Bill Gates Condom Challenge: It's On!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/03/bill-gates-condom-challenge-its-on/

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Video: Imaging methodology reveals nano details not seen before

Thursday, March 28, 2013

A team of scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Northwestern University has produced 3-D images and videos of a tiny platinum nanoparticle at atomic resolution that reveal new details of defects in nanomaterials that have not been seen before.

Prior to this work, scientists only had flat, two-dimensional images with which to view the arrangement of atoms. The new imaging methodology developed at UCLA and Northwestern will enable researchers to learn more about a material and its properties by viewing atoms from different angles and seeing how they are arranged in three dimensions.

The study will be published March 27 by the journal Nature.

The authors describe being able to see how the atoms of a platinum nanoparticle -- only 10 namometers in diameter -- are arranged in three dimensions. They also identify how the atoms are arranged around defects in the platinum nanoparticle.

Three-dimensional volume renderings of the platinum nanoparticle are reconstructed from 104 experimental projections in which nearly all the atoms of the nanoparticle are visible. Furthermore, 3-D atomic steps at twin boundaries and the 3-D core structure of edge and screw dislocations in the nanoparticle are observed at atomic resolution. (See Figures 2-4 in the paper.) These dislocations and the atomic steps at the twin boundaries, which appearto be stress-relief mechanisms, are not visible in conventional 2-D projections.

Credit: Chien-Chun Chen, UCLA

Similar to how CT scans of the brain and body are done in a hospital, the scientists took images of a platinum nanoparticle from many different directions and then pieced the images together using a new method that improved the quality of the images.

This novel method is a combination of three techniques: scanning transmission electron microscopy, equally sloped tomography (EST) and three-dimensional Fourier filtering. Compared to conventional CT, the combined method produces much higher quality 3-D images and allows the direct visualization of atoms inside the platinum nanoparticle in three dimensions.

"Visualizing the arrangement of atoms in materials has played an important role in the evolution of modern science and technology," said Jianwei (John) Miao, who led the work. He is a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA and a researcher with the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

"Our method allows the 3-D imaging of the local structures in materials at atomic resolution, and it is expected to find application in materials sciences, nanoscience, solid state physics and chemistry," he said.

"It turns out that there are details we can only see when we can look at materials in three dimensions," said co-author Laurence D. Marks, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

"We have had suspicions for a long time that there was more going on than we could see from the flat images we had," Marks said. "This work is the first demonstration that this is true at the atomic scale."

Nanotechnology expert Pulickel M. Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice University complimented the research.

"This is the first instance where the three-dimensional structure of dislocations in nanoparticles has been directly revealed at atomic resolution," Ajayan said. "The elegant work demonstrates the power of electron tomography and leads to possibilities of directly correlating the structure of nanoparticles to properties, all in full 3-D view."

Defects can influence many properties of materials, and a technique for visualizing these structures at atomic resolution could lead to new insights beneficial to researchers in a wide range of fields.

"Much of what we know about how materials work, whether it is a catalyst in an automobile exhaust system or the display on a smartphone, has come from electron microscope images of how the atoms are arranged," Marks said. "This new imaging method will open up the atomic world of nanoparticles."

###

Northwestern University: http://www.northwestern.edu

Thanks to Northwestern University for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127483/Video__Imaging_methodology_reveals_nano_details_not_seen_before

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Simulations uncover obstacle to harnessing laser-driven fusion: Under realistic conditions, hollow cones fail to guide energetic electrons to fuel

Mar. 26, 2013 ? A once-promising approach for using next-generation, ultra-intense lasers to help deliver commercially viable fusion energy has been brought into serious question by new experimental results and first-of-a-kind simulations of laser-plasma interaction.

Researchers at The Ohio State University are evaluating a two-stage process in which a pellet of fusion fuel is first crushed by lasers on all sides, shrinking the pellet to dozens of times its original size, followed by an ultra-intense burst of laser light to ignite a chain reaction. This two-stage approach is called Fast Ignition, and there are a few variants on the theme.

In a recent paper, the Ohio State research group considered the long-discussed possibility of using a hollow cone to maintain a channel for the ultra-intense "ignitor pulse" to focus laser energy on the compressed pellet core. Drawing on both experimental results from studies at the Titan Laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and massively-parallel computer simulations of the laser-target interaction performed at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) in Columbus, Ohio, the research team found compelling evidence that the cone-guided approach to Fast Ignition has a serious flaw.

"In the history of fusion research, two-steps-forward and one-step-back stories are a common theme," said Chris Orban, Ph.D., a researcher of the High Energy Density Physics research group at Ohio State and the lead theorist on the project. "But sometimes progress is about seeing what's not going to work, just as much as it is looking forward to the next big idea."

Since the ultra-intense pulse delivers energy to the fuel through relativistic electrons accelerated by the laser interaction, the Ohio State study focused on the coupling of the laser light to electrons and the propagation of those electrons through the cone target. Rather than investigating how the interaction would work on a high-demand, high-cost facility like the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is also based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the largest scientific operations in the world, the researchers considered experiments just across from NIF at the Titan laser, which is much smaller and easily accessible.

These images from their simulations highlight the trajectories of randomly-selected electrons for a thin cone (left) and thick cone (right), each attached to a copper wire. Background colors show the strength of the electric fields pointing away from the cone and wire. For thin cones, the electric fields act to guide energetic electrons forward into the wire while for thick cones -- a more realistic case -- these fields are too distant to be effective. An animation of the simulation is available online at: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~orban/cone_wire_final5mJ_4_5ps.avi.

Despite its size and despite having lower total energy, for a brief moment the Titan laser is many thousands of times more intense than NIF, which makes it a decent stand-in as a second-stage ignitor pulse. The OSU-led experimental team focused the Titan pulse on hollow cone targets attached at the tip to copper wires and observed the burst of X-ray photons coming from the copper as a measure of the laser energy to relativistic electron conversion efficiency.

The X-ray signal was much lower from the hollow cones with thicker cone walls. "This was strong evidence to the experimental team that the typical approach to cone-guided Fast Ignition wouldn't work, since thicker cones should be more realistic than thin cones," said Orban. "This is because electrons are free to move around in a dense plasma, much like they do in a normal metal, so the thicker cone target is like a thin cone embedded in a dense plasma."

These intuitions were tested in simulations performed at OSC. Whereas earlier efforts to simulate the laser-target interaction were forced to simplify or shrink the target size in order to make the calculations more feasible, Orban used the LSP code to perform the first-ever, full-scale 2D Particle-In-Cell simulations of the entire laser-target interaction using fully realistic laser fields.

These simulations also included a sophisticated model for the pre-heating of the target from stray laser light ahead of the ultra-intense pulse developed by collaborators at the Flash Center for Computational Science at the University of Chicago.

"We were delighted to help Chris use the FLASH code to provide realistic initial conditions for his Particle-In-Cell simulations," said Don Lamb, director of the Flash Center. "This is an outstanding example of how two groups can collaborate to achieve a scientific result that neither could have achieved alone."

To conduct the simulations, the Ohio State researchers accessed OSC's flagship Oakley Cluster supercomputer system. The HP-built system features 8,300+ Intel Xeon cores and 128 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Oakley can achieve 88 teraflops, tech-speak for performing 88 trillion calculations per second, or, with acceleration from the NVIDIA GPUs, a total peak performance of 154 teraflops.

"The simulations pointed to the electric fields building up on the edge of the cone as the key to everything," said Orban. "The thicker the cone is, the further away the cone edge is from the laser, and as a result fewer energetic electrons are deflected forward, which is the crucial issue in making cone-guided Fast Ignition a viable approach."

With both the experiment and the simulations telling the same story, the evidence is compelling that the cone-guided route to Fast Ignition is an unlikely one. While other studies have come to similar conclusions, the group was the first to identify the plasma surrounding the cone as a severe hindrance. Thankfully, there are still many other ideas for successfully igniting the fusion pellet with current or soon-to-be-constructed laser facilities. Any future efforts to spark fusion reactions with these lasers using a two-stage fast-ignition approach must be mindful to consider the neutralizing effect of the free electrons in the dense plasma.

"We could not have completed this project without the Oakley Cluster," Orban noted. "It was the perfect combination of speed and RAM and availability for us. And thanks to the profiling I was able to do, the compute time for our production runs went from two weeks in November 2011 to three or four days as of February 2012."

"Energy and the environment is one of the primary focus areas of the center, and this research fits perfectly into that domain," said Brian Guilfoos, the client and technology support manager for OSC. "Many of our systems were designed and software packages selected to best support the type of computing required by investigators working in fields related to our focus areas."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio Supercomputer Center.

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Journal Reference:

1. K. U. Akli, C. Orban, D. Schumacher, M. Storm, M. Fatenejad, D. Lamb, R. R. Freeman. Coupling of high-intensity laser light to fast electrons in cone-guided fast ignition. Physical Review E, 2012; 86 (6) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.86.065402

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/2LmJkrdgNbo/130326162340.htm

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States Target Non-Military Drones

Privacy advocates nationwide are concerned that numerous bills being presented to control the use of drones for research and rescue efforts in the United States may not be enough to protect Americans' rights.

Drones are increasingly being used by agencies such as police and fire departments, reports NBC News, and many agencies say the small flying machines are becoming crucial devices. The Federal Aviation Administration has been tasked to integrate drones into the U.S. air space by 2015, but their use for non-military purposes is already growing.

State officials are busy working on bills to protect residents from privacy and safety concerns. For example, Oregon lawmakers have proposed a bill to require anyone who operates a drone to be licensed by the Oregon Department of Aviation, according to the network.

In Indiana, a bill won't allow a news station to use drones to survey traffic or allow law enforcement to send them out searching for lost hikers. In Nebraska drones can't be used to gather information or evidence except in the case of a terrorist threat.

The bills, if passed, will help protect Americans' privacy, advocates argue.

?With drones, we have arrived at a moment when it is technologically possible to engage in constant mass aerial surveillance," American Civil Liberties Union senior policy analyst Jay Stanley told NBC. And even though surveillance cameras already watch people, drones ?raise the stakes considerably from there,? he said.

Domestic drones aren't quite as powerful or effective as those being used by the Pentagon, but they still offer a new tool for law enforcement.

Current laws may be able to help prevent some abuses, said John Villasenor, policy expert with UCLA and the Brookings Institution. However, questions still remain about what will be done with the information that is gathered.

?Whether data's being collected by Google or from cellphones or bank cameras or traffic cameras, I don't think the medium is the essence," countered Michael Toscano, president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, which represents drone makers, according to NBC.

? 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.newsmax.com/US/States-Target-Non-Military-Drones/2013/03/24/id/496065

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Cameras capture tigers trekking through wildlife corridor

World Land Trust

An adult male tiger photographed on March 13, 2013, in Kerala shortly after eating a gaur, an Indian bison.

By Douglas Main, LiveScience

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A camera trap has captured photos of two healthy tigers using a protected corridor in the Kerala province of southwest India this year, evidence that the pathway could help populations of the endangered animals.

The first photo shows an adult male tiger in very good health that has just preyed upon a gaur, also known as an Indian bison, according to a release from the World Land Trust, which funded the creation of the protected area. The camera trap spotted another adult tiger, also in good health, earlier in the year.

The corridor, which is about 4 miles (6 kilometers) long and connects two adjacent wildlife reserves, was originally created to allow elephants to move between the parks. Indeed, elephants have been spotted moving through the area, as have sloth bears, leopards, barking deer and mongooses, according to the release.

World Land Trust

An adult tiger photographed on Jan. 5, 2013, in Kerala, southwest India.

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"We are all very pleased to see the increased usage of the corridor by a wide range of animals, and capturing these tigers on film is very exciting," said Sandeep Kr. Tiwari, deputy director at Wildlife Trust of India.

The Thirunelli-Kudrakote corridor, as it's called, runs through a global hotspot of diversity, the World Land Trust reports. India's largest elephant population calls the corridor home, as do 10 native mammal species (including the Salim Ali's fruit bat and the Nilgiri tahr, a type of goat) and 13 endemic bird species, like the Malabar parakeet.

Email Douglas Main ?or follow him @Douglas_Main. Follow us? @OAPlanet, Facebook ?or ? Google+.Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/29ef81ee/l/0Lscience0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A30C240C174428960Ecameras0Ecapture0Etigers0Etrekking0Ethrough0Ewildlife0Ecorridor0Dlite/story01.htm

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PFT: Giants offer Cruz $7 million-plus per year

Getty Images

The Buccaneers struggled last year on defense, especially in the secondary.? And, as Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times explains it, coach Greg Schiano takes that personally.

Schiano got his NFL start as the defensive backs coach in Chicago, but in his first year as a head coach Schiano?s team nearly set the league record for passing yards allowed in a season.? Included in that total were 69 completions of at least 20 yards and 11 of more than 50.

?The big pass plays, those are killers,? Schiano said, via Stroud.? ?They not only affect the game, but they affect the momentum of the game.? When you?re at home, it sucks the life out of your crowd, and when you?re on the road, it ignites the crowd.

?Some of the changes we made are the result of people not doing things exactly how we wanted them done. We did make a staff change,? Schiano said, regarding the departure of defensive backs coach Ron Cooper.? ?I?m not going to duck that. . . .? It?s even more frustrating for me because that?s supposed to be your area of expertise.?

The Buccaneers have added safety Dashon Goldson via free agency, and they continue to be in the hunt for Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis.? Goldson and Mark Barron have similar styles, and that?s fine with Schiano.

?It doesn?t matter to me,? Schiano said. ?We?re actually an interchangeable safety defense.? So there?s not really a cover guy and a box guy.?

The ultimate cover guy ? Revis ? would pump up the secondary considerably.? And it could make the Buccaneers major players in the NFC South.? Even if, in the end, the Bucs don?t have a spot in the lineup for future Hall of Famer Ronde Barber.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/03/23/report-giants-offer-cruz-more-than-7-million-per-year/related/

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