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Thursday, February 2, 2006

Bathurst Regional Council, the local government responsible for the city of Bathurst and its surrounds in Central Western New South Wales, Australia yesterday revealed it had received a development application for the new Bathurst Base Hospital.

The new hospital is to be built behind the current hospital on the same site and is expected to cost the New South Wales government AUD96 million. The Bathurst Hospital will be the first in the Bathurst-Orange-Bloomfield redevelopment project.

The new hospital will have 149 beds, up from 85 for the current hospital. The hospital will also feature a mental health unit – previously psychiatric patients had to travel to Orange to the Bloomfield Hospital for treatment.

The Bathurst Hospital is expected to have state-of-the art facilities and will share some services with the to be constructed Orange Base Hospital.

The Bathurst Regional Council has approved the demolition of 12 buildings on the hospital site for enabling works. The hospital site is heritage listed although council decided that as the buildings do not contribute to the streetscape they may be demolished.

The demolitions are expected to take place late next month and will take around six weeks to complete. A temporary driveway will then be built to replace the current service entry for food and linen as it will become part of the work site.

Upon completion of the new hospital, the current ward block will be demolished leaving the original building from the late 19th century intact. The original building is expected to become an education centre and consulting rooms.

The original building was opened in 1834. Since then the facility has undergone numerous upgrades and add-ons, with the present ward block being opened in stages from 1978 to 1982.

Other buildings expected to be retained include the Daffodil Cottage (a cancer care centre) and the original Nurse’s quarters known as Poole House.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

A new historic physics record has been set by scientists for exceedingly small writing, opening a new door to computing‘s future. Stanford University physicists have claimed to have written the letters “SU” at sub-atomic size.

Graduate students Christopher Moon, Laila Mattos, Brian Foster and Gabriel Zeltzer, under the direction of assistant professor of physics Hari Manoharan, have produced the world’s smallest lettering, which is approximately 1.5 nanometres tall, using a molecular projector, called Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) to push individual carbon monoxide molecules on a copper or silver sheet surface, based on interference of electron energy states.

A nanometre (Greek: ?????, nanos, dwarf; ?????, metr?, count) is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one billionth of a metre (i.e., 10^-9 m or one millionth of a millimetre), and also equals ten Ångström, an internationally recognized non-SI unit of length. It is often associated with the field of nanotechnology.

“We miniaturised their size so drastically that we ended up with the smallest writing in history,” said Manoharan. “S” and “U,” the two letters in honor of their employer have been reduced so tiny in nanoimprint that if used to print out 32 volumes of an Encyclopedia, 2,000 times, the contents would easily fit on a pinhead.

In the world of downsizing, nanoscribes Manoharan and Moon have proven that information, if reduced in size smaller than an atom, can be stored in more compact form than previously thought. In computing jargon, small sizing results to greater speed and better computer data storage.

“Writing really small has a long history. We wondered: What are the limits? How far can you go? Because materials are made of atoms, it was always believed that if you continue scaling down, you’d end up at that fundamental limit. You’d hit a wall,” said Manoharan.

In writing the letters, the Stanford team utilized an electron‘s unique feature of “pinball table for electrons” — its ability to bounce between different quantum states. In the vibration-proof basement lab of Stanford’s Varian Physics Building, the physicists used a Scanning tunneling microscope in encoding the “S” and “U” within the patterns formed by the electron’s activity, called wave function, arranging carbon monoxide molecules in a very specific pattern on a copper or silver sheet surface.

“Imagine [the copper as] a very shallow pool of water into which we put some rocks [the carbon monoxide molecules]. The water waves scatter and interfere off the rocks, making well defined standing wave patterns,” Manoharan noted. If the “rocks” are placed just right, then the shapes of the waves will form any letters in the alphabet, the researchers said. They used the quantum properties of electrons, rather than photons, as their source of illumination.

According to the study, the atoms were ordered in a circular fashion, with a hole in the middle. A flow of electrons was thereafter fired at the copper support, which resulted into a ripple effect in between the existing atoms. These were pushed aside, and a holographic projection of the letters “SU” became visible in the space between them. “What we did is show that the atom is not the limit — that you can go below that,” Manoharan said.

“It’s difficult to properly express the size of their stacked S and U, but the equivalent would be 0.3 nanometres. This is sufficiently small that you could copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin not just once, but thousands of times over,” Manoharan and his nanohologram collaborator Christopher Moon explained.

The team has also shown the salient features of the holographic principle, a property of quantum gravity theories which resolves the black hole information paradox within string theory. They stacked “S” and the “U” – two layers, or pages, of information — within the hologram.

The team stressed their discovery was concentrating electrons in space, in essence, a wire, hoping such a structure could be used to wire together a super-fast quantum computer in the future. In essence, “these electron patterns can act as holograms, that pack information into subatomic spaces, which could one day lead to unlimited information storage,” the study states.

The “Conclusion” of the Stanford article goes as follows:

The team is not the first to design or print small letters, as attempts have been made since as early as 1960. In December 1959, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who delivered his now-legendary lecture entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” promised new opportunities for those who “thought small.”

Feynman was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as work in particle physics (he proposed the parton model).

Feynman offered two challenges at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, held that year in Caltech, offering a $1000 prize to the first person to solve each of them. Both challenges involved nanotechnology, and the first prize was won by William McLellan, who solved the first. The first problem required someone to build a working electric motor that would fit inside a cube ¹/₆₄ inches on each side. McLellan achieved this feat by November 1960 with his 250-microgram 2000-rpm motor consisting of 13 separate parts.

In 1985, the prize for the second challenge was claimed by Stanford Tom Newman, who, working with electrical engineering professor Fabian Pease, used electron lithography. He wrote or engraved the first page of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, at the required scale, on the head of a pin, with a beam of electrons. The main problem he had before he could claim the prize was finding the text after he had written it; the head of the pin was a huge empty space compared with the text inscribed on it. Such small print could only be read with an electron microscope.

In 1989, however, Stanford lost its record, when Donald Eigler and Erhard Schweizer, scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose were the first to position or manipulate 35 individual atoms of xenon one at a time to form the letters I, B and M using a STM. The atoms were pushed on the surface of the nickel to create letters 5nm tall.

In 1991, Japanese researchers managed to chisel 1.5 nm-tall characters onto a molybdenum disulphide crystal, using the same STM method. Hitachi, at that time, set the record for the smallest microscopic calligraphy ever designed. The Stanford effort failed to surpass the feat, but it, however, introduced a novel technique. Having equaled Hitachi’s record, the Stanford team went a step further. They used a holographic variation on the IBM technique, for instead of fixing the letters onto a support, the new method created them holographically.

In the scientific breakthrough, the Stanford team has now claimed they have written the smallest letters ever – assembled from subatomic-sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter. The new super-mini letters created are 40 times smaller than the original effort and more than four times smaller than the IBM initials, states the paper Quantum holographic encoding in a two-dimensional electron gas, published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The new sub-atomic size letters are around a third of the size of the atomic ones created by Eigler and Schweizer at IBM.

A subatomic particle is an elementary or composite particle smaller than an atom. Particle physics and nuclear physics are concerned with the study of these particles, their interactions, and non-atomic matter. Subatomic particles include the atomic constituents electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are composite particles, consisting of quarks.

“Everyone can look around and see the growing amount of information we deal with on a daily basis. All that knowledge is out there. For society to move forward, we need a better way to process it, and store it more densely,” Manoharan said. “Although these projections are stable — they’ll last as long as none of the carbon dioxide molecules move — this technique is unlikely to revolutionize storage, as it’s currently a bit too challenging to determine and create the appropriate pattern of molecules to create a desired hologram,” the authors cautioned. Nevertheless, they suggest that “the practical limits of both the technique and the data density it enables merit further research.”

In 2000, it was Hari Manoharan, Christopher Lutz and Donald Eigler who first experimentally observed quantum mirage at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. In physics, a quantum mirage is a peculiar result in quantum chaos. Their study in a paper published in Nature, states they demonstrated that the Kondo resonance signature of a magnetic adatom located at one focus of an elliptically shaped quantum corral could be projected to, and made large at the other focus of the corral.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Plastic surgeon to the stars Dr. Frank Ryan has died in a car accident at age 50. It is reported that the Jeep Ryan was driving crashed over the side of the Pacific Coast Highway and landed on rocks. Lifeguards were first on the scene and unsuccessfully tried to rescue Ryan. It is thought that no other vehicle was involved in the incident.

Dr. Ryan, a celebrity in his own right, performed plastic surgery on several stars including Janice Dickinson, Gene Simmons, Shauna Sand and Adrianne Curry. He appeared on several television shows and became one of the first people to perform plastic surgery on television in 1995.

A representative for Janice Dickinson released a statement about the death of Ryan. She said “Janice is deeply, deeply anguished! She is stunned and wants the world to know what a genius Dr. Ryan was.”

Ryan was traveling with his pet dog at the time of the crash; the dog was found seriously injured in the ocean and was transported to a local veterinarian. Dr. Ryan was pronounced dead at the scene.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Martin Garbus, Esq. filed a shareholder derivative suit Monday against Marvel Entertainment and its Chief Executive Officer Isaac Perlmutter, as well as Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel superhero characters, and Lee’s wife and former Marvel Studios head, Avi Arad. The suit is for more than US$750 million (£528M) — about half of the estimated proceeds from Marvel’s movies.

Plaintiff Stan Lee Media (SLM) has four shareholders who live in Florida, California and Canada, and include Jose Abadin and Nelson Thall. The company is suing for recovery of civil damages representing one-half of film and book earnings from such blockbuster films as Spider-Man, Iron Man, X-Men, Hulk, and Fantastic Four franchises.

Defendants are accused of copyright violations over both the Marvel superhero characters and intellectual properties created by Stan Lee. Spider-Man’s three cinematic outings, starring Tobey Maguire, earned more than $1bn (£702m). “Most of Marvel’s financial success, including from the films, comes out of assets created by Stan Lee that are the subject of this suit,” the complaint states.

Lee, 86, has denied the allegations and has previously filed his own $50 million counter lawsuit against SLM, claiming the company has destroyed his name and reputation and prevented his effort to develop such properties as “The Accuser” and “The Drifter” and others via his first-look deals with Disney and Virgin Comics. Lee also co-created Daredevil, Doctor Strange and Thor.

Former dot-com company STM further alleges that it has agreed to pay Lee a $250,000 annual salary plus $100 million in company stock in exchange for the rights to the superhero characters. “That money should have gone to the corporation,” said Garbus. Lee’s counsel, Mark Williams, replied: “We look forward to a positive resolution for Stan Lee and his family.” Marvel has said the court pleadings, which were filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, are filled with “ridiculous claims”.

SLM ran out of operating capital during the dot-com meltdown in December 2000, closing operations entirely by December 19 of that year. The company was placed into Chapter 11 Reorganization in Bankruptcy by Stan Lee in 2001. During the insolvency proceedings, Lee assigned the major character franchises he had created to his new public company, POW! Entertainment, without the bankruptcy court’s approval.

Two multi-billion dollar lawsuits for damages were filed against Lee, his new company, his new partner Arthur Lieberman and Marvel Entertainment for cybersquatting and failure to disclose the existence and value of the Rights Assignment Lee made to the company when he founded it.

The company remained under bankruptcy protection until the US Trustee for the Central District of California moved to dismiss the bankruptcy proceedings for failure of the company as debtor in possession to comply with basic requirements of filing monthly reports and paying quarterly fees to the Trustee. SLM was taken back by the shareholders after its dismissal from bankruptcy and hired a legal and accounting forensic consultant to review all transactions that occurred during bankruptcy.

By November 2006, all of the officers and directors of the company had resigned or abandoned their positions and the company’s lawyers for the debtors in possession attempted to obtain court authorization to destroy or dispose of the company’s books and records. This initiated a long-running legal battle between shareholders and the company’s founder, Lee.

The plaintiffs in this most recent suit contend that Lee, Perlmutter, Arthur Lieberman and Avi Arad conspired in bad faith to conceal and misappropriate financial interests in Lee’s creations assigned to Stan Lee Media in 1998. SLM’s meltdown involved its former President Peter F. Paul fleeing to Brazil, contributions made to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Paul’s extradition and more. In 2007, SLM filed a $5 billion lawsuit in which it claimed co-ownership of all of Stan Lee’s creations for Marvel.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Fourteen houses have been destroyed and another 3 damaged by a bush fire burning in Jarrah forests and farmland near the historical timber town of Dwellingup 70km south east of Perth, Western Australia.

The fire has also destroyed approximately 100 power poles, leading to a loss of telecommunication services to the town and affecting water supplies. Mobile generators have been installed for emergency power.

Steve Slavin, spokesman for Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC), said that 250 fire-fighters are containing the fire with crews concentrating on the southern front, which is now within 3 km of the town.

Mr Slavin said “Our concern is that winds this afternoon will be swinging around to the south and increasing in intensity.” “It’s making us nervous. The advice we’re giving to people in Dwellingup is if they’ve decided that they will leave, this would be a good time to do it”

In separate fires near North Yunderup, Greenfields and Parkland have affected transmission lines supplying power to approximately 56,000 properties.

Additional fires are burning near Toodyay 85km north east of Perth, Another fire is burning near Williams approximately 160 south east of Perth and 90Km east of Dwellingup. And in the southern rural suburb of Forrestdale. These fires are reported to be under control.

Western Australian Police Arson squad are investigating these fires as some appear to be deliberately lit. The Police are also investigating the death of a women in her mid 20’s who died on Saturday after her car rolled while fleeing the fire near Toodyay.

Monday, May 26, 2008

The Rosley Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, Australia was raided by police over the weekend following complaints of child pornography. The complaints related to an exhibition of works by photographer Bill Henson, which included several photographs of naked pubescent children. Twenty-one of the forty photographs in the exhibition were seized during the raid, and police have announced that charges will be laid under the NSW Commonwealth and Crimes Act for “publishing an indecent article”. Digital versions have also been removed from the Gallery’s website.

Politicians on both sides of the fence spoke out against the exhibition. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, speaking to the Nine Network, said he found the photos to be “absolutely revolting […] Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff – frankly I don’t think there are any – just allow kids to be kids.” His Opposition counterpart, Brendan Nelson, believes that the exhibition “violates the things for which we stand as Australians and indeed as parents”.

Art experts have supported Henson and defended his work, denying claims of child pornography and exploitation. According to Betty Churcher, a former director of the National Gallery of Australia, “[t]here is absolutely no suggestion of pornography in these photographs”. Sydney art dealer Denis Savill hung one of Henson’s works, featuring two nudes, in his gallery window beside an Arthur Boyd nude, to “give them something to grizzle about”.

According to Tony Oxley, husband of gallery owner Roslyn, the gallery’s answering machine has recorded several threats to burn the building down. The police action also calls into question the fate of similar works by Henson in other galleries in Australia and around the world.

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Maureen Faibish of 711 Lincoln Way San Francisco, CA was arrested on June 24, 2005 on the charge of child endangerment in the actions leading up to the death of her son, 12-year-old Nicholas Faibish, who was mauled by one or both of her two pit bull dogs, Rex 2 and Ella.

Nicholas was discovered dead in the front bedroom of her home at approximately 15:15 PDT on June 3, 2005, by his mother, who had left the house to run some errands. She had locked her son in the basement to keep him away from the dogs. “I put him down there, with a shovel on the door.”, Faibish said in a telephone interview to the San Francisco Chronicle. “He had a bunch of food. And I told him, ‘Stay down there until I come back.’ Typical Nicky, he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Faibish stated that she believes that her son had walked in when Rex 2, a male pit bull, was attempting to mate with Ella, a female pit bull who was in heat at the time. She stated that Rex 2 had been acting possessively prior to the incident. A police officer shot and killed Ella in order to gain entry to the apartment. Rex 2 was captured and removed to an animal shelter. “The police killed the wrong dog if you ask me.”, Faibish said.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

A team of eight transplant surgeons in Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, led by reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow, age 58, have successfully performed the first almost total face transplant in the US, and the fourth globally, on a woman so horribly disfigured due to trauma, that cost her an eye. Two weeks ago Dr. Siemionow, in a 23-hour marathon surgery, replaced 80 percent of her face, by transplanting or grafting bone, nerve, blood vessels, muscles and skin harvested from a female donor’s cadaver.

The Clinic surgeons, in Wednesday’s news conference, described the details of the transplant but upon request, the team did not publish her name, age and cause of injury nor the donor’s identity. The patient’s family desired the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The Los Angeles Times reported that the patient “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.” The clinic’s dermatology and plastic surgery chair, Francis Papay, described the nine hours phase of the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” Thereafter, another team spent three hours sewing the woman’s blood vessels to that of the donor’s face to restore blood circulation, making the graft a success.

The New York Times reported that “three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005, two in France and one in China, all using facial tissue from a dead donor with permission from their families.” “Only the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip, lower teeth and jaw are hers, the rest of her face comes from a cadaver; she could not eat on her own or breathe without a hole in her windpipe. About 77 square inches of tissue were transplanted from the donor,” it further described the details of the medical marvel. The patient, however, must take lifetime immunosuppressive drugs, also called antirejection drugs, which do not guarantee success. The transplant team said that in case of failure, it would replace the part with a skin graft taken from her own body.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon praised the recent medical development. “There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Leading bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania withheld judgment on the Cleveland transplant amid grave concerns on the post-operation results. “The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Dr Alex Clarke, of the Royal Free Hospital had praised the Clinic for its contribution to medicine. “It is a real step forward for people who have severe disfigurement and this operation has been done by a team who have really prepared and worked towards this for a number of years. These transplants have proven that the technical difficulties can be overcome and psychologically the patients are doing well. They have all have reacted positively and have begun to do things they were not able to before. All the things people thought were barriers to this kind of operations have been overcome,” she said.

The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Isabelle Dinoire on November 27 2005, when she was 38, by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Her Labrador dog mauled her in May 2005. A triangle of face tissue including the nose and mouth was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient. Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

In 2004, the same Cleveland Clinic, became the first institution to approve this surgery and test it on cadavers. In October 2006, surgeon Peter Butler at London‘s Royal Free Hospital in the UK was given permission by the NHS ethics board to carry out a full face transplant. His team will select four adult patients (children cannot be selected due to concerns over consent), with operations being carried out at six month intervals. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old neurofibromatosis victim Pascal Coler of France ended after having received what his doctors call the worlds first successful full face transplant.

Ethical concerns, psychological impact, problems relating to immunosuppression and consequences of technical failure have prevented teams from performing face transplant operations in the past, even though it has been technically possible to carry out such procedures for years.

Mr Iain Hutchison, of Barts and the London Hospital, warned of several problems with face transplants, such as blood vessels in the donated tissue clotting and immunosuppressants failing or increasing the patient’s risk of cancer. He also pointed out ethical issues with the fact that the procedure requires a “beating heart donor”. The transplant is carried out while the donor is brain dead, but still alive by use of a ventilator.

According to Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society’s ethics committee, it is unknown to what extent facial expressions will function in the long term. He said that it is not certain whether a patient could be left worse off in the case of a face transplant failing.

Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon‘s facial transplantation working party, commented that if successful, the transplant would be “a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction” and “a major step forward for the facially disfigured.”

In Wednesday’s conference, Siemionow said “we know that there are so many patients there in their homes where they are hiding from society because they are afraid to walk to the grocery stores, they are afraid to go the the street.” “Our patient was called names and was humiliated. We very much hope that for this very special group of patients there is a hope that someday they will be able to go comfortably from their houses and enjoy the things we take for granted,” she added.

In response to the medical breakthrough, a British medical group led by Royal Free Hospital’s lead surgeon Dr Peter Butler, said they will finish the world’s first full face transplant within a year. “We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months. This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people. These are people who would otherwise live a terrible twilight life, shut away from public gaze,” he said.