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| Sunday, 16 October 2005 |
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Sound, smell and vision used to locate quake survivors
Rescue workers equipped with a battery of sophisticated sensing tools have helped free survivors trapped beneath buildings destroyed in the earthquake that shook northern Pakistan on Saturday. The government now estimates that 30,000 people may have been killed in the tragedy, a further 43,000 injured and up to five million people left homeless - rivalling the numbers displaced by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Local and international rescue workers have managed to save a handful of lives amid the terrible losses. Teams from the US, the UK, Japan, China, France, Hungary and the United Arab Emirates have travelled to Pakistan's mountainous north to help recover those still trapped from the quake, and 144 aftershocks. A UK charity called Rescue and Preparedness in Disasters (RAPID), based in Gloucester, has sent two teams to the region. The first has so far helped rescue five people from a collapsed tower block in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, including a woman and her young son who were trapped underground for 60 hours. The rescuers have forgone sleep in the dash to find anyone still alive. The RAPID workers are equipped with several tools, including an acoustic sensor called a vibraphone, which can pick up the sound of someone tapping beneath debris. The apparatus pinpoints their location by triangulating microphones using known points to calculate where an unknown sound source is coming from. Rescue units also carry equipment that senses slight changes in carbon dioxide and oxygen levels. The tubes are fed under the rubble to detect people breathing. Also a miniature camera connected to a long cable, known as Snake Eye, can be fed between cracks in debris to spot any survivors. But perhaps the most important tool available is decidedly less high-tech. Sniffer dogs are the quickest way to locate trapped survivors, alerting rescuers the moment they pick up the scent. "Dogs are the best," a spokesman from RAPID said. "They respond to scent and give an audible sound as well." Simple construction equipment can also be crucial, moving wreckage to uncover pockets that might contain casualties and removing rubble when survivors are pinpointed. Back in the UK, RAPID's work involves testing new methods for located trapped survivors. Their armoury could soon include a hand-held radar device developed by Japanese geological company Oyo. It is designed to detect subsurface movement, including breathing, and can display the survivor's location on a screen. The second RAPID team will go to Bagh, a town deep in the hills of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, with the assistance of a dog rescue team also from the UK. The town was destroyed by the quake and has seen little aid so far, and a Dutch rescue team working in Bagh has so far been unable to recover any survivors. The RAPID crew may later move on to Muzaffarabad, the worst-hit city and the location of the UN's coordination centre. Courtesy World Science Atoms under control for quantum computing Max Planck researchers lay the foundations for a distributed quantum computer with the "quasipermanent" storing of an atom between two mirrors. Complex computing operations could be greatly accelerated through massive parallel processing in a quantum computer. The smallest units of information are what are known as quantum bits, which could be realized using atoms or molecules, if one can manipulate their position, quantum state, and interactions with other particles. Controlling single atoms in an optical resonator is now one decisive step closer to becoming reality for the research team led by Professor Gerhard Rempe of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, near Munich, Germany. The scientists report in the magazine Nature that they were able to cool single rubidium atoms in every direction of motion and keep them there on average for 17 seconds, using a sophisticated array of lasers in an optical resonator. This is, by far, the longest storage time ever reached in a strongly coupled resonator system. Using this trick of combining different cooling methods which have different kinds of effects, the researchers were able to prepare an exactly known number of atoms in the centre of an optical resonator. The storage times, on average more than 15 seconds, allow experiments in which the interaction of individual atoms with individual photons can be checked. This is, for example, a pre-condition for the entanglement, coupling, and teleportation of quantum states between very distant atoms with the help of photons. In this way, the researchers have taken a tangible step toward creating a distributed quantum computer made of a number of strongly coupled atom resonator systems. Courtesy: World science Milky Way map reveals surprises Our Milky Way galaxy looks quite different from an ordinary spiral galaxy, astronomers say, after conducting what they call the most comprehensive structural analysis ever done of the galaxy. The survey gives fine details of a long, central bar feature that astronomers say distinguishes the Milky Way from more usual spiral galaxies. This is the best evidence ever for this long central bar in our galaxy, said Ed Churchwell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer and senior author of a paper describing the new work. The report is to appear in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research journal. Using NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers surveyed some 30 million stars in the plane of the galaxy in an effort to build a detailed portrait of the inner regions of the Milky Way. The task, Churchwell said, is like trying to describe the boundaries of a forest from a vantage point deep within the woods: "This is hard to do from within the galaxy." Spitzer's capabilities, however, helped the astronomers cut through obscuring clouds of interstellar dust by gathering infrared light, a type of light which penetrates these clouds. This provided information on tens of millions of stars at the center of the galaxy. The new survey gives the most detailed picture to date of the inner regions of the Milky Way, according to the astronomers. "We're bringing tens of millions of objects into the equation, said Robert Benjamin, lead author of the new study and a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The possibility that the Milky Way Galaxy has a long stellar bar through its center has long been considered by astronomers, and such phenomena are not unheard of in galactic taxonomy. They are clearly evident in other galaxies, and it is a structural characteristic that adds definition beyond the swirling arms of typical spiral galaxies. The new study provides estimates for the size and orientation of the bar that are far different from previous estimates. It shows a bar, consisting of relatively old and red stars, spanning the center of the galaxy roughly 27,000 light years in length. This is 7,000 light years longer than previously believed, the researchers said. The analysis also suggests the bar is oriented at about a 45-degree angle relative to a line joining the sun and the center of the galaxy, according to the astronomers. Astronomers have debated whether a presumed central feature of the galaxy would be a bar structure or a central ellipseu or both. The new research, the Wisconsin astronomers said, clearly shows a bar-like structure. Courtesy: Associated Press US Tiniest dinosaur eggs found Scientists say they have found the smallest dinosaur eggs which could be called dinosaur eggs since scientists believe birds are living dinosaurs. The four eggs, two of which contain remains of embryos, come from a dinosaur that may also turn out to be the smallest known, the researchers said: It may have been the size of a goldfinch or slightly bigger. The eggs are about 18 millimetres (0.7 inch) long, roughly the width of a thumbnail. This makes them about as big as goldfinch eggs said Eric Buffetaut of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, one of the discoverers. One cannot accurately estimate the size of an adult from the size of an egg, he added, but in birds there is nevertheless a link between egg size and adult size, with a few exceptions. What this means is that the eggs are certainly from a very small dinosaur. A goldfinch is about 11 centimetres (a bit over 4 inches) long. The eggs come from a theropod, he said, a type of dinosaur that included the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex and is also believed to be the group from which birds descend. Indeed, the newfound eggs seem to come from a sort of tiny dinosaur-bird who lived at the cusp of the transition between the two forms, Buffetaut said. The eggshell shows a mixture of dinosaur-like features (knobs on the surface) and bird-like characters (three structural layers), wrote Buffetaut in the email. These eggs are from an animal that was somewhere along the transition from dinosaurs to birds, and where exactly it should be placed is still unclear. The beast who laid the egg may have been a bird-like small theropod, similar perhaps to some of the feathered dinosaurs described from rocks of comparable age in northeastern China, but smaller, Buffetaut wrote. The tiny eggs were found among a group of bones of other animals in 2002 and 2003 in an outcrop of red rocks at Phu Phok, northeastern Thailand, according to Buffetaut and his colleagues. They described the eggs in the September 13 issue of the German scientific journal Naturwissenschaften (Natural Sciences). The eggs were dated to the early Cretaceous, a period spanning from about 145 million to 100 million years ago. The non-avian dinosaurs died out much later, about 65 million years ago. The eggs small size also lends further support to the theory, Buffetaut said, that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Most biologists believe this by now but skeptics remain. Courtesy: World Science |
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