A Senate committee Thursday approved proposals that could make it easier to open new hospital trauma centers ? and assure that some disputed trauma centers would remain open.
JIM SAUNDERS, THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
Plunging into a debate about Florida?s trauma system, a Senate committee Thursday approved proposals that could make it easier to open new hospital trauma centers ? and assure that some disputed trauma centers would remain open.
The Senate Appropriations Committee took up a health-care bill (SB 966) and made changes that could help fast-track new trauma centers in four regions of the state and also protect trauma centers that have been embroiled in a series of legal challenges.
Bill sponsor Aaron Bean, R-Fernandina Beach, said lawmakers are trying to make sure people have access to trauma care within what he called the ?golden hour? after accidents.
?Are you within the golden hour to make it alive to a hospital??? he asked.
But the proposals, which popped up as part of a 128-page amendment to the bill and two subsequent amendments, drew criticism from teaching hospitals and safety-net hospitals that provide trauma care. Mark Delegal, a lobbyist for the Teaching Hospital Council of Florida, said the proposals had not been considered by health-care committees that ordinarily would debate such ideas.
?This is the kind of stuff that those of us who work in this process should not do,?? Delegal said.
The move by the Appropriations Committee came two days after a House panel also approved a bill to overhaul the way trauma centers are approved. But the Senate version appears to be more far-reaching.
In part, it would create a special approval process for trauma centers in four regions that it describes as having ?limited access to trauma care services.? As an example, one of those regions is in the western Panhandle, where Fort Walton Beach Medical Center has been trying to get approval to open a trauma center.
Notre Dame astrophysicist discovers 5-planet system like EarthPublic release date: 18-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Justin Crepp jcrepp@nd.edu 574-631-4092 University of Notre Dame
Researchers for the first time have identified Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Images of the star taken by Notre Dame astrophysicist Justin Crepp rule out alternative explanations of the data, confirming that five planets orbit Kepler 62, with two located in the habitable zone. The results were published in Science magazine today.
"A five-planet system with planets of 1.41 and 1.61 Earth-radii in the habitable zone of a K2V star has been detected with the Kepler spacecraft and validated with high statistical confidence," the paper reports. Those two, named Kepler-62 e and f are the outermost of the five observed planets and receive a solar flux from the star similar to that received from the Sun by Venus and Mars. Their size suggests that they are either rocky, like Earth, or composed mostly of solid water. A planet discovered more than a year ago in the habitable zone of another Sun-like star, Kepler-22, has a radius 2.4 times the radius of earth, leaving researchers less sure of its composition.
"From what we can tell, from their radius and orbital period, these are the most similar objects to Earth that we have found yet," said Crepp, the Freimann assistant professor of physics. Data from the Kepler mission, launched in 2009 to identify extrasolar planets, has so far resulted in several dozen of some 3,000 "Kepler Objects of Interest" having been studied in detail.
Researchers use fluctuations in the brightness of a star to identify the presence of a potential planet whose transit periodically dims the light of the star. Crepp uses large ground-based telescopes to image the host star and analyzes the system to make sure other astronomical phenomena, such as nearby eclipsing binary stars, are not causing the fluctuation, a common "false positive" encountered in the research. Crepp noticed a faint dot near Kepler-62 a year ago, leading to months of detailed study to confirm the planet interpretation.
"What really helped is that this star has five planets," he said. "You can mimic one planet with another event, but when you have five of them and they're all periodic, that helps to put the nail in the coffin. It's hard to make that kind of signature with anything else that you can dream up."
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Notre Dame astrophysicist discovers 5-planet system like EarthPublic release date: 18-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Justin Crepp jcrepp@nd.edu 574-631-4092 University of Notre Dame
Researchers for the first time have identified Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Images of the star taken by Notre Dame astrophysicist Justin Crepp rule out alternative explanations of the data, confirming that five planets orbit Kepler 62, with two located in the habitable zone. The results were published in Science magazine today.
"A five-planet system with planets of 1.41 and 1.61 Earth-radii in the habitable zone of a K2V star has been detected with the Kepler spacecraft and validated with high statistical confidence," the paper reports. Those two, named Kepler-62 e and f are the outermost of the five observed planets and receive a solar flux from the star similar to that received from the Sun by Venus and Mars. Their size suggests that they are either rocky, like Earth, or composed mostly of solid water. A planet discovered more than a year ago in the habitable zone of another Sun-like star, Kepler-22, has a radius 2.4 times the radius of earth, leaving researchers less sure of its composition.
"From what we can tell, from their radius and orbital period, these are the most similar objects to Earth that we have found yet," said Crepp, the Freimann assistant professor of physics. Data from the Kepler mission, launched in 2009 to identify extrasolar planets, has so far resulted in several dozen of some 3,000 "Kepler Objects of Interest" having been studied in detail.
Researchers use fluctuations in the brightness of a star to identify the presence of a potential planet whose transit periodically dims the light of the star. Crepp uses large ground-based telescopes to image the host star and analyzes the system to make sure other astronomical phenomena, such as nearby eclipsing binary stars, are not causing the fluctuation, a common "false positive" encountered in the research. Crepp noticed a faint dot near Kepler-62 a year ago, leading to months of detailed study to confirm the planet interpretation.
"What really helped is that this star has five planets," he said. "You can mimic one planet with another event, but when you have five of them and they're all periodic, that helps to put the nail in the coffin. It's hard to make that kind of signature with anything else that you can dream up."
###
[ | 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.
Our solar system resides in an area of our galaxy called the "Local Bubble" [wikipedia.org], roughly a few hundred lightyears across. This region is very empty compared to the average interstellar medium in the galaxy, as a result of a large number of supernovae that blew out a sort of cavity in our interstellar neck of the woods long ago. In actual structure it's more of an irregular "Local Chimney" [solstation.com] going right through the galactic disc rather than a spherical bubble.
As a result, pinning the cause of TFA's observations to a single supernova is not all that simple, as supernovae were very common in the Sun's general neighborhood in our galactic past..
Here's a nice graphic of the larger features in and around our local bubble [nasa.gov]. It's a fascinating subject if you enjoy understanding our location in a galactic context.
It’s Monday! These riveting reads will ease you back into the work week: Michael Weatherly‘s daughter shows off her best dance moves — The Ellen DeGeneres Show All the ins and outs parents need to know about toddler apps — Baby Zone Should solitary confinement be allowed for jailed minors? — CNN Dad recalls his [...]
Claw marks on a 100-million-year-old riverbed in China reveal how some dinosaurs doggy-paddled over long distances, scientists say.
"What we have are scratches left by the tips of a two-legged dinosaur's feet," study researcher Scott Persons, of the University of Alberta, said in a statement. "The dinosaur's claw marks show it was swimming along in this river and just its tippy toes were touching bottom."
Stretching over a distance of 50 feet (15 meters), the markings show that the dinosaur had a coordinated, left-right, left-right swimming style, Persons said. The researchers believe the scratches belong to a carnivorous theropod ? a type of dinosaur that walked on two legs ? that stood roughly 3 feet (1 meter) at the hip.
While it's tough to determine the identity of the swimming dinosaur from these marks alone, Persons suspects it could have been an early tyrannosaur or a Sinocalliopteryx, predators known to have roamed this prehistoric landscape in China.
The paddle-scratches were found in a dried-up river in China's Szechuan Province, which Persons described as a "dinosaur super-highway," full of the footprints of other Cretaceous-era theropods and long-necked, four-legged sauropods.
The research was detailed April 8 in journal Chinese Science Bulletin.
It's not the first time dinosaur paddle prints have turned up in the fossil record. In 2007, paleontologists found S-shaped prints on the bottom of what was a lake in the Cameros Basin in Spain 125 million years ago. The unusual tracks indicate the animal's body was floating in about 10 feet (3.2 m) of water when it scratched the lakebed, researchers said at the time.
Earlier this year, a group of scientists published a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology arguing that a set of up to 4,000 fossilized footprints in Australia is evidence of a dinosaur river crossing ? not a stampede over land, as was long thought.
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Public release date: 18-Apr-2013
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