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A. A Nanoengineered Heat Source Creates Metallic Bonds Without Thermal Damage
Narrator: This is Science Today. The development of a heat source material called NanoFoil®, which permits large and small components to metallically bond without thermal damage, was based on materials science research initiated and performed by Troy Barbee, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Barbee explains that when this man-made, nanoengineered foil is ignited, all the energy goes into heating the foil and none is lost in the surrounding environment.
Barbee: And what that does is that allows you to have a very localized heat source with which you can control the amount of energy. This will enable you to put it between two pieces of materials in which to join with a solder or a braising alloy, produce the heat locally and join things which you couldn't join before because of the sensitivity to the overall heat.
Narrator: From computers to airplanes, nearly every product requires a number of joining steps during manufacturing to create durable metallic bonds that do not damage the materials being bonded. NanoFoil® is sold by Reactive NanoTechnologies for different commercial applications. For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B. The Ongoing Contributions of the Joint Genome Institute
Narrator: This is Science Today. Since its inception in 1997, the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, which played a significant role in decoding the human genome, has helped countless researchers understand the underlying organization, function, and evolution of living systems. Rachel Mueller, a graduate student of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley worked with the Joint Genome Institute, or JGI, to analyze Plethodonids – the largest family of salamanders.
Mueller: Working at the JGI has been great because the technology there was developed to sequence the Human Genome, which is a huge amount of data and way more data than most people in evolutionary or organismal biology can ever get their hands on. People had tried in the past to figure out the Plethodonid family tree with genetic data, but it just wasn't possible to get enough genetic data to answer this type of question because these salamanders have been diverged from each other for so long – so it's so long ago, that you need quite a bit of information to get at that.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
What Chest Pain Patients Need to Know about Urgent Care
Narrator: This is Science Today. Part of what's been driving emergency room visits up in this country is an increased awareness and push to make sure that patients who need urgent care are getting it. On the other hand, Ellen Weber of the University of California, San Francisco's Division of Emergency Medicine, says it's sometimes difficult for patients to know, for example, whether their chest pain is resulting from a heart attack or just indigestion.
Weber: Nobody should feel foolish about coming to an emergency department. It's not the job of the person who is not a medical person to decide for themselves that they have an illness that does or doesn't need treatment. If they have a new symptom and they just need reassurance, I don't think that's a bad reason to come to an emergency department.
Narrator: The key, Weber says, is to put it into context.
Weber: If I have a pain in my arm or my leg, I go in my own head – well, this is probably not a stroke. But I've always told people they should never feel silly about discovering that they don't have a serious problem – that's what we're here for.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
D. How MRI Technology May Be Used in Agriculture
Narrator: This is Science Today. Using technology borrowed from the medical field, University of California agriculture engineers have developed a new device for detecting freeze damaged citrus fruits without having to cut them open. Agricultural engineer Jim Thompson says the device was built to measure water quality content and uses the same principle as magnetic resonance imaging.
Thompson: When the fruit has been frozen, the cell structure is disrupted compared with normal fruit and the magnetic resonance signal will detect the fact that the water is held different in the fruit cells in those areas where the fruit cells have been damaged by freezing.
Narrator: But as in the medical field, an MRI-type fruit scanner would be expensive.
Thompson: At this point the magnetic resonance imaging cost in the range of about forty thousand dollars, which is fairly expensive. Although, some of the detection systems we use now in packing lines are about that same cost. So while it is expensive, if it's accurate, it would be worthwhile.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
New Insights into Deep Earthquakes
Narrator: This is Science Today. In August of 2002 two massive deep earthquakes, centered in the same underwater trench below the Fiji Islands in the Pacific, occurred seven minutes apart. Geologist Harry Green of the University of California, Riverside, says the observation that one earthquake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter Scale, caused another 7.7 quake nearby, may have major implications for understanding how earthquakes are initiated.
Green: The effects of the first earthquake 300 km away and 65 km deeper is really very, very small and that's what causes the great interest—because how could this very small effect, within seven minutes, produce an earthquake even larger than the one that triggered it?
Narrator: Green says this event may help us understand the physical mechanism that causes earthquakes, so that we can better predict damaging quakes in the future – even ones at more shallow depths.
Green: It gives us a new time element to combine with seismology that can give us insight as to how the earthquakes get started.
Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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