This could get awkward. We need to stop burning fossil fuels to avoid the risk of dangerous climate change. But limiting the amount we can burn will take a chunk out of the global economy.
A non-binding international agreement is in place to try to limit global warming to 2 ?C. If it is to be honoured, we can only burn about a quarter of the planet's existing fossil fuel reserves.
A new report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative says this would slash the value of the biggest energy companies by between 40 and 60 per cent, because they have invested billions of dollars in exploring untapped resources.
Tick tock
In effect, investors have created a "carbon bubble" by ploughing money into fossil fuel reserves that should not be exploited.
The economic damage could be minimised if any climate agreement was phased in gradually, says Aled Jones of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. "The problem is we're running out of time," he says, so such a plan needs to be agreed soon. If an emissions limit was imposed suddenly, Jones says it would spark a global economic crisis.
Oil-exporting countries have long been aware of this problem. Since the 1990s, states like Saudi Arabia have been arguing that any climate agreement should compensate them, as they will not be able to sell their valuable fossil fuel reserves.
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The Voyager 1 spacecraft is among NASA's fleet powered by Plutonium-236.
By Mike Wall Space.com
NASA will now foot the entire bill for the United States' production of plutonium-238 spacecraft fuel, which recently started up again for the first time in a quarter-century.
The space agency had been splitting costs for the reboot with the U.S. Department of Energy, which actually produces plutonium-238. But NASA is the only projected user of the stuff, so the arrangement changed in the White House's federal budget request for 2014, which was unveiled earlier this month.
"Since the (Obama) administration has a 'user pays' philosophy, we are now in a position to pay for basically the entire enterprise, including the base infrastructure at DOE," NASA Chief Financial Officer Beth Robinson said in an April 10 press conference. "We'll be partnering with DOE in the next couple of months to figure out how to best do this, and how to streamline the program to produce plutonium-238."?[Nuclear Generators Power NASA Probes (Infographic)]
Plutonium-238 is not a bomb-making material, but it is radioactive, emitting heat that can be converted to electricity using a device called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. For decades, RTGs have powered NASA probes to destinations in deep space, where sunlight is too weak and dispersed to be of much use to a robot.
For example, the agency's twin Voyager spacecraft, which are knocking on the door of interstellar space, are both RTG-powered. So is the Mars rover Curiosity, whose observations recently helped scientists determine that the Red Planet could once have supported microbial life.
The DOE stopped producing Pu-238 in 1988, after which NASA began sourcing the fuel from Russia. But the agency received its last Russian shipment in 2010, and supplies have been dwindling ever since, worrying many scientists and space-exploration advocates.
So NASA and the DOE have been working together on a Pu-238 restart, which officials from both agencies have estimated will cost between $75 million and $90 million over five years.
This effort has made significant progress. NASA officials announced last month that researchers at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee had irradiated targets of neptunium-237 with neutrons, successfully generating small amounts of plutonium-238 ? the nation's first in 25 years.
Scaling up from these early test activities shouldn't be too much of a chore, officials said.
"By optimizing the production process, it is estimated that 1.5 to 2 kilograms (3.3 to 4.4 pounds) per year will be produced by 2018. This amount will be enough to meet NASA's projected needs for future planetary missions. The Science budget request fully funds this requirement," NASA officials wrote in the agency's 650-page explanation of its 2014 budget request.
"For the first time, NASA?s request also includes $50 million to support the radioisotope power system development infrastructure through full-cost recovery mechanisms at the Department of Energy," they added.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall?and Google+.?Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?or?Google+. Originally published on?Space.com.
Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
ERs have become de facto psych wardsPublic release date: 24-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Julie Lloyd jlloyd@acep.org 202-728-0610 American College of Emergency Physicians
WASHINGTON Long waits for insurance authorization allowing psychiatric patients to be admitted to the hospital from the emergency department waste thousands of hours of physician time, given that most requests for authorization are ultimately granted. A study to be published in the May issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine argues that pre-authorization process is akin to health care "rationing by hassle factor" ("Insurance Prior Authorization Approval Does Not Substantially Lengthen the Emergency Department Length of Stay for Patients with Psychiatric Conditions").
"An emergency department is just about the worst place for a psychiatric patient to wait for an inpatient bed, and yet that is exactly what the pre-authorization process forces on millions of these vulnerable people," said senior author J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD of the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Mass. "The thousands upon thousands of hours emergency physicians spend obtaining prior authorization for admission to the hospital are hours we are not spending on direct patient care. Only Medicare does not require prior authorization for us to admit psychiatric patients to the hospital; maybe they are onto something."
Researchers recorded data on 53 patients, most of whom were in the emergency department because they were having suicidal thoughts. Half of the authorization requests took under 20 minutes to be approved, but 10 percent of the patients' authorizations took an hour or more. Only one of the 53 patients' insurance carriers denied pre-authorization. There are approximately 2.5 million psychiatric admissions to hospitals every year in the U.S.
"Psychiatric care is really the poor stepchild in the world of insurance coverage," said lead author Amy Funkenstein, MD, of Brown University in Providence, R.I.. "Insurance carriers reimburse poorly and as a consequence, hospitals often have inadequate resources for patients who urgently need this care. The situation is so dire that ERs are now being designed and configured to house psychiatric patients awaiting placement as inpatients. These patients deserve better."
###
Annals of Emergency Medicine is the peer-reviewed scientific journal for the American College of Emergency Physicians, the national medical society representing emergency medicine. ACEP is committed to advancing emergency care through continuing education, research, and public education. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, ACEP has 53 chapters representing each state, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A Government Services Chapter represents emergency physicians employed by military branches and other government agencies. For more information, visit http://www.acep.org.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
ERs have become de facto psych wardsPublic release date: 24-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Julie Lloyd jlloyd@acep.org 202-728-0610 American College of Emergency Physicians
WASHINGTON Long waits for insurance authorization allowing psychiatric patients to be admitted to the hospital from the emergency department waste thousands of hours of physician time, given that most requests for authorization are ultimately granted. A study to be published in the May issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine argues that pre-authorization process is akin to health care "rationing by hassle factor" ("Insurance Prior Authorization Approval Does Not Substantially Lengthen the Emergency Department Length of Stay for Patients with Psychiatric Conditions").
"An emergency department is just about the worst place for a psychiatric patient to wait for an inpatient bed, and yet that is exactly what the pre-authorization process forces on millions of these vulnerable people," said senior author J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD of the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Mass. "The thousands upon thousands of hours emergency physicians spend obtaining prior authorization for admission to the hospital are hours we are not spending on direct patient care. Only Medicare does not require prior authorization for us to admit psychiatric patients to the hospital; maybe they are onto something."
Researchers recorded data on 53 patients, most of whom were in the emergency department because they were having suicidal thoughts. Half of the authorization requests took under 20 minutes to be approved, but 10 percent of the patients' authorizations took an hour or more. Only one of the 53 patients' insurance carriers denied pre-authorization. There are approximately 2.5 million psychiatric admissions to hospitals every year in the U.S.
"Psychiatric care is really the poor stepchild in the world of insurance coverage," said lead author Amy Funkenstein, MD, of Brown University in Providence, R.I.. "Insurance carriers reimburse poorly and as a consequence, hospitals often have inadequate resources for patients who urgently need this care. The situation is so dire that ERs are now being designed and configured to house psychiatric patients awaiting placement as inpatients. These patients deserve better."
###
Annals of Emergency Medicine is the peer-reviewed scientific journal for the American College of Emergency Physicians, the national medical society representing emergency medicine. ACEP is committed to advancing emergency care through continuing education, research, and public education. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, ACEP has 53 chapters representing each state, as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. A Government Services Chapter represents emergency physicians employed by military branches and other government agencies. For more information, visit http://www.acep.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Good news, Bostonians: yours is the second major US city to get Aereo live television access via the web, and it's starting on May 15th. Aereo announced its next city expansion this morning, and said the service will go live to pre-registered parties on May 15th. It will eventually become widely available to Boston's "designated market area," which includes "more than 4.5 million consumers in 15 counties in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont." We've got the full list of counties after the break if you're interested.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg for Aereo, which has plans for expansion in 22 cities just this year. The OTA network internet streaming TV service launched in New York City early last year. Traditional broadcast networks have voiced concern over Aereo's TV model, even threatening to move to cable should the nascent internet company gets its way in an ongoing legal battle.
LG's just shed some much needed light on its May 1st New York event. Turns out the "genius" the company will be celebrating stands for Atlas Genius -- as in the band -- and the star of this fete: the Optimus G Pro. We've already seen and very favorably reviewed the global model of LG's performance flagship (for the G's successor, you'll have to wait until Q3) and now it looks like the US is in store for a potential carrier-branded version of its own. If it arrives internally unmolested, we're looking at a 5.5-inch 1080p True HD IPS+ display, Snapdragon 600 and a 2.1-megapixel / 13-megapixel camera setup capable of dual video recording. We'll be on-site for this stateside debut, so stay tuned for the full monty.
Apr. 22, 2013 ? Understanding exactly how stem cells form into specific organs and tissues is the holy grail of regenerative medicine. Now a UC Santa Barbara researcher has added to that body of knowledge by determining how stem cells produce different types of "daughter" cells in Drosophila (fruit flies). T
he findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Denise Montell, Duggan Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at UCSB, and colleagues studied the ovaries of fruit flies in order to see stem cells in their natural environment. Because these organisms are excellent models for understanding stem cell biology, researchers were able to shed light on the earliest stages of follicle cell differentiation, a previously poorly understood area of developmental biology. "It is clear that the fundamental principles that control cell behavior in simple animals are conserved and control the behavior of our cells as well," she said. "There is so much we can learn by studying simple organisms."
Using a nuclear protein expressed in follicle stem cells (FSCs), the researchers found that castor, which plays an important role in specifying which types of brain cells are produced during embryonic development, also helps maintain FSCs throughout the life of the animal. "Having identified this important protein molecule in fruit flies, we can test whether the human version of the protein is important for stem cells and their daughters as well," said Montell. "The more we know about the molecules that govern stem cell behavior, the closer we will get to controlling these cells."
Her research team placed the evolutionarily conserved castor (Cas) gene, which encodes a zinc finger protein, in a genetic circuit with two other evolutionarily conserved genes, hedgehog (Hh) and eyes absent (Eya), to determine the fates of specific cell progeny (daughters). What's more, they identified Cas as a critical, tissue-specific target of Hh signaling, which not only plays a key role in maintaining follicle stem cells but also assists in the diversification of their progeny.
The study also shows that complementary patterns of Cas and Eya reveal the gradual differentiation of polar and stalk precursor cells at the earliest stages of their development. In addition, it provides a marker for cell fates and insight into the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which FSC progeny diverge into distinct fates.
Follicle cells undergo a binary choice during early differentiation. Those that turn into specialized cells found at the poles of egg chambers go on to make two cell types: polar and stalk. The three genes, Cas, Eya and Hh, work in various combinations, sometimes repressively, to determine which types of cells are formed. Cas is required for polar and stalk cell fate specification, while Eya is a negative regulator of these cells' fate. Hh is necessary for Cas to be expressed, and Hh signaling is essential to repress Eya.
"If you just had one of these markers, it was hard to tell what's going on," explained Montell. "All the cells looked the same and you had no idea when or how the process occurred. But now we can actually see how the cells acquire different identities."
Hh also plays many roles in embryonic development, adult homeostasis, birth defects, and cancer. Hh antagonists are currently in clinical trials for the treatment of several types of cancer. However, Hh signaling is important in so many different cell types and tissues that systemic delivery of such inhibitors may cause serious side effects. Therefore identifying the essential, tissue-specific effectors of Hh has the potential to lead to the identification of more specific therapeutic targets.
Someday, targeted inhibition of Hh signaling may be effective in the treatment and prevention of many types of human cancers.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Santa Barbara, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Yu-Chiuan Chang, Anna C.-C. Jang, Cheng-Han Lin, and Denise J. Montell. Castor is required for Hedgehog-dependent cell-fate specification and follicle stem cell maintenance in Drosophila oogenesis. PNAS, April 22, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1300725110
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The United States asked Turkey's leader to delay a Gaza Strip visit so as not to upset U.S. efforts to revive Ankara's ties with Israel and Middle East peace talks, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who has for years spoken of his desire to visit the Palestinian enclave, said last week he planned to go in late May after an official visit to the United States.
But Kerry said a Turkish visit to Gaza, controlled by the Hamas Islamist group which rejects Israel's existence, might distract from efforts to revive Middle East peace talks.
"With respect to the PM's potential visit to Gaza: We have expressed to the PM that we really think it would be better delayed and it shouldn't take place at this point in time," Kerry told a news conference in Istanbul.
"We thought that the timing of it is really critical with respect to the peace process we are trying to get off the ground and that we would like to see the parties begin with as little outside distraction as possible," he added.
Kerry has visited the region several times in recent weeks, holding talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Erdogan had been expected to visit Gaza this month but postponed his trip at the request of the United States. He will travel to Washington to meet President Barack Obama on May 16.
"I think the prime minister listened very graciously to that and he has been very thoughtful and sensitive about it and if needs be we certainly could have further conversations about it when he comes to Washington," Kerry added.
Hamas's refusal to recognize the Jewish state and past vows to destroy it are a key reason behind an Israeli blockade of the coastal territory since Hamas seized it from the more moderate pro-Western Fatah movement in 2007. Europe and the United States have long demanded Hamas drop violence and recognize Israel as a condition for any dialogue.
TURKISH-ISRAELI RELATIONS
The planned trip would also come at a sensitive time for Turkish-Israeli relations.
Obama last month brokered a first step in reconciliation between the two former allies, whose relations were frozen after the 2010 killing by Israeli marines of nine Turks aboard a Gaza-bound aid ship.
Netanyahu apologized in March to his Turkish counterpart over the killings and pledged compensation to the bereaved, meeting a long-standing Turkish demand. Turkey, for its part, appeared to back off on a separate demand that Israel stop blockading Gaza.
An Israeli delegation will visit Turkey for the first time in three years this week in a sign of thawing relations and Kerry said he discussed with Turkish officials the importance of "completing the task" in renewing ties.
"Tomorrow there will be a meeting that begins to continue down that road and I look forward to a fruitful completion of that initiative," he said.
Kerry said he wanted to see an improvement in life on the ground in Gaza, bringing goods into the enclave, while moving to full diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel.
"If allies who have differences have suddenly put those aside ... you have a much stronger ability to address other concerns that we may have," Kerry said, pointing to challenges posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions and civil war in Syria.
"There are huge reasons why it is beneficial for this rapprochement to be completed as soon as possible because it meets all of our strategic needs and interests," he added.
(Additional reporting by Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Jason Webb)
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Public release date: 24-Apr-2013
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