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//////////////Dairy Products Consumed by Children Too High in Fat? A study published in the November 2007 issue of The Journal of Pediatrics looks at children's dairy intake.
///////////////Autism and Vaccine Link On March 6, a federal court granted compensation to a Georgia girl because she developed autism-like symptoms after receiving childhood vaccines in 2000. Officials did not say the vaccines caused autism; rather, they concluded the vaccines aggravated a preexisting condition. Do you agree or disagree with the court's decision to award compensation?
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////////////////Symptom Profile of Common Colds in School-Aged Children The common cold in school-aged children is characterized by nasal congestion, cough, and runny nose. Signs and symptoms usually continue for at least 10 days.
//////////////////CME Cognitive and Neuromotor Impairments Seen at 5 Years in Children Born Preterm Results from a study show that in children born before 33 weeks' gestation, cognitive and neuromotor impairments by 5 years of age increase with decreasing gestational age.
//////////////////Topical Emollients Improve Survival of Very Premature Neonates Skin barrier therapy in the form of topical application of sunflower seed oil or Aquaphor reduces mortality in very premature neonates in hospital settings, according to results of a study from Bangladesh.Reuters Health Information 2008
////////////////////Apnea After Immunization Predictable in Some Hospitalized Neonates Multiple factors, including severity of illness, predict apnea following immunization in hospitalized infants, researchers report in the March issue of Pediatrics.Reuters Health Information 2008
//////////////////New Research Confirms Childhood Stroke More Common in Boys Two large studies into childhood stroke confirm earlier findings from smaller studies that stroke is more common in boys.
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//////////////////////Oxygen Therapy for Hospitalized Infants With Bronchiolitis Determines LOS Oxygen supplementation is the prime determinant of the length of stay (LOS) for infants hospitalized with acute viral bronchiolitis, Scottish researchers report in the March issue of Pediatrics.Reuters Health Information 2008
///////////////////Court Ruling Does Not Confirm Autism-Vaccine Link, CDC Says Federal health officials said on Thursday the government has not conceded that vaccines cause autism even after a Georgia girl won federal compensation in a case arguing a vaccine led to her autistic condition.
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//////////////////AMJ=Exactly 150 years ago, a hot summer and the effluent from growing numbers of water closets reduced the river Thames in London to what was publicly termed a 'great stink'. Today, at least one-sixth of the world's population lives in slums and shanty-towns as unhealthy as those in Britain's 19th-century towns and cities, with similar health and social problems.http://abcmail.net.au/t/111460/603940/2381/0/
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/////////////////ABC=Quantum entanglement
Listen Now - 15032008 Download Audio - 15032008
Quantum entanglement is a strange telepathic link which allows particles to influence each other's properties. Some have suggested the power travels at millions of times the speed of light. The notion defies our idea of common sense. Einstein dismissed the theory as too spooky to be real. But entanglement is more than just a product of the equations of quantum theory. It exists and plays a part in the real world. It is at the forefront of a technological revolution. It can be used in encrypting information. It is unbreakable. The race is on to bring quantum cryptography to a worldwide market. It will be used to protect financial transactions and information flow. It will be used to drive quantum computers. Michael Brooks's book, Entanglement is a thriller based on the power of entanglement falling into the wrong hands.
Show Transcript
Transcript
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Robyn Williams: Physics can be really mind-boggling. Try Entanglement. That's both a concept in physics and the title of a gripping novel by Michael Brooks. If you think solid light is a worry, entanglement is beyond belief.
Michael Brooks: Around five years ago a researcher called Nicolas Gisin performed a strange experiment in the mountains of Switzerland. He and his team sent million of photons, the quantum particles of light, whizzing through optical fibres between two villages 11 kilometres apart. The photons travelled at the speed of light which, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, is supposed to be the fastest anything can move through the universe. However, the photons were connected via a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, a strange almost telepathic link that allows particles to influence each other's properties. Gisin measured how fast that influence travelled and clocked it at least 10 million times the speed of light.
Quantum entanglement defies all our notions of common sense. When you entangle a pair of particles by letting them interact, all the information about those two particles-their size, their momentum, their electrical charge or whatever-no longer resides on one or the other, it lives in both of them, which means they can continue to affect each other no matter how far apart they are. Even if you send one of an entangled pair of particles to the other side of the universe, you can still tweak that particle's properties instantaneously by tweaking the particle you hold in your hand. It is almost like having a remote control for the universe.
Einstein hated the idea of entanglement. Even though experiments have shown that it doesn't pass information at more than the speed of light and so it doesn't strictly contravene relativity, it was nevertheless too strange for him, belonging more to the realm of magic and fairytales than to science. He dismissed it as too spooky to be real. Though it was a product of the equations of quantum theory, he felt it showed there must be something wrong with the theory. Unfortunately Einstein died before experiments showed that entanglement was more than just an artefact of quantum equations. It does exist, and it plays an important role in the real world.
Entanglement is actually everywhere. Any two subatomic particles that interact in some way become entangled, sharing that spooky link. When you see light coming from a faraway star, for instance, the photon, the particle of light, is almost certainly still entangled with the atoms way up there in the star that emitted it. Next time you look up at the heavens you can marvel at your spooky link with the stars too; when your eye absorbs the energy of that starlight you become, in some small way, linked in with the distant constellations.
The constant interactions between electrons and the atoms that make up your body mean that you yourself are a mass of entanglements. In fact it might even explain why you are alive while the chair you are sitting on is not. The physicist Paul Davies has suggested that a better understanding of quantum entanglement might help us work out what it means for something to be alive, something that biologists are still struggling to understand.
Quantum entanglement is not just about esoteric and strange wonderings about the nature of life or our links with the universe however. It is also at the forefront of a technological revolution. Gisin, for instance, is now working with a Melbourne-based technology company called Senetas to put entanglement to work as a means of encrypting data. At the end of last year, this Swiss-Australian collaboration made entanglement's first real-world contribution to data protection when it used quantum entanglement to lock down the security of the Swiss national elections. The elections were protected by a technology called quantum cryptography where information is transmitted securely in photons of light that have been entangled together. It is an unbreakable encryption because it is rather like putting a seal on a document. The only way to read the information is to disturb the entanglement, and any such tampering is, like a broken seal, immediately obvious.
After their success in Switzerland, Nicolas Gisin's company, id Quantique, is now working with Senetas to bring Quantum encryption to a worldwide market. They face stiff competition in this. Companies all over the world are trying to exploit quantum entanglement for data security. Plans are afoot to use this same idea to protect data and therefore money in electronic bank transfers, for example. US government researchers are going a step further. They have sent entangled photons for quantum cryptography into space to reprogram a satellite without anyone being able to eavesdrop on the transmission.
The US government has a very good reason to be so interested in quantum cryptography, it is the only kind of encryption that can withstand an attack by the other technological revolution that entanglement brings; the quantum computer. Quantum computers use entanglement between atoms to perform incredibly fast number crunching. In the quantum world an atom can be used to encode several different numbers at once, and if you entangle enough atoms together you increase that power exponentially. Entangle together just 250 atoms and you can simultaneously encode more numbers than there are atoms in the entire universe. So quantum computing with even a modest number of entangled atoms can be like having several thousand computers working together on a problem. The world's most secret codes are only secret because it requires too much computing power to crack them. When the quantum computer fulfils its potential, these codes will be extremely vulnerable to attack.
Building a truly powerful quantum computer is fraught with difficulties, but Australian researchers are at the centre of one of the most impressive and promising efforts. That's because, in 1988, University of NSW researcher Bruce Kane had a brilliant idea. Kane bypassed all the laborious efforts to use exotic new tools to bring the quantum computer to life, showing instead that techniques currently used to make normal computers could be harnessed to make a quantum version. Overnight, building a quantum computer became a plausible idea.
Within a year of Kane's proposal being published, the Australian government had put millions of dollars into establishing the Australian Centre for Quantum Technology, now led by Robert Clark of UNSW. Making Kane's idea work is not easy but the project is still leading the race to make the first quantum computer. Just now quantum computers are at a very early stage of development and not particularly threatening in their code-cracking abilities. However, the machines of the future will be very impressive indeed and very threatening if, like the US government, you have secrets that you want to keep safe. The threat would be especially serious if the technology should fall into the wrong hands, a scenario that is not beyond the realms of possibility.
Shortly after Kane published his paper, I was at a meeting at the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Senior administrators were trying to decide how much money Europe should be putting into quantum computing research. In order to work this out they were asking a series of questions, such as how far the Americans have got with quantum technology. Their final question was rather more unexpected. 'Is there,' they asked, 'any mafia involvement?' The possibility hadn't occurred to me until then but when the question was raised I was suddenly aware what was at stake. The idea of cracking government codes would surely be of enormous interest to those who wanted to sell military secrets, say, or hack coastguard communications in order to send shipments of narcotics around the world.
And that was the point at which my novel Entanglement was born. The premise comes right from Kane's breakthrough; what if someone out of the blue showed you how to make a code-cracking quantum computer and then disappeared? It wouldn't be long before people were knocking at your door. You'd just have to hope that it wasn't the organised crime syndicates that got to you first.
The first truly powerful quantum computer has yet to be built, as far as we know. But the fact that quantum technology is now being pursued by governments shows how far we have come since Einstein dismissed entanglement as nothing more than 'spooky' half a century ago. Entanglement is very weird, yes, but it's also very real. Sometimes even the greatest minds get it wrong.
Robyn Williams: Michael Brooks writes about physics for New Scientist magazine. His novel Entanglement is both a thriller awash with blood and a quantum physics primer.
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