NASA Talk Examines Adaption to Rising Coastal Sea Levels

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OnTuesday, April 7, at NASA's Langley Research Center inHampton, Virginia,Hans-Peter Plagwill present "Adaptation to Sea Level Rise: Protecting Against, or Preparing for, Inundation of the Coastal Zone?" at2 p.m.in the Pearl Young Theater.

The director of the Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute (MARI) atOld Dominion UniversityinNorfolk, Virginia, Plag will propose the onset of major changes in how we think about the future of coastal zones due to the projected rise in sea levels.

Plag will be available to answer questions from the media during a news briefing at1:15 p.m.that day. Media who wish to do so should contactChris Rinkat 757-864-6786, or by e-mail atchris.rink@nasa.gov, by noon on the day of the talk for credentials and entry to the center.

That same evening at 7:30, Plag will present a similar program for the general public at the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtownHampton. This Sigma Series event is free and no reservations are required.

The sea level has been stable during the last 6,000 years, so humans have developed large settlements in coastal zones throughout the world. The current coastal infrastructure relies on this stable sea level and coastline, but there have been rapid climate changes observed in recent decades.

The projected changes point to a sea level rise during the next few centuries that will far exceed those experienced by past civilizations. This rise will lead to major changes in the coastline with few options to protect large areas of the coastal zone.

As director of MARI, Plag's areas of expertise include sea level and climate change, disaster risk reduction, sustainability, and Earth system dynamics.

He studied mathematics and geophysics, earning degrees in 1976 from the Technische Fachhochschule Berlin technical college and in 1982 from the Free University ofBerlin. Plag holds a doctorate in natural sciences from the Free University ofBerlin, and worked at universities and research institutes inGermany, theUnited Kingdom,Norwayandthe United States.

For more information about NASA Langley's Colloquium and Sigma Series Lectures, visit:

http://colloqsigma.larc.nasa.gov

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NASA Talk Examines Adaption to Rising Coastal Sea Levels

NASA's Super Pressure Balloon Marks First Continental Crossing

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Less than six days after launching from Wanaka, New Zealand, NASAs massive Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) completed its first continental crossing April 1 flying over the southern tips of Chile and Argentina.

The balloon reached the South American continent around noon EDT, April 1, and continues on its potentially record-breaking mission that could see multiple circumnavigations of the globe over several weeks of flight.

The balloon is performing exceptionally well, said Debbie Fairbrother, NASAs Balloon Program Office chief and principal investigator for the SPB. The team is absolutely thrilled with the balloons performance results to date, and we look forward to many, many more days of flight.

The SPB launched March 26 Eastern Time (March 27 New Zealand time) and has traveled nearly a third of the way around the world flying a 5,000-pound tracking and telemetry payload at a constant, near-space altitude of 110,000 feet.

The balloon continues to perform as expected thanks to theexpertise and efforts of the super pressure balloon team and our experienced mission specialists at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, said John Pullen, general manager, Technical Services Division of Orbital ATKs Space Systems Group. Each day brings the NASA/Orbital ATK team another step closer towards exceeding the current super pressure balloon record of 54 days in flight.

The mission seeks to validate the SPB technology, specifically its ability to fly at a constant, near-space altitude as well as flying long duration upward of 100 days.

The science and engineering communities have previously identified ultra long-duration balloon flights at stable altitudes as playing an important role in providing low cost access to the near-space environment for science and technology.

Maintaining a constant float altitude in the stratosphere is a formidable challenge for airborne systems, including balloons. Most standard heavy-lift zero pressure balloons can vary in altitudes as great as 45,000 feet (13.7 km) due to the alternating warming and cooling of the day and night cycle. In response, mission operators typically release excess weight in the form of ballast to maintain altitude. However, the SPB is designed to maintain a positive internal pressure and shape irrespective of its environment, which keeps the balloon at a constant float altitude. Put another way, in much the same way a car tire pressure changes based on the environment around it while maintaining its volume, so does the SPB.

Anyone may track the progress of the flight, which includes a map showing the balloons real-time location, at:

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NASA's Super Pressure Balloon Marks First Continental Crossing

How Advances In Battlefield Medicine Can Save Civilians' Lives

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Medics surround a wounded U.S. soldier as he arrives at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. Chris Hondros/Getty Images hide caption

Medics surround a wounded U.S. soldier as he arrives at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan.

About 10 years ago, Dr. Swaminatha Mahadevan was conducting research at a Nepalese hospital, when he witnessed something that would never have happened back home in California.

An older man had been in a road accident and was thrown from a car. He was lying on a hospital gurney. He was bleeding to death. "But no one was doing anything about it," says Mahadevan, an emergency medicine professor at Stanford University. "In the States, this man would have had a whole team of doctors leaning over him."

But in Nepal, there was no one. The hospital didn't have the staff or resources to save the man's life.

Mahadevan jumped into action, tying a sheet around the man's wounds to slow the bleeding. "I don't know if he survived," Mahadevan says. But the incident helped him realize something: Most poor countries just aren't equipped to deal with such emergencies. And yet, violence and injuries cause more deaths each year worldwide than HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined.

Now researchers in London think tools developed for battlefield hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan can help fill in this gap. They want to adapt wartime medical techniques to help civilians in poor countries, which often have high rates of traffic accidents, building collapses, fires and gun violence.

With new technologies and some innovative tricks, Army medics have gotten really good at treating injured troops. Battlefield casualties have fallen sharply, says Richard Sullivan, an epidemiologist at King's College London. "It's one positive thing that has come out of these conflicts," he says.

Sullivan and his colleagues published a study last month in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine exploring advancements in battlefield medicine, along with recommendations for how to use them in low- and middle-income countries.

In many cases, the key to saving someone whether injured in a war zone or a traffic accident is to keep him from bleeding to death before he gets to a hospital, the team wrote.

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Science and medicine have a 'publication pollution' problem

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Dr. Arthur Caplan warns that plagiarism, fraud and predatory publishing is 'corroding the reliability of research'

(New York, NY) April 3, 2015 - The scientific community is facing a 'pollution problem' in academic publishing, one that poses a serious threat to the "trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and medicine," according to one of the country's leading medical ethicists.

Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, director of the Division of Medical Ethics in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center, shares these and other observations in a commentary publishing April 3 in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

"The pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing is corroding the reliability of research," writes Dr. Caplan. "Yet neither the leadership nor those who rely on the truth of science and medicine are sounding the alarm loudly or moving to fix the problem with appropriate energy."

In his commentary, Dr. Caplan describes several causes of publication pollution:

According to Dr. Caplan: "All these polluting factors detract from the ability of scientists and physicians to trust what they read, devalue legitimate science, undermine the ability to reproduce legitimate findings, impose huge costs on the publication process, and take a toll in terms of disability and death when tests, treatments, and interventions are founded on faulty claims."

Dr. Caplan proposes a national meeting of leaders in science and medicine to lead a sustained challenge to proactively and aggressively go after this pollution problem.

"The currency of science is fragile, and allowing counterfeiters, fraudsters, bunko artists, scammers, and cheats to continue to operate with abandon in the publishing realm is unacceptable," he asserts.

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About NYU Langone Medical Center

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Science and medicine have a 'publication pollution' problem

Vice Dean Mini Kahlon explains how the Dell Medical School is driving a new vision for Austin – Video

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Vice Dean Mini Kahlon explains how the Dell Medical School is driving a new vision for Austin
The Dell Medical School is Live at South by Southwest. Mini Kahlon, Vice Dean of Strategy Partnerships, talks with Jay Boisseau, CEO and Co-founder of Vizias. The duo discusses the Dell Medical...

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Vice Dean Mini Kahlon explains how the Dell Medical School is driving a new vision for Austin - Video

SXSWs Hugh Forrest credits Dell Medical School as a catalyst for MedTech growth in Austin, TX – Video

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SXSWs Hugh Forrest credits Dell Medical School as a catalyst for MedTech growth in Austin, TX
The Dell Medical School is Live at South by Southwest. Hugh Forrest, Director of the SXSW Interactive festival, came by to talk with the school #39;s associate director of communications, Steve...

By: Dell Medical School - University of Texas at Austin

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SXSWs Hugh Forrest credits Dell Medical School as a catalyst for MedTech growth in Austin, TX - Video