than exporting clothing, toys, electronics, and other popular consumer goods. The country is on a scientific roll, to the point where it could conceivably be regarded as the emerging global center for scientific research, a new report indicates. It describes an amazing growth in chemical patenting and publishing that could bring new and innovative products to the world market ranging from pharmaceuticals to microchips, as per an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News, (C&EN) ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

C&EN Senior Editor Sophie L. Rovner reports that China in 2009 became the world leader in the number of chemistry patent applications published annually. China published 67,000 patent applications in 2009, in comparison to 52,000 for Japan and 41,000 for the United States. Publication of scientific papers originating in China increased faster than any other nation during the last 10 years. The output of papers with Chinese authors more than quadrupled from 20,000 papers in 1998 to more than 112,000 in 2008. The publication of U.S. scientific papers rose by barely 30 percent during that period.

In achieving this growth, researchers in China are embracing collaborators in the U.S. and other countries. It is becoming increasingly clear that the country is changing the "world map of research," with China conceivably at its center, the article suggests......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:08:05 GMT

Prenatal Education in the Palm of Your Hand

There are also voices recordings and pictures to help reinforce the information. Everything can be accessed via the large touchscreen. There"s also a slot for a memory card and it can be hooked up to a computer via USB. No word on if additional information can be added to the Gravida using these means.

The Gravida Nurse is small, cute, helpful and going for $22.65

Via UberGizmo Posted by: Sarah      Read more     Source

January 6, 2010, 4:22 PM CT

Full-body scanners and radiation

Amid concerns regarding terrorists targeting airliners using weapons less detectable by traditional means, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is ramping up deployment of whole body scanners at security checkpoints in U.S. airports. These systems produce anatomically accurate images of the body and can detect objects and substances concealed by clothing.

To date, TSA has deployed two types of scanning systems:.

Millimeter wave technology uses low-level radio waves in the millimeter wave spectrum. Two rotating antennae cover the passenger from head to toe with low-level RF energy.

Backscatter technology uses extremely weak X-rays delivering less than 10 microRem of radiation per scan ─ the radiation equivalent one receives inside an aircraft flying for two minutes at 30,000 feet.

An airline passenger flying cross-country is exposed to more radiation from the flight than from screening by one of these devices. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement (NCRP) has reported that a traveler would need to experience 2,500 backscatter scans per year to reach what they classify as a Negligible Individual Dose. The American College of Radiology (ACR) agrees with this conclusion.

The ACR is not aware of any evidence that either of the scanning technologies that the TSA is considering would present significant biological effects for passengers screened......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source