(Sandia Labs News Release) Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste.
Sandia chemist Tina Nenoff heads a team of researchers focused on removal of radioactive iodine from spent nuclear fuel. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. “This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture,” said chemist Tina Nenoff of Sandia’s Surface and Interface Sciences Department.
The discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents. A characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel can be reprocessed to recover fissile materials and provide fresh fuel for nuclear power plants. Countries such as France, Russia and India are reprocessing spent fuel. Continue reading »
By Joseph Castro (LiveScience) The act of helping others out of empathy has long been associated strictly with humans and other primates, but new research shows that rats exhibit this prosocial behavior as well.
In the new study, laboratory rats repeatedly freed their cage-mates from containers, even though there was no clear reward for doing so. The rodents didn’t bother opening empty containers or those holding stuffed rats.
To the researchers’ surprise, when presented with both a rat-holding container and a one containing chocolate — the rats’ favorite snack — the rodents not only chose to open both containers, but also to share the treats they liberated.
By Adam Bernstein (Washington Post) Loren R. Mosher, 70, who died of liver cancer July 10 at a clinic in Berlin, was a contrarian psychiatrist and schizophrenia expert who was dismissed from the National Institute of Mental Health for his controversial theories on treatment.
While chief of NIMH’s Center for the Study of Schizophrenia from 1968 to 1980, Dr. Mosher decried excess drugging of the mentally ill. He eventually established small, drug-free treatment facilities that were more akin to homes than hospitals.
Creating Soteria House in the early 1970s, he said, caused lasting trouble with the psychiatric community. After showing studies of patient recovery that matched traditional treatment with medication, the project lost its funding amid a strong peer backlash. So did a second residential treatment center in San Jose.
via Contrarian Psychiatrist Loren Mosher, 70 (washingtonpost.com).
By Robert Sanders (UC California, Berkeley) University of California, Berkeleyscientists have shown that ionized plasmas like those in neon lights and plasma TVs not only can sterilize water, but make it antimicrobial – able to kill bacteria – for as long as a week after treatment.
A brief spark in air produces a low-temperature plasma of partially ionized and dissociated oxygen and nitrogen that will diffuse into nearby liquids or skin, where they can kill microbes similar to the way some drugs and immune cells kill microbes by generating similar or identical reactive chemicals. (Courtesy of Steve Graves)
Devices able to produce such plasmas are cheap, which means they could be life-savers in developing countries, disaster areas or on the battlefield where sterile water for medical use – whether delivering babies or major surgery – is in short supply and expensive to produce.
“We know plasmas will kill bacteria in water, but there are so many other possible applications, such as sterilizing medical instruments or enhancing wound healing,” said chemical engineer David Graves, the Lam Research Distinguished Professor in Semiconductor Processing at UC Berkeley. “We could come up with a device to use in the home or in remote areas to replace bleach or surgical antibiotics.”
Low-temperature plasmas as disinfectants are “an extraordinary innovation with tremendous potential to improve health treatments in developing and disaster-stricken regions,” said Phillip Denny, chief administrative officer of UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies, which helped fund Graves’ research and has a mission of addressing the needs of the poor worldwide.
By George Monbiot (The Guardian UK) The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin.
By Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens (The Scientist) In August, we proposed, in an article in PLoS Medicine, that medical “guest writers” might be sued for fraud. For some time, commentators have called for sanctions against academic doctors who agree to sign their names to articles that are planned and developed by medical writing companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Some have even called these practices fraudulent, but have not confronted the legal difficulties with that approach—namely that the grounds for fraud are hard to establish: those who have been harmed by the drugs the patients are unlikely to have read the article, and therefore cannot claim to have believed that the “guest” was the true author, while the doctors who found the article persuasive are unlikely to have used the drug themselves.
We argue that the readers of medical journals are also victims. The value of their subscription is diminished when the editors unwittingly publish articles signed by guest writers who falsely claim to be the author. This violates the journal’s publication requirements, making the articles themselves fraudulent. We also argue that when the pharmaceutical sponsors use these articles to defend themselves in lawsuits for example, to prove a drug’s safety, that effort should be treated as a fraud on the court, resulting in a verdict in favor of the opposing party.
