College-Age Catholics Celebrate the Church?s New Pope

ROME ? Young U.S. Catholics studying in Rome are enthusiastic about Pope Francis.

Joshua Cambria, a convert to Catholicism who hails from Providence, R.I., and a student-services officer at John Cabot University in Rome, said he ran to St. Peter?s upon seeing the white smoke while watching the conclave proceedings on TV.

"I was personally hoping for [Italian Cardinal Angelo] Scola, a grand Ambrosian theologian with an appetite for reform. But, again, I am both surprised and pleased with the outcome of the holy conclave," said Cambria, who describes himself as being as much of an Italian as an American.

Like Cambria, other American students in Rome had their particular thoughts and hopes about who would succeed Benedict XVI.

Tatum McWhirter, a philosophy and theology student at Rome?s Pontifical Lateran University, said she was rooting for Canada?s Marc Ouellet, who, like U.S. Cardinals Sean O?Malley and Timothy Dolan, was touted by many analysts as a contender prior to the conclave.

Standing in the easing rain in the piazza, after the second and third ballots burned black, just before noon ? a few hours before Francis was elected on the fifth ballot ? Rome-based seminarians Sean Grismer and Adam Potter agreed that "it would be great for the Church in America if one of the American cardinals is elected," as Potter, a Pittsburgh native, put it.

But both men, who study at Rome?s Pontifical North American College, agreed that it would not matter who emerged as the 266th Pope.

Grismer, from Rockford, Ill., remarked, "We won?t have any difficulty loving and supporting him if it?s not [an American]."

?

Wet But United

Another unifying aspect of the conclave was the rain-sodden Roman spring. As the crowds began to fill St. Peter?s Square on the evening of March 13, the view from above was a kaleidoscopic sea of umbrellas.

The rain beat down for most of the intervening hours until Pope Francis appeared for the first time on the balcony overlooking the square.

A humorous interlude during the wait was provided by a seagull alighting on top of the chimney over the Sistine Chapel, out of which later puffed the white smoke to announce that our new Pope had been elected.

When Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran emerged at 8:12pm to declare?"Habemus Papam!"?("We have a pope!"), elaborating that the Argentinian winner had taken the name Francis, the seagull-landing episode seemed appropriate ? and compelling ? in retrospect, given how St. Francis of Assisi is often portrayed as surrounded by birds or with a dove nestling in his hand.

McWhirter, a Nebraskan, said being in Rome to witness papal history was an exceptional experience for her and her fellow students.

"It has been a unique experience studying with people ? mostly seminarians ? from around the world and talking to them about these events. We are finding that this is uniting us because we all share one Pope and one Church," she said.

Looking ahead to the new pontificate of Francis, Kyle Larson, a recent convert to Catholicism from Amery, Wis., shared something similar to comments of some Vatican experts, for whom the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was a surprise. "I don?t know much about the new Pope, but I feel that he should be the best for the job, since God has called him to do such things," said the business student, now a few months into an academic term in Rome at the University of Mary.

Minnesotan?Mary Wermerskirchen, another University of Mary student, has high hopes for the new Pope: "Pope Francis, or

Papa Francesco, as the Italians say ? is a pope of many firsts; and at a time like this, we need something radical to happen to all of us."

?

An Exhilarating Experience

And regardless of what comes next, experiencing a conclave firsthand was widely described by American students as an exhilarating experience.

Adam Potter put it this way: "It?s a real privilege to be studying in Rome at this time. It?s a historic moment, when you think of it ? the Lord raising up a shepherd to lead his Church."

Simon Roughneen covers Southeast Asia for several publications

and was on assignment in Rome for

the Register during the

conclave period.

Source: http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/college-age-catholics-celebrate-the-churchs-new-pope/

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Quantum tricks drive magnetic switching into the fast lane

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, Iowa State University, and the University of Crete in Greece have found a new way to switch magnetism that is at least 1000 times faster than currently used in magnetic memory technologies. Magnetic switching is used to encode information in hard drives, magnetic random access memory and other computing devices. The discovery, reported in the April 4 issue of Nature, potentially opens the door to terahertz and faster memory speeds.

Ames Laboratory physicist Jigang Wang and his team used short laser pulses to create ultra-fast changes in the magnetic structure, within quadrillionths of a second (femtosecond), from anti-ferromagnetic to ferromagnetic ordering in colossal magnetoresistive materials, which are promising for use in next-generation memory and logic devices. Scientists, led by Ilias E. Perakis, at the University of Crete developed the theory to explain the observation.

"The challenge facing magnetic writing, reading, storing and computing is speed, and we showed that we can meet the challenge to make the magnetic switches think ultra-fast in the femtosecond range ? one quadrillionth of a second ? by using quantum 'tricks' with ultrashort laser pulses " said Wang, who is also an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University.

In current magnetic storage and magneto-optical recording technology, magnetic field or continuous laser light is used. For example, photo-excitation causes atoms in ferromagnetic materials to heat up and vibrate, and the vibration, with the help of a magnetic field, causes magnetic flips. The flips are part of the process used to encode information.

"But the speed of such thermal magnetic switching is limited by how long it takes to vibrate the atoms, and by how fast a magnetic field can reverse magnetic regions" said Wang. "And it is very difficult to exceed the gigahertz switching speed limit of today's magnetic writing/reading technology."

So, some scientists have turned their attention to colossal magnetoresistive (CMR) materials because they are highly responsive to the external magnetic fields used to write data into memory, but do not require heat to trigger magnetic switching.

"Colossal magnetoresistive materials are very appealing for use in technologies, but we still need to understand more about how they work," said Wang. "And, in particular, we must understand what happens during the very short periods of time when heating is not significant and the laser pulses are still interacting with magnetic moments in CMR materials. That means we must describe the process and control magnetism using quantum mechanics. We called this 'quantum femto-magnetism.'"

Wang's team specializes in using ultra-fast spectroscopy, which Wang likens to high-speed strobe photography, because both use an external pump of energy to trigger a quick snapshot that can be then re-played afterwards. In ultra-fast laser spectroscopy, a short pulse of laser light is used to excite a material and trigger a measurement all on the order of femtoseconds.

"In one CMR manganite material, the magnetic order is switched during the 100-femtosecond-long laser pulse. This means that switching occurs by manipulating spin and charge quantum mechanically," said Wang. "In the experiments, the second laser pulse 'saw' a huge photo-induced magnetization with an excitation threshold behavior developing immediately after the first pump pulse."

The fast switching speed and huge magnetization that Wang observed meet both requirements for applying CMR materials in ultra-fast, terahertz magnetic memory and logic devices.

"Our strategy is to use all-optical quantum methods to achieve magnetic switching and control magnetism. This lays the groundwork for seeking the ultimate switching speed and capabilities of CMR materials, a question that underlies the entire field of spin-electronics," said Wang. "And our hope is that this means someday we will be able to create devices that can read and write information faster than ever before, yet with less power consumed."

###

DOE/Ames Laboratory: http://www.external.ameslab.gov

Thanks to DOE/Ames Laboratory for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127590/Quantum_tricks_drive_magnetic_switching_into_the_fast_lane

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Researchers Use Brain Scans To Reveal Hidden Dreamscape

A window into dreams may now be opening.

Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

A window into dreams may now be opening.

Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

Scientists say they have found a way to get a glimpse of people's dreams.

"Our results show that we can predict what a person's seeing during dreams," says Yukiyasu Kamitani, a researcher at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan.

Philosophers, poets and psychologists have long shared a fascination with dreams. But Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley says solving the mystery of our dreams is one tough problem.

"In psychology and neuroscience there's been 100 years of argument about whether dreams are important or unimportant," says Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "We don't really know, because we haven't had very good access to peoples' dreams."

Scientists don't have very good access, because they have to rely on how people talk about their dreams, often as those images are already slipping away.

"Because of the nature of dreams we find it very difficult to remember our dreams and to sort of describe them well," Gallant says. "So the idea is you could perhaps build a dream decoder that would allow you to inspect your dreams after you had them and sort of interrogate them and figure out what you were dreaming about."

Now Kamitani and his colleagues have come up with a decoding program that analyzes brain activity while people sleep.

To do it, Kamitani's team repeatedly scanned the brains of three volunteers just as they were starting to drift into dreams. "We focused on dream experience which can be detected just a few minutes after the sleep onset," Kamitani says.

The researchers awakened the study subjects more than 200 times to ask them to describe their dreams in detail so they could gather data on which patterns of brain activity meant what.

A decoded dream reconstructed in a video: "What I was just looking at was some kind of characters," the volunteer said. "There was something like a writing paper for composing an essay, and I was looking at the characters from the essay or whatever it was."

"Many of them were just about daily life in the office," Kamitani says. Others were bizarre or humorous, he says. One man dreamed he was having dinner with a famous Japanese movie star.

The scientists then did more brain scans while the volunteers were awake so they could tweak their program to characterize various patterns of brain activity. "We used that to train the decoder," Kamitani says.

In a paper being published in this week's issue of the journal Science, the researchers then showed they could often predict at least parts of what the subjects were dreaming.

"The results suggest that it may be possible to read out dream contents even when you don't remember just by looking at brain activity," Kamitani says.

Other scientists called the research a technological tour de force, and potentially a milestone toward starting to understand our dreams.

"In this field of dream decoding no one has managed to successfully do this before," Gallant says. "So this is not the final step down this road, it's the first step."

The ultimate goal would be a tool that could provide vivid, detailed representations of our dreams.

"If you could build the perfect dream decoder it would create a movie on your television screen and it would just replay your dreams," Gallant says. "It would replay all the actions that happened, the actors, the people involved and it would replay the sound."

We're nowhere near that yet. But the research reported in Science represents at least a small step toward revealing what we dream and perhaps someday why.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/04/176224026/researchers-use-brain-scans-to-reveal-hidden-dreamscape?ft=1&f=1007

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Trade emerging as a key driver of Brazilian deforestation

Apr. 4, 2013 ? A new study published online April 4th in the journal Environmental Research Letters finds that trade and global consumption of Brazilian beef and soybeans is increasingly driving Brazilian deforestation. Consequently, current international efforts to protect rainforests (e.g., REDD) may be undermined by the increased trade and consumption.

By estimating CO₂ emissions from deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon from 1990 to 2010, and connecting the emissions to the most important direct drivers of Brazilian deforestation, i.e. cultivation of soybeans and grazing of cattle, the study allocates the emissions to countries based on domestic consumption and international trade of Brazilian soybeans and beef.

"With a consumption perspective, the share of responsibility for deforestation is divided among the global consumers. What, in one perspective is Brazil's problem, is now a global problem" said lead author Jonas Karstensen of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research -- Oslo (CICERO), a climate research institute in Norway.

According to the study, 2.7 billion tonnes of CO₂, or 30% of the carbon emissions associated with deforestation in the last decade, was exported from Brazil. Of this, 29% were due to soybean production and 71% were due to cattle ranching.

Brazilian consumption is responsible for the largest share of emissions from its own deforestation: on average over the two decades, 85% of the emissions embodied in Brazilian beef products and 50% of those in Brazilian soybean products have been driven by Brazilian consumption.

"Particularly in the last decade, greater imports by emerging markets and industrialized countries have led to an increasing share of exported emissions from Brazil" said Karstensen. "Consequently, in recent years more of Brazil's deforestation is allocated to foreign regions."

Russia has recently increased its share from very low levels to becoming the world's largest importer of emissions embodied in Brazilian beef in 2010, with 15% of total exported beef. China's share of emissions linked to soybeans has increased from 7% of total production emissions in 2000 to 22% in 2010, equivalent to about 41% of the emissions embodied in exported soybeans in 2010.

"According to our estimates, Asia, mainly due to China and Russia, now consumes more Brazilian soybeans and beef than the European market" said co-author Glen Peters of CICERO.

Consumption of Brazilian soybeans and beef by countries who are already seeking to protect Brazilian forests (e.g., via REDD), is driving demand and therefore indirectly increasing the deforestation they are seeking to prevent.

"Countries are putting more and more pressure on the Brazilian Amazon by consuming agricultural products, and by doing this they are undermining their efforts to protect the same forest" said Karstensen.

Both total Brazilian agriculture production and export shares have generally been increasing while deforestation rates have seen a dramatic decrease over recent years.

"With increasing global pressure on Brazilian agriculture to increase production and changes to the Brazilian Forest Code, it seems unlikely that Brazilian deforestation rates will continue to decrease at the current rate without strengthening measures to protect the forests" said co-author Robbie Andrew.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO).

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Jonas Karstensen, Glen P Peters, Robbie M Andrew. Attribution of CO2emissions from Brazilian deforestation to consumers between 1990 and 2010. Environmental Research Letters, 2013; 8 (2): 024005 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024005

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/MOmF5Cf1_EY/130404135215.htm

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Detroit emergency manager disavows letter on union contracts

By Steve Neavling

DETROIT (Reuters) - Detroit's new state-appointed emergency manager on Wednesday disavowed letters sent by the mayor's office saying that the city would stop honoring contracts with its police, fire and paramedics' labor unions.

The apparent miscommunication between Mayor Dave Bing and Kevyn Orr, the former bankruptcy lawyer brought in to clean up Detroit's finances, highlights the challenges Orr may face as he assumes increasing power in the biggest state takeover of an American city in more than two decades.

Written to Michigan's five commissioners of employment relations, the letters declared that as of March 28, the destitute city considered itself in receivership status and no longer bound by its union contracts. March 28 is the date when a Michigan law went into effect giving the emergency manager wide powers including to abrogate union contracts.

Orr's spokesman, Bill Nowling, said the emergency manager had no warning that the letters would be sent.

"That letter was not authorized by the emergency manager and we are looking into it," Nowling said. "Any action of that sort has to be authorized by the emergency manager and this was not."

A spokesman for Mayor Bing, who has said he will try to work with the emergency manager, declined to comment.

According to a copy of the letters, written by Lamont Satchel, the city's director of labor relations, the city was freed from all collective bargaining agreements under state law once it was in receivership.

"The City is no longer obligated to participate in collective bargaining," said the letters, which were given to Reuters by a union official copied on the correspondence.

The letter also declared the city's withdrawal from all mediations and arbitrations and ordered Michigan's bureau of employee relations to dismiss any pending union issues. The bureau mediates and arbitrates labor disputes on which the city and its unions cannot reach agreement.

The city's unionized police, fire, and paramedics are working under contracts imposed on them last summer by Mayor Bing, which cut their pay by 10 percent. Employees also were required to pay 20 percent of their medical costs.

Detroit has agreements with some 48 unions, and outside analysts have said the city needs concessions from organized labor in order to restore financial health. The city is running a $100 million annual budget deficit and a state report said it has some $14 billion in long-term debt.

Orr, a former bankruptcy lawyer who worked on the restructuring of auto company Chrysler, was appointed last month by Michigan's Republican Governor Rick Snyder despite objections from elected city officials.

(Reporting by Steve Neavling; Editing by David Greising, Greg McCune and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/detroit-emergency-manager-disavows-letter-union-contracts-015815034.html

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Google forks off WebKit to create new rendering engine 'Blink'; will power Chrome and Chrome OS

Initial work focuses on internal improvements and brings very little change for web developers

Update: Chrome developer Alex Russell has an excellent read on this for those interested.

On the Chromium blog, Google just announced that they have split off WebKit to create and further develop the open source Blink rendering engine. Blink will, over time, diverge away from WebKit and evolve in "different directions" with a focus on speed and stability. If all goes according to plan, developer channels of Chrome and Chrome OS should see a Blink-powered version in short order.

The reason behind the decision, according to the Chromium blog post, is that Chrome handles all the different processor architectures a bit differently. Forking their own model will alleviate future issues in both the WebKit code and Chrome itself.

Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

Because WebKit is open source, Google has long been one of the main contributors. Blink will also be open source, and qualified developers will be able to become "official" contributors if nominated by the group. 

On the surface, Blink won't bring much, if any, visual change. The changes are under the hood, and users should see no difference. Of course, with software anything can happen. This is a big undertaking, and we wish the best of luck to the entire Chrome team.

And yes, Blink sounds very Google Glass specific. There is no mention of the wearable device, and we're not going to speculate.

Source: Chromium blog

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/LI8Qqc53Asw/story01.htm

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AntTek Quick Settings: Jelly Bean customization for all

Get total toggle control with a custom version of Jelly Bean's Quick Settings on Android 2.1 and up.

One of the most anticipated features Jelly Bean brought to Android was Quick Settings. These handy little toggles live in the notification area, and make turning things like WiFi and Bluetooth on and off just a swipe away. While they're a welcomed addition to Android, they are limited to eight static titles and have no option for customization. That's where AntTek Quick Settings comes in. Compatible with Android 2.1 Eclair and above, this app not only replicates Quick Settings functionality on non-Jelly Bean phones, but gives Jelly Bean users a much needed level of customization.

Check out the full run through of what this app can do after the break.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/oaa93Ysk_qA/story01.htm

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