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+-   Antimatter in lightning[->] on Friday November 06, @04:52PM AMESN

Submitted by AMESN on Friday November 06, @04:52PM
earth
AMESN writes "The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope launched last year detects gamma rays from light years away, but recently it detected gamma rays from lightning on Earth. And the energy of the gamma rays is specific to the decay of positrons, which are the antimatter flavor of electrons. Finding antimatter in lightning surprised researchers and suggests the electric field of the lightning somehow got reversed."
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+-   CDC adopts near real-time flu tracking system[->] on Thursday November 05, @05:42PM CWmike

Submitted by CWmike on Thursday November 05, @05:42PM
medicine
CWmike writes "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched an effort this week to better and more easily track for H1N1, or Swine Flu, and other seasonal influenza activity throughout the U.S. The CDC said it is now tracking data on 14 million patients from physician practices and hospitals that is stored on a relational database hosted by GE Healthcare, General Electric Co.'s health care division. The data is submitted daily from physician's offices and hospitals that use GE's electronic medical record (EMR) system. The data is then uploaded to GE Healthcare's Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC), a database repository designed with HIPAA-compliance parameters of patient anonymity and best practices where it can be the subject of medical data queries. The CDC can perform queries to look for flu-like symptoms being reported by physicians, and then disseminate the data for health care providers and local government officials throughout the country, who can alert businesses and others about flu outbreak hot spots. The CDC also hopes its analysis of the data helps it better understand the characteristics of H1N1 outbreaks and to determine who is most at risk for developing complications from the virus. Prior to implementing the new system, the CDC relied heavily on tracking insurance claims data, which could take days, if not weeks, to make its way to the agency's medical staff for analysis. "You not only want to get the data from here to there, but then you also have to say I need to normalize that data," said Dr. Mark Dente, chief medical informatics officer for GE Healthcare IT. "For example, if one doctor says hypertension, another says HTN and someone else says high blood pressure, it all means the same thing when you enter a query against the data.""
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+-   Fear Detector to Sniff Out Terrorists on Wednesday November 04, @09:28PM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Wednesday November 04, @09:28PM
biotech
Hugh Pickens writes "Evidence that the smell of fear is real was uncovered by US scientists last year who studied the underarm secretions of 20 terrified novice skydivers and found that people appear to respond unconsciously to the sweat smell of a frightened person. Now the Telegraph reports that researchers hope a ''fear detector'' will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good. ''The challenge lies in the characterization and identification of the specific chemical that gives away the signature of human fear, especially the fear in relation to criminal acts," says Professor Tong Tun at City University London who leads the team developing security sensor systems that can detect the human fear pheromone. The project will look at potential obstacles to the device, such as the effects of perfume and the variances in pheromone production and if the initial 18-month feasibility study is successful, the first detectors could be developed in the next two to three years. ''I do not see any particular reason why similar sensor techniques cannot be expanded to identify human smells by race, age or gender to build a profile of a criminal during or after an incident,'' Tong added."
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+-   The tech aboard the International Space Station[->] on Tuesday November 03, @11:20AM CNETNate

Submitted by CNETNate on Tuesday November 03, @11:20AM
space
CNETNate writes "With its own file server for uploaded Hollywood blockbusters, a 10Mbps Internet connection to Earth and a stock of IBM ThinkPad notebooks for sending emails, the amount of consumer technology aboard the $150 billion International Space Station is impressive. Yet it's the responsibility of just two guys to maintain the uptime of the Space Station's IT, and they have given an in-depth interview with CNET to explain what tech's aboard, how it works and whether Windows viruses are a threat to the astronauts. In a related feature, the Space Station's internal network (which operates over just bandwidth of just1Mbps) and its connected array of Lenovo notebooks is explained, along with the future tech we could see aboard the traveling colony as it traverses the future."
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