The Meadows Racetrack & Casino and its community of harness racing horsemen and horsewomen stood up to cancer Saturday with two special races to help fund breast cancer awareness.
The track and the Meadows Standardbred Owners Association, which coordinated the event, donated all commissions from the races to the Magee Women?s Hospital Breast Cancer Program. Funds raised Saturday will enhance the more than $12,000 already provided by The Meadows and the MSOA through previous events.
In the Breast Cancer Awareness Trot, which featured female drivers, Cherie Keith guided Sweet Elly Mae to victory while Danita Harvey and her daughter Nikki Harvey finished second and third, respectively, with Yankee Elizabeth and Stiletto.
Dean Zaimes captured the Breast Cancer Awareness Pace, which was limited to drivers with fewer than 50 wins this year at The Meadows, behind Captain Greg. Tyler Stillings (Odds On BP) and Brad Provost (Therealshowstopper) completed the ticket.
Tony Hall won seven of the remaining 11 races on the card, including five in a row beginning with Race 7.
MOSCOW ? It was more money than either family has ever seen ? but it's still not clear if it can make the pain go away.
A court awarded two Russian families $100,000 each in compensation Monday from a maternity home that accidentally switched their daughters at birth. It said they could use the money to house the girls, now 12, next to each other.
The story has captivated Russia for ever since the families learned about the switch several months ago.
During divorce proceedings, one man refused to support his daughter Irina ? who has dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin ? because she didn't look like him. A DNA test then revealed that neither he nor the mother, Yuliya Belyaeva, were Irina's biological parents.
An official investigation then tracked down Irina's biological father, Naimat Iskanderov, who had been raising Belyaeva's own child, Anna, in a neighboring town.
Belyaeva said the news still makes her shiver.
"It is very unpleasant to relive those memories," she told The Associated Press. "We still can't fully comprehend what happened."
In video broadcast on Russia's NTV television, Belyaeva laughed with joy Monday after the judge delivered the verdict in a courtroom in Kopeisk, an industrial town of 140,000 in Russia's Ural Mountains, but Iskanderov remained stone-faced.
Fair-skinned Anna strongly resembles her biological mother Belyaeva, while Irina looks like her father Iskanderov, an ethnic Tajik born in the Central Asian and mostly Muslim ex-Soviet state of Tajikistan.
The video showed Belyaeva caressing Anna, while Irina, whom she raised, sat stern-faced with her eyes downcast.
"She feels jealous," Belyaeva said in televised remarks.
Belyaeva married again after separating from her husband and gave birth to two more children. Iskanderov parted with his wife when Anna was five but later married again, according to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
Despite the verdict, Belyaeva said the swap will leave lasting emotional scars.
"The money just can't ease the pain," Belyaeva said. "All the money in the world isn't worth a child's look at mother ... there are moments when I think it would have been better if I hadn't known anything about that."
Russian television reports said the girls don't want to leave the parents who raised them, so the families were thinking of using the compensation money, which is huge by Russian standards, to live near each other or even share a home.
"I would like us to share a house so that we don't worry about her daughter coming to me and the other way round," Iskanderov said on television.
Belyaeva said she would prefer separate houses nearby, so that "we see our children growing up and take part in their education."
Belyaeva also identified the nurse who she claimed mixed up the babies, but the nurse denied any responsibility.
"I know it was not me who did it," nurse Nelly Prokopyeva told Russian television.
This is not the first time a Russian court decision has resolved a hospital mix-up.
In 2009, a court in the central Russian town of Mtsenks ordered two mothers to swap their two-year-old sons following a DNA test that proved the children were mixed up at a maternity hospital. The case was complicated by the ethnic and religious background of the women ? one of them was ethnic Russian and Orthodox Christian, while the other one was ethnic Chechen and Muslim.
FLINT, Mich. ? A jury that hears the first murder trial linked to a 2010 stabbing spree in Michigan will be allowed to consider evidence of the other attacks, a judge said Friday.
The decision by the judge was a blow to defense lawyers who believe Elias Abuelazam won't get a fair trial if the jury hears he's accused of other violent acts that shocked the Flint area last year.
After making the key ruling in court, Genesee County Judge Judith Fullerton met privately with lawyers and settled on Feb. 7 as the trial date in the death of Arnold Minor.
Abuelazam was captured in August 2010 while trying to flee the country and subsequently was charged with three murders and six attempted murders in and around Flint, 60 miles north of Detroit. The victims who survived say they were viciously stabbed after he stopped them late at night and asked for directions or help with his car.
Under Michigan law, prosecutors in certain cases can present evidence of similar acts. Assistant prosecutor Tamara Phillips said there was a pattern of "short, quick, swift" attacks linked to Abuelazam.
Offering evidence of the other stabbings would be crucial, she said, especially if Abuelazam chooses an insanity defense.
Victims would say "he was lucid" during the attacks, Phillips said. "He wasn't talking about demons or voices."
The judge said the circumstances were "amazingly similar."
Defense attorney Ed Zeineh unsuccessfully argued that the evidence would be extremely prejudicial against Abuelazam. Outside court, he said Fullerton's ruling will have a role in whether an insanity defense will be pursued.
A psychiatrist, Dr. Norman Stanley Miller, has been lined up to testify in support at trial, while prosecutors have three experts to rebut him, according to court filings reviewed by The Associated Press.
"It's seriously being considered," Zeineh told the AP.
Abuelazam did not speak in court but often conferred with his two attorneys. He was heavily shackled at the wrists and ankles and closely watched by four sheriff's officers.
In addition to facing charges in nine Michigan stabbings, Abuelazam is charged with one stabbing in Toledo, Ohio. He is also suspected in five more in Flint and one in Leesburg, Va.
A study of the spread of West Nile Virus across North America since its introduction in 1999 implicates robins as a key disease vector. Sophie Bushwick.
October 27, 2011
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West Nile virus first appeared in North America in 1999. And it quickly moved across the continent. Now a study has pinned the proliferation on a particular culprit: robins. The work is published in the journal Science. [A. Marm Kilpatrick, Globalization, Land Use, and the Invasion of West Nile Virus]
A variety of animals can serve as hosts for West Nile, but the virus primarily spreads through a few species of mosquitoes that usually feed on birds, and those bird species, which become viral hosts. Robins may not be the most abundant of birds, but mosquitoes find their blood particularly tasty, frequently feeding on them and turning them into viral ?super-spreaders.?
In fact, the virus may be why the once-growing robin population has leveled off. The mosquitoes and birds responsible for West Nile?s spread abound where people also live, raising the odds that a mosquito that picked up the virus feeding on a robin could transmit it to a person.
Knowing that the spread of mosquito-borne disease depends on the insects? feeding habits could help researchers predict and prevent the spread of new pathogens. As Dickenson said, hope is the thing with feathers. Even if it?s infected.
?The Great Pumpkin? season (Halloween to you and me) is a great time of year to treat yourself to some Peanuts.
Charles Schulz's lovable gang bring hilarity to the Reagan era in the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts 1981-82. Now up to Volume 16, the comic strip shows no signs of getting stale as the years go by and the antics continue.
Skip to next paragraph
Here's some of what the gang is up to in this in this volume:
? Charlie Brown gets his big chance to pitch for Peppermint Pattie?s baseball team with 2 outs in the ninth and a 50-run lead. Sounds like a sure thing doesn?t it? His own team runs into trouble ? on top of always losing ? when they have their baseball field taken away. But Charlie Brown actually has something good happen to him when a girl cast member (no, not his sister) gives him a kiss!
? Lucy has her mind set on having a vegetable garden but she expects Linus and Snoopy to do all the manual labor.
? Charlie Brown?s sister Sally goes to "Beanbag? Camp" where she gets to lie in her beanbag, watch TV, and eat junk food. She has some "weighty" issues to deal with when she gets home.
? Marcie gets promoted to Patrol Person, but it becomes too tiring so her pal Peppermint Pattie fills in for her.
? As for Peppermint Pattie, she aspires to turn pro golfer to become rich and famous. She also has an encounter with a butterfly that she later believes was an angel. Although not the most alert of students she tries to apply to a school for gifted children, thinking it hands out presents.
? Woodstock continually gets into trouble with the notes floating up from Schroeder's piano.
? Snoopy is busy in this volume. First in his WWI exploits, this time joined by his brother Spike, as a soldier in the trenches and his sister Belle, as a Red Cross nurse. Snoopy also has to deal with bugs moving into his supper dish thinking it?s the coliseum and then a department store. Molly Volley is back to enlist Snoopy into being her partner in mixed doubles tennis. We also get to meet another of the beagle?s long-lost siblings ? his spotted brother "Marbles."
? And of course we get 2 years of anticipation for the arrival of the "Great Pumpkin." Poor Linus never gives up hope.
As usual, the strip reproduction is flawless, each appearing in crisp black and white with 3 daily strips per page and full page Sundays. The handy index to quickly find a favorite character or subject returns as well.
This volume?s introduction is by Lynn Johnston, a fellow cartoonist and creator of the long running strip "For Better Or For Worse." She shares some heartwarming recollections from her long friendship with "Sparky." We learn that the Peanuts creator fought writer?s block and that he saw no humor in getting old. ?I?m not ready to go. I haven?t finished yet. I still have so much to do!? Schulz lamented in his hospital bed. It's a heartbreaking moment that makes you wonder about all the strips we will not see but all the more appreciative of the ones we can treasure, with over 30 years collected and more to come as the Fantagraphics series moves towards completion.
So make sure your trick or treat bag is a big one and fill up on the fun, you?ll enjoy every morsel. It?s almost as if the "Great Pumpkin" arrived after all!
Rich Clabaugh is a Monitor staff artist.
Join the Monitor's book discussion on Facebook and Twitter.
CANCUN, Mexico ? Tourists abandoned Cancun and other resorts while Mexican authorities evacuated hundreds of residents from low-lying areas ahead of a weakened Hurricane Rina's pass along Yucatan's Caribbean coast Thursday.
Civil protection officials moved some 2,300 people from Holbox, an island where the Caribbean meets the Gulf of Mexico, and the federal government closed the archaeological sites that dot the coast. NASA cut short an undersea laboratory mission near Key Largo, Florida, bringing the crew back to land.
Lines snaked from ticket counters in Cancun's crowded airport Wednesday as jumbo airliners heading to Canada and Europe waited in pouring rain. Many travelers said they were already scheduled to leave on Wednesday. But Janet Gallo, 41, of New York City decided to cut short her five-day trip to the town of Playa del Carmen.
"At the hotel, they told us they would make a decision whether to evacuate later today, but we didn't want to wait. We would rather be home when it hits," Gallo said.
Ports closed to navigation for recreational, fishing and small boats in the state of Quintana Roo, home to Cancun, and neighboring Yucatan state, while the island of Cozumel was closed to larger vessels, including the ferry that connects the island and Playa del Carmen.
Rina was forecast to remain a hurricane as it swept along Mexico's most popular tourist destinations of Cancun, Cozumel and the Riviera Maya, though forecasters predicted it would continue to weaken.
Rina's maximum sustained winds were near 75 mph (120 kph) early Thursday, down from 110 mph (175 kph) on Wednesday. It was about 115 miles (190 kilometers) south of the island of Cozumel and was moving northwest at about 6 mph (9 kph).
About 275 people living in the fishing town of Punta Allen, south of Tulum, were moved to emergency shelters and a smaller group was evacuated from the atoll of Banco Chinchorro.
Luh McDevitt, 56, a furniture and interior designer in Cozumel, said her family was fitting hurricane shutters to the house and securing furniture.
"I am not really scared," said the Cincinnati, Ohio, native who has lived in Cozumel since 2000. "Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was a Category 5. The worst part of the hurricane is after. We didn't have electricity in our house for three weeks."
Mexico's government said it was sending nearly 2,400 electrical workers plus cranes, vehicles and generators to repair and maintain services as quickly as possible after the storm.
Jorge Arturo Cruz, spokesman for Quintana Roo's education department, said schools were ordered closed in communities along the coast and on Cozumel in anticipation of the storm.
The coastal area around Tulum is dotted with Mayan ruins and farther north is Playa del Carmen, another popular spot for international tourists and the departure point for ferries serving Cozumel.
State Tourism Director Juan Carlos Gonzalez Hernandez said there had been about 83,000 tourists in the state, with about 28,000 of them in Cancun and 45,000 more on the stretch of coast south of Cancun that includes Tulum and Playa de Carmen.
He estimated 10,000 tourists had left by Wednesday night. There were only about 1,719 tourists on Cozumel, and many of them had left, he said.
At least eight cruise ships were changing itineraries away from the storm's path, said a spokesman for Carnival Cruise Lines, Vance Gulliksen.
The area was badly damaged by Hurricane Wilma in 2005, when Cancun's white-sand beaches were largely washed away. Insurance officials estimated total damage at $3 billion.
A hurricane warning was in effect for the east coast of the Yucatan Peninsula from north of Punta Gruesa to Cancun.
The projected track showed Rina curving east toward Cuba and the Straits of Florida after crossing the eastern tip of Yucatan, though the U.S. National Hurricane Center cautioned "there is great uncertainty as to where Rina will be located by the weekend."
___
Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon in Mexico City contributed to this story.
A wave of CIA drone strikes targeting al-Qaeda figures in Yemen is stoking widespread anger here that U.S. policy is cruel and misguided, prioritizing counterterrorism over a genuine solution to the country's raging political crisis.
Politics have never been a concern to Sam al-Homiganyi and his fellow teenagers. This month, though, they were shocked by the sudden death of a friend and are struggling to understand why.
Fighting back tears, his gaze fixed downward, Homiganyi, a lean-looking 15 year-old from the outskirts of Sana'a, told TIME, "He was my best friend; we played football together everyday." Another of his friends spoke up, gesturing to the gloomy group of jean-clad boys around him: "He was the same as us. He liked swimming, playing computer games, watching movies... you know, normal stuff." (See photos of Yemen on the brink.)
The dead friend was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old born in Denver, Colorado, the third American killed in as many weeks by suspected CIA drone strikes in Yemen. His father, the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, also an American citizen, was killed earlier this month, along with alleged al-Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan, who was from New York. When Abdul Rahman's death was first reported in the western press, his age was given as 21 by local Yemeni officials. Afterwards, however, the Awlaki family put out a copy of Abdulrahman's birth certificate.
According to his relatives, Abdulrahman left the family home in the Sana'a area on Sept. 30 in search of his fugitive father who was hiding out with his tribe, the Awalak, in the remote, rugged southern province of Shabwa. Days after the teenager began his quest, however, his father was killed in a U.S. drone strike. Then, just two weeks later, the Yemeni government claimed another airstrike killed a senior al-Qaeda militant. Abdulrahman, his teenage cousin, and six others died in the attack as well. A U.S. official said the young man "was in the wrong place at the wrong time," and that the U.S. was trying to kill a legitimate terrorist ? al-Qaeda leader Ibrahim al-Banna, who also died ? in the strike that apparently killed the American teen-ager. (See a video on the volatile uprisings in Yemen.)
Abdulrahman's distraught grandfather is not buying the explanation. Nasser al-Awlaki, who received a university degree in the U.S., had for years sought an injunction in American courts to prevent the Obama administration from targetting and killing his son, Anwar. He told TIME, "I really feel disappointed that this crime is going to be forgotten. I think the American people ought to know what really happened and how the power of their government is being abused by this administration. Americans should start asking why a boy was targeted for killing." He continued, "In addition to my grandson's killing the missile killed by brother's grandson who was a 17-years old kid, who was not an American citizen but is a human being killed in cold blood. I cannot comprehend how my teenage grandson was killed by a Hellfire missile. How nothing was left of him except small pieces of flesh. Why? Is America safer now that a boy was killed?" As for his son, Abdulrahman's father, Nasser al-Awlaki says that the U.S. "killed my son Anwar without a trial for any crime he committed... They killed him just for his freedom of speech." He levels the charges directly at the U.S. President. "I urge the American people to bring the killers to justice. I urge them to expose the hypocrisy of the 2009 Nobel Prize laureate. To some he may be that. To me and my family he is nothing more than a child killer."
Meanwhile, the U.S. is caught between prosecuting the campaign, which depends in part on intelligence provided by security forces loyal to Yemen's embattled government, and encouraging political change. Inspired by the Arab Spring, Yemen has been convulsed by nine months of anti-government demonstrations which are now verging dangerously on civil war. U.S. diplomats have tried to manage a transition that will see President Ali Abdullah Saleh step down but keep the Yemeni state focused on counter-terrorism. "America's view of our country is wrong, and motivated only by its own cynical interests," says Hassan Luqman, a demonstrator camped out in the indefatigable sit-in colony known as "Change Square" in Yemen's capital. "Its support for the regime is a dishonor to all the youths who have fallen as martyrs struggling against it." (See an interview with Ali Abdullah Saleh, president of Yemen.)
Western diplomats contend that while terrorism figures prominently in their concerns on Yemen, they are refusing to let the recent killing of several prominent al-Qaeda leaders distract them from the task of seeking a constructive political solution. "I'm sure the government hoped recent successes against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would diminish pressure on them, but we maintain our line," a Sana'a-based Western diplomat said. "This hasn't changed the course on Yemen's long-term issues."
But the campaign of aerial bombardments in Yemen, accelerated by the Obama administration, has all too often missed its intended targets and killed innocents, aggravating the country's already dire humanitarian and security situation. In December 2009, a U.S. cruise missile crashed into a caravan of tents in the rural South, killing dozens, among them 14 women and 21 children. Despite an uproar by Yemeni rights groups and a detailed investigation by Amnesty International, U.S. officials refused to take responsibility for the bombing.
More disastrously, an American warplane wiped out the deputy governor of the oil-rich Maareb province along with his entire retinue last summer. They had gathered to accept the surrender of a wanted al-Qaeda militant who, finding the appointed site in flames, retraced his steps unscathed. A massive rebellion by the official's tribal kinsmen lingers to this day, and disturbances to the area's oil infrastructure have undercut the country's only lucrative export and severed the supply of electricity and fuel to millions of Yemenis every day. (See photos of the hand art of Yemen's protesters.)
Yemen's restive southern province of Abyan, has also been a focus of drone attacks, and has been at the center of a ferocious, months-long battle between army units ? supplied with essential provisions by the U.S. ? and al-Qaeda-linked militants. Refugees from the fighting, angrily recall seeing and hearing drones, and believe the government is deliberately exploiting the chaos to garner political capital from foreign powers. Her eyes aflame beneath a full black veil, Maryam, one of the refugees, noted, "I swear some of these bombs were American." Packed into a make-shift shelter in the Port city of Aden along with dozens of other families, she insisted, "We saw aircraft ? small planes ? we had never seen before, zooming above us 24 hours a day and terrifying our children."
Thousands of activists throughout southern Yemen, which had been an independent state until a bloody civil war imposed unification with the North two decades ago, see the al-Qaeda issue as a distraction from their legitimate grievances and calls for autonomy. "The South is rich in oil, and sits along one of the world's biggest shipping lanes," says Hassan al-Bishi, a general in the former South Yemen and anti-government activist. "If the United States continues to ignore our interests and focus only on one silly issue, we must seek other allies...China or Iran, for instance."
Cutting deeply into the country's political conflicts and across its broad expanse, the U.S. bombing offensive risks alienating the youth who will inevitably inherit Yemen's future. "I have one question for you," said one of Abdulrahman's young friends, his gloom turning to anger. "Who can't America kill?"
High-quality white light produced by four-color laser sourcePublic release date: 26-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: neal singer nsinger@sandia.gov 505-845-7078 DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
diode lasers eventually could challenge LEDs for home and industrial lighting supremacy
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories.
Both technologies pass electrical current through material to generate light, but the simpler LED emits lights only through spontaneous emission. Diode lasers bounce light back and forth internally before releasing it.
The finding is important because LEDs -- widely accepted as more efficient and hardier replacements for century-old tungsten incandescent bulb technology -- lose efficiency at electrical currents above 0.5 amps. However, the efficiency of a sister technology -- the diode laser -- improves at higher currents, providing even more light than LEDs at higher amperages.
"What we showed is that diode lasers are a worthy path to pursue for lighting," said Sandia researcher Jeff Tsao, who proposed the comparative experiment. "Before these tests, our research in this direction was stopped before it could get started. The typical response was, 'Are you kidding? The color rendering quality of white light produced by diode lasers would be terrible.' So finally it seemed like, in order to go further, one really had to answer this very basic question first."
Little research had been done on diode lasers for lighting because of a widespread assumption that human eyes would find laser-based white light unpleasant. It would comprise four extremely narrow-band wavelengths -- blue, red, green, and yellow -- and would be very different from sunlight, for example, which blends a wide spectrum of wavelengths with no gaps in between. Diode laser light is also ten times narrower than that emitted by LEDs.
The tests -- a kind of high-tech market research -- took place at the University of New Mexico's Center for High Technology Materials. Forty volunteers were seated, one by one, before two near-identical scenes of fruit in bowls, housed in adjacent chambers. Each bowl was randomly illuminated by warm, cool, or neutral white LEDs, by a tungsten-filament incandescent light bulb, or by a combination of four lasers (blue, red, green, yellow) tuned so their combination produced a white light.
The experiment proceeded like an optometrist's exam: the subjects were asked: Do you prefer the left picture, or the right? All right, how about now?
The viewers were not told which source provided the illumination. They were instructed merely to choose the lit scene with which they felt most comfortable. The pairs were presented in random order to ensure that neither sequence nor tester preconceptions played roles in subject choices, but only the lighting itself. The computer program was written, and the set created, by Alexander Neumann, a UNM doctoral student of CHTM director Steve Brueck.
Each participant, selected from a variety of age groups, was asked to choose 80 times between the two changing alternatives, a procedure that took ten to twenty minutes, said Sandia scientist Jonathan Wierer, who helped plan, calibrate and execute the experiments. Five results were excluded when the participants proved to be color-blind. The result was that there was a statistically significant preference for the diode-laser-based white light over the warm and cool LED-based white light, Wierer said, but no statistically significant preference between the diode-laser-based and either the neutral LED-based or incandescent white light.
The results probably won't start a California gold rush of lighting fabricators into diode lasers, said Tsao, but they may open a formerly ignored line of research. Diode lasers are slightly more expensive to fabricate than LEDs because their substrates must have fewer defects than those used for LEDs. Still, he said, such substrates are likely to become more available in the future because they improve LED performance as well.
Also, while blue diode lasers have good enough performance that the automaker BMW is planning their use in its vehicles' next-generation white headlights, performance of red diode lasers is not as good, and yellow and green have a ways to go before they are efficient enough for commercial lighting opportunities.
Still, says Tsao, a competition wouldn't have to be all or nothing. Instead, he said, a cooperative approach might use blue and red diode lasers with yellow and green LEDs. Or blue diode lasers could be used to illuminate phosphors -- the technique currently used by fluorescent lights and the current generation of LED-based white light -- to create desirable shades of light.
The result makes possible still further efficiencies for the multibillion dollar lighting industry. The so-called ''smart beams'' can be adjusted on site for personalized color renderings for health reasons and, because they are directional, also can provide illumination precisely where it's wanted.
###
Colorimetric and experimental guidance was provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The research was published in the July 1, Optics Express.
This work was conducted as part of the Solid-State Lighting Science Energy Frontier Research Center, funded by the U.S. DOE Office of Science.
pic cutlines: Sandia researcher Jeff Tsao examines the set-up used to test diode lasers as an alternative to LED lighting. Skeptics felt laser light would be too harsh to be acceptable. Research by Tsao and colleagues suggests the skeptics were wrong. (Photo by Randy Montoya). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
In the test setup, similar bowls of fruit were placed in a lightbox with a divider in the middle. In this photo, the bowl on one side was illuminated by a diode laser light and the other was lit by a standard incandescent bulb. The aesthetic quality of diode laser lighting (left bowl) compares favorably with standard incandescent lighting (right). (Photo by Randy Montoya). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
Four laser beams -- yellow, blue, green and red -- converge to produce a pleasantly warm white light. Results suggest that diode-based lighting could be an attractive alternative to increasingly popular LED lighting, themselves an alternative to compact-florescent lights and incandescent bulbs. (Photo by Randy Montoya). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov 505-845-7078
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
High-quality white light produced by four-color laser sourcePublic release date: 26-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: neal singer nsinger@sandia.gov 505-845-7078 DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
diode lasers eventually could challenge LEDs for home and industrial lighting supremacy
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories.
Both technologies pass electrical current through material to generate light, but the simpler LED emits lights only through spontaneous emission. Diode lasers bounce light back and forth internally before releasing it.
The finding is important because LEDs -- widely accepted as more efficient and hardier replacements for century-old tungsten incandescent bulb technology -- lose efficiency at electrical currents above 0.5 amps. However, the efficiency of a sister technology -- the diode laser -- improves at higher currents, providing even more light than LEDs at higher amperages.
"What we showed is that diode lasers are a worthy path to pursue for lighting," said Sandia researcher Jeff Tsao, who proposed the comparative experiment. "Before these tests, our research in this direction was stopped before it could get started. The typical response was, 'Are you kidding? The color rendering quality of white light produced by diode lasers would be terrible.' So finally it seemed like, in order to go further, one really had to answer this very basic question first."
Little research had been done on diode lasers for lighting because of a widespread assumption that human eyes would find laser-based white light unpleasant. It would comprise four extremely narrow-band wavelengths -- blue, red, green, and yellow -- and would be very different from sunlight, for example, which blends a wide spectrum of wavelengths with no gaps in between. Diode laser light is also ten times narrower than that emitted by LEDs.
The tests -- a kind of high-tech market research -- took place at the University of New Mexico's Center for High Technology Materials. Forty volunteers were seated, one by one, before two near-identical scenes of fruit in bowls, housed in adjacent chambers. Each bowl was randomly illuminated by warm, cool, or neutral white LEDs, by a tungsten-filament incandescent light bulb, or by a combination of four lasers (blue, red, green, yellow) tuned so their combination produced a white light.
The experiment proceeded like an optometrist's exam: the subjects were asked: Do you prefer the left picture, or the right? All right, how about now?
The viewers were not told which source provided the illumination. They were instructed merely to choose the lit scene with which they felt most comfortable. The pairs were presented in random order to ensure that neither sequence nor tester preconceptions played roles in subject choices, but only the lighting itself. The computer program was written, and the set created, by Alexander Neumann, a UNM doctoral student of CHTM director Steve Brueck.
Each participant, selected from a variety of age groups, was asked to choose 80 times between the two changing alternatives, a procedure that took ten to twenty minutes, said Sandia scientist Jonathan Wierer, who helped plan, calibrate and execute the experiments. Five results were excluded when the participants proved to be color-blind. The result was that there was a statistically significant preference for the diode-laser-based white light over the warm and cool LED-based white light, Wierer said, but no statistically significant preference between the diode-laser-based and either the neutral LED-based or incandescent white light.
The results probably won't start a California gold rush of lighting fabricators into diode lasers, said Tsao, but they may open a formerly ignored line of research. Diode lasers are slightly more expensive to fabricate than LEDs because their substrates must have fewer defects than those used for LEDs. Still, he said, such substrates are likely to become more available in the future because they improve LED performance as well.
Also, while blue diode lasers have good enough performance that the automaker BMW is planning their use in its vehicles' next-generation white headlights, performance of red diode lasers is not as good, and yellow and green have a ways to go before they are efficient enough for commercial lighting opportunities.
Still, says Tsao, a competition wouldn't have to be all or nothing. Instead, he said, a cooperative approach might use blue and red diode lasers with yellow and green LEDs. Or blue diode lasers could be used to illuminate phosphors -- the technique currently used by fluorescent lights and the current generation of LED-based white light -- to create desirable shades of light.
The result makes possible still further efficiencies for the multibillion dollar lighting industry. The so-called ''smart beams'' can be adjusted on site for personalized color renderings for health reasons and, because they are directional, also can provide illumination precisely where it's wanted.
###
Colorimetric and experimental guidance was provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The research was published in the July 1, Optics Express.
This work was conducted as part of the Solid-State Lighting Science Energy Frontier Research Center, funded by the U.S. DOE Office of Science.
pic cutlines: Sandia researcher Jeff Tsao examines the set-up used to test diode lasers as an alternative to LED lighting. Skeptics felt laser light would be too harsh to be acceptable. Research by Tsao and colleagues suggests the skeptics were wrong. (Photo by Randy Montoya). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
In the test setup, similar bowls of fruit were placed in a lightbox with a divider in the middle. In this photo, the bowl on one side was illuminated by a diode laser light and the other was lit by a standard incandescent bulb. The aesthetic quality of diode laser lighting (left bowl) compares favorably with standard incandescent lighting (right). (Photo by Randy Montoya). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
Four laser beams -- yellow, blue, green and red -- converge to produce a pleasantly warm white light. Results suggest that diode-based lighting could be an attractive alternative to increasingly popular LED lighting, themselves an alternative to compact-florescent lights and incandescent bulbs. (Photo by Randy Montoya). Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated and managed by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
Sandia news media contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov 505-845-7078
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BEIJING (Reuters) ? China said on Wednesday it will launch within weeks its first spacecraft capable of docking with a module it put into orbit last month, in what will mark a crucial test of its growing space program.
The unmanned Shenzhou-8 spacecraft, carried by the Long March-2F rocket, will blast off in early November, state media reported, and will later try to dock with the Tiantong-1, or "Heavenly Palace-1" space laboratory module China launched in September.
Officials with China's space program have said the docking tests will provide experience for the building of a permanent manned space station around 2020.
It is also the latest in a long string of Chinese space launches that have burnished national pride, as budget restraints and shifting priorities have held back U.S. manned space launches.
The official Xinhua news agency did not give a specific date for the launch, but said the craft was being transported to the remote Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert.
Beijing is still far from catching up with space superpowers. Russia, the United States and other countries jointly operate the International Space Station, a group to which China does not belong.
The United States will not test a new rocket to take people into space until 2017. Russia has said manned missions are no longer a priority for its space program, which has struggled with delays and glitches.
China launched its second moon orbiter last year after it became only the third country to send its astronauts walking in space outside their orbiting craft in 2008.
It plans an unmanned moon landing and deployment of a moon rover in 2012, and the retrieval of lunar soil and stone samples around 2017. Scientists have talked about the possibility of sending a man to the moon after 2020.
China is also jostling with neighbors Japan and India for a bigger presence in space, but its plans have faced international wariness. Beijing says its aims are peaceful, and that the involvement of its military is natural given the magnitude of the undertaking.
(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Paul Tait)
All Critics (90) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (83) | Rotten (7)
A work of hushed and persuasive emotional veracity.
The movies have long been mad about the onset of madness.
The chilling genius of "Take Shelter'' isn't that the threat is never specified but that it doesn't need to be.
A movie for this moment in time, this moment in our lives.
The movie makes you uncomfortable, but in a good way. Nichols has turned the current moment of American unease into a powerful metaphor.
The story of a man afflicted with fearful visions, Take Shelter is a film that's hitting the right apocalyptic trumpet call at the right time.
Take Shelter is paced slowly and deliberately, which is necessary to make believable whatever is tormenting Curtis.
Those who've never understood [anxiety] could do to see Take Shelter as a total immersion virtual reality experience.
With that frowning face - including a right eye that looks sleepy and a left one that looks crazed - Michael Shannon could play Jekyll and Hyde at the same exact time.
Michael Shannon gives his best onscreen performance ever... and creates what might well be the finest male character of 2011.
While Take Shelter is a marvellously composed film, it is also one that holds you at a distance
Out of his 'Tree of Life'
It's creepy and enigmatic, but there's an odd sense of enlightenment as well, making the effort valuable, even if Nichols gets lost in his own material at times.
An engrossing, quietly unnerving film that's one of the year's best...with an astonishing performance by Michael Shannon.
It's so stunningly effective at establishing a sense of dread that it's almost impossible to recommend it without reservations.
The film has the form of a little domestic drama, but it's intense enough to, perhaps, cause you to start watching the skies yourself.
Is Curtis a prophet or is he just crazy? The script, by tyro director Jeff Nichols, does a good job keeping you guessing and still surprises you in the end.
Shannon's talent can be hard to control - it can burst the containment of his character and destabilize a movie - but in "Take Shelter" it is expertly deployed by writer-director Jeff Nichols.
Relentlessly sinister, filled with an eerily ambiguous sense of unease.
Shannon reteams with Shotgun Stories writer-director Nichols for another exploration of one man's wobbling mental state. But this time the story is much more introspective, and watching it is thoroughly unnerving.
A dread-inducing and sometimes downright creepy exercise in Hitchcockian paranoia.
A compelling character-driven piece that offers a beguiling, unsettling inside view of a troubled mind.
Monday night was Broadway night on ?Dancing With the Stars,? but despite the fun theme and loads of classic show tunes, the ballroom turned into a brawl-room when one pro and one judge went head-to-head in a post-performance war of words.
Yes, somewhere between near perfect performances from Ricki Lake and J.R. Martinez, and the requisite weekly dud from Chaz Bono, sparks flew.
It all started after Hope Solo completed a rumba that was ... well, about what one would expect from a Hope Solo rumba ? a little stiff, not quite sexy enough and not too precise with the footwork. But it wasn?t the absolute worst routine from her or the low point of the night. (For the latter, see Bono?s ?Phantom of the Opera? number, which could serve as a tutorial in how not to tango.)
Join us for 'Dancing' chats on Tuesdays at 3:30 ET
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You be the judge! Rate the 'Dancing' contestants
Sometimes, it's hard to agree with the judges when they score the celebrities on their footwork. Now you can rate the stars' performances too.
Updated 73 minutes ago
10/25/2011 3:26:35 AM +00:00
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At first, head judge Len Goodman assured Solo that he always thought there was ?so much there? in terms of hoofer potential from her. It just never comes out. From there, tough Goodman took over with heel-lead nitpicks and even criticism for Solo?s bad boots. Then he went for the kicker.
?This was your worst dance of the whole season, in my opinion,? he said.
With that, the audience erupted in boos, and feeling their support, Solo?s partner, the always outspoken Maksim Chmerkovskiy, encouraged the crowd to keep the jeers coming.
Goodman was not amused.
?Don?t start all of that, Maks, 'cause half the fault is yours,? he snapped.
And it was on!
Story: You be the judge! Rate the 'Dancing' contestants
Chmerkovskiy pointed out the praise from the audience. Goodman countered, citing his 50 years of experience. The "Dancing" pro? He suggested to the venerable panelist that ?maybe it?s time to get out.?
Fellow judges Carrie Ann Inaba and Bruno Tonioli briefly jumped in at that point, calling for some judicial respect. But it seemed that Chmerkovskiy had already had enough of the unbalanced judging act that gives props for just for trying for hopefuls Bono and Nancy Grace, and a long list of technical complaints for Solo.
?With all due respect, this is my show,? he told co-host Brooke Burke after the panel flashed two 7s and a 6 for the dance. ?You know, I help make it what it is. I love every aspect of it. I love every professional that?s ever been here, and I love ever celebrity that puts effort in to it every week. Having said that, I?m a little tired that we?re being judged some on effort and some being picked on for heel leads. That?s all I?m saying.?
'Dancing' stars step out to support Bono
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Hard to argue with that logic, but some might take exception with the spotlight-stealing effect Chmerkovskiy?s ballroom battle had ? someone like fellow pro Derek Hough, who pulled the best ?Oh no he didn?t!? mug in the background as Chmerkovskiy ranted away. Or Cheryl Burke, who took on the uncomfortable, telltale stare of someone trying get through an awkward holiday meal with the in-laws.
At least it didn?t last too long. Soon enough, the pros and the amateurs put the drama to rest and hit the stage for the just-for-fun group dance, and as group dances go, it wasn?t half bad.
Heck, even grumpy Goodman gave it a thumbs-up.
Pee-wee Herman: I want to go 'Dancing'
Who?ll waltz right out of the competition Tuesday night? Well, given the random mix of ousters we?ve seen so far, it seems just as likely that a worthy boot (like the good-hearted but bad-footed Bono) could go as it does a middle-of-the-pack contender (David Arquette). But then again, the butting of heads in the ballroom could hurt Solo even though she stayed mostly silent through it all.
In other words, we?ll soon see.
Ree Hines remains a loyal member of Team Maks. What did you think of the night?s ballroom battle? Tell us on our Facebook page! Also, be sure to join Ree for our weekly post-performance ?Dancing? chat on Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. ET.?
Nokia introduced the Lumia smartphone line today, the first of its global wave of phones powered by Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. Living up to Nokia's reputation, the phones are bold, beautiful ? and not yet available in the U.S.
According to a tipster, social product review site gdgt?will be expanding its embeddable widget offerings, which have previously included Time's Techland blog, to a more massive scale on our sister AOL site, Engadget. A screencap of how the integration will work, above. Like TechCrunch's Crunchbase, gdgt will be syndicating its crowdsourced product data, user review data, Q&A and discussions across related Engadget content. In return gdgt will benefit from the exposure to Engadget?s formidable readership.
Ken's historic battle against Lord Mercury was the first, and biggest battle in MWF history. It was the first to display superhuman abilities in combat, and to label Ken as "The World's Strongest Man." After that battle, no man challenged Ken. Any man who did is probably dead, like Mercury, after the confirmation that his vitals stopped.
NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) ? Chord Overstreet will return to "Glee" for a multi-episode arc, Fox announced Monday.
The announcement followed the decision -- which evoked the wrath of many "Glee" fans -- not to bring him back to the show this season after he debuted in the second season.
Overstreet's Sam Evans will be back at McKinley High beginning in December.
"We love Chord and have always said that we wanted him back," said Ryan Murphy, executive producer and co-creator of "Glee."
"So here's an early Christmas present for all the Gleeks -- Sam is coming back to McKinley, and just in time for sectionals!"
Added Overstreet: "I had the best time on 'Glee' and couldn't be more excited to be returning."
Josh Nesbit sees a bright future for the cellphones that most of us see as antiquated. The 24-year-old Nesbit is the CEO of nonprofit Medic Mobile, and this startup exec?s vision is to take those chunky Nokias and other phones of the recent past?the kind that most Americans threw out or relegated to the junk drawer long ago?and use them to radically change how health care is delivered in developing nations.
These old phones don?t have the touchscreens and slick software features of our shiny new smartphones. But they can text, and in Nesbit?s eyes, a simple technology like text messaging is a tool that can be used to track disease outbreaks, help first responders quickly locate victims after disasters, and more.
Nesbit and I first met on a drizzling Tuesday morning in New York, as he was getting ready to deliver a presentation to the United Nations Foundation?s mHealth Alliance about mobile health?more specifically, on what he calls the calls the marriage of ?techies and healthies.? He knows that SMS and SIM card applications are not sexy technologies. For him, though, it?s the numbers that are so attractive. There are more than 5 billion mobile phone subscribers across the globe, while 90 percent of the world?s population is covered by a cell signal. In sub-Saharan Africa, an area plagued by public health woes and a lack of infrastructure, 50 percent of people now have access to a cellphone. Within two years, if not sooner, that figure will jump to 100 percent. ?Ubiquity is the killer app,? Nesbit says.
The notion that SMS could revolutionize healthcare first entered Nesbit?s mind in 2007, when he was still a Stanford undergrad. He?d just met Dickson Mtanga, a community health worker in rural Malawi who was walking 35 miles to deliver handwritten patient charts to the nearest hospital. Nesbit biked out to Mtanga?s village one day, only to discover that his cellphone got a better signal there than it did on Stanford?s campus in Palo Alto, Calif. All those bars of service jumped from the phone?s screen and slapped him across the face: These far-reaching GSM networks, he realized, could connect doctors and patients like never before.
Armed with a $5000 grant, a backpack full of old phones, and a laptop running a GSM modem and the open-source group-texting software called FrontlineSMS, Nesbit started working with the hospital and community health workers to coordinate patient care. The system they put in place allowed Mtanga and others to text in the information on those medical charts rather than making the hours-long trek. Patients could text their symptoms to doctors, cutting down on unnecessary visits for minor ailments and freeing up space for those in need of serious care. Within six months of the system going live, the number of patients being treated for tuberculosis doubled, more than 1200 hours in travel time were eliminated, and emergency services became available in the area for the first time. The operating costs in those six months: $500, Nesbit says.
Malawi was the proof-of-concept he needed, but another challenge soon followed when a massive earthquake tore apart Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2010. Nesbit knew that group-texting could support the relief effort. Within a few hours, working with the U.S. State Department and with mobile operators in Haiti, he secured 4636 as a short code that any victim could text for free to request assistance.
The messages started coming in?but a tad too fast. ?If you tell people to text their name and location, you?re going to get free-form messages in mostly Haitian Creole with vague references to locations,? Nesbit says. In order to help decipher these urgent texts requesting search-and-rescue teams, more water, or any number of other needs, Nesbit and his team recruited an army of 2500 volunteers over the Internet who spoke Haitian Creole and knew the logistics of Port-au-Prince. ?They were essentially mapping, categorizing, and translating every single one of those texts, and we ended up processing 80,000 messages in the first three weeks after the earthquake.? When Nesbit?s team got actionable info, they forwarded it to the U.S. Army?s forces on the ground.
Volunteers came through to decipher messages in Haiti, but it?s unrealistic to rely on the good intentions of strangers as a filter for hundreds or thousands of texts. To improve how it processes texts, Medic Mobile recently handed a computational linguist at Stanford six months of free-form texts between community health workers and physicians in Malawi. The linguist developed an AI method that could differentiate the type of requests and then bump the most urgent messages, such as someone in need of emergency treatment, to the top of the queue for when the doctor checked the messages. It auto-categorized the messages with a 98 percent accuracy rate, even when words were misspelled, punctuation was erratic, and different dialects appeared.
Mobile Health
The explosion of cellphone use around the world has inspired a flood of new ideas about how to use that tech to improve healthcare. Besides Nesbit?s Medic Mobile, there are also ideas to turn camera phones into cheap diagnostic tools for vision problems or malaria, for example.
Patty Mechael, executive director of the U.N. Foundation?s mHealth Alliance, keeps tabs on these new techs. They all face major infrastructure hurdles, such as the lack of reliable energy sources to power phone chargers in some developing countries. But another, less tangible challenge is figuring out what mobile health programs are actually working and worth scaling up, and which ones aren?t. ?What we have in mHealth are millions of flowers blooming, in many ways. Lots of pilots are being done throughout the world, many of which are reaching populations of a few thousand each,? Mechael says. ?We?re at a tipping point where people are starting to say, ?Okay, we need to be a bit more strategic, collaborative, cohesive.??
Nesbit is among the voices calling for a more focused approach to mobile health. A wave of angst washes over his face when I ask if there?s too much hype surrounding mobile health, if it?s too saturated of a field. Hype is good, he says. What?s bad is hype that?s disconnected from implementation. All the media coverage and promises made about mobile health in recent years, he says, make it seem as if millions of health workers in developing nations have already integrated their phones into their daily practice. In reality, only about 20,000 have done so. Medic Mobile has SMS systems operating in 14 countries, and that number will jump to 20 in the next six months. Only a few thousand people are using Medic Mobile?s programs today, but the nonprofit just rolled out its first SIM card application, which can be used on virtually every mobile phone in existence. By 2015, Nesbit expects to have 500,000 community health workers using SMS applications to link patients with doctors.
If he hits those numbers, ubiquity really will be the killer app.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) ? France and Germany are close to a deal to leverage the euro zone bailout fund through first loss insurance for the primary bond market and a special purpose vehicle with an EFSF subordinated loan for the secondary market, euro zone officials said.
There is also wide support for a declaration from euro zone leaders which would welcome continued European Central Bank bond purchases on the secondary bond market, the officials said. The ECB has said it would prefer to take a back seat once the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) is fully functional with new powers.
"There is broad backing for a declaration of euro zone leaders supporting continued ECB bond purchases," one euro zone official said.
"France backed down on its demand to leverage the EFSF with the ECB, but insisted the ECB should still be somehow involved through its bond buying programme on the secondary market," a second euro zone official said.
"The ECB would make very clear it will stay on the market," the second official said.
Separately, the 440 billion euro EFSF will seek to get more bang for its buck on the primary and secondary markets to turn investor sentiment back in favor of Italian and Spanish paper.
This, policymakers hope, would prevent the third and fourth largest euro zone economies from running into financing problems that could prove too big for the euro zone to handle.
"There are only two models which are getting more detailed now. The first is the insurance scheme, the second is an SPV of the EFSF, into which third parties could pay in," a third euro zone source said.
"In the end, a mixture of the two models could be decided on. Additionally the EU should talk with the IMF about further cooperation," the third official said.
The second official explained that the EFSF would guarantee the first 20-30 percent of losses investors might suffer if they bought the bonds of Italy or Spain at a primary auction and the sovereigns later defaulted.
To support the secondary market, the EFSF would create a special purpose vehicle (SPV) with private investors, sovereign wealth funds or other institutions, perhaps the International Monetary Fund, who would contribute paid-in capital.
With the twin measures, a two-tier bond market with primary issuance insured, and existing bonds not, would be avoided.
The EFSF would also commit to pay capital to the SPV through a subordinated loan.
Against this capital the new SPV would then borrow money on the market and use the cash to buy bonds of Italy or Spain on the secondary market.
In case of a default of one of the pair, the EFSF would be the first liable to cover the losses.
Euro zone officials cautioned however, that details of the scheme were still under discussion and could yet change -- for instance whether the EFSF should guarantee the SPV borrowing or the subordination of the loan was enough.
(Additional reporting by Jan Strupczewski and Ilona Wissenbach; writing by Jan Strupczewski, editing by Mike Peacock)
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Public release date: 26-Oct-2011
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