LONDON -- Britain's food regulator said horse meat had been found in beef products at Taco Bell fast food outlets, the first time it has been discovered on sale in British restaurants since the scandal broke in January.
The Food Standards Agency said Friday that it had conducted 1,797 tests over the past seven days, over 99 percent of which had come back negative for horse meat levels at or above 1 percent.
However, four tests were positive, it said. These included Birds Eye ready meals and Brakes skewers, already withdrawn from sale.
It added that no tests to date on samples containing horse DNA had found the veterinary medicine phenylbutazone, or "bute."
Tex-Mex fast-food chain Taco Bell, owned by U.S. firm Yum Brands Inc., has three outlets in the U.K.
"Some batches of ground beef supplied to us from one supplier in Europe tested positive for horse meat," Taco Bell U.K. said in a statement.
"We immediately withdrew ground beef from sale in our restaurants, discontinued purchase of that meat, and contacted the Food Standards Agency with this information," it added.
The news is awkward timing for Yum, which on Monday said it was moving to tighten food safety and reverse a sharp drop in business at its KFC restaurants in China after a scare over contaminated chicken.
Related:
'Fraud on a massive scale': Horse meat scandal keeps growing
Hamburgers pulled from UK supermarket shelves over horse meat
Burger King axes UK supplier in wake of horse meat scandal
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Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
Feb. 27, 2013 ? Accelerating a free electron with a laser has been a longtime goal of solid-state physicists. David Cline, a distinguished professor in the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Xiaoping Ding, an assistant researcher at UCLA, have conducted research at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and have established that an electron beam can be accelerated by a laser in free space.
This has never been done before at high energies and represents a significant breakthrough, Cline said, adding that it also may have implications for fusion as a new energy source.
In free space, a plane-wave laser is unable to accelerate an electron, according to the Lawson-Woodward theorem, posited in 1979. However, Yu-kun Ho, a professor at China's Fudan University in Shanghai, and his research group have proposed a concept of what physicists refer to as the capture-acceleration scenario to show that an electron can be accelerated by a tightly focused laser in a vacuum.
In the capture-acceleration scenario, the diffraction from a tightly focused laser changes not only the intensity distribution of the laser but also its phase distribution, which results in the field phase velocity being lower than the speed of light in a vacuum in some areas.
Thus, a channel that overlaps features of both strong longitudinal electric field and low-laser-phase velocity is created, and electrons can receive energy gain from the laser. The acceleration effect increases along with increasing laser intensity, Cline said. This channel for electrons may be useful for other scientific endeavors, such as guiding an electron beam into a specific region of laser fusion applications, he said.
A possible application of this discovery is the use of laser plasma fusion to provide a new energy source for the U.S. and other countries. The focus of the laser generates a natural channel that can capture electrons and drive them into a pellet that explodes, by fusion, to produce excess energy, Cline said.
With federal funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, a project to carry out a proof-of-principle beam test for the novel vacuum acceleration at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Accelerator Test Facility (BNL-ATF) has been proposed and approved -- a collaboration among the UCLA Center for Advanced Accelerators, of which Cline is principal investigator, Ho's group and the Accelerator Test Facility team.
BNL-ATF is one of the few facilities that can provide both a high-quality electron beam and a high-intensity laser beam for the beam test, Cline said. Ho's group provides theoretical support. UCLA scientists -- Cline, Ding and Lei Shao, a former UCLA physics graduate student of Cline's -- are responsible for the whole experiment and the experimental data analysis.
Simulation research work and hardware design have been done in accordance with BNL-ATF's experimental conditions. The simulation results predict that vacuum laser acceleration phenomena can be observed with ATF's diagnostic system.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal References:
L. Shao, D. Cline, X. Ding, Y.K. Ho, Q. Kong, J.J. Xu, I. Pogorelsky, V. Yakimenko, K. Kusche. Simulation prediction and experiment setup of vacuum laser acceleration at Brookhaven National Lab-Accelerator Test Facility. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 2013; 701: 25 DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2012.09.053
David Cline, Lei Shao, Xiaoping Ding, Yukun Ho, Qing Kong, Pingxiao Wang. First Observation of Acceleration of Electrons by a Laser in a Vacuum. Journal of Modern Physics, 2013; 04 (01): 1 DOI: 10.4236/jmp.2013.41001
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Fun Fore All, 8 Progress Ave, Cranberry Township, PA | Get?Directions?? $25.00
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New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks during a news conference regarding the automatic spending cuts, Friday, March 1, 2013, at the Pentagon. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks during a news conference regarding the automatic spending cuts, Friday, March 1, 2013, at the Pentagon. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
New Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel arrives at a news conference regarding the automatic spending cuts, Friday, March 1, 2013, at the Pentagon. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel lamented $46 billion in automatic defense budget cuts as "abrupt and arbitrary" but expressed confidence Friday that the Obama administration will find ways to manage them without jeopardizing national security.
At his first news conference since replacing Leon Panetta as Pentagon chief, Hagel struck a more relaxed tone about the budget reductions, part of $85 billion in government-wide spending cuts that were taking effect Friday at midnight.
Whereas Panetta had warned of "catastrophic" effects that could reduce America to the status of a "second-rate" military power, Hagel said he believed the across-the-board budget cuts and their far-reaching effects will prove manageable.
"Today, America has the best fighting force in the world capable of responding to any challenge," he told reporters. "This unnecessary budget crisis makes that job much harder. But we will continue to ensure America's security."
Hagel met for a little over an hour with the chiefs of each of the services, plus the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, to discuss budget issues.
Hagel told reporters that numerous actions will be taken in coming days by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps to begin meeting the requirement for $46 billion in budget savings by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. He said thousands of defense civilian workers, for example, will be notified later this month that they could be required to take one day of unpaid leave per week through September.
President Barack Obama has exempted military personnel from the automatic budget cuts, and the Pentagon has decided that its combat operations in Afghanistan, as well as its nuclear weapons force, will be protected from reductions. Even so, the Army will curtail training of forces other than those scheduled to go to Afghanistan; the Air Force will reduce flying hours for pilots and the Navy has already announced plans to delay ship deployments and ship maintenance.
Ashton Carter, the deputy defense secretary, said the Pentagon is doing all it can to prevent a drastic curtailment of troop training. But he said that will prove harder if the administration and the Congress are unable to strike a budget deal soon.
"(For) those who do not appreciate how serious this is, as the year goes on, it will be unmistakable," Carter said. "This is not subtle."
The defense spending cuts will hit some states harder than others.
Carter sent warning letters to the governors of 10 states that will be most severely impacted: Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, California, Maryland, Ohio, Alabama and Washington.
The letters lay out in stark terms the number of civilian defense workers in each state who will face unpaid furloughs and the cutbacks that will hurt local bases and defense contractors. Copies of the letters were provided to The Associated Press on Friday.
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Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
FILE - This Sept. 12, 2012 file photo shows Idina Menzel at the West Coast premiere of "The Book of Mormon" at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. Menzel will return to Broadway since winning the Tony Award for "Wicked" to star in "If/Then," an original Broadway musical. The production will begin previews on Broadway on March 4, 2014 and will officially open on March 27, 2014. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, file)
FILE - This Sept. 12, 2012 file photo shows Idina Menzel at the West Coast premiere of "The Book of Mormon" at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. Menzel will return to Broadway since winning the Tony Award for "Wicked" to star in "If/Then," an original Broadway musical. The production will begin previews on Broadway on March 4, 2014 and will officially open on March 27, 2014. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, file)
FILE - This Sept. 12, 2012 file photo shows Idina Menzel at the West Coast premiere of "The Book of Mormon" at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. Menzel will return to Broadway since winning the Tony Award for "Wicked" to star in "If/Then," an original Broadway musical. The production will begin previews on Broadway on March 4, 2014 and will officially open on March 27, 2014. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP, file)
NEW YORK (AP) ? Idina Menzel, who won a Tony Award as the green witch in "Wicked," is planning a return to Broadway.
Producers of a new musical by the creators of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Next to Normal" announced Thursday that Menzel will star in their "If/Then," a Broadway-bound musical that first takes a stop this fall in Washington, D.C.
Tom Kitt will supply the music, Brian Yorkey will write the story and lyrics, and Michael Greif will direct. All three did the same jobs for "Next to Normal."
The new show will make its world premiere this November at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., and then go on to open on Broadway in March 2014.
Producers said the musical will center on the character of Elizabeth, who on the verge of turning 40, moves to New York. "Set against the ever-shifting landscape of modern day Manhattan, 'If/Then' is a romantic and original new musical about how choice and chance collide and how we learn to love the fallout," producers said in a statement.
Menzel made her Broadway debut in "Rent" and won a Tony as Elphaba in "Wicked." Her films include "Enchanted," ''Rent" and "Ask the Dust." She also has launched a solo recording career and had a recurring role on TV in "Glee."
"I've experienced the beauty of working on original musicals and was eager to find a project where the material was exciting and new and spoke to my heart. I'm thrilled to have finally found it - an original musical with a complex, flawed, and surprising central character that I cannot wait to bring to life onstage," she said in a statement.
"If/Then" is being produced by David Stone, who produced both "Wicked" and "Next to Normal."
Turn trash into cash... and save energyPublic release date: 1-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Marcia Goodrich mlgoodri@mtu.edu 906-487-2343 Michigan Technological University
New process transforms old milk jugs into everything from lab equipment to cell phone cases
Suppose you could replace "Made in China" with "Made in my garage." Suppose also that every time you polished off a jug of two percent, you would be stocking up on raw material to make anything from a cell phone case and golf tees to a toy castle and a garlic press.
And, you could give yourself a gold medal for being a bona fide, recycling, polar-bear-saving rock star.
Michigan Technological University's Joshua Pearce is working on it. His main tool is open-source 3D printing, which he uses to save thousands of dollars by making everything from his lab equipment to his safety razor.
Using free software downloaded from sites like Thingiverse, which now holds over 54,000 open-source designs, 3D printers make all manner of objects by laying down thin layers of plastic in a specific pattern. While high-end printers can cost many thousands of dollars, simpler open-source units run between $250 and $500and can be used to make parts for other 3D printers, driving the cost down ever further.
"One impediment to even more widespread use has been the cost of filament," says Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering. Though vastly less expensive than most manufactured products, the plastic filament that 3D printers transform into useful objects isn't free.
Milk jugs, on the other hand, are a costly nuisance, either to recycle or to bury in a landfill. But if you could turn them into plastic filament, Pearce reasoned, you could solve the disposal problem and drive down the cost of 3D printing even more.
So Pearce and his research group decided to make their own recycling unit, or RecycleBot. They cut the labels off milk jugs, washed the plastic, and shredded it. Then they ran it through a homemade device that melts and extrudes it into a long, spaghetti-like string of plastic. Their process is open-source and free for everyone to make and use at Thingiverse.com.
The process isn't perfect. Milk jugs are made of high-density polyethylene, or HDPE, which is not ideal for 3D printing. "HDPE is a little more challenging to print with," Pearce says. But the disadvantages are not overwhelming. His group made its own climate-controlled chamber using a dorm-room refrigerator and an off-the-shelf teddy-bear humidifier and had good results. With more experimentation, the results would be even better, he says. "3D printing is where computers were in the 1970s."
The group determined that making their own filament in an insulated RecycleBot used about 1/10th the energy needed to acquire commercial 3D filament. They also calculated that they used less energy than it would take to recycle milk jugs conventionally.
RecycleBots and 3D printers have all kinds of applications, but they would be especially useful in areas where shopping malls are few and far between, Pearce believes. "Three billion people live in rural areas that have lots of plastic junk," he says. "They could use it to make useful consumer goods for themselves. Or imagine people living by a landfill in Brazil, recycling plastic and making useful products or even just 'fair trade filament' to sell. Twenty milk jugs gets you about 1 kilogram of plastic filament, which currently costs $30 to $50 online."
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Pearce's research is described in depth in two articles: "Distributed Recycling of Waste Polymer into RepRap Feedstock,"coauthored with Christian Baechler and Matthew DeVuono of Queen's University and published in the March issue of Rapid Prototyping; and "Distributed Recycling of Post-Consumer Plastic Waste in Rural Areas," coauthored by Jerry Anzalone, Megan Kreiger, Meredith Mulder and Alexandra Glover of Michigan Tech, which will appear in the Proceedings of the Materials Research Society.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Turn trash into cash... and save energyPublic release date: 1-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Marcia Goodrich mlgoodri@mtu.edu 906-487-2343 Michigan Technological University
New process transforms old milk jugs into everything from lab equipment to cell phone cases
Suppose you could replace "Made in China" with "Made in my garage." Suppose also that every time you polished off a jug of two percent, you would be stocking up on raw material to make anything from a cell phone case and golf tees to a toy castle and a garlic press.
And, you could give yourself a gold medal for being a bona fide, recycling, polar-bear-saving rock star.
Michigan Technological University's Joshua Pearce is working on it. His main tool is open-source 3D printing, which he uses to save thousands of dollars by making everything from his lab equipment to his safety razor.
Using free software downloaded from sites like Thingiverse, which now holds over 54,000 open-source designs, 3D printers make all manner of objects by laying down thin layers of plastic in a specific pattern. While high-end printers can cost many thousands of dollars, simpler open-source units run between $250 and $500and can be used to make parts for other 3D printers, driving the cost down ever further.
"One impediment to even more widespread use has been the cost of filament," says Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering. Though vastly less expensive than most manufactured products, the plastic filament that 3D printers transform into useful objects isn't free.
Milk jugs, on the other hand, are a costly nuisance, either to recycle or to bury in a landfill. But if you could turn them into plastic filament, Pearce reasoned, you could solve the disposal problem and drive down the cost of 3D printing even more.
So Pearce and his research group decided to make their own recycling unit, or RecycleBot. They cut the labels off milk jugs, washed the plastic, and shredded it. Then they ran it through a homemade device that melts and extrudes it into a long, spaghetti-like string of plastic. Their process is open-source and free for everyone to make and use at Thingiverse.com.
The process isn't perfect. Milk jugs are made of high-density polyethylene, or HDPE, which is not ideal for 3D printing. "HDPE is a little more challenging to print with," Pearce says. But the disadvantages are not overwhelming. His group made its own climate-controlled chamber using a dorm-room refrigerator and an off-the-shelf teddy-bear humidifier and had good results. With more experimentation, the results would be even better, he says. "3D printing is where computers were in the 1970s."
The group determined that making their own filament in an insulated RecycleBot used about 1/10th the energy needed to acquire commercial 3D filament. They also calculated that they used less energy than it would take to recycle milk jugs conventionally.
RecycleBots and 3D printers have all kinds of applications, but they would be especially useful in areas where shopping malls are few and far between, Pearce believes. "Three billion people live in rural areas that have lots of plastic junk," he says. "They could use it to make useful consumer goods for themselves. Or imagine people living by a landfill in Brazil, recycling plastic and making useful products or even just 'fair trade filament' to sell. Twenty milk jugs gets you about 1 kilogram of plastic filament, which currently costs $30 to $50 online."
###
Pearce's research is described in depth in two articles: "Distributed Recycling of Waste Polymer into RepRap Feedstock,"coauthored with Christian Baechler and Matthew DeVuono of Queen's University and published in the March issue of Rapid Prototyping; and "Distributed Recycling of Post-Consumer Plastic Waste in Rural Areas," coauthored by Jerry Anzalone, Megan Kreiger, Meredith Mulder and Alexandra Glover of Michigan Tech, which will appear in the Proceedings of the Materials Research Society.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
As a bird sings, some neurons in its brain prepare to make the next sounds while others are synchronized with the current notes?a coordination of physical actions and brain activity that is needed to produce complex movements, new research at the University of Chicago shows.
In an article in the current issue of Nature, neuroscientist Daniel Margoliash and colleagues show, for the first time, how the brain is organized to govern skilled performance?a finding that may lead to new ways of understanding human speech production.
The new study shows that birds' physical movements actually are made up of a multitude of smaller actions. "It is amazing that such small units of movements are encoded, and so precisely, at the level of the forebrain," said Margoliash, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy and psychology at UChicago.
"This work provides new insight into how the physics of producing vocal signals are represented in the brain to control vocalizations," said Howard Nusbaum, a professor of psychology at UChicago and an expert on speech.
By decoding the neural representation of communication, Nusbaum explained, the research may shed light on speech problems such as stuttering or aphasia (a disorder following a stroke). And it offers an unusual window into how the brain and body carry out other kinds of complex movement, from throwing a ball to doing a backflip.
"A big question in muscle control is how the motor system organizes the dynamics of movement," said Margoliash. Movements like reaching or grasping are difficult to study because they entail many variables, such as the angles of the shoulder, elbow, wrist and fingers; the forces of many muscles; and how these change over time" he said.
"With all this complexity, it has been difficult to determine which of the many variables that describe movements are the ones that are represented in the brain and used to control movements," he said.
It's difficult to find a natural framework with which to analyze the activity of single neurons. The bird study provided us a perfect opportunity," Margoliash said. Margoliash is a pioneer in the study of brain function in birds, with studies that include how learning occurs when a bird sleeps and recalls singing a song.
For the current study, he worked with Ana Amador, a post-doctoral researcher at UChicago, and University of Buenos Aires scholars Yonatan Sanz Perl and Gabriel Mindlin. The four are co-authors of the Naturepaper "Elementary Gesture Dynamics are Encoded by Song Premotor Cortical Neurons."
For the study, the team studied zebra finches while the birds sang and while they slept (when songs were broadcast through a speaker). Researchers recorded the activity of single neurons through tiny wires connected to the birds' brains.
Mindlin, professor of physics at the University of Buenos Aires, and his students have created a mathematical model of the mechanics of the movement of the syrinx, the avian vocal organ. The team used that information to track the connections between brain responses and the physical actions needed to produce a song.
They reduced the description of a song to only two variables?the pressure pushing air through the syrinx and the tension of the vibrating membranes of the syrinx that are needed to produce the song. They also compared the timing predicted by the model with the timing of responses of the neurons in the bird's "song system."
The study revealed how activity at higher levels of the brain tracks basic motor functions. The team also avoided a problem scholars previously encountered. In the past, investigators did not know how to relate song with the variables of pressure and tension, and so they had an incomplete understanding of how neurons controlled song, Margoliash said. For example, a previous theory of song control contended that these complex movements are governed by a clock in the brain that runs independent of the song.
By looking at the physiological variables that the bird uses to control singing, the team was able to find something others had not noticed before: the precise timing between the firing of the neuron and the action connected with it.
"One fascinating observation we made really surprised us: that the forebrain neurons fire precisely at the time a sound transition is being produced," Margoliash explained. "But it takes far too much time for the activity in the forebrain to influence the bird's sound box in the periphery," Margoliash continued. The neurons that the team investigated are tracking and encoding particular moments in song but are not directly controlling them. "Lower levels of the brain are controlling the sound output, but the timing of these neurons suggest that they are helping to evaluate feedback from the produced sound."
Similar feedback plays an essential role in coordinating human speech, and in the skilled performance of athletes and musicians. Now, for the first time, there is a mathematical description that matches brain activity for highly skilled behavior, in the beautiful songs of birds.
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University of Chicago: http://www-news.uchicago.edu
Thanks to University of Chicago for this article.
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