Pulling Back the Cosmic Veil Powell, Corey
American scientist,
09/2022, Letnik:
110, Številka:
5
Journal Article
For months, the team in charge of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) maintained spy-level secrecy around the first targets that would be surveyed by the giant observatory. The suspense started ...building at the telescope's flawless launch on Christmas Day, 2021, and escalated sharply with the start of full operations this summer. Now, the first images are out, and they were worth the wait. JWST can't help but make notable discoveries everywhere it looks, because its capabilities go far beyond those of any of its predecessors. Its 6.5-meter-wide mirror, composed of 18 gold-coated beryllium hexagons, collects more than six times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope. Its detectors can observe infrared rays out to a wavelength of 30 microns, allowing it to peer through dust and to view the stretched, reddened light from the early universe. Other space telescopes have focused on the infrared sky, but not with anything like JWST's sensitivity.
"The center of our galaxy is complex, extreme, and violent," says Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Here, a panorama of the galaxy.
The Brain Cartographer Powell, Corey S
American scientist,
07/2022, Letnik:
110, Številka:
4
Journal Article
An interview with Hongkui Zeng, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, is presented. Among other things, Zeng shares how she is approaching the colossal challenge of ...understanding the human mind.
The Path to Glory Powell, Corey S
American Scientist,
05/2019, Letnik:
107, Številka:
3
Journal Article, Book Review
Seeing is believing is such a truism that it was already a cliche in the second century BCE, when the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus planted those words in his comedy Truculentus. The saying ...has stuck with us, because the human imagination is puny compared with the vastness of our experience and our potential. The triumphs of the Space Age are perhaps the greatest illustrations of this gap. Fewer than a dozen years passed between the founding of NASA and the Apollo 11 Moon landing on Jul 20, 1969. It was an achievement that still staggers the imagination--one so extraordinary that a community of Internet trolls thrives on the notion that the Moon shot must have been a hoax because believing that it actually happened is so difficult. The pages in between do their best to prove Mattingly wrong. You have surely seen the famous first man on the Moon photograph (which actually shows Buzz Aldrin, not Neil Armstrong), but not the way you see it here.
First Person: Jill Tarter Powell, Corey
American scientist,
09/2018, Letnik:
106, Številka:
5
Journal Article
An interview with astronomer Jill Tarter is presented. Tarter said that at the end of my graduate career at the University of California, Berkeley, Stu Bowyer, who is an x-ray astronomer at Berkeley, ...had a clever idea about searching for intelligent life. Sturealized that with a radio telescope we could build some back-end equipment to analyze incoming radio waves to look for signs of an artificial signal. We could do this while the radio astronomers were using the telescope to do their investigations. The NASA program before 19931 had two prongs. One was the targeted search using the world's large radio telescopes; the other was a sky survey, using the DSN 34-meter dishes around the world. When Congressional termination happened, we were able to transfer equipment for the targeted search to the SETI Institute or to other observatories. But without the DSN telescopes, we couldn't keep the sky survey alive.
First Person: Elena Aprile Powell, Corey
American scientist,
09/2018, Letnik:
106, Številka:
5
Journal Article
An interview with professor of physics at Columbia University Elena Aprile is presented. Aprile said that the main achievement right now of the null results has been that theories of what dark matter ...could be have to be rethought. It's exciting to have a new machine that can go still further and prove another order of magnitude of sensitivity. I proposed back in 2001 to make a one-ton dark-matter detector with 10 modules of 100 kilos each. We didn't think we could make a one-ton detector all in one piece, so it was a modular approach. That we've done with the XENON1T. Now I think we must challenge ourselves again. We have to increase the mass, but we also have to reduce the background. The principle is exactly the same, but we've stayed separated despite many efforts to get us to marry. Psychologically it's wonderful. We keep leading, but then they come a bit later with something better and more sensitive.
STUDY DESIGN.An observational study.
OBJECTIVE.The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of a health planʼs prior authorization (PA) programs for low back pain (LBP) in a non-Medicare ...population by assessing changes in pre-surgical nonoperative care; lumbar fusion trends; and overall back surgery rates compared with another health plan with a similar program and national benchmarks. The PA programs require mandatory physiatrist consultation before surgical evaluation, with subsequent additional LBP surgery PA.
SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA.LBP is prevalent and concern exists that spinal fusion is overutilized for LBP.
METHODS.Annual rates of lumbar fusion trended over 6 years, and analysis of changes in standardized costs for LBP-related services among a 501-member subset who underwent lumbar fusion before and after program implementations, during the period January 1, 2008, through December 31, 2013, among commercial members aged 18 and 65 years enrolled in a health maintenance organization with commercial membership averaging >500,000 annually.
RESULTS.After initiation of the physiatrist PA in December 2010, lumbar fusions decreased from 76.27/100,000 in 2010 to 62.63/100,000 in 2011 with subsequent increases to 64.24/100,000 and 73.84/100,000 in years 2012 and 2013. For members who had lumbar fusion, per-member, pre-surgical costs increased by $2,233 with the physiatrist PA and an additional $1,370 with implementation of the LBP surgery PA (March 2013). Spinal injections and inpatient admissions were the greatest contributors to the overall increase in costs. The physiatrist and LBP surgery PA programs were also associated with lengthening of LBP episodes ending in surgery by 309 and 198 days.
CONCLUSION.Mandatory referral to a physiatrist before surgical evaluation did not result in persistent reduction in lumbar fusions. Instead, these programs were associated with the unintended consequence of increased costs from more nonoperative care for only a transitory change in the lumbar fusion rate, likely from delays due to the introduction of both PA programs.Level of Evidence3
First Person: Dante Lauretta Powell, Corey S
American scientist,
07/2014, Letnik:
102, Številka:
4
Journal Article
The A recibo and Goldstone radio telescopes got great radar data on this object: rotation period, pole orientation, overall structure. OSIRIS-REx will allow us to map the distribution of water and ...organics in the inner solar system. What happens is the smaller you get, the more the Yarkovsky effect changes the semi-major axis the size of the orbit, Yarkovsky appears to be a size sorting mechanism in the main asteroid belt, where the smallest asteroid from a collision like the one that formed Bennu gets pushed really quickly and delivered into the inner solar system.
PDF