U.S Army purchases AN/PRC-155 Manpack radios upgrade from General Dynamics

The United States Army ordered new kits from General Dynamics worth $5 million to upgrade 100 Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit (HMS) AN/PRC-155 two-channel Manpack radios. These devices allow them to communicate with the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite communications system of the Army. The upgrade comprises of a field-replaceable power amplifier and supporting software, which will enable a secure voice and data communication with the MUOS system. The kits are said to be delivered in the fall of this year.

The two-channel PRC-155 manpack radios, which runs the essential waveforms from the defense department library, will enable U.S soldiers to access the MUOS system wherever they are deployed -- either land, sea or air. The waveforms include the Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) that connects dismounted soldiers to the network, the Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW) that transports huge amounts of data, and the legacy SINCGARS waveform used for communication with existing radios.

With the help of PRC-155’s two-channel capability, soldiers who are operating under any of these waveforms can interconnect with soldiers using another waveform on the second channel. A network of soldiers have the ability to be interconnected with others in a far, remote location, thanks to the MUOS capability in the PRC-155.

In a statement, General Dynamics C4 Systems President Chris Marzilli said, “By upgrading fielded PRC-155 radios, the Army will greatly enhance soldier effectiveness by providing a tenfold increase in SATCOM capacity for secure, over-the-horizon military communications. MUOS access on the two-channel PRC-155 will also allow current Army networks to be bridged and extended far beyond their current reach.

Lockheed Martin awarded $100 contract by Air Force to support GPS ground control segment

World-leading company Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global-Solutions recently received a contract from the U.S Air Force Space Command and Missile Center worth $100 to support and sustain the ground control segment for the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite constellation.

The contract, which runs from January 2013 through June 2019, appoints Lockheed Martin to provide organizational and depot sustainment support for the GPS ground segment. This will allow Air Force Space Command 2nd Space Operations Squadron, based in Colorado, to perform on-orbit operational control of the GPS satellite constellation. This includes support for command and control ground systems, systems engineering, hardware and communications engineering, among others.

To accomplish the tasks, Lockheed needs the participation of Arctic Slope Research Corporation (ASRC), ISYS Technologies, Overlook Systems Technologies, Ogden Air Logistics Center and Tigua Technology Services. Demands for near 100% system availability, as well as the fiscal constraints being placed on the GPS program are essential factors in sustaining the GPS control station.

Aside from the U.S Air Force, Lockheed Martin was also contracted by the U.S Army for $755 million to provide hardware services associated with the combat-proven PATRIOT Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) Missile Segment program.

This contract includes fiscal year 2013 missile and command launch system production for the Army, as well as a follow-on sale of the PAC-3 Missile to Taiwan. The Asian country is said to be the fifth international client for the PAC-3 Missile.

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Shinya Yamanaka's Nobel Prize and interest in sport

Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese physician and researcher of adult stem cells, or biological cells found in all multicellular organisms, that can divide through mitosis and differentiate into diverse specialized cell types and can self-renew to produce more stem cells.

Yamanaka serves as the director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application and a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University, or “Kyodai,” a national university located in Kyoto, Japan; and as a professor of anatomy at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a center of health sciences research, patient care, and education, located in San Francisco, California. He is also the current president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR).

In 2011, he received the Wolf Prize in Medicine, awarded once a year by the Wolf Foundation in Israel, with Rudolf Jaenisch, a biologist at MIT. This year, he won two prizes: the Millenium Technology Prize, the largest technology prizes in the world, together with Linus Torvalds, a Finnish American software engineer and hacker, who has the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel; and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, administered by the Nobel Foundation, awarded once a year for outstanding discoveries in the fields of life sciences and medicine, together with John B. Gurdon.

Yamanaka practiced judo and played rugby as a university student. He also has a history of running marathons. After a 20-year gap, in 2011, he competed in the inaugural Osaka Marathon, an annual marathon road running event for men and women over the classic distance of 42.195 km which is held in late October in the city of Osaka, Japan, as a charity runner with a time of 4:29:53. He also took part in the 2012 Tokyo Marathon, an annual marathon sporting event in Tokyo, the capital of Japan, to raise money for iPS research, finishing 4:03:19. He will also run in the second Osaka Marathon on November 25, 2012.

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Medical Institutions' Delivery

Provision of medical care is classified into primary, secondary, and tertiary care categories.

Primary care medical services are health care given by healthcare providers: physicians, a professional who practices medicine, who is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury, and other physical and mental impairments; physician assistants (PA), a healthcare professional who is trained to practice medicine under the supervision of a physician; nurse practitioners (NP), advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) who have completed graduate-level education (either a Master of Nursing or Doctor of Nursing Practice degree); or other health professionals who have first contact with a patient seeking medical treatment or care. These occur in: physician offices; clinics (“outpatient clinics” or “ambulatory care clinics”), health care facilities that are primarily devoted to the care of outpatients; nursing homes (“convalescent homes,” “skilled nursing facilities” (“SNF”), “care home,” “rest home,” “intermediate care,” or “old folk’s home”), which provide a type of residential care; schools, home visits, and other places close to patients.

About 90% of medical visits can be treated by the primary care provider. These include treatment of: acute and chronic illnesses; preventive care/medicine, consisting of measures taken to prevent diseases (or injuries), rather than curing them or treating their symptoms; and health education, the profession of educating people (all ages and both sexes) about health.

Secondary care (“healthcare”) medical services, the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans, are provided by medical specialists in their offices or clinics or at a local community hospitals for a patient referred by a primary care provider who first diagnosed or treated the patient. Referrals are made for those patients who required the expertise or procedures performed by specialists. These include both: ambulatory care, a personal health care consultation, treatment or intervention using advanced medical technology or procedures delivered on an “outpatient” basis (i.e. where the patient’s stay at the hospital or clinic, from the time of registration to discharge, occurs on a single calendar day); and inpatient services, or when a patient is “admitted” to the hospital and stays overnight or for an indeterminate time, usually several days or weeks (though some cases, such as coma patients, have been in hospitals for years). Others are: emergency rooms (“emergency department” (“ED”), “accident & emergency” (A&E”), “casualty department”), or “ER,” a medical treatment facility specializing in acute care of patients who present without prior appointment, either by their own means or by ambulance; intensive/critical-care medicine, a branch of medicine concerned with the diagnosis and management of life-threatening conditions requiring sophisticated organ support and invasive monitoring; surgery services; physical therapy (“physiotherapy”), often abbreviated “PT,” a health care profession primarily concerned with the remediation of impairments and disabilities and the promotion of mobility, functional ability, quality of life and movement potential through examination, evaluation and physical intervention carried out by “physical therapists” (known as “physiotherapists” in some countries) and “physical therapist assistants” (known as “physical rehabilitation therapists” in some countries); labor and delivery (“childbirth,” also called “partus” or Parturition”), the culmination of a human pregnancy or gestation period with the expulsion of one or more newborn infants from a woman’s uterus; endoscopy units, with endoscopy meaning “looking inside” and typically refers to looking inside the body for medical reasons using an “endoscope,” an instrument used to examine the interior of a hollow organ or cavity of the body; hospice centers, or centers for a type of care and a philosophy of care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill or seriously ill patient’s symptoms; diagnostic/medical/clinical laboratory, or a laboratory where tests are done on clinical specimens in order to get information about the health of a patient as pertaining to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease; and medical imaging services, the technique and process used to create images of the human body (or parts and functions thereof) for clinical purposes (medical procedures seeking to reveal, diagnose, or examine disease) or medical science (including the study of normal anatomy and and physiology; etc. Some primary care providers may also take care of hospitalized patients and deliver babies in a secondary care setting.

Tertiary care medical services, specialized consultative health care, usually for inpatients and on referral from a primary or secondary health professional, in a facility that has personnel and facilities for advanced medical investigation and treatments, such as tertiary referral hospital, are provided by specialist hospitals or regional centers equipped with diagnostic and treatment facilities not generally available at local hospitals. These include: trauma centers, a hospital equipped to provide comprehensive emergency medical services to patients suffering traumatic injuries; burn treatment centers, for a type of injury to flesh caused by heat, electricity, chemicals, light, radiation or friction; advanced neonatology unit service, a subspecialty of pediatrics that consists of the medical care of newborn infants, especially the ill or premature newborn infant; organ transplants, the moving of an organ from one body to another or from a donor site to another location on the patient’s own body, for the purpose of replacing the recipient’s damaged or absent organ; high-risk pregnancy; radiation oncology/therapy (“radiotherapy”), sometimes abbreviated to XRT or DXT, the medical use of ionizing radiation, generally as part of cancer treatment to control or kill malignant cells; etc.

Modern medical care also depends on information--still delivered in many health care setting in paper records, but increasingly nowadays by electronic means.

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