Quantum Briefs
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Photo courtesy of Barbara Cohen.
Searching for Meteorities
By Diana Sanchez
“For UNM’s Institute of Meteoritics Research Scientist Barbara Cohen, combing over the Antarctic snow is just another summer’s day. For two seasons she spent six weeks of Antarctica’s summer (our winter) as a team member of the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET), funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Hunting for meteorites on the frozen continent is ideal because the severe conditions leave them preserved, concentrated, and easy to see. “Meteors usually take five to ten years to disintegrate, but in a hot desert, they don’t wither and turn into soil,” she says. “Antarctica is basically a cold desert.” The white snowy landscape also provides stark contrast against the meteorites they find—black on the outside after burning through the atmosphere. She says, “We use a map and GPS to navigate around where we’ve already looked. Then, the only instruments we use are our eyes.”
Along with her team, Cohen spotted an exciting find—a new type of meteorite. “It’s clearly a meteorite, but we have no idea what it is,” she says. “No one’s ever seen anything like it before—ever.” It, along with other ANSMET finds are sent to Smithsonian scientists who catalog each meteorite after conducting preliminary elemental tests. After that, samples are up for grabs. “Anyone can have a piece, anywhere in the world,” she explains. “Even researchers who find the meteorites have to write a request for a piece of one.” She definitely plans on requesting a sample of the mysterious meteorite she found, and says by age-dating meteorites, “We can understand the beginnings of the solar system,” adding, “They’re the only way we know anything about Mars or asteroids.”
As for her future summer plans, she says, “It’s really cool. I’d go back again—definitely.”
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Photo courtesy of the Long Wavelength Array. |
Really Neat Astronomy By Steve Carr “New scientific discoveries are constantly being made with the evolution of technology. Space is no exception—distant radio galaxies and clusters have become tools for understanding the earliest black holes and the cosmological evolution of dark matter and dark energy, respectively. Several UNM researchers hope the Long Wavelength Array will eventually provide useful information about the Earth and the cosmos. Gregory Taylor, associate professor of physics and astronomy and LWA scientific director; Lee J. Rickard, LWA executive project director; and Christopher Watts, LWA ionospheric scientist, are on the leading edge of such technology, along with a number of collaborators.
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In fall of 2006, UNM collaborators at the University of Texas Applied Research Lab and the Naval Research Lab installed the current prototype, which is referred to as the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array (LWDA), to differentiate it from the larger LWA project, on the Plains of San Agustin in southwestern New Mexico. It is now providing images of the sky that show emissions from the center of the Galaxy, a supermassive black hole, and the remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova more than three hundred years ago. It is comprised of sixteen four-foot-tall antennas combined to produce data comparable to that from a more traditional dish style telescope with a diameter of seventy feet.
Rickard says UNM is in a good situation to provide great research.
“We’ve got an instrument where we think we can do a lot of really neat astronomy,” he says. “It has a big impact on things like communications systems, navigation systems, and imaging the surface of the earth to look for things under forests. There are all sorts of applications. It’s a great opportunity.”
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Altered States
by Luke Frank
Look at the little faces in any pediatric emergency unit. Eyes are big
and welling; legs are nervously swinging in an oversized chair; tiny knuckles
are white with anxiety.
During a medical emergency, kids can become frightened, almost hysterical, about the pain and trauma they’ve encountered—the sight of their own blood, the sounds of others in pain, and the great unknown that awaits.
When
fear shifts gears, the experience can be tough on the child, tough on
the family, and tough on medical staff. Robert Sapien, director of pediatric
emergency medicine at University of New Mexico Hospital (UNMH), has embarked
on a journey into the subconscious using medical relaxation techniques—hypnosis—to
help all parties better cope with the experience.
Sapien began extensive certification training approximately three years
ago at the Hypnotherapy Academy of America in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and
is now training UNMH emergency medicine residents, nurses, social workers,
and child life specialists. “Medical relaxation is a technique that
taps into the human subconscious,” he says. “This has been
a very serious undertaking for me—the human mind is not something
to play with.”
Sapien uses several steps to access the subconscious and then gently apply pain management techniques for kids. This can include an imaginary pain dial—a numb spot that the child can apply to the point of pain—and “pain dilution”—using different colors to represent varying levels of pain. Such tools engage the child, creating a distraction and effectively diverting attention from the injury and the procedure.
“Medical relaxation has much the same effect as daydreaming or exercising,” he concludes. “It puts your mind in a different place, a different environment. Moreover, it seems to nurture communication among staff and patients, and improve bedside manner.”
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Fostering Health Policy
by Diana Sanchez
With $18.5 million of initial funding, UNM established the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy in January 2007. The Center
aims to create a new generation of scholars to lead the nation in health
policy discussion. Along with providing scholarships for eligible Economics,
Political Science, and Sociology PhD candidates, the Center offers funding
competitions each spring with the stipulation that scholarship recipients
complete at least six hours of health policy coursework. With these scholarships,
the Center endeavors to increase the representation and presence of minorities
with PhDs and expertise in health policy, ultimately creating greater
racial and ethnic diversity at the national level where health policy
is formed.
Additionally,
the Center offers research grants to UNM faculty working on projects related
to health policy and health disparities and also hosts visiting scholars.
Together, faculty and students working with the Center are fostering new
leadership by providing a physical, educational, and cultural base for
minority students to gain access to training and research opportunities,
thus giving true voice to the very group most affected by health policy
decision-making.
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Building a Virtual Fortress
by Karen Wentworth
Many people in many locations working together on a complex problem is
a dream the internet makes real. However, preventing any sabotage in the
process is a challenge that keeps researchers like Assistant Professor
of Computer Science Jared Saia on the search for solutions.
Saia is working on mathematical algorithms that may lead to a workable, commercially viable software program to keep communication on the web flowing smoothly. A four hundred thousand dollar National Science Foundation CAREER Science award, along with other awards from the NSF and Sandia National Laboratories, support his work.
His research, using probabilistic method and expander and extractor graphs, allows him to create ways for web-based projects to survive and function reliably, even if up to one third of the people involved in a particular collaboration are attempting to disrupt it. Saia says his algorithms are robust, scalable, and can support systems even if hundreds of millions—a group as large as the entire population of Japan—are participating.
He
is working with several collaborators, including Valerie King at the University
of Victoria and Microsoft Research, Vishal Sanalani, a former UNM student
now at Microsoft Research, and Erik Vee at Yahoo Research.
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Information Bounty
by Carolyn Gonzales
The UNM Latin American Knowledge Harvester is an outcropping of a U.S.
Department of Education grant funded through Technological Innovation
and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access.
This highly competitive, four-year, eighty thousand dollar award supports UNM partnerships with universities in Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil to reduce the digital divide between scientific communities in North and South America.
“The Harvester addresses the challenge to identify and maintain stable and reliable internet access to library and institutional collections and digitized archives in and about Latin America,” says Johann van Reenen, assistant dean of University Libraries.
Using an internationally agreed upon Open Archives Initiate Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, the Harvester allows UNM and its Latin American partners to collect content and make it available across disciplines, with a customized interface that gathers streams of full-text content from participating repositories.
The harvester reaps content representing the fields of history, public health, and social medicine, and includes photographs and images, curriculum resources for teaching, indigenous culture, and new scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, including works in progress.
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Creating Future Biomedical Engineers by Diana Sanchez “Someone made the medicine you take, hearing aids, hip replacements—those people are biomedical engineers,” says Heather Canavan, assistant professor of chemical and nuclear engineering. She and colleagues are bringing this message to bilingual, fifth-grade and Albuquerque High School classrooms, where students benefit from biomedical presentations from UNM researchers. These presentations are part of the outreach component of a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to UNM’s Center for Biomedical Engineering. This is one of its Partnerships for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) programs, which foster development of collaborative partnerships between minority-serving institutions and NSF-supported centers and facilities to increase diversity in materials research. UNM
has partnered with Harvard University to conduct research, education,
and outreach in the area of biomaterials. Center Director and Professor
of Chemistry and Chemical and Nuclear Engineering, Gabriel Lopez
says Harvard was “a natural fit. UNM is a top minority-serving
institution with a strong history of materials research. By partnering
with them we stand to become a major national program.” Creating possibilities is also the objective of the outreach to Albuquerque students. By teaching them about bioengineering and associated opportunities in the future, the field of bioengineering will become diversified. UNM researchers work closely with Albuquerque Public Schools to create age-appropriate plans. Because Canavan’s research focus is cardiovascular tissue engineering, she based one demonstration on the heart, calling it “How To Mend a Broken Heart.” Part of the lesson included actual implants for the students to examine for the “Name that Implant” quiz. In its first year, the project has been a huge success, and the team hopes to continue the outreach long after the initial grant period. Says Canavan, “The teachers and APS administration really like it. It’s been very rewarding for everyone who has participated, from professors on down to students.”
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