As countries try to rid themselves of toxic mercury pollution, some people are slathering and even injecting creams containing the metal onto or under their skin to lighten it, putting themselves and others at risk for serious health problems. To find those most at risk, scientists are reporting today that they can now identify these creams and intervene much faster than before. Authors of the research are speaking at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The meeting, organized by the world’s largest scientific society, features nearly 12,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics and is being held through Thursday. “In the U.S., the limit on mercury in products is 1 part per million,” says Gordon Vrdoljak, Ph.D., of the California Department of Public Health. “In some of these creams, we’ve been finding levels as high as 210,000 parts per million — really substantial amounts of mercury. If people are using the product quite regularly, their hands will exude it, it will get in their food, on their countertops, on the sheets their kids sleep on.” Identifying the toxic products has been a slow process, however. So, Vrdoljak turned to an instrument that uses a
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Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the two American aid workers infected with the Ebola virus while volunteering in Liberia, were released from the hospital yesterday after they recovered from the illness.
They were both given an experimental serum, Zmapp, before being flown from Liberia to CDC facilities in Atlanta, Georgia, three week ago. Brantly — who was seriously deteriorating before the drug was administered — yesterday appeared overjoyed, telling the media he was "thrilled to be alive."
These two Americans might have recovered anyway. In the West African communities that have...
MoreWhen I first started reading Ars Technica, performance of a processor was measured in megahertz, and the major manufacturers were rushing to squeeze as many of them as possible into their latest silicon. Shortly thereafter, however, the energy needs and heat output of these beasts brought that race crashing to a halt. More recently, the number of processing cores rapidly scaled up, but they quickly reached the point of diminishing returns. Now, getting the most processing power for each Watt seems to be the key measure of performance.
None of these things happened because the companies making processors ran up against hard physical limits. Rather, computing power ended up being constrained because progress in certain areas—primarily energy efficiency—was slow compared to progress in others, such as feature size. But could we be approaching physical limits in processing power? In this week's edition of Nature, The University of Michigan's Igor Markov takes a look at the sorts of limits we might face.
Markov notes that, based on purely physical limitations, some academics have estimated that Moore's law had hundreds of years left in it. In contrast, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), a group sponsored by the major semiconductor manufacturing nations, gives it a couple of decades. And the ITRS can be optimistic; it once expected that we would have 10GHz CPUs back in the Core2 days. The reason for this discrepancy is that a lot of hard physical limits never come into play.
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The method overcomes limitations of existing techniques which are limited to the surface or small-sized specimens, and allows a 3-D representation of the phase fractions within the sample volume. The work has just been published in the journal “Advanced Materials“. Reconstructed energy-selective neutron tomography: This is a visualization of austenite and martensite distribution in torsion (two images to left) and tensile (image to the right) loading. “For many engineering applications it is of major importance to characterize the bulk of materials spatially, instead of only probing selected locations. The new method provides exactly that capability, and the HZB-UTK team has demonstrated it by using samples made from stainless steel that undergo a phase transformation after being subjected to tensile and torsional deformation.”, said Prof. Dayakar Penumadu from UTK. He and UTK Ph.D. student Robin Woracek collaborated with the researchers Ingo Manke, Nikolay Kardjilov and André Hilger from the Imaging Group at the Institute of Applied Materials (F-IAM) at HZB on establishing new quantitative imaging methods by making use of diffraction contrast due to Bragg scattering in polycrystalline materials. Since the measurement method uses neutrons of selected wavelengths, the current work will also pave the way to implement such methods at
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A schematic of the stopped-flow mixing experiment to probe salt-induced disassembly of nucleosome core particles. The left side shows NCPs in solution before the addition of sucrose. On the right, sucrose is added to increase solvent density, effectively erasing the signal from the protein. Pollack lab Biophysics is a science of shapes – the shapes of molecules like DNA as they wrap and unwrap around protein cores, for instance. Cornell researchers have unveiled a new method for observing such processes in real time. Professor of applied and engineering physics Lois Pollack and her research group have devised a way to watch dynamic movements and shape changes of molecules in solution using a new X-ray scattering method. In aNucleic Acids Researchpaper recently published online, they proved their method by observing transient nucleosome structures as DNA unwound from them. The work was done in collaboration with professor Lisa Gloss and her research group at Washington State University. When stored away, DNA is wrapped like thread around a core of eight proteins called histones. This assembly is known as a nucleosome core particle (NCP). The entire system takes many shapes as the DNA unwraps for processes including transcription and replication of genetic
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