The House is taking its first
step Wednesday to avoid a government shutdown, as Washington looks to forgo forcing a fiscal crisis this month and instead turns its attention to
a more deliberate debate over long-term deficit reduction. Read full article >> The Spanish market is in turmoil, and house prices are buyer-friendly. Owning a cellphone on one of the biggest providers can sometimes feel like an unhappy relationship, with companies frequently taking advantage of customers. The unofficial Web site for the Villas of Ashburn proclaims that it is maintained by "a renegade
group of volunteer residents" who declare themselves to be "55 or better (most of us are better)." For years, officials in wealthy, liberal Montgomery County have avoided difficult decisions
on scaling back pensions and health-care benefits for retirees. Now, the long-term shortfall is $4.8 billion. The Carnegie-winning author of After Tomorrow picks her top 10 books that throw everything you think you know upside downAfter Tomorrow is our latest Teen Book Club read and we're going to be asking Gillian all about it in our Q&A later metabolic cooking metabolic cooking If you have a question for Gillian, email us at childrens.books@guardian.co.uk by 5pm on Friday 10 May 2013I'm incurably nosey – so naturally I'm a great reader. One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives. Want to know what it's like being rich? Living in Japan? Emigrating? Being an elephant? Whatever you fancy exploring, there's almost certainly a book to fill your mind with images and start you thinking.And
it doesn't end with that book or that subject. The more we
open our minds to other cultures and
other ways of understanding reality, the less we take our own for granted. And the more possibilities we see in our own surroundings.
That's how fiction begins, of course. I wrote After Tomorrow because I thought: What would it be like if we were refugees? (And I was shocked to discover how little it would take.)Here's
my list of ten books that
have made me think about what it would be like to live text the romance back review different place, or a different time, or a different body. Happy exploring!1. The Arrival by Shaun TanThis is a graphic novel
like no other. It has no words, because Shaun Tan is exploring what it's like to be an immigrant in a place, where the language, the writing - even the food – are totally unfamiliar.
If you really want to know what it's like trying to function in a completely alien culture, this is the book for you. Miraculously, although it has no words and the pictures are full of strange buildings and objects, it manages to be
moving and thought-provoking - and ultimately optimistic.2. Small Island by Andrea LevyA
completely different kind of book about immigration. It's told by four distinctive characters: Gilbert and Hortense, from Jamaica, who are hoping for new opportunities in Britain; warm-hearted Queenie Bligh; and her racist husband, Bernard. Because it's set in a real place and time – Britain in 1948 – it gives a longer perspective on immigration. Whatever our roots are, all four characters are separated from us tinnitus miracle passage of time and the huge changes in culture since 1948.3. River Town
by Peter HesslerPeter Hessler spent two years in China, teaching in a small town on the Yangtze, around fifteen years ago. He describes his day to day life and how he gradually came to feel at home in the town and make friends with local people.
There are many more up-to-date books about China, but when I was in Beijing last month, this is the book everyone told me
to read, to understand what life was like beyond the big cities.4. Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome:
A User Guide to Adolescence by Luke JacksonLuke Jackson
has Asperger Syndrome and he wrote this book when he was thirteen, because "so many books are written about
us, but none are written directly to adolescents with Asperger Syndrome. I thought I would write one in the hope that we could all learn together."
It helped me to understand not just about Asperger's, but about how easy it is to talk about people who are different instead of acne no more Cold Comfort Farm by Stella GibbonsI've known this perfect, funny book all my life – long before I knew what culture shock was.
Smart, urban Flora Poste, left orphaned, with no marketable skills, decides to go and live with her cousins, the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm. She finds herself plunged into a hilarious, doom-laden world of dark secrets and emotional tempests – but it's the Starkadders who get hit by culture shock.
They're helpless to stop Flora sorting out their lives to her own satisfaction – and triumphing over the sukebind.6. The Inheritors by William GoldingIt's incredibly hard to write novels where people really think in a different way. Suppose you had no real language, little memory and hardly any understanding of the link between causes and effects? That's how William
Golding has imagined the Neanderthal characters in this book.
Since it was written, theories about the Neanderthals have changed, but his picture of people who are not like us is as powerful as ever.7.
The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan PriceGoing back in time would surely paleo recipe book ultimate culture shock. This is one of my favourite time-travel books. Susan Price has a unique and stylish way of dealing with the mechanics of that travel. (Too good to give away here.) She sends her heroine, Andrea, back to the rough and tumble of the English/Scottish borders in the 16th century – where Andrea's view of herself is brilliantly transformed. Then Andrea's 16th century lover, Per, is swept forward into the 21st century – so you get two different culture clashes in one book.8. Jude the Obscure by Thomas HardyJude must be the ultimate Different Hero - the nineteenth century cultural outsider who sets his heart on going to Oxford University and comes crashing up
against the barriers of class distinction and academic snobbery. It's an almost unbearably pessimistic book, full of Hardy's anger at the ways in which working class people were despised and excluded. But part of its greatness is that he lets us see that Jude really is an outsider, whose dreams are heart-breakingly unrealistic.9. Wonder by R J PalacioThe hero of this ipad video lessons ipad video lessons a boy called Auggie, who has a very different face. Having been born seriously disfigured, he's missed all his early school years because of operations.
The book starts at the beginning of his first school term and it's told from many different points of view: by Auggie himself, by his friends and by his sister.
It explores all the 'issues'
you might expect, but in the end it's worth reading because it's a book about great characters (which proves its point, really).10. Titus Groan by Mervyn PeakeAnd if the whole world was different? There are not many books as strange as Titus Groan, where everything is different - the characters, the ritual, the language and the extraordinary, brooding presence of the castle of Gormenghast itself. People who love it can never explain its magic to those who hate it.
The ultimate Marmite book.After
Tomorrow is our latest Teen Book Club read and we're going to be asking Gillian all about it in our Q&A later this month.
If you have a question for Gillian, email us at tubelaunch 5pm on Friday 10 May 2013Teen booksChildren and teenagersChildren's books: 8-12 yearsguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
| Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds MIT OpenCourseWare has released a new version of Differential Equations in the innovative OCW Scholar format designed for independent learners. Organized by Professor Haynes Miller and Dr. Jeremy Orloff, 18.03SC Differential Equations includes lecture videos, exams and solutions, and interactive Java® demonstrations. Differential equations are important to scientists and engineers who need to model natural systems and solve engineering problems.The original version of 18.03 Differential Equations was first published on OCW in 2004 and has regularly been among the most visited courses on the site, attracting more than 30,000 users each month. Both the original version and the new Scholar version include video recorded in
the MIT classroom by renowned math professor Arthur Mattuck. In 1992, Mattuck was among the first group of faculty to be designated Margaret MacVicar Fellows, which recognizes faculty who have made info cash sustained contributions to the teaching and education of undergraduates at MIT."It's a real thrill to integrate these outstanding lectures into a format
specifically designed to support online learning," Miller says. "It brings the best of the classroom together with new learning approaches enabled by the Internet." Miller is also a MacVicar Fellow.OCW Scholar courses represent a new approach to OCW publication. MIT faculty, staff and students work closely with the OCW team to structure the course materials for independent learners. These courses offer more materials than typical OCW courses and include new custom-created content. In addition to the lecture videos, exams and demonstrations, the OCW Scholar version of Differential Equations includes course notes, problem sets and solutions, and a unique series of video problem-solving sessions recorded specifically for this publication.The first five of a planned 15 OCW Scholar courses were launched by MIT OpenCourseWare in January 2011, and
have collectively received more than 800,000 visits in less than a year. The initial OCW Scholar courses included Classical Mechanics, Electricity and Magnetism, Solid State Chemistry, Single Variable Calculus, Chris Farrell Membership Calculus.Linear Algebra was published earlier this year, and Differential Equations is the second of seven OCW Scholar courses that will be published in 2012.
Other upcoming OCW Scholar courses include Principles of Microeconomics, Introduction to Psychology, Fundamentals of Biology, Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I, and Introduction to Computer Science and Programming.
OCW Scholar courses are published on the OCW site with the support of the Stanton Foundation. The world economy can weather the Federal Reserve’s tightening of monetary policy without major problems as long as it is “gradual†and “properly announced,†International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Wednesday. Read full article >> Health experts warn of growing threat from 'exotic' diseasesLeading health experts are urging the government to take action against the growing threat that mosquito-borne diseases, including potentially fatal malaria, could soon arrive in the UK.The
disturbing recommendation to "act now before it is too late" is being made as a growing body of evidence indicates that what were once thought of as tropical diseases are
being found ever closer to blogging with john chow experts meeting at the annual public health conference of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health later this week will hear that rising incidences of a growing list of pest-borne diseases are now a "serious" cause for concern in the UK.The conference will be told that it would be complacent to think that diseases such as dengue fever, malaria and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, now
present on the European continent but once considered "exotic and confined to faraway places", will not emerge in the UK."With predicted changes to climate in the UK, characterised by warming and wetter summers providing perfect breeding grounds for a number of pest-borne diseases, we need to consider some robust public health measures to minimise the potential outbreaks," said Julie Barratt, director of the CIEH.The government's Health Protection Agency commissioned research, published last year, which claimed that "it is likely that the range and activity of many ticks and
mosquitoes will increase across the UK by the 2080s".However, experts are now warning that there is a risk that the threat to the UK
is more Million Dollar Pips was detected in France and Croatia in 2010 and malaria was reported in Greece in 2011.The increased use of salt marshes to protect coastal regions and the heightened risk of flooding means the UK is becoming a more attractive habitat for mosquitoes, while the increasing proximity
of animals that carry ticks to humans is another concern.Diseases that the UK needs urgently to guard against are Lyme disease and West Nile virus – which has already become a major health issue in the United States. First detected in Queens, New York, in 1999, the virus has now spread across the US, with a
major outbreak in 2012.As
of 30 August 2012, the latest figures available, there had been 115 human cases of West Nile virus reported in EU member states, mainly Greece, Italy and Romania.
There were
a further 224 cases reported in neighbouring countries and the virus has been diagnosed as close to the UK as Ireland.In
the UK, previously rare diseases are being diagnosed with increasing frequency.
In 2001, there were 200 confirmed cases of Lyme FAP Turbo is caused by infected ticks carried on animals. By 2011, this had risen to 959 confirmed cases, according to HPA statistics. The true figure could be considerably higher, experts believe, as Lyme disease requires a clinical diagnosis and its symptoms, such as rashes and flu, can mimic other illnesses
and be misdiagnosed.
At its most serious, the disease can result in blindness and paralysis.The
charity Lyme Disease Action said that ticks, which are the size of
a full stop, are carried on deer and small mammals such as foxes and rabbits, as well as birds, and are able to sense a passing potential blood donor by picking up the carbon dioxide that humans exhale.The
LDA warns that "ticks can easily go undetected and their bite does not cause irritation, because they inject their host with an anaesthetic".Barratt said the government could not afford to be complacent. "Pests will become a very serious public health issue in the UK as a result of climate
change," she said. "The spread of West Nile virus in the US
and Lyme Forex Megadroid Europe are warning signals of the impact of pests on public health."The increasing threat posed to the UK from exotic diseases is partially a result of changes in the way that people live today."Modern living conditions, urban sprawl and
emerging changes in climate make the spread of pests and pest-borne diseases increasingly likely," Barratt said. "The effects of these conditions
and changes need to be properly
monitored and understood. We should not wait for an outbreak to happen before we act."The
CIEH is calling for the introduction of an EU-wide policy on mosquito control and greater collaboration between EU member states. It also said there was a need for the creation of a new, standardised disease notification system that reported across Europe to a central agency.Other initiatives should include the harmonisation of guidelines on insecticide use and greater surveillance by both public health and veterinary agencies.Infectious diseasesHealth policyMalariaClimate changeHealthJamie Dowardguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | Binary Options Trading Federal employee salary rates
would remain frozen through 2013 under a bill the House plans to start considering Wednesday. The bill would replace a temporary funding measure that expires March 27; without new budget authority, a partial government shutdown would go into effect. That would cause immediate furloughs of many federal employees who already are facing potential furloughs starting about the same time because of sequestration budget cuts.
Read full article >> Microsoft is seeking permission to disclose "aggregate statistics" about the number of requests for data it receives under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, following a similar move by Google earlier this month.
All India Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee supports government on Sri Lanka. Cricket is losing a man valued as much for his personal qualities as his batting prowess with retirement of the Mowbray mongrelT he Oval is famous for its valedictions, its final Tests and last hurrahs, its Kleenex sales
and achingly sad, crepuscular moments. They usually come a month or two later than this but on Thursday Ricky Ponting, the mongrel from Traffic Travis his final first‑class innings, raged and raged for seven hours against the dying of the light.While Ashton Agar was doing something astonishing in Nottingham, Ponting scored 169 not out to save Surrey from defeat by Nottinghamshire. Then he raised his bat to recognise the standing ovation, and a great cricketer was gone.There was catharsis as well as heavy runs for Ponting.
For this venerable ground had been the scene of the player's worst moment, he said, when England achieved the draw in 2005 that won them the Ashes in the greatest series of them all.Then there was 2009 when, making his last Ashes appearance in
this country, he could not prevent England winning theTest at the venue and reclaiming the urn that had been lost so ignominiously in Australia almost three years earlier. Ponting, now 38, had become the first Australian captain for over a century to lose two Ashes series in England, and he would go on to lose a third at home.So there are scars for him, along with the garlands, as he moves towards Popup Domination his young family and collection of greyhounds – Shane Warne gave him the nickname Punter because of his love of betting on the dogs.The boy Ponting, who would go on to play 168 Tests and 375 ODIs, was one of the most remarkable of cricketing prodigies. Born in Mowbray, a blue‑collar suburb
of Tasmania's Launceston, he scored four centuries in five days for his club's under-13 side.
He was so good that serious consideration was given to him playing for the state side when he was just 14.Today,
he stands second only to Sachin Tendulkar as the most successful run-scorer in Test cricket. In terms of esteem among Australian batsmen, he has edged ahead of the elegant Greg Chappell, the redoubtable Allan Border and the taciturn Steve Waugh, and only Sir Don Bradman stands ahead of him.In truth, he should
have left international cricket a little earlier than he did; in his final Test series, against South Africa at the end of last year, there were just 32 runs scored from five innings with the 1-0 series defeat Viral Traffic Optimizer his final Test in Perth.But
then, to prove there was life still there, he was voted Sheffield
Shield player of
the year after scoring 875 runs at an average of 87.50 – and with it he won that domestic trophy for the first time.
When he made his debut for Surrey earlier this season he scored 192 against Derbyshire. But, even more than the runs, we will treasure
the snarling, feisty competitiveness which made him such a formidable – though undersized – Aussie Rules footballer when he was 16. Remember that four-letter fusillade against the England fielders after he had been run out by the substitute fielder Gary Pratt at Trent Bridge in 2005?That aggression, when mixed with drink, once threatened his great career.
Early on, he was thrown out of a nightclub in India and given a black eye in a Sydney brawl.Today, though, it is his quality as a man, as well a cricketer, which we value.
Last month, at The Oval, he spoke for hours with a gathering of Surrey club captains, showing as much Easyvideosuite them as they did
in him.When he joined Somerset back in 2004, he arrived tired and jet-lagged but insisted on playing in
a Twenty20 game at Taunton that evening when asked, and in a benefit match for Keith Parsons the following day. He scored a century in each of his first two championship games and had a profound influence on James Hildreth and other young players.Long ago, when the only blimps in cricket were colonels, I didn't care much for Australians. Maybe that was because the first one I met, as a 12-year-old, was the
infamous Cec Pepper, who pushed away this autograph hunter when he was an umpire at Leicester during the 1964 Ashes tour.Some
years later,
the profane Sergeant Pepper asked another autograph seeker if he had one for Garry Sobers, and then devastated the boy by signing his own name over that of the
great West Indies captain.But
my encounter with Pepper came before I grew to love Australia and recognise the Ashes as the greatest sporting contest of them all.English
cricket is defined by these unrelenting Total Wellness Cleanse review character and skill. And no cricketer was harder, more combative and more talented in these contests than the man who has just walked from the field for the last time in the long shadows of a south London evening.Ricky PontingSurreyAustralia cricket teamCounty Championship 2013 Division OneCounty Championship Division OneAustralia sportCricketPaul Weaverguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Work-related master's degrees are on the rise as people
seek skills that will help them find a new pathIf traditional academic subjects leave you cold, your interest might be piqued by the increasing number of fascinatingly unconventional postgraduate courses available across the country. Vocational study is becoming more popular, with people sometimes using master's courses to move into a new career.Jimmy
Lyons moved to London from Cork in an effort to further his music career and found a job working in a school for children with autism. He signed up for City University's music-therapy course, offered in association with Wallstreet Forex Robot Nordoff Robbins."Pursuing a course of study in that field felt like the next logical step," he explains. "I could use my love for music in a way that had a positive impact on others' lives and that would also be fulfilling for me as a musician and a person."Music
therapy, like speech and occupational therapy, is a registered health
profession, so there's a fine balance in the course between music and care. "We are looking for a very particular blend of skills and personal qualities," says Gary Ansdell, Nordoff Robbins' director of education. "We're looking for
high degrees of musicianship, but also sensitivity and resilience."ProgressionWork experience in a range of settings is a key part of the two-year course. "That progression, from being very supported to 90% independent, is one of our key factors – developing entrepreneurship in our students," Ansdell says. "Music therapists have to create their own work
and have to have the skills to do that."Producing graduates who have the skills that employers in their field require is a key part of Durham University's magnetic messaging Now in its third year, it offers three routes for students to pursue: environmental hazards; health and public policy; and security. Each course combines theory with the latest industry-specific technology.Many of the 24-strong intake use the full-time taught course as a form of continuing professional development, or as a way to gain more skills and increase their employability.They are helped along the way by the programme's links with leading companies and organisations across a huge array of sectors."We have a nice interest across the expanding risk sector," says programme director Louise Bracken.
"Our students have been incredibly successful and, because they're staying in the field of risk, they're coming back to us [to recruit]."The
course includes media training and production, as well as engagement with the theory and practice of risk management, so it's little wonder Bracken concludes: "We're starting to have this reputation within the risk industry: we do produce great students who go into the world of work with the skills they just wouldn't get with straight degrees."StudentsPostgraduatesHigher
educationCarrie Dunnguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and panic away panic away or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
| Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds The Air Force has determined that Booz Allen Hamilton is not responsible for the disclosure of government secrets by former employee Edward Snowden a spokesman for the service said Thursday. “At this time, we have no indication of any wrongdoing on the part of the Booz Allen Hamilton corporation,†said Lt. Col.
John Dorrian, an Air Force spokesman. Read full article >> After Cal Coach Mike Montgomery shoved a star player to make him play better, some sports columnists pushed back and the coach voiced his regrets.
As the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize 2013 launches, former Guardian science editor Tim Radford
explains his approach to writing, and why journalists should be careful not to take science too seriouslyTim Radford The organizers of the concert, set for late August outside Albany, hope to find support and money among country music fans. As many countries evacuate their citizens from Japan and
begin reassessing their nuclear programs, ress.com/2013/08/27/the-adonis-effect-review-does-brad-howards-system-work">adonis Ratio takes a more conservative stance - urging only that its citizens stay 50 miles away from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant. A dozen
bombings on Monday in and around Baghdad and north of the city killed at least 41 and wounded 125 others, security officials said. With more energy efficient car options available than ever before, the number choices can be daunting. Here’s where two green car rating agencies’ picks coincided. The stations agreed to pay a total of $167,850 in fines for raising prices after Hurricane Sandy; investigations are still pending against dozens of other stations. The red curve is the initial absorption spectrum before the start of the experiment; the gray curves
are the 30-minute spectra; and the green curve is the final spectrum. Comparison of the curves shows that peak 2 goes down more quickly than peak 1 does — and it ultimately disappears. Eisele and her co-workers were able to show that this fast decrease in intensity of peak 2 reflects changes in the outer cylinder and that the slower decrease of peak social monkee changes in the inner cylinder. The conclusion: Peak 2 can be unambiguously attributed to the outer cylinder, peak 1 to the inner one.
Moreover, the portions of the absorption spectrum that drop only in amplitude with no significant change in shape can be traced to the inner cylinder.Detailed
analysis of the experimental data confirmed that the original spectrum is made up of the spectra of two essentially independent chemical species superimposed on one another. The two LH cylinders can thus be treated as two electronically separate systems, with at most weak coupling between them. In addition, images taken with a cryogenic electron transmission microscope clearly showed the double-walled structure of the nanotubes — both before and after oxidation. Indeed, the only difference in the post-oxidation images was that the exterior surfaces of the nanotubes were “decorated with silver nanoparticles,†says Eisele. Those results confirm that the outer cylinder was still physically present. Only its optical behavior had changed.The isolation of the inner cylinder’s spectrum made possible unprecedented theoretical advances. After three years’ work, collaborators led by Professor Make Him Desire You Make Him Desire You at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, modeled a structure for the inner cylinder that reproduced the experimentally observed spectrum.
The structure has molecules organized in a herring-bone fashion — a geometry previously proposed by others but with certain details that are different. For example, each tile is made up of two molecules, and as the tiles wrap around to form the cylinder, they tilt out from the surface at distinctive angles.Knoester
and his group next modeled the structure of the outer cylinder assuming the same packing geometry but adjusted to span the greater circumference. They then calculated the spectrum of a suprastructure formed from their two cylinders that shows remarkable agreement with Eisele’s measured absorption spectrum. By combining these experimental and theoretical results, the researchers were
thus able to settle a >long-standing argument about the geometry of such cyanine-based nanotubes.Only the beginningArmed with their new understanding, the researchers at MIT are
now continuing their studies. For example, they are examining the nature of the weak interaction between the inner and outer cylinders, and they are looking
Aquaponics 4 You happens when many cylindrical nanotubes cluster together, as they do in nature. Says Eisele, “Now we need to know whether we can think of them as a superposition of individual cylinders — or do they become a totally new systemwith different optical properties?â€But even a cluster of LH cylinders is just one building block for a future device, Bawendi says. He and Eisele are now working to connect the LH nanotubes to quantum dots
(QDs) — nanometer-scale inorganic crystals that fluoresce when stimulated by light.
That combination raises exciting possibilities. By controlling the size of the QDs, Bawendi — an expert in this field — will be able to “tune†them to absorb sunlight and
then emit a specific wavelength that will generate maximum electron excitation in the LH nanotubes. In the lab, that focused light will enable the researchers to track how the excitation propagates along the LH nanotubes. In a practical device, such tailored QDs could deliver focused energy that LH nanotubes could efficiently transport and deliver to a system — perhaps including more Family Survival Course where chemical reactions might, for instance, produce fuels.Bawendi
stresses that such concepts are very far down the line.
“The idea is to create something from building blocks, so first we have to understand
the building blocks themselves and how they interact,†he says.
But if his “grand vision†succeeds, a device integrating such building blocks could one day provide a completely new way to collect energy from the sun — perhaps modeled in part on that solar-harvesting genius, the green sulfur bacterium.This research was supported by the MIT Center for Excitonics, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy,
Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Integrative Research Institute for the Sciences in Berlin, the National Science Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the US Army Research Office and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Further information can be found in
.M. Eisele, C.W. Cone, E.A.
Bloemsma, S.M. Vlaming, C.G.F.
van der Kwaak, R.J.
Silbey, M.G. Bawendi, J. Knoester, J.P. Rabe, and D.A. Vanden Bout. “Utilizing ex recovery system elucidate the nature of exciton transitions in supramolecular dye nanotubes.â€
Nature Chemistry, vol. 4, pp. 655–662, July 2012.B.J.
Walker, V. Bulović, and M.G. Bawendi. “Quantum dot/J-aggregate blended films for light harvesting and energy
transfer.†Nano Letters, vol. 10, pp. 3995–3999, 2010.D.M. Eisele, J. Knoester, S. Kirstein, J.P. Rabe, and D.A. Vanden Bout. “Uniform exciton fluorescence from individual molecular nanotubes
immobilized on solid substrates.†Nature Nanotech, vol. 4, pp. 658–663, 2009.B.J. Walker, G.P. Nair, L.F. Marshall, V. Bulović, and M.G. Bawendi. “Narrow-band absorption-enhanced quantum dot/J-aggregate conjugates.†Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 31, pp. 9624–9625, 2009. Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet in our solar system, revolves around the sun in a mere 88 days, making a tight orbit that keeps the planet
incredibly toasty. Surface temperatures on Mercury can reach a blistering 800 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to liquefy lead.  Now researchers from
NASA, MIT, the University of California at Los Angeles and elsewhere have discovered evidence that the scorching planet may harbor pockets of water ice, along with organic material, in several permanently shadowed Natural Vitiligo Treatment system Mercury’s north pole. The surprising discovery suggests to scientists that both ice and organic material, such
as carbon, may have been
deposited on Mercury’s surface by impacts from comets or asteroids. Over time, this volatile material could then have migrated to the planet’s poles.“We
thought the most exciting finding could be that this really was water ice,†says Maria Zuber, the E.A.
Griswold Professor of Geophysics in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and a member of the research team.
“But the identification of darker, insulating material that may indicate complex organics makes the story even more thrilling.â€Zuber and her colleagues published their results this week in the journal Science.Mounting evidence for iceThe possibility that water ice might exist on Mercury is not new: In the 1990s, radar observations detected bright regions near Mercury’s poles that scientists believed could be signs of either water ice or a rough planetary surface. However, the evidence was
inconclusive for either scenario. To get a clearer picture of Mercury’s polar regions, Zuber and her colleagues analyzed observations taken by NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) mission, a probe that has been orbiting the planet and mapping its topography since April 2011.
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