During summer time, a lot of people tend to go to a different state for a family or couple getaway just to enjoy what life has to offer and also to experience being away from the stressful world for once. I knew some people who loves to go to Florida for a family vacation. Sometimes, they do rent rental vacation homes or an apartment for a week to also save money compare to staying in a hotel. I'm sure a lot of people did the same thing in order to fully enjoy their family vacation getaway, it's also a must have to save money as much as possible. Therefore, things like this also the best alternative to spend more money.
However, we may never know what's ahead, especially with kids, we will never deny that for once in a while, accidents may happen. What if you've been injured or someone in your family are? It may be weird to think about it, but sometimes, it is important to consider things. If injuries ruined your vacation, then maybe it's time to seek help to an expert when it comes to Premises Liability Injuries that you or someone in your household had suffer, to seek liability particularly to injuries involving children.
Sometimes, this can happen during a vacation or staying at rental vacation homes that aren't really well maintenance or fully well maintained. So, if these happen to you, then contact the Personal Injury Lawyers in Fort Lauderdale located in Florida. Then, you and your family member's medical needs will be meet such as medical bills, lost wages and out-of-pocket expenses. To resolve your injury claim or accident, then it's time to seek legal help. You deserve to be compensated. Life is too short to suffer and be in anguish, where you supposed to enjoy your family vacation, rather, sometimes life is too complicated but with the help of an attorney, life can be good.
Particle accelerator that can fit on a tabletop opens new chapter for science researchPublic release date: 20-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Michael Downer downer@physics.utexas.edu 512-471-6054 University of Texas at Austin
Tabletop device achieves energy and focus that has previously required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of 2 football fields
AUSTIN, Texas Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have built a tabletop particle accelerator that can generate energies and speeds previously reached only by major facilities that are hundreds of meters long and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
"We have accelerated about half a billion electrons to 2 gigaelectronvolts over a distance of about 1 inch," said Mike Downer, professor of physics in the College of Natural Sciences. "Until now that degree of energy and focus has required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of two football fields. It's a downsizing of a factor of approximately 10,000."
The results, which were published this week in Nature Communications, mark a major milestone in the advance toward the day when multi-gigaelectronvolt (GeV) laser plasma accelerators are standard equipment in research laboratories around the world.
Downer said he expects 10 GeV accelerators of a few inches in length to be developed within the next few years, and he believes 20 GeV accelerators of similar size could be developed within a decade.
Downer said that the electrons from the current 2 GeV accelerator can be converted into "hard" X-rays as bright as those from large-scale facilities. He believes that with further refinement they could even drive an X-ray free electron laser, the brightest X-ray source currently available to science.
A tabletop X-ray laser would be transformative for chemists and biologists, who could use the bright X-rays to study the molecular basis of matter and life with atomic precision, and femtosecond time resolution, without traveling to a large national facility.
"The X-rays we'll be able to produce are of femtosecond duration, which is the time scale on which molecules vibrate and the fastest chemical reactions take place," said Downer. "They will have the energy and brightness to enable us to see, for example, the atomic structure of single protein molecules in a living sample."
To generate the energetic electrons capable of producing these X-rays, Downer and his colleagues employed an acceleration method known as laser-plasma acceleration. It involves firing a brief but intensely powerful laser pulse into a puff of gas.
"To a layman it looks like low technology," said Downer. "All you do is make a little puff of gas with the right density and profile. The laser pulse comes in. It ionizes that gas and makes the plasma, but it also imprints structure in it. It separates electrons from the ion background and creates these enormous internal space-charge fields. Then the charged particles emerge right out of the plasma, get trapped in those fields, which are racing along at nearly the speed of light with that laser pulse, and accelerate in them."
Downer compared it to what would happen if you threw a motorboat into a lake with its engines churning. The boat (the laser) makes a splash, then creates a wave as it moves through the lake at high speed. During that initial splash some droplets (charged particles) break off, get caught up in the wave and accelerate by surfing on it.
"At the other end of the lake they get thrown off into the environment at incredibly high speeds," said Downer. "That's our 2 GeV electron beam."
Former UT Austin physicist Toshiki Tajima and the late UCLA physicist John Dawson conceived the idea of laser-plasma acceleration in the late 1970s. Scientists have been experimenting with this concept since the early 1990s, but they've been limited by the power of their lasers. As a result the field had been stuck at a maximum energy of about 1 GeV for years.
Downer and his colleagues were able to use the Texas Petawatt Laser, one of the most powerful lasers in the world, to push past this barrier. In particular the petawatt laser enabled them to use gases that are much less dense than those used in previous experiments.
"At a lower density, that laser pulse can travel faster through the gas," said Downer. "But with the earlier generations of lasers, when the density got too low, there wasn't enough of a splash to inject electrons into the accelerator, so you got nothing out. This is where the petawatt laser comes in. When it enters low density plasma, it can make a bigger splash."
Downer said that now that he and his team have demonstrated the workability of the 2 GeV accelerator, it should be only a matter of time until 10 GeV accelerators are built. That threshold is significant because 10 GeV devices would be able to do the X-ray analyses that biologists and chemists want.
"I don't think a major breakthrough is required to get there," he said. "If we can just keep the funding in place for the next few years, all of this is going to happen. Companies are now selling petawatt lasers commercially, and as we get better at doing this, companies will come into being to make 10 GeV accelerator modules. Then the end users, the chemists and biologists, will come in, and that will lead to more innovations and discoveries."
###
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Particle accelerator that can fit on a tabletop opens new chapter for science researchPublic release date: 20-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Michael Downer downer@physics.utexas.edu 512-471-6054 University of Texas at Austin
Tabletop device achieves energy and focus that has previously required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of 2 football fields
AUSTIN, Texas Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have built a tabletop particle accelerator that can generate energies and speeds previously reached only by major facilities that are hundreds of meters long and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
"We have accelerated about half a billion electrons to 2 gigaelectronvolts over a distance of about 1 inch," said Mike Downer, professor of physics in the College of Natural Sciences. "Until now that degree of energy and focus has required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of two football fields. It's a downsizing of a factor of approximately 10,000."
The results, which were published this week in Nature Communications, mark a major milestone in the advance toward the day when multi-gigaelectronvolt (GeV) laser plasma accelerators are standard equipment in research laboratories around the world.
Downer said he expects 10 GeV accelerators of a few inches in length to be developed within the next few years, and he believes 20 GeV accelerators of similar size could be developed within a decade.
Downer said that the electrons from the current 2 GeV accelerator can be converted into "hard" X-rays as bright as those from large-scale facilities. He believes that with further refinement they could even drive an X-ray free electron laser, the brightest X-ray source currently available to science.
A tabletop X-ray laser would be transformative for chemists and biologists, who could use the bright X-rays to study the molecular basis of matter and life with atomic precision, and femtosecond time resolution, without traveling to a large national facility.
"The X-rays we'll be able to produce are of femtosecond duration, which is the time scale on which molecules vibrate and the fastest chemical reactions take place," said Downer. "They will have the energy and brightness to enable us to see, for example, the atomic structure of single protein molecules in a living sample."
To generate the energetic electrons capable of producing these X-rays, Downer and his colleagues employed an acceleration method known as laser-plasma acceleration. It involves firing a brief but intensely powerful laser pulse into a puff of gas.
"To a layman it looks like low technology," said Downer. "All you do is make a little puff of gas with the right density and profile. The laser pulse comes in. It ionizes that gas and makes the plasma, but it also imprints structure in it. It separates electrons from the ion background and creates these enormous internal space-charge fields. Then the charged particles emerge right out of the plasma, get trapped in those fields, which are racing along at nearly the speed of light with that laser pulse, and accelerate in them."
Downer compared it to what would happen if you threw a motorboat into a lake with its engines churning. The boat (the laser) makes a splash, then creates a wave as it moves through the lake at high speed. During that initial splash some droplets (charged particles) break off, get caught up in the wave and accelerate by surfing on it.
"At the other end of the lake they get thrown off into the environment at incredibly high speeds," said Downer. "That's our 2 GeV electron beam."
Former UT Austin physicist Toshiki Tajima and the late UCLA physicist John Dawson conceived the idea of laser-plasma acceleration in the late 1970s. Scientists have been experimenting with this concept since the early 1990s, but they've been limited by the power of their lasers. As a result the field had been stuck at a maximum energy of about 1 GeV for years.
Downer and his colleagues were able to use the Texas Petawatt Laser, one of the most powerful lasers in the world, to push past this barrier. In particular the petawatt laser enabled them to use gases that are much less dense than those used in previous experiments.
"At a lower density, that laser pulse can travel faster through the gas," said Downer. "But with the earlier generations of lasers, when the density got too low, there wasn't enough of a splash to inject electrons into the accelerator, so you got nothing out. This is where the petawatt laser comes in. When it enters low density plasma, it can make a bigger splash."
Downer said that now that he and his team have demonstrated the workability of the 2 GeV accelerator, it should be only a matter of time until 10 GeV accelerators are built. That threshold is significant because 10 GeV devices would be able to do the X-ray analyses that biologists and chemists want.
"I don't think a major breakthrough is required to get there," he said. "If we can just keep the funding in place for the next few years, all of this is going to happen. Companies are now selling petawatt lasers commercially, and as we get better at doing this, companies will come into being to make 10 GeV accelerator modules. Then the end users, the chemists and biologists, will come in, and that will lead to more innovations and discoveries."
###
[ | 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.
GPS and paper maps vie for driving domination The prevalence of GPS in cars and smartphones makes it a popular option for getting where you're going. But according to a survey by Michelin, it still leads drivers astray occasionally, and many still rely on plain old paper in one form or another.
Source: NBCnews Posted on:
Wednesday, Jun 19, 2013, 8:58am Views: 9
Beijing is one of the earliest still-existant cities planned around a grid: the old city is organized around a chessboard-like matrix of alleys, known as hutong, that date back at least a millenium. But as developers in Beijing scramble to built modern towers in the urban core, hutong are disappearing.
SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - An Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 could learn on Tuesday whether a judge will grant him more time to prepare as he represents himself in the military trial.
Major Nidal Hasan, 42, could face the death penalty in the trial, now scheduled to begin with opening statements on July 1 after several delays, most recently because he has been allowed to represent himself and relegate his military lawyers to an advisory role.
The judge, Colonel Tara Osborn, has been pressing to get the court martial back on track nearly four years after the November 2009 attack on a facility where soldiers were preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Thirteen people died and 32 were wounded.
Fort Hood was a major deployment point for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hasan himself had been preparing to leave for Afghanistan with a unit assigned to help soldiers deal with mental issues.
Among the unresolved issues: How will potential jurors be questioned, what new role should the defense attorneys play now that they are not leading his defense, and how to talk to a jury of military officers about Hasan's beard.
A U.S.-born Muslim, Hasan says he wears a beard for religious reasons, although that violates military dress code.
Military officials at the Texas Army post were not specific about which legal questions Osborn would answer on Tuesday.
Hasan, who was shot by civilian base police during the attack, unsuccessfully sought to argue at trial that he was protecting the Taliban from American aggression. Last week, Osborn denied a request to argue that line of defense.
Hasan, now paralyzed from the chest down, has asked for three more months to develop a new defense strategy and witnesses. Experts said Osborn could give Hasan additional time to protect the integrity of a future verdict.
"If I were a betting man, I would say maybe a delay of a week," said former Army prosecutor Geoffrey Corn. "This will eliminate the risk that, on appeal, some appellate court will say you should have granted a delay."
Osborn decided to ignore Hasan's beard - an issue that delayed proceedings for months and caused another judge to be removed from the case - but may need to address jurors about it.
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BEIJING (Reuters) - China's home price rises slowed for a second straight month in May from the previous month, in a sign that Beijing's attempts to bring stability to a frothy property market are having some effect.
However in year-on-year terms, prices rose at their fastest pace this year, highlighting the dilemma facing authorities looking to support an economy struggling with weak export demand and sluggish activity without resorting to tough measures that could risk a sharp slowdown in property, one of the few growth areas.
The government unveiled a fresh round of measures in March to try to cool the sector, but they were less stringent than market expectations and their implementation has been spotty across the country so far.
Liu Jianwei, a senior statistician at the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said that the easing pace of month-on-month gains was a sign of slowing momentum, but warned that more needed to be done.
"There are still many cities seeing home prices rising and the property tightening campaign should continue to focus on implementation," Liu said in a statement accompanying the data.
Only Beijing has implemented a 20 percent capital gains tax on pre-owned home sales required by the central government, and has also required developers of big homes, commercial and office buildings to finish construction of at least seven floors before applying for pre-sales of the projects.
Smaller cities, meanwhile, more dependent on the property sector to raise revenue and often in hock with developers, have largely ignored the tax, according to media reports.
Average new home prices in 70 major Chinese cities rose 0.9 percent in May from the previous month, easing from April's month-on-month gains of 1 percent, according to Reuters calculations from data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Tuesday.
Compared with a year ago, new home prices rose 6 percent in May, the fifth consecutive rise and the sharpest since January 2011 when Reuters started to calculate the nationwide data.
New home prices in Beijing in May rose 11.8 percent from a year earlier, compared with April's year-on-year increase of 10.3 percent. Shanghai prices in May were up 10.2 percent from a year ago, versus 8.5 percent annual growth in April.
Gains in May in both cities were the fastest since January 2011. Home prices rose month-on-month in 65 of 70 cities monitored by the NBS in May, down from 67 in April.
BRIGHT SPOT
Real estate, which has direct influence on some 40 other business industries in China, appears to be the only bright sector. Recent data has shown weakness in exports and domestic activity.
The heated demand for properties is largely due to a lack of investment options for domestic investors and credit being channeled into real estate to seek quick returns rather than into production as exports and domestic demand slow.
Thus, China's policymakers face a dilemma in regulating property: further relaxing monetary policy could mean home prices run out of control, but to press too hard against housing inflation risks damaging the broad economy.
"Rising property prices make it difficult for policymakers to loosen monetary policy, at least in the short term." said Zhiwei Zhang, an economist at Nomura, in an email note.
"The outlook for property prices depends on the monetary policy stance over the next several months. If policy continues to tighten and M2 growth trends down, property prices will likely follow," Zhang added.
The dilemma could get worse as analysts expect upward pressure on home prices to persist in the coming months due to rising land prices, supply shortages in key cities and relatively loose monetary policy.
The latest Reuters poll predicted an 8 percent rise in China's house prices this year.
Official figures on June 9 showed Chinese property sales in May increased 28 percent from a year earlier in area terms, moderating from a rise of 40 percent in April, but still keeping a robust growth pace.
A recent buoyant land market in tier 1 cities - typically a prelude to home price rises - will reinforce market expectations that prices are still marching up.
Authorities in Shanghai last month sold a land parcel for 4.6 billion yuan ($750.81 million), a record high in the country's financial hub.
"I don't think the government will change its tightening stance on the property market even though the broad economy is changing," said Chen Guoqiang, vice-chairman of China Real Estate Society.
China does not have an official index for nationwide home prices. Reuters started its weighted China home price index in January 2011 when the NBS stopped providing nationwide data, and instead only gave home price changes in 70 major cities.
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Public release date: 20-Jun-2013
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