Mammography rates better with shared care
If follow-up mammography is an indicator of quality breast cancer care, then older survivors who receive shared care–provided by both a primary care physician and a cancer specialist–are better cared for than those who don’t.
A study at the Medical College of Wisconsin Center for Patient Care and Outcomes Research in Milwaukee revealed that about two-thirds of elderly breast cancer survivors underwent shared care in the
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire even in outer space. A new infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows a burning hot galaxy whose fiery stars appear to be blowing out giant billows of smoky dust.
The galaxy, called Messier 82 or the “Cigar” galaxy, was previously known to host a hotbed of young, massive stars. The new Spitzer image reveals, for the first time, the “smoke” surrounding those stellar fires.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Dr
On Thursday 15 March, at the headquarters of the European Space Agency, a co-operation agreement was signed between ESA and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales for the development of Alphabus, Europe’s next generation of telecommunication satellites.
The signature of this co-operation agreement follows the signature of a contract in June 2005 between the European Space Agency (ESA), the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), EADS Astrium and Alcatel Space (which
Cosmic space is filled with continuous, diffuse high-energy radiation. To find out how this energy is produced, the scientists behind ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory have tried an unusual method: observing Earth from space.
During a four-phase observation campaign started on 24 January this year, continued until 9 February, Integral has been looking at Earth. Needing complex control operations from the ground, the satellite has been kept in a fixed orientation in space, whil
Astronomers report an unprecedented elongated double helix nebula near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, using observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The part of the nebula the astronomers observed stretches 80 light years in length. The research is published March 16 in the journal Nature.
“We see two intertwining strands wrapped around each other as in a DNA molecule,” said Mark Morris, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, and lead author. “Nobody has
An international team of physicists has converted three normal atoms into a special new state of matter whose existence was proposed by Russian scientist Vitaly Efimov in 1970.
In this new state of matter, any two of the three atoms–in this case cesium atoms– repel one another in close proximity. “But when you put three of them together, it turns out that they attract and form a new state,” said Cheng Chin, an Assistant Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago.
Chi
Physicists at JILA have designed and demonstrated a highly sensitive new tool for real-time analysis of the quantity, structure and dynamics of a variety of atoms and molecules simultaneously, even in minuscule gas samples. The technology could provide unprecedented capabilities in many settings, such as chemistry laboratories, environmental monitoring stations, security sites screening for explosives or biochemical weapons, and medical offices where patients’ breath is analyzed to monitor
Optical fiber helped bring us the Internet, and silicon/germanium devices brought us microelectronics. Now, a joint team from Penn State University and the University of Southampton has developed a new way to combine these technologies. The team has made semiconductor devices, including a transistor, inside microstructured optical fibers. The resulting ability to generate and manipulate signals inside optical fibers could have applications in fields as diverse as medicine, computing, and remot
The unusual spokes that appear fleetingly on the rings of Saturn only to disappear for years at a time may become visible again by July, according to a new study spearheaded by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The spokes, which are up to 6,000 miles long and 1,500 miles in width, were first spotted 26 years ago by the Voyager spacecraft, said CU-Boulder Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. But when the Cassini spacecraft arrived at Saturn in
Pity the brown dwarf. It’s too large to be a planet, but too small to be a star.
Although these “failed stars” are neither fish nor fowl, they play an important role in the cosmic scheme of things. Many astronomers think that they may actually be the most common product of the stellar formation process. So information about brown dwarfs can provide valuable new insights into the dynamic processes that produce stars out of collapsing whirlpools of interstellar dust and gas.
GIRAFFE at VLT reveals the turbulent life of distant galaxies
Studying several tens of distant galaxies, an international team of astronomers found that galaxies had the same amount of dark matter relative to stars 6 billion years ago as they have now. If confirmed, this suggests a much closer interplay between dark and normal matter than previously believed. The scientists also found that as many as 4 out of 10 galaxies are out of balance. These results shed a new light on how
While analysing the complex structure of the Milky Way, an international team of astronomers from Italy and the United Kingdom has recently derived the shape of the Galactic outer stellar disc, and provided the strongest evidence that, besides being warped, it is at least 70% more extended than previously thought. Their findings will be reported in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and is a new step in understanding the large-scale structure of our Galaxy.
Using the 2MASS
Unbalanced superfluid could be akin to exotic matter found in Quark Star
Rice University physicist Randall Hulet will discuss breakthrough efforts to create a long-sought quantum superfluid at a press conference at 2:30 p.m. today at the American Physical Society’s 2006 March Meeting.
In January, Hulet’s laboratory reported in the journal Science the observation of an elusive quantum state – a superfluid of fermions with mismatched numbers of dance partners. Despite
By designing a variant of an astronomical technique proposed by Einstein, researchers from The University of Auckland and Massey University, together with astronomers from Auckland’s Stardome Observatory, have found evidence for a new icy “Super Earth”.
While over 100 gaseous Jupiter-sized planets have been discovered in the last decade, and four medium Neptune-sized planets, until now there have been no discoveries of Earth-sized terrestrial planets that could support li
Two recent papers by Pitt physicist offer a deeper understanding of how electrons behave on surfaces, with applications in electronics and energy
Hrvoje Petek, University of Pittsburgh professor of physics and codirector of Pitt’s Gertrude E. and John M. Petersen Institute of NanoScience and Engineering (PINSE), has published two papers in recent weeks that literally illuminate how electrons behave on various surfaces.
In the first paper, Petek and Miroslav Nyvl
Brown dwarfs — failed stars that fall somewhere between the smallest stars and the largest planets on the spectrum of heavenly objects — have always been viewed by astronomers as a critical link in the understanding of how both stars and planets form.
The trouble with brown dwarfs, however, is that they are hard to find and, so far, they have defied nearly all attempts to accurately assess their size.
But now astronomers, including a University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer, rep
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