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Electromagnetic ion cyclotron waves are generated by the instability of hydrogen ions and cause nearby helium ions to accelerate.

The Earth’s magnetosphere contains plasma, an ionized gas composed of positive ions and negative electrons. The motion of these charged plasma particles is controlled by electromagnetic fields. The energy transfer processes that occur in this collisionless space plasma are believed to be based on wave-particle interactions such as particle acceleration by plasma waves and spontaneous wave generation, which enable energy and momentum transfer.

However, while the coexistence of waves with accelerated particles in the magnetosphere has been studied for many years, the gradual nature of the interactions between them has made observation of these processes difficult. Detection of local energy transfer between the particles and the fields is therefore required to enable quantitative assessment of their interactions.

Researchers from Nagoya University’s Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research (ISEE) are part of a research team that have performed ultrafast measurements using four Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft to evaluate the energy transfer that occurred during interactions associated with electromagnetic ion cyclotron waves. “We observed that the ion distributions were not symmetrical around the magnetic field direction but were in fact in phase with the plasma wave fields,” states Nagoya University’s Masafumi Shoji.

The energy transfer process from the hydrogen ions to the helium ions occurs via wave-particle interactions.

The high-time-resolution measurements provided by the MMS spacecraft were combined with composition-resolved ion meas industrial wireless  urements to demonstrate the simultaneous occurrence of two energy transfers. The first energy transfer was from hot anisotropic hydrogen ions to an ion cyclotron wave via a cyclotron resonance process, while the second transfer was from the cyclotron wave to helium ions, which took place via a nonresonant interaction and saw the cold He+ ions being accelerated to energies of up to 2 keV.

“This represents direct quantitative evidence of the occurrence of collisionless energy transfer between two distinct particle populations via wave-particle interactions,” says Yoshizumi Miyoshi from Nagoya University’s ISEE. “Measurements of this type will even provide the capability to identify the types of wave-particle interactions that are occurring.” The team’s findings were rec industrial m2m  ently published in Science.

It is hoped that this research represents a major step towards a quantitative understanding of the wave-particle interactions and energy transfer between particle populations in space plasma. This would have implications for our understanding of a wide variety of space plasma phenomena, includ IoT PLC accessing the Van Allen radiation belt, geomagnetic storms, auroral particle precipitation, and atmospheric loss from planets, such as the loss of oxygen ions from Earth’s atmosphere.

Publication: N. Kitamura, et al., “Direct measurements of two-way wave-particle energy transfer in a collisionless space plasma,” Science 07 Sep 2018: Vol. 361, Issue 6406, pp. 1000-1003; DOI: 10.1126/science.aap8730

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Bunostegos akokaensis: About the same size as a cow, this pre-reptile also stood the same way — upright with its legs underneath. It may be the earliest known creature to do so, according to a new study. Drawings: Morgan Turner

According to a new study from Brown University, the pre-reptile Bunostegos akokanensis the oldest known creature to have walked upright on all fours, roam dsl  ing the ancient supercontinent of Pangea about 260-million years ago.

A newly published analysis of the bones of Bunostegos akokanensis, a 260-million-year-old pre-reptile, finds that it likely stood upright on all fours like a cow or a hippo, making it the earliest known creature to do so.

To date all of the known pareiasaurs who roved the supercontinent of Pangea in the Permian era a quarter of a billion years ago were sprawlers whose limbs would jut out from the side of the body and then continue out or slant down from the elbow (like some modern lizards). Morgan Turner, lead author of the study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, expected Bunostegos would be a sprawler, too, but the bones of the animal’s forelimbs tell a different story.

“A lot of the animals that lived around the time had a similar upright or semi-upri din rail  ght hind limb posture, but what’s interesting and special about Bunostegos is the forelimb, in that its anatomy is sprawling — precluding and seemingly directed underneath its body — unlike anything else at the time,” said Turner who performed the analysis under the supervision of Christian Sidor while a student at the University of Washington. Now Turner is a graduate student at Brown University. “The elements and features within the forelimb bones won’t allow a sprawling posture. That is unique.”

The findings allowed Turner, Sidor, and her co-authors to characterize how Bunostegos might have looked, standing like a cow and about the same size.

“Imagine a cow-sized, plant-eating reptile with a knobby skull and bony armor down its back,” said co-author Linda Tsuji of the Royal Ontario Museum, who discovered the fossils in Niger with Sidor and a team of paleontologists in 2003 and 2006.

Four forelimb findings

Turner examined much of the skeletons of several individuals. The findings that matter most, however, are all in the forelimbs. In particular, four observations make the case, she said, that Bunostegos stood differently than all the rest, with the legs entirely beneath the body.

The shoulder joint (1), humerus (2), knee-like elbow hinge (3), and a longer ulna (4) together make the case that Bunostegos stood with its legs under its body.

The shoulder joint — the glenoid fossa — is facing down such that the humerus (the bone running from shoulder to elbow) would be vertically oriented underneath. It would restrict the humerus from sticking out to the side.

Meanwhile Bunostegos’ humerus is not twisted like those of sprawlers. In a sprawler, the twist is what could allow the humerus to jut out to the side at the shoulder and then orient the forearm downward from the elbow. But the humerus of Bunostegos has no twist, suggesting that the foot could actually reach the ground only if the elbow and shoulders were aligned under the body, Turner said.

The elbow joint is also telling. Unlike in sprawling pareiasaurs, which had considerable mobility at the elbow, the movement of Bunostegos’s elbow is more limited. The way the radius and ulna (forearm bones) join with the humerus forms a hinge-like joint, and wouldn’t allow for the forearm to swing out to the sides. Instead, it would only swing in a back and forth direction like a human knee.

Finally, the ulna is longer than the humerus in Bunostegos, which is a common trait among non-sprawlers. “Many other sprawling four-legged animals have the reverse ratio,” Turner said.

Going back 260 million years

The idea that Bunostegos would be an outlier in terms of its posture matches well with the idea that it was somewhat of an outlier in its choice of habitat.

“Bunostegos was an isolated pareiasaur,” Turner said.

Way back when, Niger was an arid place (like some of it is today) where plants and water sources might well have been few and far between. Scientists have associated walking upright on all fours with a more energy-efficient posture than sprawling. For the long journeys between meals, Turner said, the upright posture might have been necessary for survival.

The significance of such an early example of the upright posture is that Bunostegos dates very far back on the evolutionary tree, pushing back the clock on when this posture shows up in evolution.

But Turner said she wouldn’t be surprised if other animals of the time are eventually also found to have similarities to this posture, which evolved independently in reptiles and mammals several times over the eras.

“Posture, from sprawling to upright, is not black or white, but instead is a gradient of forms,” Turner said. “There are many complexities about the evolution of posture and locomotion we are working to better understand every day. The anatomy of Bunostegos is unexpected, illuminating, and tells us we still have much to learn.”

At Brown, Turner is working in the lab of Stephen Gatesy, where she is studying a Industrial IoT Products   continuum of postures and locomotion in ancient creatures. In addition to Turner, Tsuji and Sidor, Oumarou Ide of the University of Niamey in Niger is an author of the study.

The National Science Foundation supported the research.

Publication: Morgan L. Turner,et al., “The vertebrate fauna of the upper Permian of Niger—IX. The appendicular skeleton of Bunostegos akokanensis (Parareptilia: Pareiasauria),” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2015; DOI:10.1080/02724634.2014.994746

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An image undergoing basic processing steps; exposure adjustments, then noise reduction, to arrive at the final image (bottom). Graphic: Christine Daniloff

In an effort to improve image-processing software, a team of researchers developed a new programming language called Halide, which is easier to read, write and revise and is significantly faster because Halide automates code-optimization procedures.

Image-processing software is a hot commodity: Just look at Instagram, a company built around image processing that Facebook is trying to buy for a billion dollars. Image processing is also going mobile, as more and more people are sending cellphone photos directly to the Web, without transferring them to a computer first.

At the same time, digital-photo files are getting so big that, without a lot of clever software engineering, processing them would take a painfully long time on a desktop computer, let alone a cellphone. Unfortunately, the tricks that engineers use to speed up their image-processing algorithms make their code almost unreadable, and rarely reusable. Adding a new function to an image-processing program, or modifying it to run on a different device, often requires rethinking an industrial IoT Gateway  d revising it from top to bottom.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aim to change that, with a new programming language called Halide. Not only are Halide programs easier to read, write and revise than image-processing programs written in a conventional language, but because Halide automates code-optimization procedures that would ordinarily take hours to perform by hand, they’re also significantly faster.

In 4g-lte   tests, the MIT researchers used Halide to rewrite several common image-processing algorithms whose performance had already been optimized by seasoned programmers. The Halide versions were typically about one-third as long but offered significant performance gains — two-, three-, or even six-fold speedups. In one instance, the Halide program was actually longer than the original — but the speedup was 70-fold.

Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Andrew Adams, a CSAIL postdoc, led the development of Halide, and they’ve released the code online. At this month’s Siggraph, the premier graphics conference, they’ll present a paper on Halide, which they co-wrote with MIT computer science professors Saman Amarasinghe and Fredo Durand and with colleagues at Adobe and Stanford University.

Parallel pipelines

One reason that image processing is so computationally intensive is that it generally requires a succession of discrete operations. After light strikes the sensor in a cellphone camera, the phone combs through the image data for values that indicate malfunctioning sensor pixels and corrects them. Then it correlates the readings from pixels sensitive to different colors to deduce the actual colors of image regions. Then it does some color correction, and then some contrast adjustment, to make the image colors better correspond to what the human eye sees. At this point, the phone has done so much processing that it takes another pass through the data to clean it up.

And that’s just to display the image on the phone screen. Software that does anything more complicated, like removing red eye, or softening shadows, or boosting color saturation — or making the image look like an old Polaroid photo — introduces still more layers of procePredictive Grid Analyticsssing. Moreover, high-level modifications often require the software to go back and recompute prior stages in the pipeline.

In today’s multicore chips, distributing different segments of the image to cores working in parallel can make image processing more efficient. But the way parallel processing is usually done, after each step in the image-processing pipeline, the cores would send the results of their computations back to main memory. Because data transfer is much slower than computation, this can eat up all the performance gains offered by parallelization.

So software engineers try to keep the individual cores busy for as long as possible before they have to ship their results to memory. That means that the cores have to execute several steps in the processing pipeline on their separate chunks of data without aggregating their results. Keeping track of all the dependencies between pixels being processed on separate cores is what makes the code for efficient image processors so complicated. Moreover, the trade-offs between the number of cores, the processing power of the cores, the amount of local memory available to each core, and the time it takes to move data off-core varies from machine to machine, so a program optimized for one device may offer no speed advantages on a different one.

Divide and conquer

Halide doesn’t spare the programmer from thinking about how to parallelize efficiently on particular machines, but it splits that problem off from the description of the image-processing algorithms. A Halide program has two sections: one for the algorithms, and one for the processing “schedule.” The schedule can specify the size and shape of the image chunks that each core needs to process at each step in the pipeline, and it can specify data dependencies — for instance, that steps being executed on particular cores will need access to the results of previous steps on different cores. Once the schedule is drawn up, however, Halide handles all the accounting automatically.

A programmer who wants to export a program to a different machine just changes the schedule, not the algorithm description. A programmer who wants to add a new processing step to the pipeline just plugs in a description of the new procedure, without having to modify the existing ones. (A new step in the pipeline will require a corresponding specification in the schedule, however.)

“When you have the idea that you might want to parallelize something a certain way or use stages a certain way, when writing that manually, it’s really hard to express that idea correctly,” Ragan-Kelley says. “If you have a new optimization idea that you want to apply, chances are you’re going to spend three days debugging it because you’ve broken it in the process. With this, you change one line that expresses that idea, and it synthesizes the correct thing.”

Although Halide programs are simpler to write and to read than ordinary image-processing programs, because the scheduling is handled automatically, they still frequently offer performance gains over even the most carefully hand-engineered code. Moreover, Halide code is so easy to modify that programmers could simply experiment with half-baked ideas to see if they improve performance.

“You can just flail around and try different things at random, and you’ll often find something really good,” Adams says. “Only much later, when you’ve thought about it very hard, will you figure out why it’s good.”

“There’s a lot of excitement about using a domain-specific language like the one they chose to do, but there really haven’t been a lot of success stories,” says John Owens, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Davis. “And I think this is going to turn out to be a terrific success story. It really has all the pieces you want from a completed system, and it’s in a really important application domain.”

“I can also see it inspiring a lot of future work,” Owens adds. “I think this is going to be a really high-impact project.”

Image: Christine Daniloff

Reprinted with permission of MIT News

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This series of graphs show the changing density of a cloud of atoms as it is cooled to lower and lower temperatures (going from left to right) approaching absolute zero. The emergence of a sharp peak in the later graphs confirms the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate — a fifth state of matter — occurring here at a temperature of 130 nanoKelvin, or less than 1 Kelvin above absolute zero. (Absolute zero, or zero Kelvin, is equal to minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 273 Celsius). Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The International Space Station is officially home to the coolest experiment in space.

NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) was installed in the station’s U.S. science lab in late May and is now producing clouds of ultracold atoms known as Bose-Einstein condensates. These “BECs” reach temperatures just above absolute zero, the point at which atoms should theoretically stop moving entirely. This is the first time BECs have ever been produced in orbit.

CAL is a multiuser facility dedicated to the study of fundamental laws of nature using ultracold quantum gases in microgravity. Cold atoms are long-lived, precisely controlled quantum particles that provide an ideal platform for the study of quantum phenomena and potential applications of quantum technologies. This NASA facility is the first of its kind in space. It is designed to advance scientists’ ability to make precision measurements of gravity, probing long-standing problems in quantum physics (the study of the universe at the very smallest scales), and exploring the wavelike nature of matter.

NASA’s Cold Atom Lab will produce clouds of ultra-cold atoms aboard the International Space Station to perform quantum physics experiments in microgravity. Atoms are chilled to about one 10 billionth of a degree above Absolute Zero, or about 10 billion times colder than the average temperature of deep space. At those temperatures, atoms behave in strange ways, allowing scientists to investigate the fundamental nature of matter.

“Having a BEC experiment operating on the space station is a dream come true,” said Robert Thompson, CAL project scientist and a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It’s been a long, hard road to get here, but completely worth the struggle, because there’s so much we’re going to be able to do with this facility.”

CAL scientists confirmed last week that the facility has produced BECs from atoms of rubidium, with temperatures as low as 100 nanoKelvin, or one ten-millionth of one Kelvin above absolute zero. (Absolute zero, or zero Kelvin, is equal to minu 459 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273 degrees Celsius). That’s colder than the average temperature of space, which is about 3 Kelvin (minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit/minus 270 degrees Celsius). But the CAL scientists have their sights set even lower, and expect to reach temperatures colder than what any BEC experiments have achieved on Earth.

At these ultracold temperatures, the atoms in a BEC begin to behave unlike anything else on Earth. In fact, BECs are characterized as a fifth state of matter, distinct from gases, liquids, solids and plasma. In a BEC, atoms act more like waves than particles. The wave nature of atoms is typically only observable at microscopic scales, but BECs make this phenomenon macroscopic, and thus much easier to study. The ultracold atoms all assume their lowest energy state, and take on the same wave identity, becoming indistinguishable from one another. Together, the atom clouds are like a single “super atom,” instead of individual atoms.

The Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) consists of two standardized containers that will be installed on the International Space Station. The larger container is called a “quad locker,” and the smaller container is called a “single locker.” The quad locker contains CAL’s physics package, or the compartment where CAL will p cost-effective M2M router  roduce clouds of ultra-cold atoms. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Tyler Winn

Not a simple instrument

“CAL is an extremely complicated instrument,” said Robert Shotwell, chief engineer of JPL‘s astronomy and physics directorate, who has overseen the challenging project since February 2017. “Typically, BEC experiments involve enough equipment to fill a room and require near-constant monitoring by scientists, whereas CAL is about the size of a small refrigerator and can be operated remotely from Earth. It was a struggle and required significant effort to overcome all the hurdles necessary to produce the sophisticated facility that’s operating on the space station today.”

The first laboratory BECs were produced in 1995, but the phenomenon was first predicted 71 years earlier by physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein. Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for being the first to create and characterize BECs in the lab. Five science groups, including groups led by Cornell and Ketterle, will conduct experiments with CAL during its first year. Hundreds of BEC experiments have been operated on Earth since the mid-1990s, and a few BEC experiments have even made brief trips to space aboard sounding rockets. But CAL is the first facility of its kind on the sp remote connectivity  ace station, where scientists can conduct daily studies of BECs over long periods.

BECs are created in atom traps, or frictionless containers made out of magnetic fields or focused lasers. On Earth, when these traps are shut off, gravity pulls on the ultracold atoms and they can only be studied for fractions of a second. The persistent microgravity of the space station allows scientists to observe individual BECs for five to 10 seconds at a time, with the ability to repeat these measurements for up to six hours per day. As the atom cloud decompresses inside the atom trap, its temperature naturally drops, and the longer the cloud stays in the trap, the colder it gets. This natural phenomenon (that a drop in pressure also means a drop in temperature) is also the reason that a can of spray paint gets cold when the paint is sprayed out: the can’s internal pressure is dropping. In microgravity, the BECs can decompress to colder temperatures than any earthbound instrument. Day-to-day operations of CAL require no intervention from the astronauts aboard the station.

In addition to the BECs made from rubidium atoms, the CAL team is working toward making BECs using two different isotopes of potassium atoms.

CAL is currently in a commissioning phase, in which the operations team conducts a long series of tests to fully understand how the CAL facility operates in microgravity.

“There is a globe-spanning team of scientists ready and excited to use this facility,” said Kamal Oudrhiri, JPL’s mission manager for CAL. “The diverse range of experiments they plan to perform means there are many techniques for manipulating and cooling the atoms that we need to adapt for microgravity, before we turn the instrument over to the principal investigators to begin science operations.” The science phase is expected to begin in early September and will last three years.

The Cold Atom Laboratory launched to the space station on May 21, 2018, aboard a Northrop Grumman (formerly Orbital ATK) Cygnus spacecraft from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Designed and built at JPL, CAL is sponsored by the Internation secure web based scada  al Space Station Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications (SLPSRA) Division of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For more information about the Cold Atom Lab, visit:

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New genomics research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial  VPN router  Intelligence Laboratory suggests vocalizing birds could tell us more about speech disorders.

Think that sparrow whistling outside your bedroom window is nothing more than pleasant background noise?

A new paper from a researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) suggests that we can apply what we know about songbirds to our understanding of human speech production — and, therefore, come closer to identifying and potentially even industrial cellular modem3g modem   reducing the prevalence of disorders like stuttering and Huntington’s Disease.

In a paper published in Science this month, CSAIL postdoc Andreas Pfenning and collaborators at Duke University compared genetic maps of brain tissue from three groups: humans, vocal-learning birds, and non-vocal-learning birds and primates.

Their results showed that there are more than 50 different genes that display similar activity patterns in humans and vocal-learning birds — patterns that are distinct from those in the brains of animals incapable of vocal-learning. That is, if a gene was more active in humans, it was more active in songbirds, but not in non-songbirds.

These findings dramatically advance existing research that previously only identified one gene (“FOXP2”) involved in both human and avian language centers. Pfenning says the work shows that genetic experiments involving birds could help scientists learn more about which genes might be involved in different speech conditions in humans.

Pfenning, who received his PhD from Duke in 2012, says he was hopeful that such correlations would be found, especially given that the manner in which birds learn specific song patterns is so similar to how humans learn to form words.

“Studying fine motor behavior is vital for a lot of neurological disorders in humans, but traditional research subjects like mice are difficult to quantify for those kinds of actions,” says Pfenning. “With birdsong, meanwhile, there are far more exact metrics, like the precision of the pitch, the timing/rhythm of the notes and even the higher-level ‘grammar’ of different songs.”

The researchers utilized multiple massive datasets for the study, including the avian genome, the songbird genome that was completed in 2010, and the “Allen Brain Atlas” that was used for humans and primates. The work is part of nearly 30 studies p industrial LTE router ublished this month by the Avian Genome Consortium, which seeks to sequence the genomes of all 48 major bird groups — only three of which had been sequenced before the consortium got to work in 2010.

Beyond the paper’s implications for specific speech disorders, Pfenning is optimistic that further research could help illuminate how our languages have evolved in the bigger picture.

“Are there common features in the evolution patterns of different animals that can tell us more about the history of human language?” he asks. “Our study is an exciting first step, and we’re just scraping the surface of what’s possible.”

Publication: Andreas R. Pfenning, et al., “Convergent transcriptional specializations in the brains of humans and song-learning birds,” Science, 12 December 2014: Vol. 346 no. 6215; DOI: 10.1126/science.1256846

Image: Sparrow from SHutterstock

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Credit: Jumanji Solar

Researchers at Princeton University have used nanotechnology to develop a nanotechnological mesh that increases efficiency over organic solar cells nearly threefold.

The scientists published their findings in the journal Optics Express¹. The team was able to reduce reflexivity and capture more of the light that isn’t reflected. The resulting solar cell is thinner, less reflective and utilizes sandwiched plastic and metal with the nanomesh. The so-called “Plasmonic Cavity with Subwavelength Hole array,” or “PlaCSH,” reduces the potential for losing light itself and reflects only 4% of direct sunlight, leading to a 52% increase in efficiency compared to conven android-computer  tional, organic solar cells.

Benefits of using the nanomesh

PlaCSH is capable of capturing large amounts of sunlight even when the sunlight is dispersed on cloudy days, which translates to an increase of 81% in efficiency in indirect lighting conditions. PlaCSH is up to 175% more efficient than traditional solar cells.

The mesh is only 30 nanometers thick and the holes in it are only 175 nm in dia industrial wireless modem  meter. This replaces the thicker, traditional top layer that is made out of indium-tin-oxide (ITO). Since this mesh is smaller than the wavelength of the light it’s trying to collect, it is able to exploit the bizarre way that light wor Industrial IoT Products  ks in subwavelength structures, allowing the cell to capture light once it enters the holes in the mesh instead of letting much of it reflect away.

The scientists believe that the cells can be made cost effectively and that this method should work for silicon and gallium arsenide solar cells as well.

References

[via Extreme Tech]

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“This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death,” said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Image from iStock .

Say goodbye to fast-food burgers and hello to fresh garden salads. While observing 37,698 men for up to 22 years and 83,644 women for up to 28 years, a new study found that regular consumption of red meat, particula WiFi M2M Router rly processed red meat, was associated with increased mortality risk.

A new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers has found that red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality. The results also showed that substituting other healthy protein sources, such as fish, poultry, nuts, and legumes, was associated with a lower risk of mortality.

“Our study adds more evidence to the health risks of eating high amounts of red meat, which has been associated with type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers in other studies,” said lead author An Pan, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH.

The study was published online in Archives of Internal Medicine.

The researchers, including senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at HSPH, and colleagues, prospectively observed 37,698 men from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study for up to 22 years and 83,644 women in the Nurses’ Health Study for up to 28 years who were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline. Their diets were assessed through questionnaires every four years.

A combined 23,926 deaths were documented in the two studies, of which 5,910 were from cardiovascular disease and 9,464 from cancer. Regular consumption of red meat, particularly processed red meat, was associated with increased mortality risk. One daily serving of unprocessed red meat (about the size of a deck of cards) was associated with a 13 percent increased risk of mortality, and one daily serving of processed red meat (one hot dog or two slices of bacon) was associated with a 20 percent increased risk.

Among specific causes, the corresponding increases in risk were 18 percent and 21 percent for cardiovascular mortality, and 10 percent and 16 percent for cancer mortality. These analyses took into account chronic disease risk factors such as age, body mass index, physical ac 4g router tivity, and family history of heart disease or major cancers.

Red meat, especially processed meat, contains ingredients that have been linked to increased risk of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. These include heme iron, saturated fat, sodium, nitrites, and certain carcinogens that are formed during cooking.

Replacing one serving of total red meat with one serving of a healthy protein source was associated with a lower mortality risk: 7 percent for fish, 14 percent for poultry, 19 percent for nuts, 10 percent for legumes, 10 percent for low-fat dairy products, and 14 percent for whole grains. The researchers estimated that 9.3 percent of deaths in men and 7.6 percent in women could have been prevented at the end of the follow-up if all the participants had consumed less than 0.5 servings per day of red meat.

“This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death,” said Hu. “On the other hand, choosing more healthful sources of protein in place of red VPN router   meat can confer significant health benefits by reducing chronic disease morbidity and mortality.”

Support for the study was provided by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Cancer Institute.

Other HSPH authors include Qi Sun, Adam Bernstein, JoAnn Manson, Meir Stampfer, and Walter Willett.

Image: iStock, Harvard Gazette

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a) In the initial state, each lattice site is filled by exactly one atom. The height of the barrier between the sites is then abruptly lowered, bringing the system out of equilibrium. b) After the barrier has been lowered, an entangled doublon-holon pair is formed. The correlated doublons and holons move across the system with opposite momenta.

Physicists from the Quantum Many-Body Systems division at the Max-Planck Institute o 3g router f Quantum Optics in collaboration with theoretical physicists from the University of Geneva have measured the propagation velocity of quantum signals in a many-body system. This is the first time researchers have succeeded in observing such Prognostics and Health Management   a process and it gives insight into the processes involved in the communication and processing of quantum information.

A quantum computer based on quantum particles instead of classical bits, can in principle outperform any classical computer. However, it still remains an open question, how fast and how efficient quantum computers really may be able to work. A critical limitation will be given by the velocity with which a quantum signal can spread within a processing unit. For the first time, a group of physicists from the Quantum Many-Body Systems division at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching near Munich) in close collaboration with theoretical physicists from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) has succeeded in observing such a process in a solid-state like system (Nature, DOI:10.1038/nature10748). The physicists generated a perfectly ordered lattice of rubidium atoms and then induced a quantum excitation – an “entangled” pair of a doubly occupied lattice site next to a hole. With the aid of a microscope they observed how this signal moved from lattice site to lattice site. “This measurement gives insight into very elementary processes involved in the communication and processing of quantum information”, Professor Immanuel Bloch points out.

The communication and processing of information in a quantum computer is based on concepts that are inherently different from those used in classical computers. This is due to the fundamental differences between quantum particles and classical objects. Whereas the latter are, for example, either black or whit Smart Vending e, quantum particles can take on both colors at the same time. It is only at the process of measurement that the particles decide on one of the two possible properties. As a consequence of this peculiar behavior, two quantum objects can form one entangled state in which their properties are strictly connected, i.e. quantum correlated. At present there is no general model for predicting how fast a quantum correlation can travel after it is generated.

Now physicists from the Quantum Many-Body Systems division have been able to directly observe such a process. They start the experiment by generating an extremely cold gas of rubidium atoms. The ensemble is then kept in a light field which divides it into several parallel one-dimensional tubes. Now the tubes are superimposed with yet another light field, a standing laser light wave. By the periodic sequence of dark and bright areas, the atoms are forced to form a lattice structure: exactly one atom is trapped in each bright spot, and is separated from the neighboring atom by a dark area which acts as a barrier.

Changing the intensity of the laser light controls the height of this barrier. At the beginning of the experiments, it is set to a value that prevents the atoms from moving to a neighboring site. Then, in a very short time, the height of the barrier is lowered such that the system gets out of equilibrium and local excitations arise: Under the new conditions one or the other atom is allowed to “tunnel” through the barrier and reach its neighboring site. If this happens, entangled pairs are generated, each consisting of a doubly occupied site, a so-called doublon, and a hole, named holon. According to a model developed by theoretical physicists from the University of Geneva around Professor Corinna Kollath, both doublon and holon move through the system – in opposite directions – as if they were real particles (see figure). “Regarding one entangled pair, it is not defined whether the doublon sits on the right or on the left side of the holon. Both constellations are present at the same time”, Dr. Marc Cheneau, a scientist in the Quantum Many-Body Systems division, explains. “However, once I observe a doubly occupied or an empty site, I exactly know where to find its counterpart. This is the correlation we are talking about.”

Now the scientists observe how the correlations are carried through the system. Using a new microscopic technique, they can directly image the single atoms on their lattice sites. In simplified terms, they make a series of snapshots each showing the position of the doublons and the holons at that very moment. The propagation velocity of this correlation can be deduced from the distance the two partners have moved apart in a certain period of time. The experimental results are in very good agreement with the predictions of the model mentioned above.

“As long as quantum information is communicated with light quanta, we know, that this is done with the speed of light,” Dr. Cheneau points out. “If, however, quantum bits or quantum registers are based on solid-state structures, things are different. Here the quantum correlation has to be passed on directly from bit to bit. Once we know how fast this process can happen, we have the key to understand, what will limit the velocity of future quantum computers.”

Image: Woogie Works Animation Studio; MPQ