What we know about engineered nanoparticles’ health and environmental safety

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In 2008, the Joint Research Centre, Institute for Health and Consumer Protection of the European Commission funded the project Engineered Nanoparticles: Review of Health and Environmental Safety (ENRHES). Last month, the ENRHES project released its final report. The overall aim of the ENRHES project was to perform a comprehensive and critical scientific review of the health and environmental safety of four classes of nanomaterials: fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, metals and metal oxides. The review considers sources, pathways of exposure, the health and environmental outcomes of concern, illustrating the state-of-the-art and identifying knowledge gaps in the field, in order to coalesce the evidence which has emerged to date and inform regulators of the potential risks of engineered nanoparticles in these specific classes.

Trapping sunlight with silicon nanowires

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Solar cells made from silicon are projected to be a prominent factor in future renewable green energy equations, but so far the promise has far exceeded the reality. While there are now silicon photovoltaics that can convert sunlight into electricity at impressive 20 percent efficiencies, the cost of this solar power is prohibitive for large-scale use. Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), however, are developing a new approach that could substantially reduce these costs.

Body Scanners protect Civil Liberties of Airline Passengers; despite concerns of Muslim critics

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by Eric Dondero

And so it begins... A Fatwa was issued last month worldwide directing all Muslims to resist the body scanner at airports. And we've just had the first test case, at an airport in the United Kingdom.

From The Times On-line, March 3:

A Muslim woman was barred from boarding a flight after she refused to undergo a full body scan for religious reasons.

The passenger was passing through security at Manchester Airport when she was selected at random for a full-body scanner.

She was warned that she would be stopped from boarding the plane but she decided to forfeit her ticket to Pakistan rather than submit to the scan. Her female travelling companion also declined to step into the scanner, citing “medical reasons” for her refusal.

The pair were attempting to fly to Islamabad in Pakistan.

The scanners have been in use for one month at Manchester and London Heathrow. The pair are the very first to refuse the use of the search method.

The Times goes on to explain:

The X-ray machines allow security officials to check for concealed weapons but they also afford clear outlines of passengers’ genitals. They are due to be introduced in all airports by the end of the year.

Leftist civil liberties groups are fiercely rejecting the scanners. Yet pro-civil liberties groups on the Right see this as a right of American and British passengers to be safe and secure from the threat of Islamic Terrorism.

From the aptly named blog Bare Naked Islam:

It isn't Islamaphobia when they are trying to kill you!

It’s about time the Brits got tough on Muslims... We should demand body scanners in every public building in America.

I side with the pro-security civil liberties advocates on this. From a libertarian view, such security measures are entirely consistent with a personal liberty standpoint. These are public, not private facilities. If the government in the UK were directing private facilities to install scanners, that would be an entirely different situation. After all, the women do have alternative and one might say "more traditional" means of transportation to Islamabad, such as the train, bus or even carriage.

Winds of Change: How Black Holes May Shape Galaxies

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Composite image of galaxy NGC 1068
New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory provide evidence for powerful winds blowing away from the vicinity of a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. This discovery indicates that "average" supermassive black holes may play an important role in the evolution of the galaxies in which they reside.


For years, astronomers have known that a supermassive black hole grows in parallel with its host galaxy. And, it has long been suspected that material blown away from a black hole -- as opposed to the fraction of material that falls into it -- alters the evolution of its host galaxy.

A key question is whether such "black hole blowback" typically delivers enough power to have a significant impact. Powerful relativistic jets shot away from the biggest supermassive black holes in large, central galaxies in clusters like Perseus are seen to shape their host galaxies, but these are rare. What about less powerful, less focused galaxy-scale winds that should be much more common?

"We're more interested here in seeing what an "average"-sized supermassive black hole can do to its galaxy, not the few, really big ones in the biggest galaxies," said Dan Evans of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who presented these results at the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Kona, Hawaii.

Evans and his colleagues used Chandra for five days to observe NGC 1068, one of the nearest and brightest galaxies containing a rapidly growing supermassive black hole. This black hole is only about twice as massive as the one in the center of our Galaxy, which is considered to be a rather ordinary size.

The X-ray images and spectra obtained using Chandra's High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer showed that a strong wind is being driven away from the center of NGC 1068 at a rate of about a million miles per hour. This wind is likely generated as surrounding gas is accelerated and heated as it swirls toward the black hole. A portion of the gas is pulled into the black hole, but some of it is blown away. High energy X-rays produced by the gas near the black hole heat the ouflowing gas, causing it to glow at lower X-ray energies.

This study by Evans and colleagues represents the first X-ray observation that is deep enough to make a high quality map of the cone-shaped volume lit up by the black hole and its winds. By combining measurement of the velocity of the clouds with estimates of the density of the gas, Evans and his colleagues showed that each year several times the mass of the Sun is being deposited out to large distances, about 3,000 light years from the black hole. The wind may carry enough energy to heat the surrounding gas and suppress extra star formation.

"We have shown that even these middle-of-the-road black holes can pack a punch," said Evans. "I think the upshot is that these black holes are anything but ordinary."

Further studies of other nearby galaxies will examine the impact of other AGN outflows, leading to improvements in our understanding of the evolution of both galaxies and black holes.

"In the future, our own Galaxy's black hole may undergo similar activity, helping to shut down the growth of new stars in the central region of the Milky Way," said Evans.

These new results provide a key comparison to previous work performed at Georgia State University and the Catholic University of America with the Hubble Space Telescope's STIS instrument.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

More information, including images and other multimedia, can be found at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu

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NASA Mars Orbiter Speeds Past Data Milestone

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Dunes and Inverted Crater in Arabia Terra
NASA's newest Mars orbiter, completing its fourth year at the Red Planet next week, has just passed a data-volume milestone unimaginable a generation ago and still difficult to fathom: 100 terabits.

That 100 trillion bits of information is more data than in 35 hours of uncompressed high-definition video. It's also more than three times the amount of data from all other deep-space missions combined -- not just the ones to Mars, but every mission that has flown past the orbit of Earth's moon.

"What is most impressive about all these data is not the sheer quantity, but the quality of what they tell us about our neighbor planet," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The data from the orbiter's six instruments have given us a much deeper understanding of the diversity of environments on Mars today and how they have changed over time."

The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars on March 10, 2006, following an Aug. 12, 2005, launch from Florida. It completed its primary science phase in 2008 and continues investigations of Mars' surface, subsurface and atmosphere.

The orbiter sports a dish antenna 3 meters (10 feet) in diameter and uses it to pour data Earthward at up to 6 megabits per second. Its science instruments are three cameras, a spectrometer for identifying minerals, a ground-penetrating radar and an atmosphere sounder.

The capability to return enormous volumes of data enables these instruments to view Mars at unprecedented spatial resolutions. Half the planet has been covered at 6 meters (20 feet) per pixel, and nearly 1 percent of the planet has been observed at about 30 centimeters (1 foot) per pixel, sharp enough to discern objects the size of a desk. The radar, provided by Italy, has looked beneath the surface in 6,500 observing strips, sampling about half the planet.

Among the mission's major findings is that the action of water on and near the surface of Mars occurred for hundreds of millions of years. This activity was at least regional and possibly global in extent, though possibly intermittent. The spacecraft has also observed that signatures of a variety of watery environments, some acidic, some alkaline, increase the possibility that there are places on Mars that could reveal evidence of past life, if it ever existed.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the spacecraft development and integration contractor for the project and built the spacecraft.

The Shallow Radar instrument was provided by the Italian Space Agency, and its operations are led by the InfoCom Department, University of Rome "La Sapienza." Thales Alenia Space Italia, in Rome, is the Italian Space Agency's prime contractor for the radar instrument. Astro Aerospace of Carpinteria, Calif., a business unit of Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp., developed the instrument's antenna as a subcontractor to Thales Alenia Space Italia.

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Seeing Eye-to-Eye on How to Fly

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The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, or NACA, which celebrates its 95th anniversary on March 3, provided the nation's earliest research and helped develop important technologies, as well as knowledge of flight safety and efficiency.

NASA adopted many of these research techniques and many of the places in which to do it, like wind tunnels and entire research centers, from the NACA. Engine cowlings to cover propellers and a series of proven air foil shapes for aircraft wings--both of which reduced drag and improved speed and efficiency--were chief NACA contributions subsequently adopted by every aircraft of the day and improved upon over the decades.

This image shows NACA chief test pilot Melvin Cough outside a hangar at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. The test vehicle on the right is a Curtiss BF2C-1 Goshawk, which was used by the U.S. Navy in the early 1930s and featured retractable landing gear.

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