GSN Acquires TrustComm

The premier small-business provider of secure COMSATCOM solutions to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), TrustComm Inc., has recently been acquired by Global Secure Networks Inc. (GSN), an American investor group, this according to TrustComm's announcement statement.

And though there will be changes, the TrustComm company name will be retained. Led by Bob Roe, TrustComm's CEO since March 2012, GSN's equity infusion is enabling TrustComm to expand its operations and continue its high level of professional service to U.S. government agencies.

TrustComm, from its secure teleport and network operations center (S-NOC) at Ellington Field Base in Houston, has successfully deployed a wide range of managed satellite networking solutions to many government agencies and commercial enterprises since 1999. And just recently, TrustComm opened its new corporate headquarters.


See also: Orbital Sciences Preps For Antares Rocket   Test Launch

USAF contracts Ball Aerospace for risk reduction service on Weather Satellite Follow-on program

Ball Aerospace and Technologies has been chosen by the U.S Air force to provide risk reduction services on its next-gen of microwave sounding and imaging instruments for the Weather Satellite Follow-on program.

Under the terms of agreement, Ball Aerospace will examine and present the best measures to achieve the requirements of DND for measuring soil moisture and ocean surface vector winds using a microwave instrument tailor fitted for small, low-cost launch vehicles. This effort shares a heritage with the Global Precipitation Monitoring Microwave Imager (GMI) instrument, a machine that was also built by Ball Aerospace and delivered to NASA for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission.

Aside from GMI and microwave instruments, Ball Aerospace is also known for building the satellite bus and Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) instrument for the Suomi National Polar-orbiting satellite -- NOAA’s newest polar-orbiting satellite. Presently, the company is also working on the satellite bus and additional copy of OMPS for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System.

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Pentagon will not procure new military satellite constellation order until 2025

U.S Army CIO G6 Space and Airborne Branch Senior Milsatcom Systems Analyst Edward Aymar predicted that Pentagon will not be acquiring additional satellite constellations order until 2025 and thought that the agency will continue to obtain new terminals and related technology instead.

During the Satellite 2013 conference, Aymar said at the military satcom panel that they have Wideband Global Satcom (WGS), Advanced-Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) and Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) that will most likely be on orbit until 2025 or even beyond that. He added, “We know we don’t have enough capacity, and our opportunities to really achieve advances and efficiencies will be whatever we can do with the satellite terminals on the ground and on our satellite control systems.”

Furthermore, the Department of Defense does not need to establish a new network each time it arrives in a new area of operations. Aymar noted, “This practice requires satellite communications because building up fiber-optics takes time. The Army does plan to field about 4,000 new WIN-T terminals for communications on the move. However, most of our current milsatcom fleets are designed to service fixed architectures.”

Lockheed Martin activates first GPS III satellite

Lockheed Martin -- a leading global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technology company -- has successfully powered up the system module of the U.S Air Force’s next-generation Global Positioning System 3 satellites. This new development indicates that the company is on schedule to send the first satellite into orbit in 2014.

The successful turning on of the GPS III SV-1 shows the satellite’s mechanical integration, validating its interfaces and paves the way for electrical and integrated hardware-software testing. The next-generation GPS satellite will complete its Assembly, Integration and Test (AI&T) in Lockheed’s new GPS Processing Facility (GPF) specifically built for efficient and affordable satellite production.

The U.S Air Force GPS III program will affordably take over the old GPS satellites, at the same time enhancing the capability to meet the increasing demands of civilian, commercial and military users. GPS III satellites are expected to provide improved accuracy and greater anti-jamming power, all while enhancing the satellite’s design life and adding a new civil signal made to be interoperable with international global navigation satellite systems.

Lockheed Martin is under the contract of the U.S Air Force to build the first four and advanced procurement funding of long-lead components for the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth GPS III satellites. Reports said that the Air Force plans on buying up to 32 GPS III satellites.

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ViaSat wins follow-on contract from U.S Marine Corps Systems Command

ViaSat has been awarded with a follow on contract from the United States Marine Corps Systems Command to carry on engineering advanced information security for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mobile devices.

Under the follow-on contract, which is worth $1.65 million, ViaSat will develop a prototype trusted smartphone, followed by a production-ready version. The project is expected to be finished by spring of this year, with the new secure mobile system available on all Android devices this summer.

With this new development, it will enable users to securely communicate over 3G/4G/LTE cellular and Wi-Fi networks using regular smartphones and tablets. Moreover, it will allow users to safely store any sensitive data and at the same time, protect their devices against malware attacks.

At the moment, ViaSat is working on providing a secure mobile enterprise system that allows COTS devices to seamlessly connect into various carrier networks. While this is specifically designed for tactical warfighters, the system of ViaSat is designed to provide secure communication of sensitive information for any government or commercial customer.

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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.

See: Internet By Satellite

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.

See: SpaceX CRS-1's Mission Plan: Flight day 4 and remainder of mission by John Diaz

Multinational company Boeing brings SENSE NanoSats to Air Force

Boeing, an American aerospace and defense corporation, has given two Space Environmental NanoSat Experiment (SENSE) satellites to the U.S Air Force

These nanosats are 30 x 10 x 10 centimeters in size, and weigh less than nine pounds each. They are scheduled to be sent into orbit in the summer of 2013 on the ORS-3 mission, built to collect and transmit weather data. Each of the nanosat contains a GPS receiver and sensor so that it can gather vdata to help support assessments and weather prediction. These nanosats also have a miniature S-band transceiver to downlink mission and spacecraft data at one megabit per second.

Boeing Phantom Works Advanced Space & Intelligence Systems Director Bruce Chesley said in a statement, "The SENSE nanosats offer customers an affordable, operationally robust option to conduct military missions using spacecraft no larger than a standard loaf of bread.”

What's inside Mariner 2?

Mariner 2 (“Mariner-Venus 1962”), an American space probe to Venus, the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days, was the first robotic space probe, a scientific space exploration mission in which a spacecraft leaves Earth and explores space, to conduct a successful planetary encounter.

The first successful spacecraft/spaceship, a vehicle, vessel or machine designed to fly in outer space, in the Mariner program, which launched a series of robotic interplanetary probes designed to investigate Mars, Venus and Mercury from 1962 to 1973, a program conducted by the American space agency NASA (“National Aeronautics and Space Administration”) who is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research, in conjunction with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it was a simplified version of the Block I spacecraft of the Ranger program, a series of unmanned space mission by the United States in the 1960s whose objectives was to obtain the first close-up images of the surface of the Moon; and an exact copy of Mariner 1, the first spacecraft of the American Mariner program. The missions of Mariner 1 and 2 spacecraft are together sometimes known as the Mariner R missions. Mariner 2 passed within 35,000 kilometers (22,000 mi) of
Venus on December 14, 1962.

The Mariner probe consisted of a 100 cm (39.4 in) diameter hexagonal bus, to which solar panels (also “solar modules,” “photovoltaic module,” or “photovoltaic panel”), a packaged, connected assembly of photovoltaic cells, instrument booms, and antennas (“aerial”), an electrical device which converts electric power into radio waves, and vice versa, were attached The scientific instruments on board the Mariner spacecraft were: two radiometers (one of each for the microwave--radio waves with wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz (0.3 GHz) and 300 GHz--and infrared light (“IR”) portions--electromagnetic radiation with longer wavelengths than those of visible light extending from the nominal red edge of the visible spectrum at 0.74 micrometres to 300 micrometers--of the electromagnetic spectrum, the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation), devices for measuring the radiant flux (power) of electromagnetic radiation; a micrometeorite (a tiny meteor: a small particle of rock in  space, usually weighing less than a gram) sensor; a solar plasma (in physics and chemistry, is a state of matter similar to gas in which a certain portion of the particles is ionized) sensor; a charged particle sensor; and a magnetometer, a measuring instrument used to measure the strength and perhaps the direction of magnetic fields.

These instruments were designed to measure the temperature distribution on the surface of Venus, as well as making basic measurements of Venus’ atmosphere, a layer of gases that surrounds Venus and that is held in place by the gravity of the planet. Due to the planet’s thick, featureless cloud cover, no camera, or a device that records images that can be stored directly, transmitted to another location, or both, were included in the Mariner unit. Mariner 10, an American robotic space probe launched by NASA on November 3, 1973, to fly by the planets Mercury and Venus, later discovered that extensive cloud detail was visible in ultraviolet (UV) light, electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than that of visible light, but longer than X-rays, that is, in the range 10 nm to 400 nm, corresponding to photon energies from 3 ev to 12 eV.

See: SpaceX CRS-1's Mission Plan: Flight Day 1 and 2 (October 8-9) 

Science, engineering and technology

The distinction between science, engineering and technology is not always clear. Science, a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe, is the reasoned investigation, or having the capacity for consciously making sense of things for establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information; or the study of phenomena, aimed at discovering enduring principles among elements of the phenomenal world, or those observable occurrence, by employing formal (utterances, conceptually similar to a ritual although typically secular and less involved) techniques such as the scientific method, a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.

Technologies, on the other hand, are not usually exclusively products of science, because they have to satisfy requirements such as: utility, which in economics, is a representation of preferences over some set of goods and services; usability, the ease of use and learnability of  a human-made object; and safety, the state of being “safe,” the condition of being protected against physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, occupational, psychological, educational or other types or consequences of failure, damage, error, accidents, harm or any other event which could be considered non-desirable.

Lastly, engineering is the goal-oriented (GO) process of designing and making tools and systems to exploit natural phenomena for practical human means, often (but not always) using results and techniques from science; describing variability in dispositional or situational goal preferences that no individual implicitly sets for him/herself in achievement situations. The development of technology may draw upon many fields of knowledge, including scientific, engineering, mathematical (the abstract study of topics encompassing quantity, structure, space, change, and other properties; it had no generally accepted definition), linguistic (“language” is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and “a language” is any specific example of such system), and historical knowledge (an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about these events), to achieve some practical result.

Technology is often a consequence of science and engineering--although technology as a human activity precedes the two fields. For example, science might study the flow of electrons, subatomic particles with a negative elementary electric charge, in electrical conductors, a material which contains moving electric charges in physics, by using already-existing tools and knowledge. This new-found knowledge may then be used by engineers to create new tools and machines, such as semiconductors, electrical conductivity intermediate to that of a conductor and an insulator; computers, a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations; and other forms of advanced technology. In this sense, scientists and engineers may both be considered technologists; the three fields are often considered as one for the purposes of research and references.

The exact relations between science and technology, a term of art used to encompass the relationship between science and technology, in particular have been debated scientists, historians and policymakers in the late 20th century, in part because the debate can inform the funding of basic and applied science. In the immediate wake of World War II (“Second World War,” “WWII,” “WW2”), a global war that was underway by 1939 and ended in 1945, for example, in the United States it was widely considered that technology was simply “applied science” and that to fund basic science was to reap technological results in due time. An articulation of this philosophy could be found explicitly in “Science--The Endless Frontier,” a treatise on postwar science policy by Vannevar Bush, an American engineer, inventor and science administrator known for his work in analog computers, for his role an initiator and administrator of the Manhattan Project, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web: “New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature... This essential new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research.” In the late-1960s, however, this view came under attack, leading towards initiatives to fund science for specific tasks (initiatives resisted by the scientific community). The issue remains contentious--though most analysis resist the model that technology simply is a result of scientific research.

See: Fathers of the Modern Medical Science

History of materials science

The history of materials science, an interdisciplinary field applying the properties of matter to various areas of science and engineering, is the study of how different materials were used as influenced by: the history of Earth, encompassing the development of the planet Earth from its formation to the present day; and the culture (a modern concept based on a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator, Cicero: “cultura animi”) of the peoples, or nation who share a common language, ethnicity, descent, or history, of the Earth.

The material of choice of a given era is often a defining point. The following phrases such as the following are good examples: Stone Age, a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with a sharp-edge, a point, or a percussion surface; Bronze Age, a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons; and the Steel Age, which is actually the Industrial Revolution, a period from 1750 to 1850 where changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times.

Originally deriving from the manufacture of ceramics, an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling, and its putative derivative metallurgy, materials science is one of the oldest forms of engineering and applied science. Modern materials science evolved directly from metallurgy, a domain of materials science that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their intermetallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are called alloys, which itself evolved from mining and (likely) ceramics and the use of fire.

A major breakthrough in the understanding of materials occurred in the late 19th century, when the American scientist Josiah Willard Gibbs, an American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics, demonstrated that the thermodynamic properties (the branch of natural science concerned with heat and its relation to other forms of energy and work) related to atomic structure, the basic unit of matter that consists of a dense central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons, in various phases, which in the physical sciences, is a region of space (a thermodynamic system), throughout which all physical properties of a material are essentially uniform, are related to the physical properties of a material.

Important elements of modern materials science are a product of the space race, a mid-to-late 20th century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in space exploration: The understanding and engineering, or the science, skill, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and also build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes, of the metallic alloys, a mixture or metallic solid solution composed of two or more elements, and silica (“silicon dioxide”), an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula SiO2, and carbon (the chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6) materials; used in the construction of space vehicles enabling the exploration of space.

Materials science has driven, and been driven by, the development of revolutionary technologies such as: plastics, any of a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic solids that are moldable; semiconductors, which has electrical conductivity intermediate to that of a conductor and an insulator; and biomaterials, or any matter, surface, or construct that interacts with biological systems.          

Before the 1960s (and in some cases decades after), many “materials science” departments were named “metallurgy” departments, from a 19th and early 20th century emphasis on metals. The field has since broadened to include every class of materials, including: ceramics (ceramic engineering, the science and technology of creating objects from inorganic, non-metallic materials); polymers, chemical compound or mixture of compounds consisting of repeating structural units created through a process of polymerization; semiconductors; magnetic materials (magnetism is a property of materials that respond to an applied magnetic field); medical implant materials, a medical device manufactured to replace a missing biological structure, support a damaged biological structure, or enhance an existing biological structure; and biological materials (materiomics, the holistic study of material systems).

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Brandon Lee: The first digital electronic computer: The notable...

Brandon Lee: The first digital electronic computer: The notable...: A succession of steadily more powerful and flexible computing devices, broadly, a term describing any goal-oriented activity requiring, b...

Looking for signs of disease through check-ups

The physical/medical/clinical examination (more popularly known as a “check-up” or “medical”) is the process by which a doctor investigates the body of a patient for signs of disease: ‘symptoms’ are what the patient volunteers, while ‘signs’ are what the healthcare provider detects by examination.

The healthcare provider uses the senses of sight, hearing, touch, and sometimes smell; e.g., in infection, uremia/uraemia (a term used to loosely describe the illness accompanying kidney failure (also called renal failure), in particular the nitrogenous waste products associated with the failure of this organ), diabetic ketoacidosis (a potentially life-threatening complication in patients with diabetes mellitus). Taste has been made redundant by the availability of modern lab tests.

Four actions are taught as the basis of physical examination: inspection, which in medicine, is the through and unhurried visualization of the client; palpation (feel), used as part of a physical examination in which an object is felt (usually with hands of a healthcare practitioner) to determine its size, shape, firmness, or location; percussion (tap to determine resonance characteristics), a method to determine the underlying structure, and is used in clinical examinations to assess the condition of the thorax or abdomen; and auscultation (listen), or the term for listening to the internal sounds of the body, usually using a stethoscope. This order may be modified depending on the main focus of the examination (e.g., a joint may be examined by simply “look, feel, move.” Having this set order is an educational tool that encourages practitioners to be systematic in their approach and refrain from using tools such as the stethoscope--an acoustic medical device for auscultation, or listening to the internal sounds of an animal or human body--before they have fully evaluated the other modalities).

See: Internet From Satellite

An Overview of the Buran Spacecraft

The Buran orbital vehicle program was developed in response to the US Space Shuttle program, which in 1980s raised considerable concerns among Soviet military and especially Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov, Minister of Defense of the Soviet Union from 1976 until his death.

An authoritative biographer of the Russian space program, academic Boris Chertok, a prominent Soviet and Russian rocket designer, responsible for control systems of a number of ballistic missiles and spacecraft, recounts how the program came into being. According to Chertok, after the US developed its Space Shuttle program, by NASA, officially called “Space Transportation System” (“STS”), the United States government's manned launch vehicle from 1981 to 2011, the Soviet military became suspicious that it could be used for military purposes, due to its enormous payload, several times that of previous US spaceships. The Soviet government asked the TsNIIMash (ЦНИИМАШ, Central Institute of Machine-building, a major player in defense analysis), an initialism for the Central Research Institute of Machine Building, which is the institute of the Russian aeronautics and space agency and specialized in the development of long range ballistic missiles, air defense, and propulsion units for defense sectors, for an expert opinion. Institute director, Yuri Mozzohorin, recalls that for as long time the institute could not envisage a civilian payload large enough to require a vehicle of that capacity. Based on this, as well as on US profitability analyses of that time, which showed that the Space Shuttle would be economically efficient only a large number of launches (one every week or so), Mozzohorin concluded that the vehicle had a military purpose, although he was unable to say exactly what. The Soviet program was further boosted after Defense Minister Ustinov received a report from analysts showing that, at least in theory, the Space Shuttle could be used to deploy nuclear bombs over Soviet territory. Chertok recounts that Ustinov was so worried by the possibility that he made the Soviet response program a top priority.

Officially, the Buran spacecraft was designed for the delivery to orbit and return to Earth of spacecraft, cosmonauts, and supplies. Both Chertok and Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy suggest that from the beginning, the program was military in nature; however, the exact military capabilities, or intended capabilities, of the Buran program remain classified. Commenting on the discontinuation of the program in his interview to “New Scientist,” a weekly non-peer-reviewed English-language international science magazine, which since 1996 has also run a website, covering recent developments in science and technology for a general audience, Russian cosmonaut/astronaut, or a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft, Olet Kotov, born October 27, 1965, in Simferopol, Crimean oblast in Ukrainian SSR, confirms their accounts:

“We had no civilian tasks for Buran and the military ones were no longer needed. It was originally designed as a military system for weapon delivery, maybe even nuclear weapons. The American shuttle also has military uses.”
Like its American counterpart, The “Buran,” when in transit from its landing sites back to the launch complex, was transported on the back of a large jet aeroplane--the Antonov An-225 “Mriya transport aircraft, a strategic airlift cargo aircraft, designed by the Soviet Union’s Antonov Design Bureau in the 1980s, which was designed in part for this task and remains the largest aircraft in the world to fly multiple times.

See: History of Computing

The Buran spacecraft

The Buran spacecraft, GRAU index--the “Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, a department of the Russian (ex-Soviet) Ministry of Defense--”11F35 K1” was a Soviet orbital vehicle analogous in function and design to the US Space Shuttle, a partially reusable launch system and orbital spacecraft operated by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for human spaceflight missions. It is developed by Chief Designer Gleb Lozino-Lozinskiy, a Russian and Ukrainian engineer, General Director and General Designer of the JSC NPO Molniya, Doctor Science, Hero of Socialist Labour, laureate of Lenin Prize (1962) and State Prizes (!950 1952), and also the lead developer of the Russian Spiral programme; of RSC Energia/RKK Energia, also known as  “OAO S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia,” a Russian manufacturer of spacecraft and space station components.  

Buran complete unmanned spaceflight in 1988 and remains the only Soviet space shuttle that was launched into space, as the Buran programme, a Soviet and later Russian reusable spacecraft project that began in 1974 at TsAGI, was formally cancelled in 1993. The shuttle Buran was destroyed in 2002 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, also called “Tyuratam,” the world’s first and largest operational space launch facility, when the hangar in which it was stored collapsed.

In addition to the shuttle “Buran,” four other space shuttles were being built in the Buran programme before its cancellation: OK-1K2 “Ptichka” (95-97% complete), an informal nickname for the second space shuttle to be produced as part of the Buran program; “Shuttle 2.01”/OK-2K1 “Baikal” (30-50% complete), the third space shuttle vehicle of the Soviet Buran program, serial number “11F35 K3”; Shuttle 2.02 (10-20% complete), the number of the fourth built Soviet Shuttle Buran reusable space vehicles; Shuttle 2.03 (dismantled), the designation of the fifth Soviet Shuttle Buran reusable space vehicle.

More than a dozen test models, mock-ups or scale models were built, of which the “analogue aero test model” OK-GLI, a test vehicle (“buran aerodynamic analogue”) in the Buran program, flew atmospheric and the 1/8 scale model BOR-5 flight vehicle, used to test the main aerodynamic characteristics, thermal and acoustic loads and stability for the Shuttle Buran program, made suborbital test flights.

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Mars Express + Rosetta = Venus Express

The Venus Express (VEX) mission was proposed in 2001 to reuse the design of the Mars Express mission, a space exploration mission being conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Some mission characteristics, however, led to design--the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system (as in architectural blueprints, engineering drawing, business process, circuit diagrams and sewing patterns) changes: primarily in the areas if thermal control, communications and electrical power.

For example, since Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun and the second smallest planet in the Solar System, is approximately twice as far from the Sun, the star at the center of the Solar System, as Venus is, the radiant heating of the spacecraft will be four times greater for “Venus Express” than “Mars Express.” Also, the ionizing radiation, or radiation composed of particles that individually carry through energy to liberate an electron from an atom or molecule, ionizing it, environment will be harsher.

On the other hand, the more intense illumination of the solar panels (also known as “solar modules,” “photovoltaic module,” or “photovoltaic panel”), packaged connected assemblies of photovoltaic cells, will result in more generated photovoltaic--solar cell, an electrical device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect, power.

The “Venus Express” mission also uses some spare instruments for the “Rosetta” spacecraft, a robotic spacecraft of the European Space Agency on a mission to study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission was proposed by a consortium led by D. Titov (Germany), E. Lellouch (France) and F. Taylor (United Kingdom).

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A Definition of High Technology

The word “technology” can also be used to refer to a collection of techniques. In this context, it is the current state of humanity’s knowledge of how to combine resources to produce desired products, to solve problems, fulfill needs, or satisfy wants; it includes technical methods, skills, processes, techniques, tools and raw materials. When combined with another term, such as “medical technology” or “space technology,” it refers to the state of the respective field's knowledge and tools. “State-of-the-art technology,” refers to the high technology (“high tech”)--technology that is at the cutting edge: the most advanced technology currently available--available to humanity in any field; the highest development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field achieved at a particular tie.

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The early Hebrew and Islamic knowledge of medicine

Most of our knowledge of ancient Hebrew medicine during the 1st millenium BC, encompassing the Iron Age and sees the rise of many successive empires, and spanned from 1000 BC to 1 BC, come from the Torah, the Jewish name for the first five books of the Jewish Bible, i.e. the Five Books of Moses--Moses, as according to the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an, is a religious leader, lawgiver and prophet, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed. It contains various health related laws and rituals.

The Hebrew contribution to the development of modern medicine started in  the Byzantine Era (“Byzantium”), the Roman Empire during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople, with the physician Asaph the Jew, also known as “Asaph ben Berakhiah,” “Asaph Judaeus,” “Asaph ha-Jehoudi,” or “Assph ha-Jehoudi” and by other names, the first Hebrew medical writer, and has since been tremendous.

After 750 CE, the Muslim world had the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Sushruta translated into Arabic, and Islamic physicians engaged in some significant medical research, i.e. in the history of medicine, Islamic medicine, Arabic medicine, Greco-Arabic and Greco-Islamic refer to medicine developed in the Islamic Golden Age, and written in Arabic, the “lingua franca” of Islamic civilization.

Notable Islamic medical pioneers include Avicenna, a Persian polymath (“Renaissance man”), or a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; he wrote almost 450 treatises in a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 survived. He, along with Imhotep and Hippocrates, has also been called the “father of medicine.” In 1025, he wrote “The Canon of Medicine,” an encyclopedia of medicine in five books, considered one of the most famous books in the history of medicine.

Others include: Abulcasis, an Arab physician who lived in Al-Andalus; Avenzoar, an Arab-Muslim physician, surgeon and a contemporary of Maimonides and Averroes; Averroes is an Andalusian Muslim polymath--master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arab music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics; and Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab physician who is mostly famous for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood.

Rhazes (“Rasis”), a Persian polymath, a prominent figure in Islamic Golden Age, physician, alchemist and chemist, philosopher, and scholar, was one of the first to question the Greek theory of humorism (“humoralism”), a now discredited (but historically important) theory of the makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers, positing that an excess or deficiency of any for distance bodily fluids in a person directly influences their temperament and health. Nevertheless, it remained influential in both medieval Western and medieval Islamic medicine.

The Islamic Bimaristan hospitals, an early example of public hospitals, or hospitals owned by a government and receives government funding.

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