A rocket carrying the European Space Agency's (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite (2 November) blasted off successfully today at 02:50 Central European Time from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Northern Russia.
Tech
An international team of physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory has succeeded in using intense laser light to accelerate protons to energies never before achieved. Using this technique, scientists can now accelerate particles to extremely high velocities that would otherwise only be possible using large accelerator facilities. Physicists around the world are examining laser particle acceleration and laser produced radiation for potential future uses in cancer treatment.
A new generation of high-energy (>kJ) petawatt (HEPW) lasers is being constructed worldwide to study high intensity laser matter interactions, including fast ignition. Fast ignition is a laser-based technique for heating and igniting deuterium and tritium fuel to fusion temperatures in a two-step process. In the first phase, laser beams vaporize a fuel pellet and compress it to a thousand times its original density, while in the second phase, electrons accelerated by an intense-laser pulse deposit energy within the fuel assembly, causing rapid heating.
Particle accelerators are among the largest and most expensive scientific instruments. Thirty years ago, theorists John Dawson and Toshiki Tajima proposed an idea for making them thousands of times smaller: surf the particles on plasma waves driven by short intense laser pulses. Since plasmas are free of the damage limits of conventional accelerators, much larger fields can be built up within such waves, enabling much smaller accelerators.
Using Einstein's theory of special relativity to speedup computer simulations, scientists have designed laser-plasma accelerators with energies of 10 billion electron volts (GeV) and beyond. These systems, which have not been simulated in detail until now, could in the future serve as a compact new technology for particle colliders and energetic light sources.
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Nature inspires technology for an engineer and an ecologist teamed up at Michigan State University. They're developing robots that use advanced materials to swim like fish to probe underwater environments.
"Fish are very efficient," explained Xiaobo Tan, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. "They can perform very efficient locomotion and maneuvering in the water."
Moose eat plants; wolves kill moose. What difference does this classic predator-prey interaction make to biodiversity?
A large and unexpected one, say wildlife biologists from Michigan Technological University. Joseph Bump, Rolf Peterson and John Vucetich report in the November 2009 issue of the journal Ecology that the carcasses of moose killed by wolves at Isle Royale National Park enrich the soil in "hot spots" of forest fertility around the kills, causing rapid microbial and fungal growth that provide increased nutrients for plants in the area.
A gold skin forms on the silver cubes as the cubes are hollowed out from within. The silver atoms enter solution through pores that form in the clipped corners of the cubes.
"But the really cool part," says Xia, "and the cool part of nanotechnology generally, is that the tiny gold cages have very different properties than bulk gold." In particular, they respond differently to light.
Alexandria, VA – Despite being highly effective and beneficial for many patients, unexpected consequences are emerging in patients who are prescribed proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) for reflux diseases. Physicians are warned to monitor these effects and prescribe these medications carefully, according to a new commentary published in the November 2009 issue of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.
A strain of MRSA that causes bloodstream infections is five times more lethal than other strains and has shown to have some resistance to the potent antibiotic drug vancomycin used to treat MRSA, according to a Henry Ford Hospital study.
The study found that 50 percent of the patients infected with the strain died within 30 days compared to 11 percent of patients infected with other MRSA strains.
The average 30-day mortality rate for MRSA bloodstream infections ranges from 10 percent to 30 percent.
Woman are at particular risk of their primary care physicians delaying diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a paper being presented at the American Society of Nephrology's 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego, California. The findings suggest that educating practitioners about CKD could increase the timely diagnosis of CKD, thereby leading to improvements in care to patients and savings in Medicare dollars.
Dialysis patients with low body fat are at increased risk of death—even compared to patients at the highest level of body fat percentage, according to research being presented at the American Society of Nephrology's 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego.
CINCINNATI – The effectiveness of pandemic flu vaccination campaigns – like that now underway for H1N1 – could be undermined by the public incorrectly associating coincidental and unrelated health events with the vaccines.
This is the conclusion of a paper published online Oct. 31 by the Lancet and authored by an international team of investigators led by Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite revealed that Typhoon Mirinae's cold thunderstorm clouds were already over sections of the central and northern Philippines on October 30 at 4:53 p.m. (Asia/Manila) local time. Mirinae is also known as "Santi" in the Philippines.
COLUMBIA, Mo. ¬–According to the Institute of Medicine, more than 90 million Americans suffer from low health literacy¬, a mismatch between patients' abilities to understand healthcare information and providers' abilities to communicate complex medical information in an understandable manner. In two recent studies, researchers at the University of Missouri found that two groups — those with limited English proficiency and those with disabilities — experience significantly lower health literacy than the general population.