University of Calabar Teaching Hospital, UCTH, has quarantined ten persons following the death of a patient in the hospital on Wednesday with symptoms suspected to be Ebola virus.
Dr. Queeneth Kalu, Chairman of Medical Advisory Committee of the hospital who made the revelation on Thursday in Calabar while addressing pressmen said blood samples have been sent to the Ebola Diagnosing Centre in Benin Edo State.
“On Wednesday, 7th October, 2015, we managed a patient who presented with symptoms mimicking viral hemorrhage (Ebola Virus) and have decided to take the necessary measures”.
Dr. Kalu stated that those quarantined are principally nurses who attended to the patient and those who came in contact with him before his death.
‘”The following have been informed: National Centre for Disease Control, Federal Ministry of Health, The Cross River State Government, Calabar Municipality, and the Department of State Security Services, DSS”
She said further information will be provided to the public as soon as the test results of blood samples sent for analysis in received by the hospital.
On September 28, 2015, a rare Total Lunar Eclipse of a Super Full Moon will be visible from most of North America, South America, Europe, West Asia and parts of Africa. Here are 11 facts you should know about this eclipse.
The full Moon of September 27/28 is aSupermoon – the Moon will be closest to the Earth. or at its perigee, as it turns into a full Moon. A rising Super Full Moon can look larger and brighter to spectators on Earth.
Total eclipses of Super Full Moons are rare. According to NASA, they have only occurred 5 times in the 1900s – in 1910,1928, 1946, 1964 and 1982. After the September 27/ 28, 2015 Total Lunar Eclipse, a Supermoon eclipse will not happen again for another 18 years, untilOctober 8, 2033.
2. People in the US Will Get Front Row Seats
People in eastern and central areas of the United States and Canada will have some of the best views of the Total Lunar Eclipse on the night of September 27, 2015, weather permitting. Here, the eclipse will begin after moonrise and finish around midnight (00:00 on September 28).
Those on the West Coast will miss the beginning stages of the eclipse because they will happen before moonrise.
It will be the last Total Lunar Eclipse visible from mainland USA until January 31, 2018.
While North and South Americans will be able to see the eclipse after sunset on September 27, 2015, people in Africa, Europe and Middle East can view it during the early hours of September 28, before the Sun rises.
Lunar eclipses can be spectacular and they are easy to see with the naked eye. Unlike solar eclipses, which require protective eye wear, a lunar eclipse can be viewed without specialized eye wear.
Solar and lunar eclipses come in pairs – a lunar eclipse always takes place two weeks before or after a solar eclipse. The September 27/ 28, 2015 Total Lunar Eclipse will be preceded by a Partial Solar Eclipse onSeptember 13, 2015.
6. It's Part of a Lunar Tetrad
The September 28, 2015 Total Lunar Eclipse is the fourth and final eclipse in a series of four total lunar eclipses called the lunar tetrad. The first three eclipses of the tetrad took place on April 15, 2014, October 8, 2014 and onApril 4, 2015.
Notice something interesting about the dates? Each of the eclipses in the tetrad occurs about 6 months apart and have 5 full Moons between them!
Lunar tetrads can be rare in some centuries and can occur frequently in others. The 21st century will have 8 lunar tetrads, the maximum number of lunar tetrads that can occur in a century. The last time this happened was in the 9th century!
The next lunar tetrad of the 21st century will start with the April 25, 2032 Total Lunar Eclipse.
In recent years, the term Blood Moon has been frequently used to refer to total lunar eclipses. Some sources suggest that the term stems from the Bible. Christian pastors Mark Blitz and John Hagee claim that the eclipses of the 2014-2015 lunar tetrad fulfill a Biblical prophecy of forthcoming difficult and trying times.
Astronomers do not use Blood Moon as a scientific term. However, it is possible that the term came to describe total lunar eclipses because of the reddish color the eclipsed Moon takes on during totality. This happens because of Rayleigh scattering, the same mechanism that causes colorful sunrises and sunsets.
The views of pastors Blitz and Hagee gathered attention in early 2014, because the eclipses in the tetrad coincide with important Jewish festivals. The eclipses in April 2014and April 2015 occured at the same time asPassover, while the October 2014 andSeptember 2015 eclipses occur during theFeast of Tabernacles. Some people took this coincidence as a sign of the end of times.
Others have dismissed any apocalyptic significance of the tetrad. Data of past eclipses show that at least eight lunar tetrads have coincided with Jewish holidays since the First Century.
The Jewish Calendar is a lunar calendar and Passover always occurs around a full Moon. Since a total lunar eclipse can only occur on a full Moon night, it is very likely that an eclipse will take place on or near Passover.
In conclusion, scientists and astronomers have found no reason to believe that the current lunar tetrad is a sign of the world to end. Even mainstream religious organizations have debunked this claim, so don't start hoarding end-of-the-world supplies just yet!
The Lunar Eclipse on September 27/ 28, 2015 will occur during the Northern Hemisphere's first fall (autumn) full Moon. Called the Harvest Moon in many northern cultures, it is the full Moon closest to theSeptember Equinox, and is astronomically significant.
On average the Moon rises about 50 minutes later every successive day in a lunar month – the time period between two full Moons or two new Moons. In New York, for example, a new Moon will rise at 6:50 am on September 13. On September 14, the Moon will rise almost 60 minutes later at 7:46 am.
Around the Northern Hemisphere's Harvest Moon, this time difference between two successive moonrises decreases to about 30-40 minutes for a few days. In New York, a full Moon will rise at 6:36 pm (18:36) on September 27 and on September 28, the Moon will rise 40 minutes later at 7:16 pm (19:16).
This curious phenomenon, which is also sometimes called the Harvest Moon Effect occurs because of the low angle that the Moon's path around the Earth makes with the horizon during the northern fall (autumn) months. This effect reverses during the Northern Hemisphere spring. The large angle that the lunar orbit makes with the horizon ensures that the moon rises more than 50 minutes later every day around the northern Spring Equinox.
Because seasons in the Southern Hemisphere are opposite to the seasons in the North, the Harvest Moon Effect occurs around the southern Fall (Autumn) Equinox in March.
Like solar eclipses, lunar eclipses tend to occur in 18 year long cycles called Saros cycles. Lunar eclipses separated by a Saros cycle share similar features, including time of the year and the distance of the Moon from the Earth. Eclipses that are separated by a Saros cycle are included in a Saros series.
The September 27/ 28, 2015 Lunar Eclipse belongs to Saros Series 137. It is the 28th eclipse and the last total lunar eclipse in a series of 81 lunar eclipses. The series began with a penumbral eclipse on December 17, 1564 and will end with another penumbral eclipse on April 20, 2953.
11. It's the Last Eclipse of 2015
2015 has 4 eclipses, the minimum number of eclipses that can happen in a calendar year. The September 28 Total Lunar Eclipse marks the last eclipse of the year. It will be preceded by a partial solar eclipse on September 13, 2015.
In the course of billions of years continents break up, drift apart, and are pushed back together again. The cores of continents are, however, geologically extremely stable and have survived up to 3.8 billions of years. These cores that are called cratons are the oldest known geological features of our planet. It was assumed that the cratons are stable because of their especially solid structure due to relatively low temperatures compared to the surrounding mantle. A team of German-American scientists now discovered that these cratons that were assumed to be "as solid as a rock" are not that solid after all. The team leading by Dr. Mikhail Kaban from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences now discovered that the craton below the North American continent is extremely deformed: its root is shifted relative to the center of the craton by 850 kilometers towards the west-southwest.
This fact is in contrast to the prevailing assumptions that these continental roots did not undergo substantial changes after their formation 2.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. The study that appears in the latest online publication of "Nature Geoscience" contradicts this traditional view. "We combined and analyzed several data sets from Earth's gravity field, topography, seismology, and crustal structure and constructed a three dimensional density model of the composition of the lithosphere below North America," explains GFZ scientist Mikhail Kaban. "It became apparent that the lower part of the cratonic root was shifted by about 850 kilometers."
What caused the deformation of the stable and solid craton? A model of the flows in Earth's mantle below North America, developed by the scientists, reveals that the mantle material below 200 kilometers flows westward at a velocity of about 4 millimeters per year. This is in concordance with the movement of the tectonic plate. Due to the basal drag of this flow the lower part of the cratonic lithosphere is shifted. "This indicates that the craton is not as solid and as insensitive to the mantle flow as was previously assumed," Kaban completes. There is far more mechanical, chemical, and thermal interaction between the craton of billions of years in age and its surrounding in the upper mantle of Earth than previously thought.
Scientists at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt have described the world’s oldest fossil sea turtle known to date. The fossilized reptile is at least 120 million years old – which makes it about 25 million years older than the previously known oldest specimen. The almost completely preserved skeleton from the Cretaceous, with a length of nearly 2 meters, shows all of the characteristic traits of modern marine turtles. The study was published today in the scientific journal “PaleoBios.”
“Santanachelys gaffneyi is the oldest known sea turtle” – this sentence from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no longer up to date. “We described a fossil sea turtle from Colombia that is about 25 million years older,” rejoices Dr. Edwin Cadena, a scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at the Senckenberg Research Institute. Cadena made the unusual discovery together with his colleague from the US, J. Parham of California State University, Fullerton.
“The turtle described by us as Desmatochelys padillai sp. originates from Cretaceous sediments and is at least 120 million years old,” says Cadena. Sea turtles descended from terrestrial and freshwater turtles that arose approximately 230 million years ago. During the Cretaceous period, they split into land and sea dwellers. Fossil evidence from this time period is very sparse, however, and the exact time of the split is difficult to verify. “This lends a special importance to every fossil discovery that can contribute to clarifying the phylogeny of the sea turtles,” explains the turtle expert from Columbia.
The fossilized turtle shells and bones come from two sites near the community of Villa de Leyva in Colombia. The fossilized remains of the ancient reptiles were discovered and collected by hobby paleontologist Mary Luz Parra and her brothers Juan and Freddy Parra in the year 2007. Since then, they have been stored in the collections of the “Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas” in Villa Leyva and the “University of California Museum of Paleontology.”
Cadena and his colleague examined the almost complete skeleton, four additional skulls and two partially preserved shells, and they placed the fossils in the turtle group Chelonioidea, based on various morphological characteristics. Turtles in this group dwell in tropical and subtropical oceans; among their representatives are the modern Hawksbill Turtle and the Green Sea Turtle of turtle soup fame.
“Based on the animals‘ morphology and the sediments they were found in, we are certain that we are indeed dealing with the oldest known fossil sea turtle,” adds Cadena in summary.
A new study documents injuries inflicted in life and death to a large tyrannosaurine dinosaur. The paper shows that the skull of a genus of tyrannosaur called Daspletosaurus suffered numerous injuries during life, at least some of which were likely inflicted by another Daspletosaurus. It was also bitten after death in an apparent event of scavenging by another tyrannosaur. Thus there's evidence of combat between two large carnivores as well as one feeding on another after death.
Daspletosaurus was a large carnivore that lived in Canada and was only a little smaller than its more famous cousin Tyrannosaurus. Like other tyrannosaurs it was most likely both an active predator and scavenger. The individual in question, from Alberta Canada, was not fully grown and would be considered a 'sub-adult' in dinosaur terms (approximately equivalent to an older teenager in human terms). It would have been just under 6 m long and around 500 kg when it died.
Researchers found numerous injuries on the skull that occurred during life. Although not all of them can be attributed to bites, several are close in shape to the teeth of tyrannosaurs. In particular one bite to the back of the head had broken off part of the skull and left a circular tooth-shaped puncture though the bone. The fact that alterations to the bone's surface indicate healing means that these injuries were not fatal and the animal lived for some time after they were inflicted.
Lead author Dr David Hone from Queen Mary, University of London said "This animal clearly had a tough life suffering numerous injuries across the head including some that must have been quite nasty. The most likely candidate to have done this is another member of the same species, suggesting some serious fights between these animals during their lives."
There is no evidence that the animal died at the hands (or mouth) of another tyrannosaur. However, the preservation of the skull and other bones, and damage to the jaw bones show that after the specimen began to decay, a large tyrannosaur (possibly of the same species) bit into the animal and presumably ate at least part of it.
Combat between large carnivorous dinosaurs is already known and there is already evidence for cannibalism in various groups, including tyrannosaurs. This is however an apparently unique record with evidence of both pre- and post-mortem injuries to a single individual.
Certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars, are more diverse than previously thought, a University of Arizona-led team of astronomers has discovered. The results, reported in two papers published in the Astrophysical Journal, have implications for big cosmological questions, such as how fast the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang.
Most importantly, the findings hint at the possibility that the acceleration of the expansion of the universe might not be quite as fast as textbooks say.
The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists have used them as cosmic "beacons" to plumb the depths of the universe, actually fall into different populations. The findings are analogous to sampling a selection of 100-watt light bulbs at the hardware store and discovering that they vary in brightness.
"We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances -- and thus when the universe was younger," said Milne, an associate astronomer with the UA's Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. "There are different populations out there, and they have not been recognized. The big assumption has been that as you go from near to far, type Ia supernovae are the same. That doesn't appear to be the case."
The discovery casts new light on the currently accepted view of the universe expanding at a faster and faster rate, pulled apart by a poorly understood force called dark energy. This view is based on observations that resulted in the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to three scientists, including UA alumnus Brian P. Schmidt.
The Nobel laureates discovered independently that many supernovae appeared fainter than predicted because they had moved farther away from Earth than they should have done if the universe expanded at the same rate. This indicated that the rate at which stars and galaxies move away from each other is increasing; in other words, something has been pushing the universe apart faster and faster.
"The idea behind this reasoning," Milne explained, "is that type Ia supernovae happen to be the same brightness -- they all end up pretty similar when they explode. Once people knew why, they started using them as mileposts for the far side of the universe.
"The faraway supernovae should be like the ones nearby because they look like them, but because they're fainter than expected, it led people to conclude they're farther away than expected, and this in turn has led to the conclusion that the universe is expanding faster than it did in the past."
Milne and his co-authors -- Ryan J. Foley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Peter J. Brown at Texas A&M University and Gautham Narayan of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, or NOAO, in Tucson -- observed a large sample of type Ia supernovae in ultraviolet and visible light. For their study, they combined observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope with those made by NASA's Swift satellite.
The data collected with Swift were crucial because the differences between the populations -- slight shifts toward the red or the blue spectrum -- are subtle in visible light, which had been used to detect type Ia supernovae previously, but became obvious only through Swift's dedicated follow-up observations in the ultraviolet.
"These are great results," said Neil Gehrels, principal investigator of the Swift satellite, who co-authored the first paper. "I am delighted that Swift has provided such important observations, which have been made toward a science goal that is completely independent of the primary mission. It demonstrates the flexibility of our satellite to respond to new phenomena swiftly."
"The realization that there were two groups of type Ia supernovae started with Swift data," Milne said. "Then we went through other datasets to see if we see the same. And we found the trend to be present in all the other datasets.
"As you're going back in time, we see a change in the supernovae population," he added. "The explosion has something different about it, something that doesn't jump out at you when you look at it in optical light, but we see it in the ultraviolet.
"Since nobody realized that before, all these supernovae were thrown in the same barrel. But if you were to look at 10 of them nearby, those 10 are going to be redder on average than a sample of 10 faraway supernovae."
The authors conclude that some of the reported acceleration of the universe can be explained by color differences between the two groups of supernovae, leaving less acceleration than initially reported. This would, in turn, require less dark energy than currently assumed.
"We're proposing that our data suggest there might be less dark energy than textbook knowledge, but we can't put a number on it," Milne said. "Until our paper, the two populations of supernovae were treated as the same population. To get that final answer, you need to do all that work again, separately for the red and for the blue population."
The authors pointed out that more data have to be collected before scientists can understand the impact on current measures of dark energy. Scientists and instruments in Arizona will play important roles in these studies, according to Milne. These include projects led by NOAO; the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, whose primary mirror was produced at the UA; and a camera built by the UA's Imaging Technology Lab for the Super-LOTIS telescope on Kitt Peak southwest of Tucson. Super-LOTIS is a robotic telescope that will use the new camera to follow up on gamma-ray bursts -- the "muzzle flash" of a supernova -- detected by Swift.
Most of the laws of nature treat particles and antiparticles equally, but stars and planets are made of particles, or matter, and not antiparticles, or antimatter. That asymmetry, which favors matter to a very small degree, has puzzled scientists for many years.
New research by UCLA physicists, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, offers a possible solution to the mystery of the origin of matter in the universe.
Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College, and colleagues propose that the matter-antimatter asymmetry could be related to the Higgs boson particle, which was the subject of prominent news coverage when it was discovered at Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider in 2012.
Specifically, the UCLA researchers write, the asymmetry may have been produced as a result of the motion of the Higgs field, which is associated with the Higgs boson, and which could have made the masses of particles and antiparticles in the universe temporarily unequal, allowing for a small excess of matter particles over antiparticles.
If a particle and an antiparticle meet, they disappear by emitting two photons or a pair of some other particles. In the "primordial soup" that existed after the Big Bang, there were almost equal amounts of particles of antiparticles, except for a tiny asymmetry: one particle per 10 billion. As the universe cooled, the particles and antiparticles annihilated each other in equal numbers, and only a tiny number of particles remained; this tiny amount is all the stars and planets, and gas in today's universe, said Kusenko, who is also a senior scientist with the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.
The research also is highlighted by Physical Review Letters in a commentary in the current issue.
The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson particle was hailed as one of the great scientific accomplishments of recent decades. The Higgs boson was first postulated some 50 years ago as a crucial element of the modern theory of the forces of nature, and is, physicists say, what gives everything in the universe mass. Physicists at the LHC measured the particle's mass and found its value to be peculiar; it is consistent with the possibility that the Higgs field in the first moments of the Big Bang was much larger than its "equilibrium value" observed today.
The Higgs field "had to descend to the equilibrium, in a process of 'Higgs relaxation,'" said Kusenko, the lead author of the UCLA research.
Two of Kusenko's graduate students, Louis Yang of UCLA and Lauren Pearce of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, were co-authors of the study. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0009937), the World Premier International Research Center Initiative in Japan and the National Science Foundation (PHYS-1066293).
Dr. Queeneth Kalu, Chairman of Medical Advisory Committee of the hospital who made the revelation on Thursday in Calabar while addressing pressmen said blood samples have been sent to the Ebola Diagnosing Centre in Benin Edo State.
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