The science behind RHCs liver thread

10 good reasons to wash your hands...and make your mother proud!

• Published on April 30, 2015

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Vasilis Theodossiou
FollowVasilis Theodossiou
Founder & Managing Director ► Food Safety / Quality Consultant ► Passionate Trainer & Speaker ► Marathon Runner
“Wash your hands before coming to the table!!”, I remember mother shouting from kitchen before our family dinner! Today, first out of educational reasons and then out of professional curiosity I have come to the point of realization that many adults (including these who work in the food sector) do not wash their hands. Back in 2002 I read the results of a survey from the American Society for Microbiology (dated 2000) where it was documented that 1 out of 3 adults did not wash their hands after leaving public restrooms. These results stroked me as thunder. Hand washing surveys in U.S. in 2010 (prepared for American Society for Microbiology & the American Cleaning Institute) show that the situation is more or less the same as in 2000.

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Since our childhood we are “programmed” to wash our hands before eating food however this tendency is somewhat lost until adulthood. As a food safety auditor I saw many times adult food handlers in several occasions not washing their hands (even in cases they knew they should). I observed the same in restrooms (at least to those I had access as a man!). The question that arises is “why we forget to wash our hands?” or even better “why we don’t wash our hands?”.

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Nowadays there are so many organizations, sites, initiatives, press releases concerning hand washing! If you take a minute, step back and think why so much time and money has been spent for something so logical, simple and easy process of our everyday life, you will start to question human behavior! Here are some really good links for example (too many to mention though, the choice was random):

• Australia: Hand Hygiene Australia (http://www.hha.org.au/)
• Canada: Hand Hygiene Challenge (http://www.handhygiene.ca/)
• New Zealand: Hand Hygiene New Zealand (http://www.handhygiene.org.nz/)
• U.S.: Centers for Disease Control & Prevention - Hand Hygiene in Healthcare Settings (http://www.cdc.gov/handhygiene/)
• World Health Organization: Clean Care is Safer Care (http://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/en/)
• The global public-private partnership for hand washing: http://globalhandwashing.org/

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Let’s be rational. It’s not only the technique which has to be discussed in a food safety seminar when talking about hand washing. Here are some reasons to wash our hands and each one of them is a good chance for discussion:

1. To be healthy.

Logical. Hand washing has proved the best way to keep you healthy against flu, dirt, biological hazards etc.

2. To handle foods safely.
1 out of 3 food poisonings worldwide is taking place because of dirty hands or incomplete hand washing!

3. To avoid killing somebody!
3.000 souls in U.S. are lost because of food poisoning (Source: CDC)! 351.000 people are dying because of food poisoning globally (Source: WHO)!

4. To avoid sending somebody to hospital.
128.000 persons are hospitalized every year in U.S. (Source: CDC) because of food poisoning, 5.946 in E.U. in 2013 (Source: EFSA)!

5. To be the example!
Scientific studies have shown that hand washing behavior of seniors plays a crucial influence on other staff (Pediatric critical care medicine Journal, 2009 May;10(3):360-3, Hand hygiene adherence is influenced by the behavior of role models). In other words seniors act as role models!

6. To minimize the risk!
Everybody says that! From Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/diseases/washing_hands.html) & UNICEF to The Thailand Centre for Evidence Based Nursing and Midwifery & European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

7. To honor the effort of your parents!
It’s not a small thing! Just think about it! Assume a family with 1 kid. Assume the kid starts to wash hands at the age of two without any help. Assume that a parent advices the kid each day for lunch / dinner / supper until the age of 12. Do the math!!!

8. To boost your organization’s reputation on hand washing!
That counts double if you are working in the food sector! When customers actually see restaurant’s personnel washing their hands not only they feel more safe to consume the prepared food but also they spread the word to their friends (ok not as fast as a bad experience but they do it!)

9. To reduce your company’s cost from possible food poisoning!
In case a food company is responsible for food poisoning Insurance fees are elevated! According to The Huffington Post food poisonings costs roughly $70 billion dollars a year in the U.S. alone!

10. To shine on!

It’s like a smile. Clean hands give you the feeling of a morning shower! A clean slate when we wash our hands, we also wash our minds clean:

“…the notion of washing away one’s sins, entailed in the moral-purity metaphor, seems to have generalized to a broader conceptualization of wiping the slate clean, allowing people to metaphorically remove a potentially broad range of psychological residues.” (Lee & Schwarz, 2011)

And please believe me there are many more reasons why we should wash our hands. We the lucky ones who have fresh clean water and soap (not to mention antibacterial soap) we should set the example and try to help those who are not so lucky and face the consequences of not having the above …gifts. Really did you know that each year diarrhea kills around 760.000 children under five (Source: World Health Organization)? Poor personal hygiene (incomplete hand washing or absence of hand washing) aggregates diarrhea. Can we live with that pretending we are safe and continue our lives without caring about hand washing? Can we close our eyes to a food handler who sneezed and didn’t wash his/her hands and continues to prepare our meal?

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Like what you read? Then spread the word not the germs!!!

****ing ****er, and appalling grammar to boot

 

I read an article in the Telegraph some years ago that reckoned in 200 years time humans would be unable to pick an apple from a tree and eat it without it being disinfected beforehand. It's artificial chemicals that we should be wary of, not microbes. By-and-large, we've had 2 billion years to get used to them.

 

In 200 years they will all be genetically engineered to be self disinfecting.

If we even pick apples from trees anymore. We'll probably 3d print them instead.

 

5 years after the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is just getting started
Posted Jul 5, 2017 by Devin ColdeweyNext Story

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It’s been five years since physicists at CERN reported (in the understated manner typical of scientists) that they had observed a particle “consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson.”



The discovery capped decades of theory and was an important triumph for the Large Hadron Collider, the means by which the elusive particle was found. But they didn’t close up shop and go home after that — the LHC, the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, is just getting up to speed.

You could be forgiven for thinking so, however. Shortly after the discovery of the Higgs, the LHC was shut down for two full years for a full servicing and upgrade. The extreme conditions created in the collider — think “big bang” extreme — were achieved at 8 teraelectronvolts, the unit of energy they use to gauge the power of the accelerated protons slamming into each other. You create greater forces snapping your fingers, but when you concentrate it into a space millions of times smaller, you can essentially puncture the fabric of reality.

Eight TeV was already an immense increase over the next most powerful system — and the complex is now running at 13 TeV, with plans to go even higher.

“The design of the LHC was to reach 14 TeV, but the machine has been working very well, so everyone has the idea that we can push past that,” LHC physicist Arturo Sánchez Pineda told me.

Protons accelerated to nearly the speed of light in the collider and smashed into each other (at those multi-TeV energy levels) produce all kinds of interesting effects because the forces and temperatures are so huge.

“The main problem five to seven years ago was looking for the Higgs boson, because it was extremely obvious it was missing in the theory,” he said. “But at the same time and in parallel, we have been looking for other things — like dark matter, supersymmetric particles, very heavy particles. It’s important from the point of view of the standard model and physics in general, but they don’t call as much attention as the Higgs.”

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Example of a “candidate Higgs boson event”; the particle isn’t observed directly but inferred through particles into which it is theorized to decay.

And with colliders, the more energy you have on tap, the better your chances of finding what you’re looking for: It’s only when forces of cosmic proportion come into play that you get protons splitting into their most exotic sub-particles.

Of course, you can’t just turn the dial and get more power out of a system so complex it’s basically its own city. Part of that is replacing the hardware. For instance, the magnets that guide the protons along their evacuated tubes have been upgraded to cryogenically cooled ones in order to accommodate the increased energy in the stream.

With great power, in this case anyway, comes great amounts of data. The LHC may have taken years to get started, but once it’s on, it’s on for as long as they can keep it running.

“I can tell you because every day I’m in the ATLAS control room: the experiment is running 24 hours a day,” Pineda said. Consequently, a lot of the advances are in how the reams of data the LHC produces are handled.

“You write code — everything is done by coding,” Pineda continued. “One guy could be next to me writing code looking for dark matter, while I’m writing code looking for the Higgs, a better way to measure it. The people who do analysis and try to find new stuff in this data, they’re all over the world.”


Pineda has himself been working on efforts to open up the LHC’s data — the more eyeballs, the better. It’s available at CERN’s open data portal, so help yourself if you think you know how to sift through the event logs and find suspicious energy signatures.

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Keep an eye out for “strange hadrons.”

The computers themselves have been upgraded over the last few decades, as well. From supercomputers to embedded control systems to user-facing interfaces, everything is constantly rolling on to the next version.

“The control systems [i.e. in control rooms] are Windows, but the majority of experimental systems are Red Hat Linux,” Pineda told me. “We’ve migrated from scientific Linux to CentOS” (for anyone counting).

“Of course security patches are important,” he added, but it’s more against preventing the systems from being taken offline than any fear of hacking. The LHC isn’t exactly a ripe target. The data is often freely available, duplicated publicly on servers all over the world — and even if you got in, “We have a custom C++ framework to analyze the data… you could save it, maybe as an Excel table or something, but it would be incredibly big.”

Considering the LHC is among the largest and longest-running experiments out there, it would be strange if there weren’t plans for the next few decades. The existing experiments and detectors will keep running for many years; Pineda said ATLAS should keep running until 2034. But two major improvements apart from the latest power boost are coming down the line.

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Cross section of an experimental cryomagnet.

The first change is the transition to what they’re calling the High Luminosity LHC. This involves the introduction of a new type of quadrupole cryomagnet into certain portions of the LHC’s ring — just before the ATLAS and CMS detectors. The stronger magnetic fields will squeeze the proton bunches into even finer threads, increasing the rate of collision by as much as an order of magnitude. Installation of the kilometer or so of these magnets is planned for 2024.

But at an unspecified date in the future comes the big change.

“The LHC is not a single ring,” Pineda explained. “There are several smaller ones, each one adding more energy, to finally be injected into the biggest one. There’s a point, though, even in the 27 kilometers of the main ring, where you can’t reach a higher energy. So the next step is to use the LHC as a pre-accelerator of an even bigger ring.”

How much bigger? The LHC’s successor will be somewhere around 100 kilometers long — 62 miles in circumference.

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Now imagine one four times bigger than the biggest one here.

The scope of this planned collider — let’s call it the XLHC — is even more mind-boggling than the original, and the original is pretty mind-boggling. But even if you had all the money today and the plans finalized and approved by the governments and institutions involved, it would take decades to assemble.

We have that to look forward to, then, but in the meantime we can enjoy the constant stream of science issuing from the LHC.

 

Will we still be involved now that we've ****ing shot ourselves over Brexit?

 

Yes, I'm sure we will. Even the stupid ****ing government know how important science R&D is to revenue. I expect some form of ring-fencing

 

Modern-day Alice trades looking glass for wormhole to explore quantum wonderland
Black hole–entanglement link could be simulated in lab, new paper suggests
BY
TOM SIEGFRIED
7:00AM, AUGUST 2, 2017

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Scientists are exploring the possibility that a pair of black holes in space could be connected by a wormhole, a spacetime tunnel that might be related to the mystery if quantum entanglement.

PITRIS/ISTOCKPHOTO

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If Lewis Carroll were alive today, he wouldn’t bother with a looking glass. His book would be called Alice Through the Wormhole.

Being the mathematician that he was, Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) would have kept current with the latest developments in quantum physics. He would no doubt be intrigued by a new paper describing an idea for the creation (or at least the simulation) of a wormhole in the laboratory to test the latest ideas linking black holes with quantum weirdness.

Carroll would be particularly happy to see that little Alice had grown up to be a quantum physicist, collaborating with somebody named Bob (whose fictional precursor has yet to be identified). Alice and Bob are the (hypothetical) primary investigators of such mysteries as quantum cryptography and quantum entanglement. They are especially skilled at quantum teleportation, in which information needed to reconstruct a quantum particle can be transported from one lab (Alice’s) to another (Bob’s).

Teleporting a quantum particle (typically a photon, a particle of light) is a few centuries of science short of teleporting Captain Kirk from the Enterprise to the surface of some planet where danger is lurking. But the conceptual groundwork is now being put in place. The new paper, posted in the physics online archive, in fact, proposes a scheme allowing Alice to teleport a person (named Tom, for some reason) to Bob — through a wormhole.

Ordinarily, wormholes (if they exist) would connect distant regions of spacetime. They wouldn’t be useful for intergalactic Hyperloop travel, as anything entering a wormhole would cause it to collapse. But much work in recent years suggests that such spacetime tunnels might link two black holes, in which case travel through them becomes thinkable, even if not physically, emotionally or economically feasible.

Wormhole travel between black holes is thinkable because of quantum entanglement, one of Alice and Bob’s specialties. In a quantum universe (like the one you are living in), particles that interact can become “entangled” in such a way that they exist in a single “quantum state.” In such a state, a measurement performed on one of the particles can reveal information about the other particle, no matter how far away the second particle is. This spooky connection is hard to explain. Some theories seem to moderate the mystery by proposing that entangled particles are connected by wormholes.

In technical terms, this connection is designated by the “equation” ER=EPR. ER stands for Einstein and Rosen, the two physicists who wrote the seminal paper describing wormholes (otherwise known as Einstein-Rosen bridges). EPR stands for Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (yes, the same Rosen — and the same Einstein, for that matter), the three physicists who wrote an early paper describing quantum entanglement (mainly in order to complain about it).

If the basic idea of ER=EPR is correct, then it might very well be possible for people to travel through wormholes, as Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind (among others) has discussed in a series of intriguing papers. In fact, Susskind contends, Alice and Bob could prove ER=EPR simply by jumping into two entangled black holes, linked by a wormhole. Alice and Bob would meet in the middle of the wormhole, thereby verifying the ER=EPR theory and winning themselves Nobel Prizes. Except for the slight snag that they could not get out of the wormhole (or even send a message), so nobody would ever know how things went once Alice and Bob finally met in person (or that they had met at all). They would be forever concealed behind the black holes’ event horizons, the surface through which no signal from the interior can escape.

In his latest paper, though, Susskind and Ying Zhao, also of Stanford, offer hope. It seems possible, Susskind and Zhao say, to mimic entangled black holes in the lab. Alice and Bob would not have to risk their futures — they could send Tom through the lab-created wormhole to see if he survived. “Combining quantum teleportation with the idea that entangled black holes are connected by Einstein-Rosen bridges implies that ER=EPR could in-principle be tested by observers who themselves never cross the horizon,” Susskind and Zhao assert.

OK, Tom is not really a person in this plan; he’s just a symbol for teleportee. A teleportee can simply be a photon, a particle containing quantum information that Alice would like to send to Bob. (Such a photon might, for instance, contain important information for a computation that Bob is performing.) Alice cannot simply measure the photon’s information, write it down and e-mail it to Bob. Looking at the photon reduces the multiple possible measurement outcomes to a single definite state (say, spin pointing up). Bob needs a particle that retains the multiple possible outcomes that make quantum information so rich.

All a particle’s quantum information can be teleported, though, if Bob and Alice share a pair of previously entangled photons. Alice allows her entangled photon to interact with Tom (the teleportee photon) and records the result. (This process DESTROYS the teleportee!) Alice then calls Bob up or texts him with the result. Bob then can perform an operation on his entangled photon, which has the effect of restoring Tom in his original state, bringing him BACK TO LIFE! (Metaphorically.)

If ER=EPR is right, Tom has in fact not died, but actually traveled through the wormhole connecting Bob and Alice’s entangled photons. In a thoroughly elaborate mathematical demonstration, Susskind and Zhao describe how this works. A key point is that the process of teleporting quantum information requires the communication of ordinary information through standard channels: To teleport one quantum bit (or qubit) of information, Alice must send Bob at least two ordinary bits of information by slower-than-light signaling of some sort. So there is no “instantaneous” spooky action at a distance going on, as some common misinterpretations suggest.

Susskind and Zhao admit that it is not very likely that Alice and Bob will ever venture into space to find two suitably connected black holes, let alone persuade somebody named Tom to come along. But it is possible to imagine a laboratory facsimile of such a paired black hole arrangement. Perhaps some clever condensed matter physicists could devise two “large shells of matter” that would mimic the properly weird gravitational spacetime geometry needed for the job. These shells would be connected by a wormhole, so Alice and Bob could jump in (they would have to “merge themselves with the matter forming the shells”) and meet “in some place outside ordinary spacetime.” But they still would not be able to inform anyone in the outer world of their success. Alice would have to induce Tom to merge with one of the shells so she could teleport him to Bob.

“When Tom emerges out of … Bob’s shell, he will recall everything he encountered, and can confirm that he really did traverse the wormhole,” Susskind and Zhao contend.

On the other hand (and this seems more promising), two quantum computers could be entangled to simulate wormhole travel. Simulating a real person would require quantum computers of unimaginably huge memory storage capacity. But with a 100-qubit quantum computer (much larger than anything available in labs today, but thinkable), a teleportee of 10 qubits could be sent through the wormhole. Small variations in the initial state of the teleportee would enable the computers to detect how it reacted to conditions in the wormhole, thereby providing the evidence needed to verify the wormhole’s existence, confirming that ER=EPR.

“There does not seem to be an in-principle obstruction to laboratory teleportation through the wormhole,” Susskind and Zhao say. “On the face of it this seems somewhat fantastical, but given that the lab is part of a quantum-gravitational world in which ER=EPR, the conclusion seems inevitable.”

As would be the subsequent book about the adventure. Forget Alice. It would be called Tom Through the Wormhole. Feed your head with that, White Rabbit.

 

Quantum tunneling takes time, new study shows
Experiments tested whether electrons could escape an atom instantaneously
BY
EMILY CONOVER
7:00AM, JULY 26, 2017

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TIME OUT Electrons can escape their atoms, even if the particles don’t have enough energy to do so, through quantum tunneling. But such tunneling takes time, a new study suggests.

NPINE/SHUTTERSTOCK

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Quantum particles can burrow through barriers that should be impenetrable — but they don’t do it instantaneously, a new experiment suggests.

The process, known as quantum tunneling, takes place extremely quickly, making it difficult to confirm whether it takes any time at all. Now, in a study of electrons escaping from their atoms, scientists have pinpointed how long the particles take to tunnel out: around 100 attoseconds, or 100 billionths of a billionth of a second, researchers report July 14 in Physical Review Letters.

In quantum tunneling, a particle passes through a barrier despite not having enough energy to cross it. It’s as if someone rolled a ball up a hill but didn’t give it a hard enough push to reach the top, and yet somehow the ball tunneled through to the other side.

Although scientists knew that particles could tunnel, until now, “it was not really clear how that happens, or what, precisely, the particle does,” says physicist Christoph Keitel of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Theoretical physicists have long debated between two possible options. In one model, the particle appears immediately on the other side of the barrier, with no initial momentum. In the other, the particle takes time to pass through, and it exits the tunnel with some momentum already built up.

Keitel and colleagues tested quantum tunneling by blasting argon and krypton gas with laser pulses. Normally, the pull of an atom’s positively charged nucleus keeps electrons tightly bound, creating an electromagnetic barrier to their escape. But, given a jolt from a laser, electrons can break free. That jolt weakens the electromagnetic barrier just enough that electrons can leave, but only by tunneling.

Although the scientists weren’t able to measure the tunneling time directly, they set up their experiment so that the angle at which the electrons flew away from the atom would reveal which of the two theories was correct. The laser’s light was circularly polarized — its electromagnetic waves rotated in time, changing the direction of the waves’ wiggles. If the electron escaped immediately, the laser would push it in one particular direction. But if tunneling took time, the laser’s direction would have rotated by the time the electron escaped, so the particle would be pushed in a different direction.

Comparing argon and krypton let the scientists cancel out experimental errors, leading to a more sensitive measurement that was able to distinguish between the two theories. The data matched predictions based on the theory that tunneling takes time.

The conclusion jibes with some physicists’ expectations. “I’m pretty sure that the tunneling time cannot be instantaneous, because at the end, in physics, nothing can be instantaneous,” says physicist Ursula Keller of ETH Zurich. The result, she says, agrees with an earlier experiment carried out by her team.

Other scientists still think instantaneous tunneling is possible. Physicist Olga Smirnova of the Max Born Institute in Berlin notes that Keitel and colleagues’ conclusions contradict previous research. In theoretical calculations of tunneling in very simple systems, Smirnova and colleagues found no evidence of tunneling time. The complexity of the atoms studied in the new experiment may have led to the discrepancy, Smirnova says. Still, the experiment is “very accurate and done with great care.”

Although quantum tunneling may seem an esoteric concept, scientists have harnessed it for practical purposes. Scanning tunneling microscopes, for instance, use tunneling electrons to image individual atoms. For such an important fundamental process, Keller says, physicists really have to be certain they understand it. “I don't think we can close the chapter on the discussion yet,” she says.

 

Add penis bacteria to the list of HIV risk factors
Microbes that thrive in oxygen-poor places may lure virus’s prey: vulnerable immune cells
BY
LAUREL HAMERS
12:33PM, JULY 25, 2017

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BAD BACTERIA Bacteria such as Prevotella (shown) are anaerobes — they can survive without oxygen. An increase in anaerobic bacteria on the penis raises the risk of HIV infection, a new study suggests.

DENNIS KUNKEL MICROSCOPY/SCIENCE SOURCE

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Out-of-whack microbes in the vagina can raise HIV risk — and now there’s evidence that the makeup of the penis microbiome matters, too. The greater the number of anaerobic bacteria tucked under the foreskin, the more likely an uncircumcised man is to become infected with the virus, researchers report July 25 in mBio.

“This mirrors what’s been seen in women, but it’s the first study of its kind in men,” says Deborah Anderson, a microbiologist and gynecologist at Boston University School of Medicine.

The data come from heterosexual Ugandan men followed for two years as part of a larger study on circumcision. Researchers swabbed the men’s penises to collect bacteria samples at the beginning of the two-year study. Then they compared the penile bacterial composition of the 46 uncircumcised men who became infected with HIV over the course of the study with that of 136 uncircumcised men who didn’t.

The total amount of penile bacteria didn’t differ, but men with higher levels of anaerobic bacteria were more likely to have contracted HIV, researchers found. Having 10 times more Prevotella, Dialister, Finegoldia and Peptoniphilus bacteria raised the risk of contracting HIV by 54 to 63 percent after controlling for other factors that might affect risk, such as condom use habits and number of sexual partners.

The results might help explain why circumcision cuts the risk of HIV, says Thomas Hope, a cell biologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago: Removing the flap of foreskin takes away a moist hideout for bacteria that thrive in oxygen-starved environments. But, Hope cautions, the study only draws an association between the microbiome and HIV — not necessarily a cause and effect.

It’s not clear how certain bacteria might raise HIV risk, but the new study revealed one possible clue: Men with more anaerobic penis bacteria also had higher levels of inflammatory cytokine proteins, which call immune cells to the scene.

“Specific bacteria might cause inflammatory response that would cause the immune cells to congregate in the penis, where they're more likely to be exposed to the virus,” says study coauthor Cindy Liu, a pathologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. HIV targets particular immune cells, so recruiting an immune response to the penis might have an unintended consequence — a free ferry ride for the virus into the bloodstream.

Liu and colleagues hope to test that explanation more thoroughly by looking at tissue samples from circumcised foreskins, and seeing whether there’s a relationship between the penis microbiome and the kinds of immune cells found in the foreskin.

Some of these same bacteria are also linked to increased HIV risk in women, and the microbes can be swapped between partners during sex. While practicing safe sex is still the best HIV-prevention strategy, topical creams that adjust the bacterial balance on the penis might someday help lower the risk of infection, Liu says.



Think this needs posting on the Cheese thread

 

I found opening a bathroom door at work with my sleeve or a tissue cut down on the number of colds I got. You can wash your hands but then you get hold of the handle the last filthy bastard opened the door with and all your good work is negated.

 

I'll be okay - it'll take years for bacteria to travel down the length of my cock.

 

Very scientifically put. Bacteria are scared of my cock

 

I hate to tell you, but your cock quit having any "human cells" years ago and is made up entirely of bacteria cells joined together now.

 

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The new deceleration ring ELENA will slow down antimatter particles further than ever to improve the efficiency of experiments studying antimatter. (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

On 2 August, the first 5.3 MeV antiproton beam coming from CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator (AD) circulated in the Extra Low ENergy Antiproton (ELENA) decelerating ring.

ELENA is the new decelerator for antimatter experiments. It has a circumference of just 30 meters and will be connected to the AD experiments to improve the conditions for typical antimatter experiments. The slower the antiprotons are (i.e. the less energy they have), the easier it is for the AD’s antimatter experiments to study or manipulate them. However, the AD decelerator can reliably only slow antiprotons down to 5.3 MeV, the lowest possible energy for a machine of this size. The much smaller ELENA ring will reduce this energy by 50 times, to just 0.1 MeV, opening up the possibility for additional experiments, such as GBAR. In addition, the density of the beams will be improved, thus increasing the efficiency with which the experiments can capture the antiprotons in their traps by a factor of 10 to 100. The new decelerator will also enable several experiments to receive antiproton beams simultaneously.

This is not the first time that a beam has circulated in ELENA. The first tests began last November, but this is the first time that antiprotons, the particle type this machine has been conceived for, have been injected. The beam of antiprotons has been successfully injected and it has been observed circulating for a few milliseconds (that is, a few thousand turns of the machine).

The commissioning of the machine will continue over the next coming months with setting-up of several systems such as the radio-frequency system, which will be used to decelerate the bunches of antiprotons. At that point, the commissioning team will start changing the energy of the beams. At the same time, a series of general adjustments of the beam optics is as well foreseen.

As antiprotons are difficult to produce and they need to be shared among many experiments, progress in the commissioning of ELENA will also be made using protons and ions coming from a local H– ion and proton source. This useful feature is speeding up the commissioning phase and within the next weeks ELENA will be ready to provide first H- beams for tests to the GBAR experiment.

 

Neutrinos seen scattering off an atom’s nucleus for the first time
Ability to detect the tiny particles performing new trick allows for new tests of physicists’ theories
BY
EMILY CONOVER
2:10PM, AUGUST 3, 2017

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NEUTRINO NABBER A compact neutrino detector (prototype pictured with physicist Juan Collar of the COHERENT collaboration) has measured a new type of neutrino interaction. The 15-kilogram detector is much smaller than those used in previous experiments.

JEAN LACHAT/UNIV. OF CHICAGO

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Famously sneaky particles have been caught behaving in a new way.

For the first time, scientists have detected neutrinos scattering off the nucleus of an atom. The process, predicted more than four decades ago, provides a new way to test fundamental physics. It will also help scientists to better characterize the neutrino, a misfit particle that has a tiny mass and interacts so feebly with matter that it can easily sail through the entire Earth.

The detection, reported online August 3 in Science, “has really big implications,” says physicist Janet Conrad of MIT, who was not involved with the research. It fills in a missing piece of the standard model, the theory that explains how particles behave: The model predicts that neutrinos interact with nuclei. And, says Conrad, the discovery “opens up a whole new area of measurements” to further test the standard model’s predictions.

Scientists typically spot neutrinos when they interact with a single proton or neutron. But the new study measures “coherent” scattering, in which a low-energy neutrino interacts with an entire atomic nucleus at once, ricocheting away and causing the nucleus to recoil slightly in response.

“It’s exciting to measure it for the first time,” says physicist Kate Scholberg of Duke University, spokesperson for the collaboration — named COHERENT — that made the new finding.

In the past, neutrino hunters have built enormous detectors to boost their chances of catching a glimpse of the particles — a necessity because the aloof particles interact so rarely. While still rare, coherent neutrino scattering occurs more often than previously detected types of neutrino interactions. That means detectors can be smaller and still catch enough interactions to detect the process. COHERENT’s detector, a crystal of cesium and iodine, weighs only about 15 kilograms. “It’s the first handheld neutrino detector; you can just carry it around,” says physicist Juan Collar of the University of Chicago.

Collar, Scholberg and colleagues installed their detector at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The facility generates bursts of neutrons and, as a by-product, produces neutrinos at energies that COHERENT’s detector can spot. When a nucleus in the crystal recoils due to a scattering neutrino, a flash of light appears and is captured by a light sensor. The signal of the recoiling nucleus is incredibly subtle — like detecting the motion of a bowling ball when hit by a ping-pong ball — which is why the effect remained undetected until now.

The amount of scattering the researchers saw agreed with the standard model. But such tests are still in their early stages, says physicist Leo Stodolsky of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, who was not involved with the research. “We’re looking forward to more detailed studies to see if it really is accurately in agreement with the expectations.” Physicists hope to find a place where the standard model breaks down, which could reveal new secrets of the universe. More precise tests may reveal discrepancies, he says. “That would be extremely interesting.”

Measuring coherent neutrino scattering could help scientists understand the processes that occur within exploding stars, or supernovas, which emit huge numbers of neutrinos (SN: 02/18/17, p. 24). The process could be used to detect supernovas as well — if a supernova explodes nearby, scientists could spot its neutrinos scattering off nuclei in their detectors.

Similar scattering might also help scientists detect dark matter, an invisible source of mass that pervades the universe. Dark matter particles could scatter off atomic nuclei just as neutrinos do, causing a recoil. The study indicates that such recoils are detectable — good news since several dark matter experiments are currently attempting to measure recoils of nuclei (SN: 11/12/16, p. 14). But it also suggests a looming problem: As dark matter detectors become more sensitive, neutrinos bouncing off the nuclei will swamp any signs of dark matter.

Coherent neutrino scattering detectors could lead to practical applications as well: Small-scale neutrino detectors could eventually detect neutrinos produced in nuclear reactors to monitor for attempts to develop nuclear weapons, for example.

Physicist Daniel Freedman of MIT, who predicted in 1974 that neutrinos would sca

 

I read this with dismay

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...and-risks-graphene-innovation?cmpId=flipboard

 

I was discussing it yesterday at a client meeting. I still feel they'll HAVE to ring fence science and technology.

 

What's everyone's thoughts on the Google memo. After one day of press backlash on the fired dude, I've read a lot of debate today, especially from female scientists online stating that the science the guy used is actually fairly sound if not the way he argued it.

Lots of discussion about how political correctness groups bury science when it thinks it'll create the wrong headline, rather than using the science to come up with a better way to achieve their goals. Which (I suspect the guys underlying motives aren't quite as pure as he declares in his memo) is what the employee actually states.

Since he was using scientific studies as the basis of his argument was it unscientific to just dismiss him as sexist rather than challenge the substance?

 

What's this all about?

 

I'll see if I can band together some links lol