●02/14-02/16

●02/14
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-diamonds-environmental-impact.html
Diamonds are known as a girl's best friend due to their splendid sparkle, but they are also held in very high regard by industrialists, who prize their unmatched density, excellent thermal conduction and other properties.
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Exploiting these unique properties is the key to a new kind of semiconductor that researchers hope could be a revolutionary advance in energy-efficient technology.
The artificial diamond super semiconductor is being developed by the Diamond Research Laboratory of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan.
Artificial diamonds are most commonly produced by decomposing methane gas in a microwave oven at temperatures of about 1,000 Celsius. This process produces minute flakes of carbon, which pile up like accumulated snow to form a thin layer, or laminate, of diamond.
The AIST team has found a way to accelerate that process, and can efficiently produce diamond laminates measuring 2.3 centimeters square and 0.4 millimeter thick -- a size that ranks alongside the largest artificial diamonds produced.
While diamond has natural insulating qualities, adding minute amounts of boric acid and some other substances during the methane-decomposition process produces a diamond that also acts as an excellent semiconductor.
……**…The AIST team last year created a prototype semiconductor element measuring 1.6 centimeters square. ……**…If about 10 such elements were combined to form one large element, it would be suitable for use in the power control system of a hybrid vehicle, Shikata said. ……**…
A hybrid car equipped with such technology would consume about 960 kilowatt hours less per year than a conventional hybrid.
If every hybrid vehicle currently in use worldwide had such a system in place, their collective carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by about 5 million tons over 40 years, he said.
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"We'd like to see diamond semiconductors become commonplace some day, since they would be sure to help realize a low-carbon society," ……**…
●02/15
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/22/science/la-sci-moon-water-20101022
The moon is a much wetter — and more chemically complicated — place than scientists had believed, according to new data released Thursday by NASA.
Last year﹝In 2009﹞, after the space agency hurtled a rocket into a frozen crater at the moon's south pole and measured the stuff kicked up by the crash, scientists calculated that the plume contained about 25 gallons of water. But further analysis over the last 11 months indicates that the amount of water vapor and ice was more like 41 gallons. ……**…
"It's twice as wet as the Sahara desert," said Anthony Colaprete, the lead scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, mission at NASA Ames Research Center in Northern California.
The instruments aboard the satellite, including near-infrared and visible light spectrometers, scanned the lunar debris cloud and identified the compounds it contained. They determined that about 5.6% of the plume was made of water, give or take 2.9%. It also included a surprising array of chemicals, including mercury, methane, silver, calcium, magnesium, pure hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
The findings were reported in six related papers published online Thursday by the journal Science.
"The lunar closet is really at the poles, and I think there's a lot of stuff crammed into the closet that we really haven't investigated yet," said Peter Schultz, a planetary geologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and one of the LCROSS team members.
The new measurements allowed Colaprete to estimate that the entire Cabeus crater could hold as much as 1 billion gallons of water.
Potentially, that would be really handy for future space explorers who might use the moon as an interplanetary way station. Along with providing water to drink, it could be mined for breathable oxygen and used to make hydrogen fuel for long-distance spacecraft.

●02/16
http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/healthcare/hospitals/2010-10-20-surgery20_st_N.htm
Training doctors and nurses to work as teams — using safety techniques borrowed from the aviation industry — cut the death rate from surgery by 18%, a new study shows.
Surgical teams in the study, which included 108 hospitals around the country, focused on low-tech techniques, such as holding briefings and debriefings before and after each operation, says study author and former astronaut James Bagian, a professor at the University of Michigan's medical and engineering schools.
These briefings, which are routinely conducted before airplane flights, allow crews to anticipate and prepare for potential safety risks, Bagian says.
Briefings helped surgical teams make important discoveries, such as learning that patients were on blood thinners, which increase the risk for serious bleeding during surgery. "You don't want to be surprised in the middle of surgery," he says.
Researchers trained operating room staff at 74 hospitals. Teams learned to recognize red flags, challenge each when they found safety risks and develop presurgical checklists, according to the study in today's Journal of the American Medical Association. The more training surgical teams received, the safer they became, Bagian says.
But Bagian notes his study has limitations. The 34 hospitals that hadn't yet undergone training at the time of the study also improved, reducing their surgical mortality rate by 7%, he says. And the design of his study prevents him from concluding that training actually caused the drop in mortality, although the link seems strong.
But the study is also "really, really important" and the largest and most rigorously designed of its kind, says Peter Pronovost, a doctor and safety advocate who wrote an accompanying editorial.
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"For decades, surgery and anesthesiology have focused on the technical work," Pronovost says. "But the harm that's occurring (from surgery) is happening due to teamwork failure, not technical failures. This is something every hospital can do."