Red Rocks continue perfect season, celebrate 40 years

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Red Rocks continue perfect season, celebrate 40 years

By Holli Joyce

February 5th, 2015 @ 6:45pm

SALT LAKE CITY It's the middle of the season and the fourth-ranked Utah gymnastics team remains undefeated (6-0, 2-0 Pac-12). It's coming off a tremendous win against Pac-12 rival Arizona, scoring its season-best overall score (197.85) thanks to nine of 13 gymnasts earning career-bests in at least one event.

It was a huge win and a lot of fun," said co-head coach Megan Marsden. "We felt like the girls finally unleashed and did what we have seen in training,

The Utes score ties with top-ranked Oklahomas season-high score. Marsden described the score as reassuring to know the team is at the very top.

As much as its difficult, it is the way we have move to the postseason to the Super Six, she added.

Nationally, the Red Rocks are ranked fourth on bars and beam, fifth on vault and tied for sixth on floor.

Floor ranking the lowest is no surprise to the team. Before the season began, the coaches decided not to do a lot of hard landings on the floor mat. The goal: keeping the athletes healthy throughout the long season.

Megan Marsden

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Red Rocks continue perfect season, celebrate 40 years

Red Devils adjusting to life without Rafferty

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HINSDALE For much of the past four years, Hinsdale Centrals boys basketball program hasnt known life without Matt Rafferty.

Now Grant Hutcherson and his Red Devil teammates are learning how to play without Rafferty, a standout senior forward who broke his right hand in a Jan. 23 game against York and could miss most of the rest of the season.

Weve been trying to keep our heads up for sure, Hutcherson said. Its definitely a blow seeing Raff go. Obviously hes our star, but were still confident in what we can do as a team and we know we can still get some wins without him, so weve practiced hard and focused on some different roles because we had to switch around some peoples roles.

Hutchersons role is one that has changed. The Red Devils sixth man at the start of the season, he saw more action in the post during a 51-47 loss against Oak Park-River Forest on Jan. 30 since George Kiernan missed the game to attend his grandmothers wake.

The Red Devils lost 61-49 against Glenbard West on Saturday to fall to 1-2 without Rafferty. They are 17-4 overall and 6-2 in the West Suburban Silver heading into Fridays 6 p.m. game at Proviso West.

Two-time defending WSS champs, the Red Devils now sit one game behind Lyons Township for the Silver lead, but their conference standing is not altering their overall goals.

Our goal is always just to play as well as we can and play at our full potential, so we never talk about number of wins or going undefeated or anything like that, Hinsdale Central head coach Nick Latorre said. We just say, Lets go out and play, improve and play as well as were capable of playing.

Against OPRF, Central saw Hutcherson (12 points), Thomas Ives (13 points) and Jordan Bradshaw (11 points) lead a balanced scoring effort. Hutcherson scored nine points in the first half, Bradshaw put up seven in the third quarter and Ives tallied eight in the final frame. Bradshaw and David Northey hit back-to-back 3-pointers to give the Red Devils a 27-26 third-quarter lead, but the Huskies pulled away down the stretch.

No matter who is on the floor, the Red Devils wont lack for work ethic.

This week were going to bust our butts even harder, learn our roles even better and try to get more comfortable with where were at and try to get more wins, Hutcherson said. Were a family and were gonna keep going hard and try to do something special this season.

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Red Devils adjusting to life without Rafferty

Red Devils adjusting to life without Matt Rafferty (video)

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HINSDALE For much of the past four years, Hinsdale Centrals boys basketball program hasnt known life without Matt Rafferty.

Now Grant Hutcherson and his Red Devil teammates are learning how to play without Rafferty, a standout senior forward who broke his right hand in a Jan. 23 game against York and could miss most of the rest of the season.

Weve been trying to keep our heads up for sure, Hutcherson said. Its definitely a blow seeing Raff go. Obviously hes our star, but were still confident in what we can do as a team and we know we can still get some wins without him, so weve practiced hard and focused on some different roles because we had to switch around some peoples roles.

Hutchersons role is one that has changed. The Red Devils sixth man at the start of the season, he saw more action in the post during a 51-47 loss against Oak Park-River Forest on Jan. 30 since George Kiernan missed the game to attend his grandmothers wake.

The Red Devils lost 61-49 against Glenbard West on Saturday to fall to 1-2 without Rafferty. They are 17-4 overall and 6-2 in the West Suburban Silver heading into Fridays 6 p.m. game at Proviso West.

Two-time defending WSS champs, the Red Devils now sit one game behind Lyons Township for the Silver lead, but their conference standing is not altering their overall goals.

Our goal is always just to play as well as we can and play at our full potential, so we never talk about number of wins or going undefeated or anything like that, Hinsdale Central head coach Nick Latorre said. We just say, Lets go out and play, improve and play as well as were capable of playing.

Against OPRF, Central saw Hutcherson (12 points), Thomas Ives (13 points) and Jordan Bradshaw (11 points) lead a balanced scoring effort. Hutcherson scored nine points in the first half, Bradshaw put up seven in the third quarter and Ives tallied eight in the final frame. Bradshaw and David Northey hit back-to-back 3-pointers to give the Red Devils a 27-26 third-quarter lead, but the Huskies pulled away down the stretch.

No matter who is on the floor, the Red Devils wont lack for work ethic.

This week were going to bust our butts even harder, learn our roles even better and try to get more comfortable with where were at and try to get more wins, Hutcherson said. Were a family and were gonna keep going hard and try to do something special this season.

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Red Devils adjusting to life without Matt Rafferty (video)

Tomorrow Daily – Ep. 122: Google growing human skin, Jennifer the skiing robot, NASA’s SMAP, and more – Video

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Tomorrow Daily - Ep. 122: Google growing human skin, Jennifer the skiing robot, NASA #39;s SMAP, and more
http://cnet.co/1LJHYd2 On today #39;s show, we explain why Google is growing human skin in a lab, watch an adorable robot ski in the name of science, and cheer on NASA as they start collecting...

By: CNET

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Tomorrow Daily - Ep. 122: Google growing human skin, Jennifer the skiing robot, NASA's SMAP, and more - Video

NASA officially backs mission to explore Europa

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Another celestial body has been added to NASA's bucket list with the space agency officially asking the US Congress for US$30 million for the first mission aimed at exploring Jupiters moon Europa. Part of the FY 2015 NASA Planetary Science budget, it would fund further development of an unmanned probe to study places in the Solar System other than Earth and Mars where life may exist.

Though NASA has made studies of missions to Europa before, these have been conceptual, while the new budget request now asks for double last year's appropriations to fund the build up to an actual mission. Though smaller than the Moon, many scientists believe that Europa has a subsurface ocean beneath its ice crust. Europa's ocean may be twice the volume than of all the seas of Earth, and some scientists believe it to be the most likely place in the Solar System where life may exist if only on the microbial level.

NASA is interested in learning more about this potential ocean, the composition of the brown areas on the moon's surface, and the geological forces forming the ice crust. In NASA's budget request, the mission was called one of the "two highest priority flagships" along with the Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher.

Possible flyby paths of the Europa Clipper (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

If the Europa mission gets the green light from Congress, NASA says that it will be similar to the conceptual Europa Clipper, which the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California has been working on. This would not be an orbital mission, but one with the probe orbiting Jupiter with occasional visits to Ganymede and Callisto to use their gravity to shift the spacecraft's orbit to send it back to Europa. NASA says that such flybys can achieve 80 percent of the science that an orbiter could for half the cost.

Exact details for the mission have yet to be nailed down, but at this time NASA says that the probe would be solar powered using current technology, and hardened against radiation with the electronics sealed in a shielded vault located between the propellant tanks. Instruments would include radar to penetrate the ice, infrared spectrometer, topographic camera, and an ion and neutral mass spectrometer.

Possible mission objectives of the Europa Clipper (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

If the mission follows the Europa Clipper study, the new probe could fly sometime in the early 2020s with a travel time to Jupiter of six and a half years as it builds up speed using flybys of Venus and Earth. Arriving in orbit around Jupiter with a two-hour main engine burn, It would then execute 45 flybys of Europa over a three-month period, passing at an altitude of 16 to 1,675 miles (25 to 2,700 km). At the end of the nominal and any extended missions, the probe would be targeted at the Jovian moon Ganymede for a controlled impact to avoid biological contamination of Europa in the event of an accidental crash.

If the mission is funded, NASA's next step will be to determine the mission requirements, architecture, planetary protection requirements, identification of risks and their mitigation, cost and schedule estimates, and payload accommodations. In addition, planning would focus on current studies of the plumes discovered jetting from the region of Europa's south pole to determine how these might affect the mission's objectives.

Source: NASA (PDF)

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NASA officially backs mission to explore Europa

Meet the Nanobot

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Story highlights Advancements in nanotechnology have created robots small enough to enter the human body Using magnets, they can be steered to the desired location to target diseases Clinical trials on human patients, targeting the eye, are about to begin Other potential uses include environmental cleanup operations, such as oil spills

They are ready to be injected into the most delicate areas of a human body -- the heart and the brain -- to deliver drugs with extreme precision or work like an army of nano surgeons, operating from within.

If it all sounds like science fiction, that's because it is: the plot of the 1966 sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage revolves largely around this concept.

In the film, four people board a miniaturized submarine to enter the bloodstream of an American scientist, left comatose by the Russians as a result of a Cold War quarrel over the technology. They only have an hour to remove a life-threatening blood clot before they return to full size. The crew manage to escape the body in the nick of time via a teardrop.

But reality has a way of catching up with our fantasies, and nanotechnology is yet another field of science that bears that promise.

At ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, mechanical engineer Brad Nelson and his team have worked on nanobots for a decade, and are now ready to think big: "We're making microscopic robots that are guided by externally generated magnetic fields for use in the human body," he told CNN.

The first to suggest that you could one day "swallow the surgeon" was beloved physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. He coined the idea in the provocative 1959 talk "There's plenty of room at the bottom", which is widely considered the first conceptual argument for nanotechnology.

"You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and 'looks' around," Feynman said, "It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out."

Nelson's microrobots might not yet have a little knife, but they sure have something special: their shape is inspired by the common E.coli bacteria, which is propelled by a rotating "tail" called the flagellum.

"Bacteria have a rotary motor," he explains, "Now, we can't make that motor, we don't have the technology for that, but we can use magnetism to move these things, so we actually take these flagella and we magnetize them, which allows them to swim."

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Meet the Nanobot

Visionary chemical engineer Robert Langer wins the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

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The 2015 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering has been awarded to the ground-breaking chemical engineer Dr Robert Langer for his revolutionary advances and leadership in engineering at the interface with chemistry and medicine. The QEPrize is a global 1 million prize that celebrates the engineers responsible for a ground-breaking innovation that has been of global benefit to humanity.

The announcement was made by Lord Browne of Madingley, Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, in the presence of His Royal Highness The Duke of York at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London on 3 February. Her Majesty The Queen will present the prize to Dr Langer at Buckingham Palace later this year.

Dr Langer is one of 11 Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA. This is MITs highest honor. His laboratory at MIT - with over 100 students, postdoctoral students, and visiting scientists at any one time - is the world's largest academic biomedical engineering laboratory. He has over 1000 issued and pending patents, over 200 major prizes to his name, and he is the most cited engineer in history (Science, 2014). His work has helped lay the foundation for a myriad of health innovations, including the long-lasting brain cancer treatment Giladel Wafer; the prostate cancer and endometriosis treatments Lupron Depot, Zoladex, and Decapeptyl SR; the schizophrenia treatment Respirdal Consta ; the diabetes treatment Bydureon; and the drug-coated cardiovascular stents that alone have benefited 10 million heart patients.

A chemical engineer by training, Dr Langer was the first person to engineer polymers to control the delivery of large molecular weight drugs for the treatment of diseases such as cancer and mental illness. His unconventional thinking toppled the established view that controlled-release drug delivery would not work for large molecules like proteins, which are very sensitive to their surroundings.

From the start, Dr Langers work has been characterized by a truly interdisciplinary approach. He developed his first drug delivery system during the 1970s while working with Dr Judah Folkman, a Harvard professor and surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital. Folkman hypothesized that the growth of cancerous tumors could be restricted by stopping angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels, and he asked Langer to find a way to inhibit it. Once he had discovered how to create polymer micro- and nano-particles that could support and release sensitive protein-based drugs in the body, he used this technique to test possible drugs to control angiogenesis. He and Dr Folkman isolated the first substances that blocked angiogenesis; such substances have been used to treat over 20 million patients.

An early application of the controlled release technology was in polymer microspheres that deliver nanopeptide drugs over several months and are now widely used to treat prostate cancer and endometriosis. Similar approaches have led to new treatments for schizophrenia, alcoholism, and drug addiction.

Together with another Harvard surgeon, Dr Joseph Vacanti at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr Langer helped pave the way for major innovations in tissue engineering, pioneering synthetic polymers that could deliver cells to form specific tissue structures. This concept led to the development of a new kind of artificial skin, now approved by the FDA for use on burn victims and patients with diabetic skin ulcers. Many other such systems, including ones for new cartilage formation and spinal cord repair, are now in clinical trials.

Professor Lord Broers FREng FRS HonFMedSci, Chair of Judges for the QEPrize, said: Robert Langer has made an immense contribution to healthcare and to numerous other fields by applying engineering systems thinking to biochemical problems. Not only has he revolutionized drug delivery, but his open-minded approach to innovation and his ability to think outside the box have led to great advances in the field of tissue engineering. He is a truly inspiring leader who has attracted brilliant people to these relatively new and exciting areas of research and is extremely involved in the commercial development of his groups research."

One of Dr Langers most recent projects is a microchip-based implant capable of storing and releasing precise doses of a drug on-demand or at scheduled intervals for up to 16 years. Microchips, the company he co-founded to commercialize the development, announced in December 2014 that it has completed clinical demonstration. Unlike traditional drug delivery platforms, Microchips Biotech's implant can respond to wireless signals, which can activate, deactivate, or modify the frequency or dose of the drug, without being removed from the patient. The company is looking initially at three areas for such an implant: diabetes, female contraception, and osteoporosis, which all require regular, long-term dosage. The contraceptive approach is funded by the Gates Foundation, as are new ways of providing single-step immunizations for polio and other vaccines, providing long-acting malaria drugs, and providing essential minerals. All of these new techniques are currently being pursued in Dr Langers lab.

This story is reprinted from material from the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.

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Visionary chemical engineer Robert Langer wins the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

Coyote hunt this weekend in Ruidoso

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A total of 39 coyotes carcasses were found in the desert west of Las Cruces. Officials believe the coyotes were killed in a contest similar to one that apparently is being organized in Ruidoso this weekend. (Robin Zielinski Sun-News)

Ruidoso apparently will be the site of a coyote contest hunt this weekend.

The hunt comes at the same time members of the New Mexico State Legislature are considering Senate Bill 253, sponsored by Sens. Mark Moores, a Republican from Albuquerque and Jeff Steinborn, a Democrat from Las Cruces, that would ban staging or participating in hunt competitions that offer prizes.

A group called Antlers Obsession Outdoors circulated information about the rules of the local hunt and how winners will be determined. On the Antlers website, Rusty Silva is listed as the guide and outfitter of the business, but the Ruidoso News was unable to contact him for comment. The notice specifically states that no Calcutta, which is illegal in New Mexico, will be allowed where betters gamble on how well a particular contestant will fare.

Preston Stone, a rancher and chairman of the Lincoln County Commission, said he's not against the contest hunts. While he doesn't find much in the current legislation that is objectionable, he said he's worried that passage of the bill would set a precedent and the next bill introduced would be more detrimental to the ranching industry. The next bill also might further restrict or remove the predator control services now used heavily by ranchers in Lincoln County, he said, adding that the licensed predator control trappers already have seen many of their weapons for controlling coyote removed.

Phil Carter, wildlife campaign manager for Animal Protection of New Mexico, said coyotes are classified in the state as unprotected fur bearers and that's one of the drivers of such hunts, where the goal is to "rack up bodies" for a prize or payoff.

Coyote killing contests hit the news in 2012 when it was learned that a state game commissioner was president of a group sponsoring a hunt in Farmington, he said. That was followed by a battle between a Los Lunas gun shop owner, who was sponsoring a coyote hunt contest, and opponents of such hunts.

Carter said his group is a lobbying organization with the goal of improving the lives of domestic and wild animals. Members have been working with the sponsors of the legislation to make sure it was targeted to contest hunts and did not infringe on anyone's right to protect property and livestock, he said.

"If this passes, it still will be legal to shoot coyotes," Carter said. "We ran a similar bill in 2013, with a House sponsor and it made it through committees, then was narrowly defeated on the House floor, because it became (mixed up) with gun rights issues. We've been careful that this bill only targets contests for prizes."

The legislation was introduced two weeks ago near the beginning of the session.

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Coyote hunt this weekend in Ruidoso