The charity bicycle tour Cops for Cancer were in South Delta Friday (Sept. 28) morning, visiting schools and raising awareness for the deadly disease.
The tour stopped at South Park elementary in Tsawwassen where the South Delta Leader took photographs of riders and school children.
Former South Park student Malcolm McQueen was on hand to hand out necklaces to the riders.
Malcolm, now a Grade 8 student at South Delta Secondary, says he was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma cancer when he was just two years old.
He's been cancer-free since 2004 and now works with the Canadian Cancer Society to help other people who going through treatment.
"I feel no one should really have to go through that," says Malcolm. "And I'll do my best to help."
Children with cancer receive bead necklaces while in hospital and the necklace grows as they receive their treatment, which is why the bicycle riders are given necklaces to demonstrate solidarity with those children.
The tour continued through Thrifty Foods in Tsawwassen, South Point Academy, and the Delta Police Department, before continuing to Langley, Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Hope tomorrow (Saturday).
Public release date: 10-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Evan Lerner elerner@upenn.edu 215-573-6604 University of Pennsylvania
PHILADELPHIA Computers may be getting faster every year, but those advances in computer speed could be dwarfed if their 1's and 0's were represented by bursts of light, instead of electricity.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made an important advance in this frontier of photonics, fashioning the first all-optical photonic switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires. Moreover, they combined these photonic switches into a logic gate, a fundamental component of computer chips that process information.
The research was conducted by associate professor Ritesh Agarwal and graduate student Brian Piccione of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Post-doctoral fellows Chang-Hee Cho and Lambert van Vugt, also of the Materials Science Department, contributed to the study.
It was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
The research team's innovation built upon their earlier research, which showed that their cadmium sulfide nanowires exhibited extremely strong light-matter coupling, making them especially efficient at manipulating light. This quality is crucial for the development of nanoscale photonic circuits, as existing mechanisms for controlling the flow of light are bulkier and require more energy than their electronic analogs.
"The biggest challenge for photonic structures on the nanoscale is getting the light in, manipulating it once it's there and then getting it out," Agarwal said. "Our major innovation was how we solved the first problem, in that it allowed us to use the nanowires themselves for an on-chip light source."
The research team began by precisely cutting a gap into a nanowire. They then pumped enough energy into the first nanowire segment that it began to emit laser light from its end and through the gap. Because the researchers started with a single nanowire, the two segment ends were perfectly matched, allowing the second segment to efficiently absorb and transmit the light down its length.
"Once we have the light in the second segment, we shine another light through the structure and turn off what is being transported through that wire," Agarwal said. "That's what makes it a switch."
The researchers were able to measure the intensity of the light coming out of the end of the second nanowire and to show that the switch could effectively represent the binary states used in logic devices.
"Putting switches together lets you make logic gates, and assembling logic gates allows you to do computation," Piccione said. "We used these optical switches to construct a NAND gate, which is a fundamental building block of modern computer processing."
A NAND gate, which stands for "not and," returns a "0" output when all its inputs are "1." It was constructed by the researchers by combining two nanowire switches into a Y-shaped configuration. NAND gates are important for computation because they are "functionally complete," which means that, when put in the right sequence, they can do any kind of logical operation and thus form the basis for general-purpose computer processors.
"We see a future where 'consumer electronics' become 'consumer photonics'," Agarwal said. "And this study shows that is possible."
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The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Institutes of Health's New Innovator Award Program.
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Penn researchers make first all-optical nanowire switchPublic release date: 10-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Evan Lerner elerner@upenn.edu 215-573-6604 University of Pennsylvania
PHILADELPHIA Computers may be getting faster every year, but those advances in computer speed could be dwarfed if their 1's and 0's were represented by bursts of light, instead of electricity.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made an important advance in this frontier of photonics, fashioning the first all-optical photonic switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires. Moreover, they combined these photonic switches into a logic gate, a fundamental component of computer chips that process information.
The research was conducted by associate professor Ritesh Agarwal and graduate student Brian Piccione of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Post-doctoral fellows Chang-Hee Cho and Lambert van Vugt, also of the Materials Science Department, contributed to the study.
It was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
The research team's innovation built upon their earlier research, which showed that their cadmium sulfide nanowires exhibited extremely strong light-matter coupling, making them especially efficient at manipulating light. This quality is crucial for the development of nanoscale photonic circuits, as existing mechanisms for controlling the flow of light are bulkier and require more energy than their electronic analogs.
"The biggest challenge for photonic structures on the nanoscale is getting the light in, manipulating it once it's there and then getting it out," Agarwal said. "Our major innovation was how we solved the first problem, in that it allowed us to use the nanowires themselves for an on-chip light source."
The research team began by precisely cutting a gap into a nanowire. They then pumped enough energy into the first nanowire segment that it began to emit laser light from its end and through the gap. Because the researchers started with a single nanowire, the two segment ends were perfectly matched, allowing the second segment to efficiently absorb and transmit the light down its length.
"Once we have the light in the second segment, we shine another light through the structure and turn off what is being transported through that wire," Agarwal said. "That's what makes it a switch."
The researchers were able to measure the intensity of the light coming out of the end of the second nanowire and to show that the switch could effectively represent the binary states used in logic devices.
"Putting switches together lets you make logic gates, and assembling logic gates allows you to do computation," Piccione said. "We used these optical switches to construct a NAND gate, which is a fundamental building block of modern computer processing."
A NAND gate, which stands for "not and," returns a "0" output when all its inputs are "1." It was constructed by the researchers by combining two nanowire switches into a Y-shaped configuration. NAND gates are important for computation because they are "functionally complete," which means that, when put in the right sequence, they can do any kind of logical operation and thus form the basis for general-purpose computer processors.
"We see a future where 'consumer electronics' become 'consumer photonics'," Agarwal said. "And this study shows that is possible."
###
The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Institutes of Health's New Innovator Award Program.
[ | 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.
NEW YORK (AP) ? A study of former NFL players finds they were unusually prone to dying from degenerative brain disease, the latest indication that repeated blows to the head may cause serious trouble later on.
The death rate from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's disease combined was about three times what one would predict from the general population, researchers reported.
Prior research had suggested football players were unusually prone to those diseases, said lead researcher Everett Lehman of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which is part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study, reported online Wednesday in the journal Neurology, looked at death certificates.
It drew on a long-running study of more than 3,400 NFL players with at least five playing seasons in the league between 1959 and 1988. Some 334 had died by the end of 2007, the cutoff for being included in the study. Researchers compared their death rates from various causes to that of a comparable group of American men.
One or another of the three brain diseases was listed as the underlying cause of death in 10 cases, which is about three times the general rate for American men, the researchers reported.
Researchers noted that the study can't prove that the results were caused by football-related concussions, and that they may not apply to pro or amateur players who've played fewer than five years.
In recent years, much of the attention to brain problems in football players has focused on a condition known as CTE, which is traced to repeated head blows. The new study didn't look for CTE. It's not among the standard list of conditions the researchers used for classifying deaths, Lehman said.
But some of the brain disease deaths counted in the study may have actually come from misdiagnosed CTE, which stands for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the researchers noted.
Dr. Robert Cantu, who co-directs a center that studies CTE at Boston University but did not participate in the new study, said the results are "not at all surprising." He agreed that some of the deaths could be misdiagnosed CTE, noting that the diagnosis requires a special chemical test of the brain after death.
Also on Wednesday, the NFL announced a donation of $30 million for medical research to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the fundraising arm of the NIH.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the research could benefit athletes and potential areas of study may include CTE, concussion management and treatment and disorders from later in life such as Alzheimer's.
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Public release date: 10-Sep-2012
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