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Wednesday, May 15, 2013
2 injured in W.Va. gas plant explosion
POCA, W.Va. (AP) -- Two workers were injured Monday when highly flammable gas used in welding exploded at a West Virginia industrial site, officials said.
Fire crews were sent at about 3:20 p.m. to Airgas, a distributor of specialty gases in Poca, outside of Charleston. Putnam County emergency management director Frank Chapman said the explosion involved about 50 tanks of acetylene that were at Airgas waiting to be refilled. What caused the tanks to explode wasn't known.
Chad Jones, a firefighter with the Bancroft Volunteer Fire Department, said four cylinders continued to burn Monday evening and that crews were letting them "burn out." They were dousing other tanks with water to keep them from exploding, said Jones, whose station was one of several to respond to the scene.
The tanks were being stored in a bay behind the facility. Jones said after the first tank exploded, "it was like a chain reaction," with fireballs shooting 100 to 150 feet in the air. A nearby business was evacuated, and windows were shattered in the back of the Airgas plant, Jones said.
Doug Barker, chief financial officer at nearby Clark Truck Parts, told The Associated Press over the phone that "we felt our building shake like it's never come close to shaking before from a storm or anything. It was enough to make us run."
Barker said he and another company official bolted from their offices, and he ran to the road and saw dark smoke in the air. Soon afterward, they heard several smaller explosions and saw fire, he said. Barker also saw three or four ambulances speed by and heard a lot of sirens.
Clark Truck Parts is about half-mile from Airgas, Barker said. He said there are some homes between the two industrial sites.
Dave Castro, manager of the TransWood trucking company about a quarter-mile from Airgas, said he also felt his building shake.
"It felt like a truck ran into the building," he said.
He said he drove toward Airgas to check on his wife, who works at another company nearby, and could see the back of the plant on fire. He said the burning area was about the size of a house, and every 15 seconds or so a black ball of smoke would rise from a tank or drum "and explode like a firework."
Acetylene is used in welding canisters. Airgas calls itself the largest U.S. supplier of industrial, medical and special gases. The company also lists on its website propane, often used in backyard grills; hydrogen, helium; and nitrous oxide, or the "laughing gas" used during some dental procedures.
Company spokesman Doug Sherman said the explosions occurred in a concrete-enclosed storage area located outside of the main plant. He said the injuries were not life-threatening, and the fire had been extinguished.
Jones said the company was sending a hazmat crew from Kentucky.
"It's a hazardous job they do every day," Jones said. "Something went wrong today."
A U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration crew was at the scene.
Chapman said the explosion involved residue of the gas left in the tanks. He said the blast would have been much worse if the tanks were filled. He said both workers suffered second and third-degree burns.
Chapman said the cause of the explosion was being investigated and that the blasts and fire were the first problem he knows to be reported at Airgas.
The injured workers were taken to Cabell Huntington Hospital for treatment. A hospital official did not know their conditions.
Airgas Inc. is based in Radnor, Pa., and has more than 15,000 employees at 1,110 locations including retail stores, gas fill plants and distribution centers, according to Hoover's database on companies. It is the largest distributor of packaged gases in the US, with a 25 percent market share and with sales of nearly $5 billion in fiscal 2012.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/2-hurt-explosions-fire-w-001243069.html
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Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Scientists uncover fundamental property of astatine -- rarest naturally occurring element on Earth
May 14, 2013 ? An international team of scientists, including a University of York researcher, has carried out ground-breaking experiments to investigate the atomic structure of astatine (atomic number 85), the rarest naturally occurring element on Earth.
Astatine (At) is of significant interest as its decay properties make it an ideal short-range radiation source for targeted alpha therapy in cancer treatment.
The results of the project, which was conceived by Professor Andrei Andreyev, an Anniversary Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of York, and Dr Valentine Fedosseev, from CERN, the European laboratory for nuclear physics research in Geneva, are reported in Nature Communications.
Through experiments conducted at the radioactive isotope facility ISOLDE at CERN, scientists have accessed, for the first time, the ionization potential of the astatine atom. This represents the essential quantity defining chemical and physical properties of this exclusively radioactive element.
The successful measurement fills a long-standing gap in Mendeleev's periodic table, since astatine was the last element present in nature for which this fundamental property was unknown.
As binding energy of the outermost valence electron, the atomic ionization energy is highly relevant for the chemical reactivity of an element and, indirectly, the stability of its chemical bonds in compounds.
Professor Andreyev, who moved to York from the University of the West of Scotland last year, said: "Astatine is of particular interest because its isotopes are interesting candidates for the creation of radiopharmaceuticals for cancer treatment by targeted alpha therapy.
"The experimental value for astatine serves also for benchmarking the theories used to predict the atomic and chemical properties of super-heavy elements, in particular the recently discovered element 117, which is a homologue of astatine."
Astatine was discovered by D. Corson and co-workers in 1940 by bombarding a bismuth target with alpha particles. The most stable isotope of this element has a half-life time of only 8.1 hours. In 1964, McLaughlin studied a 70 ng sample of artificially produced radioactive isotopes of astatine and was first to observe two spectral lines in the UV region. Apart from this, no other data on astatine's atomic spectrum was known before the study launched at CERN?s ISOLDE.
At ISOLDE, short-lived isotopes created in nuclear reactions induced by a high energy proton beam release from target material and can immediately interact with laser beams inside the hot cavity of laser ion source.
Once the wavelengths of lasers are tuned in resonance with selected atomic transitions the atoms are step-wise excited and ionized due to absorption of several photons with total energy exceeding the ionization threshold. This so-called Resonance Ionization Laser Ion Source (RILIS), in combination with electromagnetic separator, supplies pure isotopic beams of different elements for many experiments performed at ISOLDE.
Among these, is a study of short-lived nuclides by in-source resonance ionization spectroscopy using a highly sensitive (below 1 isotope per second) detection of nuclear decay. Physicists from KU Leuven, Belgium developed the setup for this study. The first laser-ionized ions of astatine were observed and identified by its characteristic alpha-decay in these experiments. Also the ionization threshold of astatine was found by scanning the wavelength of ionizing UV laser.
A second phase of the study of the atomic spectrum of astatine took place at the ISAC radioactive isotope facility of the Canadian national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics TRIUMF in Vancouver, where new optical transitions in the infrared region of spectrum were found. With the newly found transitions a highly efficient three-step ionization scheme of astatine was defined and used at ISOLDE RILIS for further study of astatine spectrum.
The researchers probed the interesting region around the ionization threshold and found a series of highly excited resonances -- known as Rydberg states. From this spectrum the first ionization potential of astatine was extracted with high accuracy.
Dr Fedosseev, the RILIS team leader working at CERN, said: "The in-source laser spectroscopy today is a most sensitive method to study atomic properties of exotic short-lived isotopes. For artificially produced elements, like super-heavy ones, this could be a real way to probe their spectra. The success in the study of astatine spectrum added confidence to such projects started recently at GANIL, France and at JINR, Russia."
Professor Andreyev, who joined York as one of 16 Chairs established to mark the University's 50th Anniversary in 2013, added: "This development allows several new phenomena to be investigated, such as the size (radii) of astatine nuclei, along with a very exotic type of nuclear fission. Our collaboration has recently initiated a series of experiments to reach these goals."
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/30tRy5lo6kc/130514112735.htm
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Sony's Got A 13.3-Inch E-Reader With Pen Input, Which Is Sort Of Like A Dodo With Antlers
I've heard some suggestions that our extreme fascination with Google Glass is more a symptom of desperation for some kind of genuine gadget innovation than anything to do with the product's merits, and a new gadget from Sony (via The Verge) has me wondering whether or not other companies are flailing about for something novel. Sony introduced a new 13.3-inch e-ink prototype reader device today, which seems new but also remarkably old and washed up all at once.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/vx5y4R8Oq1c/
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Judge rules U.S. soldier's killing of five was premeditated
By Eric M. Johnson
TACOMA, Washington (Reuters) - A military judge ruled on Monday that a U.S. soldier who shot and killed five fellow servicemen at a combat stress clinic in Iraq acted with premeditation, a decision that will almost surely get him life in prison.
U.S. Army Sergeant John Russell, in a deal that spared him the death penalty, pleaded guilty last month to killing two medical staff officers and three soldiers at Camp Liberty in Baghdad in a 2009 shooting that the military has said may have been triggered by combat stress.
Russell faced an abbreviated court-martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state to determine the level of his guilt and whether he acted with premeditation, as prosecutors said, or on impulse, as the defense has argued.
The judge in the case, Army Colonel David Conn, asked Russell, to stand and gave his ruling. He did not provide further details.
Russell's state of mind before, during and after the attack, one of the worst incidents of soldier-on-soldier violence in the Iraq war, has been central to legal proceedings over the past year at the Pacific Northwest military base.
In his ruling, the judge ultimately sided with prosecutors who said Russell tried to gain an early exit from the Army and had then sought revenge on a mental health worker who would not help him achieve that goal.
The mandatory sentence for even one count of premeditated murder is life in prison, and at issue going forward is whether Russell will ever be eligible for parole. Both sides will present arguments, and Conn is likely to rule on that by week's end.
After the verdict, prosecutors called several witnesses who gave emotional accounts, often directed at Russell, who sat and listened calmly, of the personal fallout they suffered since the attack.
"Are you numb?" clinic technician Alexandria Miller, who was outside the clinic in the moments before the attack, asked Russell. "You are an emotionless monster. You have robbed the world of five angels."
TACTICAL PRECISION
Prosecutors painted Russell, a 48-year-old Texas native, as a calculating and vindictive malingerer who had been angered after a nasty spat with a healthcare worker at the clinic who refused to help him leave the Army early.
They said he stole a Ford SUV, loaded a 30-round magazine into an M16-A2 rifle, and drove roughly 40 minutes to the clinic to exact revenge. There, he smoked a cigarette, removed identification tags and the gun's optical sight and slipped into the clinic through a back entrance closest to that doctor's office.
An Army forensic science officer who analyzed the scene after the attack testified that Russell killed with the tactical precision of a trained soldier.
But defense attorneys set forth a sharply different theory, saying Russell's mental health had been severely weakened by several combat tours and that he was suicidal prior to the attack and provoked to violence by maltreatment at the hands of healthcare workers at Camp Liberty.
A forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Sadoff of the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that Russell suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis at the time of the shootings and had death wishes related to his illnesses.
"My plan was to kill myself," Russell said during his plea hearing. "I wanted the pain to stop."
The last doctor to treat Russell before the attack, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Jones, had engaged in a heated exchange with Russell the day of the attack, a day after a Russell implored Jones for help making an early exit.
Jones, who had been on a phone call in a separate clinic office during the attack, testified on Monday he was grateful to be alive. He dove out a window and was unharmed. On Monday, he addressed the rows of family members of the dead and drew attention to that fact.
"They have suffered immensely, greater than I have," Jones said. "(Russell) was judge, jury and executioner in his idea of justice."
(Editing by Cynthia Johnston, G Crosse, Bernard Orr and Cynthia Osterman)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/u-soldier-acted-premeditation-killing-comrades-iraq-judge-160435843.html
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Bloomberg Reporters Used Shady Terminal Access To Spy - Gizmodo
Trading on Wall Street is basically a huge game of poker and it would be kind of hard to bluff or cover your strategy if Bloomberg News reporters were watching your Bloomberg terminal to track your every move. So you'd assume that said reporters wouldn't abuse their corporate affiliation like that, because it would be shady and weird. And that assumption would be wrong.
Goldman Sachs officials called Bloomberg LP out this week, according to the New York Post, when they realized that reporters from Bloomberg News had been monitoring activity on traders' terminal accounts. The terminals, which cost more than $20,000 a year, are a ubiquitous resource across banks and trading firms with about 315,000 subscribers. Reporters did not have extensive private access, but could see when a trader logged on to a terminal and checked things like bond trades or equities indices. Goldman basically took the position that they weren't trying to be paranoid, but it really wasn't okay for a Bloomberg reporter to ask if someone had been fired based on the fact that there was no recent activity on his/her terminal account.
Bloomberg issued a statement saying that the whole thing had been a mistake, and that reporters would no longer have access to the information, but it seems that the "mistake" has been going on for years, and that it was one form of leverage Bloomberg News used to gain traction during its early days. Outside of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve is investigating whether the tactic was used on its regulators. The New York Times explained:
Bloomberg reporters used the ?Z function? ? a command using the letter Z and a company?s name ? to view a list of subscribers at a firm. Then, a Bloomberg user could click on a subscriber?s name, which would take the user to a function called UUID. The UUID function then provided background on an individual subscriber, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives, and weekly statistics on how often they used a particular function. A company spokesman said both of those functions had been disabled in the newsroom.
At this point it pretty much seems like the behavior was legal, but it's certainly not ideal and is definitely corrosive in terms of faith that any part of Bloomberg can be trusted to keep private information separate from Bloomberg News. Competing wire service Thomson Reuters, which also has a financial data service meant to rival Bloomberg terminals, took the opportunity to note that its news division operates independently and is never given the opportunity to read other peoples' diaries. [New York Post, New York Times, PandoDaily ]
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Source: http://gizmodo.com/bloomberg-reporters-used-sketchy-terminal-access-to-col-503232014
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