Onqn This Week in Time Capsules: DVDs, Radar and Ruminating About Death
AP Most Americans have probably never heard of it, but there is a special federal court that was set up to compensate victims and their families for vaccine injuries. This vaccine court has been functioning since 1988. Its genesis can be found on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention government Web page, National Vaccine Program Office.In summary, in the early 1980 s, there were so many claims of injuries from DTP vaccine which has since been replaced with what officials believe is a safer ve
stanley mugs rsion of the vaccine: DTaP , that vaccine makers told Congress they wouldn t be able to
stanley flasche produce vaccines unless they were protecte
stanley website d from liability. Members of Congress and public health officials worried that unless vaccine makers were somehow protected, they would stop producing vaccines and the public health would be threatened. The result was vaccine court. The concept was put together with help from government, vaccine makers and the public. Victims can receive compensation in a streamlined process. Vaccine makers don t have to bear the cost. Instead, damages are paid by the public through a 75-cent tax we pay on each dose of vaccine administered. All sides in the controversies over vaccine safety would probably agree that vaccine court isn t perfect, but despite some of its flaws, it is generally widely praised. Unfortunately, vaccine court is little-known. It s believed only a small fraction of the total number of claims ever makes its way to this court. In my Cdre Tiny Sensors Powered By Passing Cars Could Monitor Our Aging Roads
A CalTech scientist and her team just announced the development of one of the strongest and lightest materials ever created. It light enough to float like a feather, and so uniquely strong,
stanley vaso it can be crushed and completely recover its shape. And鈥攇et this鈥攊t made of ceramic. The combination of features is made possible by building criss-cross lattices think: Eiffel Tower struts on a microscopic scale. The so-c
stanley cup becher alled nanostructured ceramics then behave like a completely new material
stanley bottles that could be used to build ultralight planes or battery electrodes. The trick to building ceramics that don ;t shatter like dinner plates is making the latticed tubes in the structure thin enough that they can bend and recover. Turns out that is super tiny, about 10 nanometers thick, like the structure picture on the top row below. The structure on the bottom features wider tubes and clearly does not bounce back. You don ;t expect these materials to recover鈥攜ou expect them to be brittle and to fracture, Christopher Spadaccini, an engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, told theMIT Technology Review. And yet they do. Now, the trick will be coming up with a way to construct the material in an economical fashion. As graphene has taught us, wonder materials are only truly wonderful when the world can afford them. [Science via TechReview] Images via Science Science
