As reported in the New York Times:

Kepler Planet Hunter Finds 1,200 Possibilities

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: 3 February 2011

Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they don’t know what to do with them all.
In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets in the universe.

Of the new candidates, 68 are one-and-a-quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller — smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water, of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun; four of these are less than twice the size of Earth, and one is even smaller.

Astronomers said that it would take years to confirm that all these candidates are really planets — by using ground-based telescopes to try to measure their masses, for example — and not just double stars or other strange systems. Many of them might never be vetted because of the dimness of their stars and the lack of telescope time and astronomers to do it all. But statistical tests of a sample of the list suggest that 80 to 95 percent of the objects on it were real, as opposed to blips in the data.

“It boggles the mind,” said William Borucki of the Ames Research Center, Kepler’s leader.

At first glance, none of them appears to be another Earth, the kind of cosmic Eden fit for life as we know it, but the new results represent only four months worth of data on a three-and-a-half-year project, and have left astronomers enthused about the chances they will ultimately reach their goal of finding Earth-like planets in the universe.

“For the first time in human history we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable zone planets,” said Sara Seager of M.I.T., who works with Kepler. “This is the first big step forward to answering the ancient question, ‘How common are other Earths?’ ”

Mr. Borucki noted that since the Kepler telescope surveys only one four-hundredth of the sky, the numbers extrapolated to some 20,000 habitable-zone planets within 3,000 light-years of Earth. He is the lead author of a paper that has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal describing the new results.

In a separate announcement, to be published in Nature on Thursday, a group of Kepler astronomers led by Jack Lissauer of Ames said they had found a star with six planets — the most Kepler has yet found around one star — orbiting in close ranks in the same plane, no farther from their star than Mercury is from the Sun.

This dense packing, Dr. Lissauer said, seems to violate all the rules astronomers thought they had begun to discern about how planetary systems form and evolve.
“This is sending me back to the drawing board,” he said.

Summarizing the news from the cosmos, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, a veteran exoplanet hunter and a mainstay of the Kepler work, said, “There are so many messages here that it’s hard to know where to begin.” He called the Borucki team’s announcement “an extraordinary planet windfall, a moment that will be written in textbooks. It will be thought of as watershed.”

Kepler, launched into orbit around the Sun in March 2009, stares at a patch of the Milky Way near the Northern Cross, measuring the brightness of 156,000 stars every 30 minutes, looking for a pattern of dips that would be caused by planets crossing in front of their suns.

The goal is to assess the frequency of Earth-like planets around Sun-like suns in the galaxy. But in the four months of data analyzed so far, a Kepler looking at our own Sun would be lucky to have seen the Earth pass even once. Three transits are required for a planet to show up in Kepler’s elaborate data-processing pipeline, which means that Kepler’s next scheduled data release, in June 2012, could be a moment of truth for the mission.

Habitable planets, in the meantime, could show up at fainter stars than our Sun, where the habitable, or “Goldilocks,” zone, would be smaller and closer to the star and planets in it would rack up transits more quickly.
Attention has been riveted on Wednesday’s data release since June, when Kepler scientists issued their first list, of some 300 stars suspected of harboring planets, but held back another 400 for further study. In the intervening months, Mr. Borucki said, some of those candidates have been eliminated, but hundreds more have been added that would otherwise have been reported in June this year.

One of the sequestered stars was a Sun-like star in the constellation Cygnus that went by the name of KOI 157, for Kepler Object of Interest. It first came to notice in the spring of 2009 when the astronomers saw that it seemed to have five candidate planets, four with nearly the same orbital periods, and in the same plane, like an old vinyl record, Dr. Lissauer recalled. Two of them came so close that every 50 days one of them would look as large as a full moon as seen from the other, Dr. Lissauer calculated.

“I got very interested in this system,” Dr. Lissauer said. “Five was the most we had around any target.” Moreover, the planets’ proximity to one another meant that they would interact gravitationally. In the fall, a sixth planet — the innermost — was found.
By measuring the slight variations in transit times caused by the gravitational interference of the inner five planets with one another, Dr. Lissauer and his colleagues were able to calculate the masses and densities of those planets. These confirmed they were so-called super-Earths, with masses ranging from two to 13 times that of the Earth. But they were also puffy, containing a mixture of rock and gas, rather than being pure rock and iron like another super-Earth, Kepler 10b, a hunk of lava announced last month at a meeting in Seattle.

Dr. Lissauer said, “It suggests that most super-Earths may be more like Neptune than Earth-like.”

Alan Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the Kepler 11 system, as it is now known, should keep theorists busy and off the streets for a long time. “This system,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “certainly belongs in the pantheon of exoplanet systems: six planets lined up in a plane pointing toward us, waiting patiently for billions of years for humankind to develop sufficient technical capabilities to detect them.”

Mr. Borucki said the growing ubiquity of small planets as revealed by Kepler was a welcome relief from the early days of exoplanet research, when most of the planets discovered were Jupiter-size giants hugging their stars in close orbits, leading theorists to speculate that smaller planets might be thrown away from those environs by gravitational forces or even dragged right into their stars.

“Those little guys are still there,” he said, “and we’re delighted to see them.”

Happy New Year everyone!

The Xmas edition of New Scientist asks the question of who matters most: Darwin in the 200th annviversary of his birth or the 400th anniversary of Galileo using a telescope?

If we go by sacrifice, Galileo wins by being under house arrest for his convictions based on empirical observations. Darwin had others, like Huxley, to vocalize his findings. Whether Darwin was “agnostic” for personal loss or philosohical science reasons, what is clear is that he had regard for how people used faith. Galileo spoke for himself, vigorously, his battle with papal idiocy not shaking his catholic faith.

While that matters not in terms of the value of their findings, it is a measure of what they had to go through. For those reasons I admire William Tyndale – I may disagree with all theology but his stand on free speech paid the ultimate price, one that paved the way to deciding for myself the truth or otherwise of the bible.

Acceptance of truth would also favour Galileo. We may point out time to get used to the idea, but anyone that claimed the sun went round the earth would be a laughing stock. Claims that evolution is wrong are cloaked as a different point of view – the verification of the theory distorted in a way that, if there was a prime mover, brings discredit on their works and culminates in dishonest inquiry that goes to any lengths to support a conclusion.

The value of humanity, as dust or apes in origin before being human, seems unchanged with either assumption. We are mammals, as Hitchens reminds us, but no less for it due to the modifications that make us as a species stand out. It may mean we are not so much a steward as a part of the animal kingdom. Our abilities mean we have moral responsibilities to behave like one.

The controversy gives Darwin an edge. That and the simplicity of a theory that explains increasing complexity, that has a body of evidence supporting it. It needed more than a telescope to prove, and Darwin devoted much of his life to collecting material to make his findings evidence based.

Rocks flying around, or the mysteries of life itself unfolding? Darwin set up biology on the path that would lead to genetics and to network theory. His thinking has set us on a path of discovery that directly effects us.

Yet both are to be celebrated. For humanity is better off for such men as these to grace us with findings that added to the sum of knowledge and paved the way for empirical observations rather than traditional orthodoxy, and discoveries that are the backbone to understanding what we are.

Well I am enjoying the 3G iPhone in a way that may be seen as unseemly for a grown man over a gadget. The last time this feeling came over me was the PSP being launched.

The key difference this time round is that communication is now more important to me than the ability to play with a frivolous distraction. I suppose that may well be the reflection of a 30 year old man that worries about pension contributions and keeping in touch with friends then a 20 something eager for the next fix of hedonistic joy at his finger tips.

Not that the iTunes and iPod features will go to waste. Nor the facebook and myspace features. Or the other features.

3G iPhone - the most fun you can have with your hands in public

And as you probably can guess this is my first blog written on the iPhone. Hopefully, this may well lead to more blogs.

However in these troubled financial times, sacrifices have had to be made. The gym membership will be cancelled. Regular cycling and a veggie lifestyle will have to be enough. [I am working on enough sleep at night and water during the day]

Not least because playing football yesterday has led me to believe that I shall never walk with my usual stride. The bank l work for sponsored children’s clubs in a tournament – a knockabout for a few hours with work colleagues when not refereeing.

I am convinced that physical exercise is to be avoided as I cannot run away from it fast enough.

The above blog is brought to you without any endorsement of any kind; but out of a device that has connected me not just to other people, but to the love of technology as being about helping you with your life rather than taking it over.

Next week Richard gives the tenth and final Simonyi Lecture, as he has retired from the Oxford University Chair for the Public Understanding of Science.

Max Hammerton’s article below mentions a skepticism about the success of public understanding on science – largely because it is hard and difficult. Studies reveal that more formal years of education and those that took voluntary course in mathematics and science were more likely to express an interest in science.

In terms of understanding, a survey in the United States [source]:

The percentage of correct responses to most of the NSF survey questions pertaining to basic science facts, concepts, and vocabulary has remained nearly constant.(See appendix table 7-9.) For example, more than 70 percent of those surveyed knew that:

• Plants produce oxygen.
• The continents have been moving for millions of years and will continue to move.
• Light travels faster than sound.
• Earth goes around the Sun (and not vice versa).
• Not all radioactivity is manmade.

In contrast, about half the respondents knew that:

• The earliest humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.
• It takes Earth one year to go around the Sun.
• Electrons are smaller than atoms.
• Antibiotics do not kill viruses.
• Lasers do not work by focusing sound waves.

A study conducted for the People for the American Way Foundation took a closer look at the question of teaching evolution and found an overwhelming majority of Americans (83 percent) agreeing that it should be taught in the classroom. However, there is also strong support for teaching creationism. A detailed breakdown of the survey findings shows a wide range of opinion on the issue:

• 20 percent favor teaching only evolution and nothing else in public schools;
• 17 percent want only evolution taught in science classes but say that religious explanations can be discussed in other classes;
• 29 percent do not have a problem with creationism being discussed in science classes but believe it should be discussed as a “belief,” not a scientific theory;
• 13 percent believe that both evolution and creationism should be taught as scientific theories in science class;
• 16 percent want no mention of evolution at all;
• 4 percent are in favor of teaching both evolution and creationism but are unsure about how to do it; and
• 1 percent have no opinion (People for American Way Foundation 2000).

While Dawkins is based in the UK, answering those questions right is for him a concern. I thought it was disconcerting that 14% of men in the poll thought the earth did not go round the sun – when reading that 34% of women thought the sun went round the earth I was dumbstruck. If this is a realistic sample of the American public the upcoming election will be won with less of a majority than those that do not know the orbit of the earth. Thankfully the world keeps on going around no matter what people think.

Perhaps there is always going to be a minority that will not concern themselves with basic science. It seems that parents do care that their children get a good science education, and when it is an issue that directly effects them, or gets a lot of media coverage they take a keen interest. The answer to me is that science has to become more connected to the everyday – to excite and encourage inquiry in early years so that science in secondary school builds on that interest.

Why does this matter? Well:

Without a grasp of scientific ways of thinking, the average person cannot tell the difference between science based on real data and something that resembles science—at least in their eyes—but is based on uncontrolled experiments, anecdotal evidence, and passionate assertions…[W]hat makes science special is that evidence has to meet certain standards (Rensberger 2000, p. 61). [ibid]

The key thing is being accessible and available. On that score, Richard Dawkins has achieved and those that wanted to understand had somewhere to go, where science could be explained in its beauty to those interested. Everyone else could fuck off.* That attitude to the role is why Dawkins succeeded with a job title beyond ability to deliver.

The above article re posted from here.

*To paraphrase what a New Science editor said; often wrongly thought to originate with Dawkins.

OTHER BLOGS:

Great Ideas of Biology – 9th Simonyi Anniversary Lecture

Me and Douglas Adams [Richard Dawkins helping me to understand Evolution]

Osamu Shimomura

Martin Chalfie

Roger Y. Tsien

A clever trick borrowed from jellyfish has earned two Americans and one Japanese scientist a share of the chemistry Nobel Prize.

Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures.

Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.[BBC News]

The Nobel Prize website however has all three down as Americans. Below is their press release:

Press Release

8 October 2008

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2008 jointly to

Osamu Shimomura, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, MA, USA and Boston University Medical School, MA, USA,

Martin Chalfie, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

and

Roger Y. Tsien, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

“for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP”.

Glowing proteins – a guiding star for biochemistry

The remarkable brightly glowing green fluorescent protein, GFP, was first observed in the beautiful jellyfish, Aequorea victoria in 1962. Since then, this protein has become one of the most important tools used in contemporary bioscience. With the aid of GFP, researchers have developed ways to watch processes that were previously invisible, such as the development of nerve cells in the brain or how cancer cells spread.

Tens of thousands of different proteins reside in a living organism, controlling important chemical processes in minute detail. If this protein machinery malfunctions, illness and disease often follow. That is why it has been imperative for bioscience to map the role of different proteins in the body.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewards the initial discovery of GFP and a series of important developments which have led to its use as a tagging tool in bioscience. By using DNA technology, researchers can now connect GFP to other interesting, but otherwise invisible, proteins. This glowing marker allows them to watch the movements, positions and interactions of the tagged proteins.

Researchers can also follow the fate of various cells with the help of GFP: nerve cell damage during Alzheimer’s disease or how insulin-producing beta cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo. In one spectacular experiment, researchers succeeded in tagging different nerve cells in the brain of a mouse with a kaleidoscope of colours.

The story behind the discovery of GFP is one with the three Nobel Prize Laureates in the leading roles:

Osamu Shimomura first isolated GFP from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which drifts with the currents off the west coast of North America. He discovered that this protein glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.

Martin Chalfie demonstrated the value of GFP as a luminous genetic tag for various biological phenomena. In one of his first experiments, he coloured six individual cells in the transparent roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans with the aid of GFP.

Roger Y. Tsien contributed to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces. He also extended the colour palette beyond green allowing researchers to give various proteins and cells different colours. This enables scientists to follow several different biological processes at the same time.

Yoichiro Nambu, 1/2 of the prize (USA)

Makoto Kobayashi, 1/4 of the prize (Japan)

Toshihide Maskawa, 1/4 of the prize (Japan)

The Nobel Prize in physics is to be shared by two Japanese citizens and an American, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced.

Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa provided new insights into the building blocks of matter.

Nambu described a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.[BBC News]

More can be found from the Nobel Committees information for the public here.

From the press release:

As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics. Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The Model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.

The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied, differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier.

A hitherto unexplained broken symmetry of the same kind lies behind the very origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, they ought to have annihilated each other. But this did not happen, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles. It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive. The question of how this exactly happened still remains unanswered. Perhaps the new particle accelerator LHC at CERN in Geneva will unravel some of the mysteries that continue to puzzle us.

OTHER BLOGS:

Nobel Prize for HIV discovery and HPV link

Steve Jones, whose book Almost Like A Whale (Darwin’s Ghost in the US) is a must read as The Origin of Species Updated, has said that human evolution has slowed down with over 50 year olds not having as many children as they did of old. Such oldies are more likely to have mutations in the cells of their sperm. He also says that the future is brown in the global age.

Steve Jones is 64.

Leading geneticist Steve Jones says human evolution is over

From left: Harald zur Hausen (half prize), Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (1/4 prize) and Luc Montagnier (1/4 prize)

Congratulations to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Luc Montagnier “for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus” and Harald zur Hausen  “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer”on sharing the Nobel Prize for medicine.

Below is taken from the press release of the Nobel Assembly:

This year’s Nobel Prize awards discoveries of two viruses causing severe human diseases.

Harald zur Hausen went against current dogma and postulated that oncogenic human papilloma virus (HPV) caused cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women. He realized that HPV-DNA could exist in a non-productive state in the tumours, and should be detectable by specific searches for viral DNA. He found HPV to be a heterogeneous family of viruses. Only some HPV types cause cancer. His discovery has led to characterization of the natural history of HPV infection, an understanding of mechanisms of HPV-induced carcinogenesis and the development of prophylactic vaccines against HPV acquisition.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier discovered human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Virus production was identified in lymphocytes from patients with enlarged lymph nodes in early stages of acquired immunodeficiency, and in blood from patients with late stage disease. They characterized this retrovirus as the first known human lentivirus based on its morphological, biochemical and immunological properties. HIV impaired the immune system because of massive virus replication and cell damage to lymphocytes. The discovery was one prerequisite for the current understanding of the biology of the disease and its antiretroviral treatment.

Discovery of human papilloma virus causing cervical cancer

Against the prevailing view during the 1970s, Harald zur Hausen postulated a role for human papilloma virus (HPV) in cervical cancer. He assumed that the tumour cells, if they contained an oncogenic virus, should harbour viral DNA integrated into their genomes. The HPV genes promoting cell proliferation should therefore be detectable by specifically searching tumour cells for such viral DNA. Harald zur Hausen pursued this idea for over 10 years by searching for different HPV types, a search made difficult by the fact that only parts of the viral DNA were integrated into the host genome. He found novel HPV-DNA in cervix cancer biopsies, and thus discovered the new, tumourigenic HPV16 type in 1983. In 1984, he cloned HPV16 and 18 from patients with cervical cancer. The HPV types 16 and 18 were consistently found in about 70% of cervical cancer biopsies throughout the world.

Importance of the HPV discovery

The global public health burden attributable to human papilloma viruses is considerable. More than 5% of all cancers worldwide are caused by persistent infection with this virus. Infection by the human papilloma virus is the most common sexually transmitted agent, afflicting 50-80% of the population. Of the more than 100 HPV types known, about 40 infect the genital tract, and 15 of these put women at high risk for cervical cancer. In addition, HPV is found in some vulval, penile, oral and other cancers. Human papilloma virus can be detected in 99.7% of women with histologically confirmed cervical cancer, affecting some 500,000 women per year.

Harald zur Hausen demonstrated novel properties of HPV that have led to an understanding of mechanisms for papilloma virus-induced carcinogenesis and the predisposing factors for viral persistence and cellular transformation. He made HPV16 and 18 available to the scientific community. Vaccines were ultimately developed that provide ≥95 % protection from infection by the high risk HPV16 and 18 types. The vaccines may also reduce the need for surgery and the global burden of cervical cancer.

Discovery of HIV

Following medical reports of a novel immunodeficiency syndrome in 1981, the search for a causative agent was on. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier isolated and cultured lymph node cells from patients that had swollen lymph nodes characteristic of the early stage of acquired immune deficiency. They detected activity of the retroviral enzyme reverse transcriptase, a direct sign of retrovirus replication. They also found retroviral particles budding from the infected cells. Isolated virus infected and killed lymphocytes from both diseased and healthy donors, and reacted with antibodies from infected patients. In contrast to previously characterized human oncogenic retroviruses, the novel retrovirus they had discovered, now known as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), did not induce uncontrolled cell growth. Instead, the virus required cell activation for replication and mediated cell fusion of T lymphocytes. This partly explained how HIV impairs the immune system since the T cells are essential for immune defence. By 1984, Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier had obtained several isolates of the novel human retrovirus, which they identified as a lentivirus, from sexually infected individuals, haemophiliacs, mother to infant transmissions and transfused patients. The significance of their achievements should be viewed in the context of a global ubiquitous epidemic affecting close to 1% of the population.

Importance of the HIV discovery

Soon after the discovery of the virus, several groups contributed to the definitive demonstration of HIV as the cause of acquired human immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier’s discovery made rapid cloning of the HIV-1 genome possible. This has allowed identification of important details in its replication cycle and how the virus interacts with its host. Furthermore, it led to development of methods to diagnose infected patients and to screen blood
products, which has limited the spread of the pandemic. The unprecedented development of several classes of new antiviral drugs is also a result of knowledge of the details of the viral replication cycle. The combination of prevention and treatment has substantially decreased spread of the disease and dramatically increased life expectancy among treated patients. The cloning of HIV enabled studies of its origin and evolution. The virus was probably passed to humans from chimpanzees in West Africa early in the 20th century, but it is still unclear why the epidemic spread so dramatically from 1970 and onwards.

Identification of virus−host interactions has provided information on how HIV evades the host’s immune system by impairing lymphocyte function, by constantly changing and by hiding its genome in the host lymphocyte DNA, making its eradication in the infected host difficult even after long-term antiviral treatment. Extensive knowledge about these unique viral host interactions has, however, generated results that can provide ideas for future vaccine development as well as for therapeutic approaches targeting viral latency.

HIV has generated a novel pandemic. Never before has science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin and provide treatment for a new disease entity. Successful anti-retroviral therapy results in life expectancies for persons with HIV infection now reaching levels similar to those of uninfected people.

Harald zur Hausen, born 1936 in Germany, German citizen, MD at University of Düsseldorf, Germany. Professor emeritus and former Chairman and Scientific Director, German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg, Germany.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, born 1947 in France, French citizen, PhD in virology, Institut Pasteur, Garches, France. Professor and Director, Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit, Virology Department, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.

Luc Montagnier, born 1932 in France, French citizen, PhD in virology, University of Paris, Paris, France. Professor emeritus and Director, World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, Paris, France.

High resolution image (pdf 1,3 Mb) »

OTHER BLOGS:

Sir Paul Nurse

http://www.who.int/bloodsafety/en/Blood_Transfusion_Safety.pdf

The blood transfusion safety document from the World Health Organization (19 September 2008) stated:

THE PROBLEMS

Many patients do not have access to blood when they need it. Of the
estimated 80 million units of blood donated annually worldwide, only 38%
are collected in the developing world where 82% of the world’s population
live. The shortfall has a particular impact on women with complications of
pregnancy, trauma victims and children with severe life-threatening
anaemia. Up to 150 000 pregnancy-related deaths could be avoided each
year through access to safe blood.

Even where sufficient blood is available, many people are exposed to
avoidable, life-threatening risks through the transfusion of unsafe blood.
The risk of acquiring HIV through the transfusion of infected blood is virtually
100%. Blood is also an effective means of transmitting hepatitis B,
hepatitis C, syphilis, malaria and Chagas disease. About 5% of HIV infections
are transmitted by unsafe transfusion as a result of the collection of blood
from unsafe donors, irregular or inadequate supplies of materials to test
blood for infections, poor laboratory testing procedures, inadequately trained
staff, absence of quality systems or unnecessary transfusions.

While blood transfusion can be life-saving, many transfusions are given
unnecessarily when the availability and use of simpler, less expensive
treatments would provide equal or greater benefit. Not only does this expose
patients needlessly to the risk of potentially fatal transfusion reactions,
it also widens the gap between supply and demand and contributes
to shortages of blood and blood products for patients who really need
them.

THE COSTS OF UNSAFE BLOOD

Access to safe blood and blood products cannot be achieved without cost.
However, an unsafe or inadequate blood supply is even more costly – in both
human and economic terms.

Morbidity and mortality resulting from the non-availability of blood or the
transfusion of infected blood have a direct impact on individuals and their
families. The transfusion of infected blood also contributes to an everwidening
pool of infection in the general population with far-reaching
consequences for society as a whole. Increased requirements for medical
and social care, the loss of productive labour and higher levels of dependency
place heavy burdens on overstretched health and social services and on
national economies.

A challenge for developing countries and their people – the WHO report gives suggestion on creating a safe blood service. It may be something we take for granted here, but do consider giving blood.

It is the gift of life.

You know what it is like. You have these plans to smash particles up to the speed of light. Then a quench comes around and stops you. Rather like my mother’s train set enthuisastic friend who took the track away after hours of painstakingly putting it together because I caused two trains to crash.

Superconducting magnets, cooled down using liquefied helium

A quench for the LHC was a magnet failure, (where they overheated and helium leaked out). So far the particles have only gone around the underground system. They have not yet had the staisfaction, as i had with my train set, of seeing them hit head on.

The setback comes just a day after the LHC’s beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.

A rampaging transformer and a heated quench. How long before some one suggests that forces beyond nature are trying to prevent the destruction of the universe? Or maybe a project taking thirteen years and $6.6bn maybe teething problems should be expected.