Saturday Lunar eclipse ‘magnified’ in US

A partial lunar eclipse about to take place will appear magnified in the US by an effect known as the “moon illusion”.

The eclipse will begin 1017 GMT when the Moon enters the shadow of Earth.

Because of the timing, it will not be visible from the UK or Europe.

But in many parts of the US and Canada, the eclipse will appear larger because it occurs while the Moon is so close to the horizon.

According to Nasa, low-hanging Moons look “unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects”. The reason for this is not understood.

“Observers in India, Japan, and parts of East Asia will experience the same phenomenon,” Nasa wrote on its website.

“They’ll see the eclipse on Saturday evening as the Moon is rising.”

At its maximum, 54% of the Moon’s diameter will be covered. This will occur at 0438 US pacific time (1138 GMT) – the event will last almost three hours.

Because the Moon, Sun and Earth are not aligned, it will not reach “totality”.

via BBC News – Lunar eclipse ‘magnified’ in US.

Dick Cheney goes to hospital after feeling ill

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney was admitted into a Washington hospital for tests after feeling ill, according to a statement issued by his office.

The 69-year-old Republican leader has suffered five heart attacks in the past 32 years.

Spokesman Peter Long said Mr Cheney is expected to remain at George Washington University Hospital over the weekend.

It was not immediately clear if Mr Cheney’s visit is related to his previous heart troubles.

Mr Cheney felt ill on Friday and visited his doctor at the hospital, who then advised him to stay for further tests.

The former vice-president suffered his last heart attack in February 2010.

Mr Cheney was vice-president under George W Bush.

via BBC News – Dick Cheney goes to hospital after feeling ill.

Thieves steal kitchen sink from South Africa police

South Africa’s police are investigating after thieves stripped a police station of all its contents, down to the kitchen sink.

The office was under renovations and ready for re-occupation when the thieves hit, reports South Africa’s Times Newspaper.

The robbers helped themselves to everything of value – including doors, cupboards, basins, cutlery, tiles, furniture, electrical equipment and mortuary fridges.

Officers from the Carletonville police station, west of Johannesburg, have had to cram into three small rooms.

The space is inadequate, and there with no holding cells or parking spaces. The rent costs the police about 127,000 rand ($17,000; £11,430) each month, reports The Times.

It is not clear how the burglars managed to clean out the office without being detected by the security company contracted by the Department of Public Works to guard the premises.

Democratic Alliance police spokesperson Dianne Kohler Barnard said that the Department of Public Works had “failed taxpayers”.

“How bizarre, that the police will now have to investigate a crime committed at a police station,” she said.

via BBC News – Thieves steal kitchen sink from South Africa police.

German TanDEM-X satellite returns first images

Germany’s new radar satellite, TanDEM-X, has returned its first images.

The spacecraft was launched from Kazakhstan on Monday on a mission to make the most precise 3D map of the Earth’s surface.

The pictures demonstrate the platform is in excellent health and ready to team up with the TerraSAR-X satellite launched in 2007.

Together, the pair will trace the variation in height across the globe to a precision of better than two metres.

This digital elevation model (DEM) will support a multitude of applications, such as the programming of navigation computers in military jets to enable them to fly ultra low. The data will also be given to relief workers to show them where an earthquake has wrought most damage in a city.

Infoterra GmbH, the company with exclusive rights to commercialize the TanDEM information, says the market for radar products is steadily growing.

The new images depict a landscape in Ukraine, the north of Madagascar, and Moscow.

The pictures illustrate neatly the particular specialism of using radar to sense the planet’s surface.

In the Madagascan data, for example, the choppiness of the waves in the open stretches of the Indian Ocean can be contrasted with the smooth reflection of the radar signal from the enclosed, clam waters of the Baie de Diego.

And in the image of Moscow-Sheremetyevo airport, the flat concrete surfaces of the runways appear as black lines because the radar beam has been very efficiently reflected away from the satellite.

TanDEM-X is flying in a polar orbit that is ever so slightly inclined to the one occupied by TerraSAR-X, some 514km above the planet.

The intention is to make TanDEM-X fly an extremely tight helix around its more established sibling. This should be achieved by October. At times, the two satellites will be separated by as little as 200m.

The pair’s radars work by constantly bouncing microwave pulses off the ground and sea surface. By timing how long the signal takes to make the return trip, the instruments can determine differences in height.

The compact orbital dance will give the pair “stereo vision”, by enabling them to operate an interferometric mode in which one spacecraft acts as a transmitter/receiver and the other as a second receiver.

Three-dimensional image acquisition is expected to start in earnest in January.

The seamless DEM of the Earth’s surface will be built up over three years of joint operations. Ultimately, it should have a vertical resolution of 1-2m and a spatial resolution of 12m – far superior to any previous global data set.

…

via BBC News – German TanDEM-X satellite returns first images.

‘No foetal pain before 24 weeks’

There is no new evidence to show foetuses feel pain in the womb before 24 weeks, and so no reason to challenge the abortion limit, UK doctors say.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ review said foetuses are “undeveloped and sedated”.

Brain connections are not fully formed, and the environment of the womb creates a state of induced sleep, like unconsciousness, they add.

Anti-abortion campaigners are likely to challenge the reports.

The issue of whether a foetus of 24 weeks or below can feel pain had been raised in the debate over whether the current time limit for abortion should be reduced.

An up-to-date analysis of evidence was recommended by MPs in a report from the Commons Science and Technology committee during the last parliament. …

via BBC News – ‘No foetal pain before 24 weeks’.

Enterprise PCs Work While They Sleep, Saving Energy and Money

Personal computers in enterprise environments save energy and money by “sleep-working,” thanks to new software called SleepServer created by computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego.

Sleep-working enterprise PCs are accessible via remote connections and maintain their presence on voice over IP, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer networks even though the PCs are in low-power sleep mode. SleepServer can reduce energy consumption on enterprise PCs previously running 24/7 by an average of 60 percent, according to a new peer-reviewed study presented by UC San Diego computer scientists on June 25 at the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston.

SleepServer creates lightweight virtual images of sleeping PCs, and these pared down images maintain connectivity and respond to applications, such as Voice over IP, instant messaging and peer-to-peer services, on behalf of the sleeping PCs. Each virtual PC image can also enable remote access to the sleeping PC it represents via protocols such as Remote Desktop, VNC and encrypted connections using SSH. SleepServer is compatible with existing networking infrastructure. It is highly scalable, runs on commodity servers, and is cross platform – it works with Windows and different versions of Linux. A MAC OSx version is being developed.

“One of the big benefits of SleepServer is configurable on-demand wakeup. SleepServer enables enterprise PCs to remain asleep for long periods of time while still maintaining the illusion of network connectivity and seamless availability,” explained Yuvraj Agarwal, the UC San Diego Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering who developed SleepServer.

Putting PCs to sleep that routinely run all night and all weekend saves energy and money.

“Reducing the electricity required to run our information technology infrastructure is an absolute must, and our SleepServer technology is an important step in this direction,” said Agarwal. “Our goal with SleepServer is to help buildings with heavy IT-loads reach net-zero energy use – so that these buildings effectively become carbon neutral by generating as much renewable energy as they consume.”

At the 2010 Design Automation Conference on June 17, Agarwal (Ph.D.’09 computer science UCSD) and UC San Diego environmental engineering professor Jan Kleissl presented their calculations on how SleepServer can play an important role in balancing a modern building’s energy consumption and renewable-energy generation over a one-year period.

SleepServer Saves Energy

During September 2009, the energy consumed by the 30 PCs running SleepServer dropped by 27 to 86 percent, with an average savings of 60 percent – when compared to leaving the machines on 24/7. Currently, more than 50 PCs in the UCSD computer science building are running SleepServer.

Enterprise PCs running SleepServer (black line) can enter energy-saving sleep mode but maintain their presence on networks and remain accessible via remote connections.

“I have seen an almost 70 percent energy savings on my PC over the last six months,” said Agarwal. …

via Enterprise PCs Work While They Sleep, Saving Energy and Money [Jacobs School of Engineering: News & Events].

Addiction: a loss of plasticity of the brain?

Why is it that only some drug users become addicts? This is the question that has been addressed by the teams of Pier Vincenzo Piazza and Olivier Manzoni, at the Neurocentre Magendie in Bordeaux (Inserm unit 862). These researchers have just discovered that the transition to addiction could result from a persistent impairment of synaptic plasticity in a key structure of the brain. This is the first demonstration that a correlation exists between synaptic plasticity and the transition to addiction. The results from the teams at Neurocentre Magendie call into question the hitherto held idea that addiction results from pathological cerebral modifications which develop gradually with drug usage. Their results show that addiction may, instead, come from a form of anaplasticity, i.e. from incapacity of addicted individuals to counteract the pathological modifications caused by the drug to all users.

This research is published in the journal Science on 25 June 2010.

The voluntary consumption of drugs is a behaviour found in many species of animal. However, it had long been considered that addiction, defined as compulsive and pathological drug consumption, is a behaviour specific to the human species and its social structure. In 2004, the team of Pier Vincenzo Piazza showed that the behaviours which define addiction in humans, also appear in some rats which will self administer cocaine*. Addiction exhibits astonishing similarities in men and rodents, in particular the fact that only a small number of consumers (humans or rodents) develop a drug addiction. The study of drug dependent behaviour in this mammal model thus opened the way to the study of the biology of addiction.

Today, thanks to a fruitful collaboration, the teams of Pier Vincenzo Piazza and Olivier Manzoni are reporting discovery of the first known biological mechanisms for the transition from regular but controlled drug taking to a genuine addiction to cocaine, characterised by a loss of control over drug consumption.

Chronic exposure to drugs causes many modifications to the physiology of the brain. Which of these modifications is responsible for the development of an addiction? This is the question the researchers wanted to answer in order to target possible therapeutic approaches to a disorder for which treatments are cruelly lacking.

The addiction model developed in Bordeaux provides a unique tool to answer this question. Thus it allows comparing animals who took identical quantities of drugs, but of which only few become addicted. By comparing addict and non-addict animals at various time points during their history of drug taking, the teams of Pier Vincenzo Piazza and Olivier Manzoni have demonstrated that the animals which developed an addiction to cocaine exhibit a permanent loss of the capacity to produce a form of plasticity known as long term depression (or LTD). LTD refers to the ability of the synapses (the region of communication between neurons) to reduce their activity under the effect of certain stimulations. It plays a major role in the ability to develop new memory traces and, consequently, to demonstrate flexible behaviour. …

via Addiction: a loss of plasticity of the brain?.

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.

Their measurements revealed that electrons from different atomic orbitals, although excited simultaneously, leave the atom with a small but measurable time delay of about twenty attoseconds. “One attosecond is one billionth of one billionth of a second, an unimaginable short interval of time. But after excitation by light one of the electrons leaves the atom earlier than the other. Hence we were able to show that electrons “hesitate” briefly before they leave an atom,” explains Reinhard Kienberger, Professor for Experimental Physics (E 11) at the TUM and head of the Junior Research Group Attosecond Dynamics at the MPQ.

Determining the cause of this hesitation was also a challenge to the LAP theorists around Dr. Vladislav Yakovlev and his colleagues from the Vienna University of Technology (Austria) and the National Hellenic Research Foundation (Greece). Although they could confirm the effect qualitatively using complicated computations, they came up with a time offset of only five attoseconds. The cause of this discrepancy may lie in the complexity of the neon atom, which consists, in addition to the nucleus, of ten electrons. “The computational effort required to model such a many-electron system exceeds the computational capacity of today’s supercomputers,” explains Yakovlev.

Nevertheless, these investigations already point toward a probable cause of the “hesitation” of the electrons: the electrons interact not only with their atomic nucleus, but they are also influenced by one another. “This electron-electron interaction may then mean that it takes a short while before an electron that is shaken by the incident light wave is released by its fellow electrons and allowed to leave the atom,” sais Dr. Martin Schulze, Postdoc at the LAP-Team. …

via Delayed time zero in photoemission.

Off-the-shelf cancer detection

…In the new study, the team captured images of cells with a small bundle of fiber-optic cables attached to a $400 Olympus E-330 camera. When imaging tissues, Richards-Kortum’s team applied a common fluorescent dye that caused cell nuclei in the samples to glow brightly when lighted with the tip of the fiber-optic bundle. Three tissue types were tested: cancer cell cultures that were grown in a lab, tissue samples from newly resected tumors and healthy tissue viewed in the mouths of patients.

Because the nuclei of cancerous and precancerous cells are notably distorted from those of healthy cells, Richards-Kortum said, abnormal cells were easily identifiable, even on the camera’s small LCD screen.

“The dyes and visual techniques that we used are the same sort that pathologists have used for many years to distinguish healthy cells from cancerous cells in biopsied tissue,” said study co-author Mark Pierce, Rice faculty fellow in bioengineering. “But the tip of the imaging cable is small and rests lightly against the inside the cheek, so the procedure is considerably less painful than a biopsy and the results are available in seconds instead of days.”

Richards-Kortum said software could be written that would allow medical professionals who are not pathologists to use the device to distinguish healthy from nonhealthy cells. The device could then be used for routine cancer screening and to help oncologists track how well patients were responding to treatment.

“A portable, battery-powered device like this could be particularly useful for global health,” she said. “This could save many lives in countries where conventional diagnostic technology is simply too expensive.”

via Rice University | News & Media.

Scientists Create 3D Models of Whole Mouse Organs

Collagen fibers (in green) outline the bronchiole pathways against a background of elastin tissue (in red) in this high-resolution image of a mouse lung. (Photo: Michael Leven/Yale)

Yale University engineers have for the first time created 3D models of whole intact mouse organs, a feat they accomplished using fluorescence microscopy. The team reports its findings in the May/June issue of the Journal of Biomedical Optics, in a study published online this week.

Combining an imaging technique called multiphoton microscopy with “optical clearing,” which uses a solution that renders tissue transparent, the researchers were able to scan mouse organs and create high-resolution images of the brain, small intestine, large intestine, kidney, lung and testicles. They then created 3D models of the complete organs—a feat that, until now, was only possible by slicing the organs into thin sections or destroying them in the process, a disadvantage if more information about the sample is needed after the fact.

With traditional microscopy, researchers are only able to image tissues up to depths on the order of 300 microns, or about three times the thickness of a human hair. In that process, tissue samples are cut into thin slices, stained with dyes to highlight different structures and cell types, individually imaged, then stacked back together to create 3D models. The Yale team, by contrast, was able to avoid slicing or staining the organs by relying on natural fluorescence generated from the tissue itself.

When combined with optical clearing, multiphoton microscopy—so called because it uses photons to excite naturally fluorescent cells within the tissue—can image a larger field-of-view at much greater depths and is limited only by the size of the lens used. Once the tissue is cleared using a standard solution that makes it virtually transparent to optical light, the researchers shine different wavelengths of light on it to excite the inherently fluorescent tissue. The fluorescence is displayed as different colors that highlight the different structures and tissue types (in the lung, for example, collagen is depicted as green while elastin shows up as red).

“The intrinsic fluorescence is just as effective as conventional staining techniques,” said Michael Levene, associate professor at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science and the team leader. “It’s like creating a virtual 3D biopsy that can be manipulated at will. And you have the added benefit that the tissue remains intact even after it’s been imaged.” …

via Scientists Create 3D Models of Whole Mouse Organs.