Thursday, May 31, 2012

Men s health personal trainer - HEALTH, BEAUTY & FITNESS ...

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Fire Debris May Spread Asbestos | Alpha Risk Management

EMSL Analytical is the nation?s largest asbestos testing lab with over 30 years experience.

If a fire occurs in a building constructed between 1935 and 1970 near your home, you may want to avoid spending time outside in your yard and call an asbestos remediation professional immediately. The deadly asbestos fibers, which may have been released by the fire, can spread in the air and settle on nearby properties, putting you and your neighbors at risk. A recent incident in Scotland highlighted how serious a problem it can be.

A Glasgow neighborhood has been told to limit use of their gardens and lawns after a nearby school went up in flames early next week. Officials suspect that debris from the fire may have contained asbestos fibers, which then settled on the surrounding property.

The clean up is underway, and residents have also been warned against attempting any cleanup on their own as asbestos clean up requires trained professionals. Residents have been urged not to cut their lawns or hedges until the work is complete, because this may spread the asbestos fibers once again.

A spokesman for the city was quoted as saying ?a substantial amount? of work to clear the debris has already been done and will continue between 7am and 10pm each day until it is finished. Furthermore, city officials are monitoring the air in the area and say that asbestos is within acceptable limits.

Asbestos becomes dangerous after building materials begin to break down and the asbestos fibers become airborne. Inhalation of asbestos fibers can lead to the development of respiratory cancers, such as lung cancer and mesothelioma. Symptoms may take up to fifty years to present themselves after the initial exposure to asbestos fibers.

?EMSL Analytical laboratories have been performing high quality asbestos analysis since 1981,? says Ed Cahill, Vice President of EMSL?s Asbestos Division. ?Each of our 31 locations is equipped and accredited to test for the presence of asbestos in the air, soil, water, or bulk building materials.?

For more information regarding EMSL?s asbestos services please call 800-220-3675 or visit www.EMSL.com.

About EMSL Analytical, Inc.????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

EMSL Analytical is a full service testing company providing quality lab services under the same private ownership since 1981. Including the corporate lab facility in Cinnaminson, NJ, EMSL Analytical operates over thirty laboratories nationwide in the US and Canada. We provide analytical services for environmental, indoor air quality (IAQ), industrial hygiene, forensics and materials science, consumer products, food safety, PCR, pharmaceutical, asbestos, lead, and radiological samples. The company has an extensive list of accreditations from leading organizations, as well as state and federal regulating bodies.

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Article source: http://www.environmental-expert.com/news/fire-debris-may-spread-asbestos-297193

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James Rees | Managing Director | Razorthorn Security

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?The first rule of business, Protect your Investment?

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James has worked within the IT industry for over fourteen years, eleven of which specialising in ?Information Security and consultancy, delivering quality advice to some of the largest and most influential organisations in the world.

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A recognised leader in his field he regularly blogs, writes articles and communicates to the business world the importance of information security in the modern business world.

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Since specialising in Information Security, James has helped companies of all sizes become more aware of the increasing dependence that modern society has on its technology, as well as helping those same companies protect their business critical assets through effective management of risks and threat to an organisations well-being in a cost effective, realistic and proactive method.?

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James specialises in ensuring that both business need and secure information technology requirements work in unison to create a solid security infrastructure that effectively protects the business rather than restricting innovation and stifling potential revenue streams.

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His communication and client facing abilities means that he is able to relate and translate information to a technical and non-technical audience at all levels, be the activity communicating risks to board level executives or working alongside an organisations technical department to deliver quality security advice on highly technical infrastructure.

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Extensive personnel and project management experience

James has managed and coordinated teams of up to 50 separate individuals to develop and create working information security solutions to some of the most complex, sensitive and difficult security problems in the industry today.

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With over ten years in Information Security, James has had the privilege of working with a large percentage of the top global companies from a wide range of industry sectors, from complex financial institutions to cutting edge research and development organisations.

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James is a firm believer in ensuring that business need and good information security can co-exist efficiently and effectively and ensures that every project incorporates that belief. ?Thus every project undertaken to date has ensured the maximum business security with minimum impact to business evolution.

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When not engaged by clients James develops cyber warfare strategies, writes articles for a number of leading publications and works on writing his book on cyber warfare.

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Accreditation

PCI DSS Qualified Security Assessor (QSA)
Certified Information Security Manager (CISM)
Experience in ISO27001, PCI DSS compliance advisories and assistance in implementation as well as full audits
Certified in numerous security technologies
Published journalist and regular commentary contributor in the field of Information Security
Part of the development board for the Cyber Security Forum Initiative (CSFI) developing Cyber warfare strategy in collusion with members of the US Military
Active member of the International Cyber Crimes Task Force
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Expertise
PCI DSS advisories
Trusted advisor to multiple organisations
Outsourced information security for organisations of all sizes
Threat and Risk management
Expert in digital intelligence
Information security project management

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The World Of Descriptive Words And Internet Marketing

The World Of Descriptive Words And Internet Marketing

What are the characteristics of your product or service? The word you use to answer this question will become your business emblem. This is a powerful view into your Image and that of your business.

Business Integrity and brand name Integrity, usually fall on to words and Marketing Campaigns, the result should bring customers and followers to your web-page.

The job of a person of words is to elevate the meaning of things to such point that this opinion contributes to human culture and human advances. Because writing means so much to a lot of people, every word that turns in paper whether the paper is palpable or only viewable, as highly or poorly by the audience, who guide their opinion by the circumstances to the information provided on these papers.

Also now a days the truth about products and product performance is crucial to evoke a customer surge after a good descriptive article. The reason I write so much about it, is because the subject is that important, I have to make sure my audience still gets me and my product. Writing is my product, therefore I am that much into this subject.

While I am not totally against automated tasks, I am here to tell you that in itself making an automatic business will not make it more successful than others. The fact is that the business owner still need be connected to the tasks and to customers.

Growing a business is a lot like growing your own food in the back yard, it requires fertilizing and proper soil to grow on. If you want to sell your business idea, you need to make sure that the words (fertilizer) is the proper communication medium, and that the audience (soil) is properly treated before exposure to the words (seeds).

Active descriptions of you and your brand name will evoke an image that future customers can't resist whether for good or bad, always make sure to estimate your posts and articles and make them match up your previously developed idea and image.

Do not forget to thank those who help you elevate your name on the Internet, those words of yours have a lot of tasks to fill in, and there is nothing more charming than someone who knows when to say thank you and what words to use to say it.

Grateful people deserve a field full of lovely flowers and edible plants, a garden filled with marigolds and sunflowers and spicy herbs. Make sure that those who follow you, buy from you and believe in you, get the sense of their worth.

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Wednesday, May 30, 2012

IT is KILLING the business ? Forward Technologies

For IT, deny-by-default is standard operating procedure. Aimed at minimizing risk, this policy has IT?s hand up to prevent end-users from installing any and all nonstandard software. From an IT security perspective, deny-by-default is sound practice. For fostering innovation? Not so much.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the tablet revolution taking place in today?s enterprise. The iPad and Apple?s curated App Store underscore IT?s need to move beyond its deny-by-default history, embrace risk, and evolve its position with respect to the business.

Everything you?ve heard about running IT is wrong. ?IT/business alignment? is a frequently used buzzword (FUB) meant to encapsulate effective IT strategy. But for the most part, this FUB, if you?re of the acronym persuasion, is a poor choice of words and an even worse way of running IT. On a fundamental level, the notion of ?alignment? separates IT from the rest of the business. And if alignment with the business is the best you can aspire to, you?ll soon be toast in this rapidly evolving IT landscape.

As I pointed out (ahem) over a year ago, (Hey Corporate IT, Get Out Of The Stoneage) today?s IT needs to make a double leap to get to the future. Mere alignment isn?t going to do the job.

To succeed going forward, IT must become a successful steward, rather than owner, of technology. It must encourage innovation at every level, right down to the end-user. It must support ?single-actor practices? rather than simply enacting global policies. And to do so, you?re going to need IT/business integration, not alignment. Becoming an integral part of the enterprise, and not just a service provider to it, is essential, because nothing IT does from now on stands on its own. Everything ? people, processes, tools, and technology ? will be wired together to reinforce each other in service of the business mission.

Risk management is the philosophy that has become ITs ball and chain. There is one place where ?alignment? is the right topic, right answer, and right vocabulary, and that?s the choice of priorities.

The most basic fact of business is that there are only three bottom-line priorities: revenue, cost, and risk. No matter what anyone at your company does, in the end it must tie back to making revenue grow, keeping costs under control, or managing risks more effectively.

The way it generally shakes out is this: Small companies, startups, Apple, and ? sad to say ? a small minority of other large companies rank revenue first, with cost coming in second and risk a distant last. Most large enterprises, having fallen into the play-it-safe trap, rank cost first, with cost coming in a close second and, in third place, cost. They?ve given up on their ability to influence revenue, and as they can?t measure whether their risk management efforts have any impact, they tend not to think of risk as a bottom-line value at all.

It?s safe to say that, with the exception of industries in which lives are at stake (health care, nuclear power, offshore drilling), most businesses rank either revenue or cost as their top priority. Risk management just has to be good enough. After all, few actually face the threat of a long vacation in a government-run facility should events go awry.

For IT, the priorities are different, with the most common ranking being Risk, Cost, and What Was That You Said?

In other words, when it comes to bottom-line priorities, IT is misaligned. This isn?t to say that risk doesn?t matter. It?s to say that IT needs to recognize that risk management isn?t the top corporate priority and stop acting as if achieving perfect prevention supersedes all other matters.

For example: In front of nearly every employee is more computing power than existed in the world at the end of WWII. Here?s what most IT security professionals consider best practice to be: Use it to access a server in the data center that emulates the computing power sitting in front of the user.

Why is that? Because it?s less risky because we can control what happens in the data center. If an end-user identifies an application that can help streamline operations (cost reduction) or take care of customers better so they?ll buy more from the company (revenue enhancement)? The operative phrase is ?deny by default.? It means, as if it weren?t blindingly obvious, that allowing end-users to install anything that runs on the powerful computing device that sits in front of them is just too risky because of all the bad things that can happen.

It?s a persuasive argument, because after all, if you stop all bad things from happening, don?t you get what?s left? The good things, that is?

It?s an argument that holds up to at least 3 seconds of close scrutiny, after which it falls completely apart. Because it rests on a faulty assumption: That good things can happen without taking risks to make them happen. And they can?t.

Which brings us to the iPad, and even more, Apple?s App Store. Instead of talking about whether end-users should be allowed to install whatever they think will be useful on their PCs, let?s talk about whether they should be able to install whatever they think will be useful on their iPads. With the exception of a small handful of technologically sophisticated wise guys, we?re now talking about employees finding useful-sounding applications in the App Store and clicking on them so they automagically install.

The reason for deny-by-default is that some PC applications are dangerous. Without intending to, employees might accidentally install what looks like a perfectly innocuous piece of software but in reality is serious malware.

Say what you want about the opaque decision process for what can and can?t be sold in the App Store. The bottom line is that Apple actually screens each application before it can be sold through the store. That being the case, does deny-by-default still make sense?

Not at all. Yes, Apple?s determination to limit its customers to what it sells in its App Store is a level of paternalistic control many of us find dislikable. From an IT risk management perspective, though, it?s more than good enough to stand deny-by-default on its head: Compared to the average cost of an app (10 bucks) and the risk that it?s actually something nefarious (negligible), the opportunity represented by employees taking the initiative to find innovative ways to improve how things get done is, in the aggregate, immense.

When deny-by-default is the policy, the response to any request that leads to someone outside of IT using technology to innovate is, ?Here?s why you can?t.? In the new IT, the response has to be, ?Here?s how you can.?

In the case of tablets, there?s no reason the future can?t be right now.

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Column: Winning's grand, entertaining is enough - KCBD ...

By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Columnist

CHICAGO (AP) - The Cubs skulked back into town with their tails between their legs and plenty to answer for.

Then Monday dawned hot and hazy and by mid-afternoon, the sun was shining, the cold beer was flowing, the wind was blowing out and a fleet of baseballs hitched a ride on the jetstream over the walls at Wrigley Field. By the time the accounting was done, the Cubs had half of the eight home runs and an 11-7 win over the equally hapless Padres.

Throw in a pre-game flight by the eagle Challenger and a seventh-inning rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" by actor Brian Dennehy - in town starring in the play, "The Iceman Cometh" - and it was entertaining enough to send fans out the door wondering where the party was relocating and exactly what they were so upset about in the first place.

Cubs manager Dale Sveum wasn't about to remind them.

"Let's not kid yourself. You lose 12 in a row, you finally win. It's a big relief," he said afterward

Just don't count on celebrating for long. Even in bad years, the Cubs usually don't swoon until June. This year they couldn't even make it to Memorial Day. At this rate, they could be mathematically eliminated by the Fourth of July.

The last six of the Cubs' dozen straight losses came during a seven-day road trip at NL Central rivals Houston and Pittsburgh, two of the only half-dozen or so teams Chicago actually has a chance against. It was like being told to bring back dinner and spending all night at the bar instead, then returning empty-handed and praying fans hadn't changed the locks on the gates at Wrigley Field.

"Patience is something a lot of fans don't have," Sveum had said Sunday in Pittsburgh.

Yet he marveled the way Cubs fans had stuck by his team thus far.

"We all understand -- I'm a huge football fan and I don't understand the Oakland Raiders losing every game. That's the way it is."

In Chicago, maybe.

Even so, Theo Epstein wasn't inclined to press his luck. His title with the Cubs is president of baseball operations, but Chicagoans think of Epstein as the boy genius-general manager who ended the Red Sox' decades-long World Series drought and was brought to town to repeat the trick here. Never mind that he preached patience upon his arrival last October and despite his best efforts, still has only two everyday ballplayers - Starlin Castro and David DeJesus - who could start for most clubs, a barely adequate rotation and a mess in the bullpen.

Even Epstein made it sound like he didn't sign on for this.

"I think we're clearly better than this ... on both fronts, short- and long-term, there's work to do," he said at a hastily arranged news conference.

Unfortunately, though beyond "start scrapping and keep grinding for pride," Epstein was short on specifics on how to improve things over the short term.

"Long term," he added, not much more optimistic, "it underscores the magnitude of the job here and sort of how far we need to go to get where we want to be."

At a century and still counting, Cub fans are either the dopiest of most patient bunch in sports. And over the course of all that losing, they've learned to savor the distractions that are often more interesting than anything the team has been able to cobble together on the field. That's why they happily blame black cats, real goats and imaginary scapegoats like Steve Bartman for the ballclub's unending run of futility.

Winning is great, but in these parts entertaining is still good enough.

Last week's brouhaha was over whether Joe Ricketts, the conservative patriarch of TD Ameritrade and the family that owns the Cubs, was really planning to finance a nasty political attack campaign against President Barack Obama - and whether that would make it harder for the Cubs to gain concessions to modify Wrigley Field from the city's staunchly Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the city council.

The week before that, it was the nostalgia kicked up by the retirement of one-time pitching phenom Kerry Wood and an essay in The Wall Street Journal calling for the destruction of Wrigley Field, suggesting the aging shrine was actually the reason for all that losing:

"Destroy it. Annihilate it. Collapse it with the sort of charges that put the Sands Hotel out of its misery in Vegas. Implosion or explosion, get rid of it. That pile of quaintness has to go. ... When a house is haunted, you don't put in a new scoreboard, add ivy, get better food or bigger beers_you move!"

Sounding more like a fan than the Cubs left-fielder, Alfonso Soriano considered the option for the briefest of moments.

"Leave this place? No, never," he said after going 3 for 4 with a homer and three RBIs. "You saw how much it was jumping when we got it going. Let's see what can happen now. We just had some tough moments before."

Which is, give or take a few years, is how the Cubs still refer to the last century.

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Do You Worry What Your Friends Think About Your Home Business? Is Facebook a Scam?

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4 Essentials of Online Paid Surveys ~ Health & Wellness Approach

If you're fascinated by creating cash through paid on-line surveys, the primary issue you'd like higher to aim to do and do is organize yourself at intervals the correct approach. Of course, there are many sites where you will notice enough facilitate to urge started, however you will not go most with this work unless you acknowledge the only thanks to induce organized properly. If you would like this career, consequent are tips to assist you turn out the foremost of this chance.

1. As mentioned, you initially ought to be compelled to be compelled to induce organized. conceive to established a separate email to receive finally finishes up in do legitimate paid surveys. it's a sensible conceive to own a fervent email for on-line surveys as a results of you will be receiving many emails and you actually don't ought to be compelled to miss any of them. fitting place a replacement email account is additionally advisable as a results of it helps you manage and monitor paid surveys throughout how higher approach.

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The fact of the matter is that there are many sorts of surveys offered on-line merely} merely will take to earn free money. kind of those surveys are lengthy and need you to answer reasonably queries, whereas completely fully completely different corporations don't would really like you to undertake and do and do variant and permit you to urge paid to work out in. just guarantee you are doing all of your analysis and prefer a reputable internet internet internet web site. Once you manage to hunt out a legitimate internet internet internet web site, you'd like higher to rearrange yourself to stay creating cash through on-line surveys. And to create sure you consistently build wise cash, it is not a nasty conceive to subscribe for one or two of of fine paid survey sites, as this could assist you to stay receiving valuable leads.

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Monday, May 28, 2012

5 Outdoor Decorating Tips | Estimulacion Temprana 2010 Home ...

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Graphene-control cutting using an atomic force microscope-based nanorobot

Graphene-control cutting using an atomic force microscope-based nanorobot [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 27-May-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: LIU Lianqing
lqliu@sia.cn
Science in China Press

Graphene, a stable two-dimensional structure, has attracted tremendous worldwide attention in recent years because of its unique electronic, physical and mechanical properties as well as its wide range of applications. It has been proven experimentally that the electrical properties of graphene are strongly related to its size, geometry, and edge structure. Therefore, controlling graphene to desired edge structures and shapes is required for its practical application. To date, researchers have explored many graphene patterning methods, such as a catalytic cutting [1-4], SPM(Scanning Probe Microscopy)-based electric field tailoring [5-7], energy beam cutting [8-10] and photocatalytic patterning techniques [11]. The current methods can tailor graphene, however, lack of real-time sensor feedback during patterning and cutting results in an open-loop manufacturing process. This greatly limits the cutting precision of graphene and reduces the efficiency of device manufacture. Therefore, a closed-loop fabrication method using interaction forces as real-time feedback is needed to tailor graphene into desired edge structures and shapes in a controllable manner.

Professor LIU Lianqing from the State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences and Professor XI Ning from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University undertook the background research to overcome this challenge. Their work, entitled "Graphene Control Cutting Using an Atomic Force Microscope Based NanoRobot", was published in SCIENTIA SINICA Physica, Mechanica & Astronomica. 2012, Vol 42(4). They investigated controlled cutting methods of graphene based on nanoscale force feedback by the introduction of robot perception, drivers and behavior coupled with an atomic force microscope. They found that the cutting forces were related to the cutting direction of the graphene lattice because of the asymmetry of the crystal structure of graphene. This discovery is expected to allow nanoscale forces to be used as real-time feedback to establish a closed-loop mechanism to cut graphene with precise control.

Atomic force microscopy is only a nanoscale observation tool, and its main shortcomings are poor location ability, lack of real-time feedback, and low efficiency. These challenges are solved by the introduction of robotics that is efficient at nanomanipulation. In this article, the relationship between lattice cutting directions and nanocutting forces were studied systematically by rotating the sample under the same cutting conditions (load, cutting velocity, tip, and effective cutting surface of the tip). The experimental results show that the cutting force is related to the lattice cutting direction: the cutting forces vary with cutting direction in the same period with a difference of up to around 209.36 nN.

This article is the first to show that cutting forces vary with lattice cutting directions, which lays an experimental foundation to build a closed-loop fabrication strategy using real-time force as a sensor feedback to control the cutting direction with lattice precision. Combined with existing parallel multi-tip technology, the technique developed in this work will make it possible to fabricate large-scale graphene-based nanodevices at low cost with high efficiency. This research was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2009AA03Z316), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project Nos. 60904095, 51050110445, and 61175103), and the CAS/SAFEA (Chinese Academy of Sciences/State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs) International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams.

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See the article: Zhang Y, Liu L Q, Xi N, et al. Graphene Control Cutting Using an Atomic Force Microscope Based NanoRobot (In Chinese). SCIENTIA SINICA Physica, Mechanica & Astronomica, 2012, 42(4):358

References

[1] Datta, S S.et al. Crystallographic Etching of Few-Layer Graphene. Nano Lett, 8, 1912-1915 (2008).

[2] Ci, L. et al. Controlled nanocutting of graphene. Nano Research, 1, 116-122 (2008).

[3] Campos, L. C. et al. Anisotropic Etching and Nanoribbon Formation in Single-Layer Graphene. Nano Lett, 9, 2600-2604 (2009).

[4] Gao, L. et al. Crystallographic Tailoring of Graphene by Nonmetal SiOx Nanoparticles. J. Am. Chem. Soc, 131, 13934-13936 (2009).

[5] Giesbers, A. J. M. et al. Nanolithography and manipulation of graphene using an atomic force microscope. Sol. St. Comm, 147, 366-369 (2008).

[6] Tapaszto, L., Dobrik, G., Lambin, P. & Biro, L. P. Tailoring the atomic structure of graphene nanoribbons by scanning tunnelling microscope lithography. Nat Nano, 3, 397-401 (2008).

[7] Weng, L., Zhang, L.Y., Chen, Y. P. & Rokhinson L.P. et al. Atomic force microscope local oxidation nanolithography of graphene. Appl. Phys. Lett, 93, 093107 (2008)

[8] Fischbein, M. D. & Drndic, M. Electron beam nanosculpting of suspended graphene sheets. Appl. Phys. Lett, 93, 113107 (2008).

[9] Bell, D. C., Lemme, M. C., Stern, L. A. & Marcus, C. M. Precision cutting and patterning of graphene with helium ions. Nanotechnology, 20, 455301(2009).

[10] Lemme, M. C., Bell, D. C., Williams, J. R. Etching of Graphene Devices with a Helium Ion Beam. ACS Nano, 3, 2674-2676(2009).

[11] Zhang, L.M., et al. Photocatalytic Patterning and Modification of Graphene. J. Am. Chem.Soc. 133, 2706-2713(2011)



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Graphene-control cutting using an atomic force microscope-based nanorobot [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 27-May-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: LIU Lianqing
lqliu@sia.cn
Science in China Press

Graphene, a stable two-dimensional structure, has attracted tremendous worldwide attention in recent years because of its unique electronic, physical and mechanical properties as well as its wide range of applications. It has been proven experimentally that the electrical properties of graphene are strongly related to its size, geometry, and edge structure. Therefore, controlling graphene to desired edge structures and shapes is required for its practical application. To date, researchers have explored many graphene patterning methods, such as a catalytic cutting [1-4], SPM(Scanning Probe Microscopy)-based electric field tailoring [5-7], energy beam cutting [8-10] and photocatalytic patterning techniques [11]. The current methods can tailor graphene, however, lack of real-time sensor feedback during patterning and cutting results in an open-loop manufacturing process. This greatly limits the cutting precision of graphene and reduces the efficiency of device manufacture. Therefore, a closed-loop fabrication method using interaction forces as real-time feedback is needed to tailor graphene into desired edge structures and shapes in a controllable manner.

Professor LIU Lianqing from the State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences and Professor XI Ning from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University undertook the background research to overcome this challenge. Their work, entitled "Graphene Control Cutting Using an Atomic Force Microscope Based NanoRobot", was published in SCIENTIA SINICA Physica, Mechanica & Astronomica. 2012, Vol 42(4). They investigated controlled cutting methods of graphene based on nanoscale force feedback by the introduction of robot perception, drivers and behavior coupled with an atomic force microscope. They found that the cutting forces were related to the cutting direction of the graphene lattice because of the asymmetry of the crystal structure of graphene. This discovery is expected to allow nanoscale forces to be used as real-time feedback to establish a closed-loop mechanism to cut graphene with precise control.

Atomic force microscopy is only a nanoscale observation tool, and its main shortcomings are poor location ability, lack of real-time feedback, and low efficiency. These challenges are solved by the introduction of robotics that is efficient at nanomanipulation. In this article, the relationship between lattice cutting directions and nanocutting forces were studied systematically by rotating the sample under the same cutting conditions (load, cutting velocity, tip, and effective cutting surface of the tip). The experimental results show that the cutting force is related to the lattice cutting direction: the cutting forces vary with cutting direction in the same period with a difference of up to around 209.36 nN.

This article is the first to show that cutting forces vary with lattice cutting directions, which lays an experimental foundation to build a closed-loop fabrication strategy using real-time force as a sensor feedback to control the cutting direction with lattice precision. Combined with existing parallel multi-tip technology, the technique developed in this work will make it possible to fabricate large-scale graphene-based nanodevices at low cost with high efficiency. This research was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2009AA03Z316), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project Nos. 60904095, 51050110445, and 61175103), and the CAS/SAFEA (Chinese Academy of Sciences/State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs) International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams.

###

See the article: Zhang Y, Liu L Q, Xi N, et al. Graphene Control Cutting Using an Atomic Force Microscope Based NanoRobot (In Chinese). SCIENTIA SINICA Physica, Mechanica & Astronomica, 2012, 42(4):358

References

[1] Datta, S S.et al. Crystallographic Etching of Few-Layer Graphene. Nano Lett, 8, 1912-1915 (2008).

[2] Ci, L. et al. Controlled nanocutting of graphene. Nano Research, 1, 116-122 (2008).

[3] Campos, L. C. et al. Anisotropic Etching and Nanoribbon Formation in Single-Layer Graphene. Nano Lett, 9, 2600-2604 (2009).

[4] Gao, L. et al. Crystallographic Tailoring of Graphene by Nonmetal SiOx Nanoparticles. J. Am. Chem. Soc, 131, 13934-13936 (2009).

[5] Giesbers, A. J. M. et al. Nanolithography and manipulation of graphene using an atomic force microscope. Sol. St. Comm, 147, 366-369 (2008).

[6] Tapaszto, L., Dobrik, G., Lambin, P. & Biro, L. P. Tailoring the atomic structure of graphene nanoribbons by scanning tunnelling microscope lithography. Nat Nano, 3, 397-401 (2008).

[7] Weng, L., Zhang, L.Y., Chen, Y. P. & Rokhinson L.P. et al. Atomic force microscope local oxidation nanolithography of graphene. Appl. Phys. Lett, 93, 093107 (2008)

[8] Fischbein, M. D. & Drndic, M. Electron beam nanosculpting of suspended graphene sheets. Appl. Phys. Lett, 93, 113107 (2008).

[9] Bell, D. C., Lemme, M. C., Stern, L. A. & Marcus, C. M. Precision cutting and patterning of graphene with helium ions. Nanotechnology, 20, 455301(2009).

[10] Lemme, M. C., Bell, D. C., Williams, J. R. Etching of Graphene Devices with a Helium Ion Beam. ACS Nano, 3, 2674-2676(2009).

[11] Zhang, L.M., et al. Photocatalytic Patterning and Modification of Graphene. J. Am. Chem.Soc. 133, 2706-2713(2011)



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I hate Web Promotion. I hate it more than you do, and I always have.Web promotion is all about getting links and traffic to sites. You can build one million quality sites but with no proper web promotion, you will never see money coming in.Most web promotion tactics have one thing in common ? trying to rank high in search engines results. In the old fashion days, I loved to submit my sites to hundreds of link directories. It worked like magic until the search engines changed their algorithms.












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2013 Ford Mustang V6 vs. 2013 Hyundai Genesis Coupe Track Test Video

2013 Ford Mustang V6 vs. 2013 Hyundai Genesis Coupe Track Test Video

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Battle of the Refreshed Middleweights?

1st Place: 2013 Hyundai Genesis Coupe Quick, rewarding at speed and strikingly styled, the Genesis Coupe is a lot of car for the money.

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Sunday, May 27, 2012

adidas 2012 Washington Wizards Draft Cap Hook T-Shirt

Item no: 12761141 Price: $21.99

AVAILABILITY:
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Let everyone know who your favorite b-ballers are in the adidas? 2012 Draft Cap Hook t-shirt! This comfy cotton tee features your NBA team's name screenprinted on the front, along with the official NBA logo.

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adidas? Men's Sizing
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Antigua? Men's Sizing
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Banner Men's T-Shirt Sizing
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Chest21 in22 in23 in24 in25 in?
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Colony Sportswear Men's Sizing
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Saturday, May 26, 2012

Space station grabs 'Dragon by the tail'

The robotic arm aboard the International Space Station successfully grabs SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule, marking a new chapter in space exploration. NBC's Mark Barger reports.

By Alan Boyle

The International Space Station's crew reached out today with a robotic arm to grab SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule and brought it in for the orbital outpost's first-ever hookup with a commercial spaceship.

It marks the station's first linkup with a U.S.-made spacecraft since last year's retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet, and potentially opens the way for dozens of commercial cargo shipments. If the long-range plan unfolds as NASA hopes, U.S. astronauts could be shuttled back and forth on the Dragon or similar spacecraft within just a few years.

"Today, this really is the beginning of a new era in commercial spaceflight," said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA's commercial crew and cargo program.?

The hookup comes after Tuesday's successful launch of the Dragon atop a Falcon 9 rocket, and represents the culmination of years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars of spending by NASA and California-based?SpaceX, known more formally as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. The company was founded a decade ago by dot-com billionaire Elon Musk, with aspirations of eventually sending humans to settle on Mars.


Musk said the technologies that were tested today will blaze a trail for those more ambitious trips to come. "This is a crucial step, and having achieved this step, it?makes the things in the future and the ultimate path toward humanity becoming a multiplanet species much, much more likely," he told reporters after the hookup. "The chances of that happening just went up dramatically, so people should be really excited about that."

But first things first: Today's operation marked the first full in-space test of the robotic Dragon spacecraft's procedure for approaching the station, and for that reason, every step along the way was carefully planned out and checked over the course of several hours.?The first steps in the procedure were tested on Thursday, during a series of maneuvers that successfully brought the 14-foot-long, 12-foot-wide, gumdrop-shaped capsule within 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) of the $100 billion space station.

Today, a far more ambitious set of maneuvers brought the Dragon all the way to the station ? but the trip wasn't always easy.

Fixing the glitches
The craft started out by taking up a position 250 meters (820 feet) below the station. From that vantage point, the Dragon was put through a series of maneuvers to test the station-to-spacecraft communication system. The space station's astronauts had the Dragon approach, then retreat, then approach, then hold its position.

After assessing the data, NASA said it wanted to do a double-check on the Dragon's thermal imagers, which are part of the rendezvous sensor system. The spacecraft was commanded to approach to a distance of 200 meters (656 feet), then stop while NASA took stock again. Space agency spokesman Josh Byerly said SpaceX's team made "minor modifications" to the thermal imaging system, just to make sure that it was providing tracking data in line with what other instruments were showing.

The Dragon was on its way to a 30-meter (98-foot) checkpoint when the team at SpaceX's Mission Control in Hawthorne, Calif., ordered the spacecraft to retreat to a distance of 70 meters (230 feet). NASA's Mission Control said the SpaceX team wanted to correct bad laser sensor readings that the Dragon was getting from a stray reflector on the station's Japanese-built Kibo laboratory.?To work around the problem, SpaceX narrowed the field of view for the laser sensor so that it wouldn't pick up light from the offending reflector.

"One of the lasers wasn't working well, so we had to recalibrate the laser and tighten the beam, and then it did work," Musk explained afterward.

Catching a Dragon by the tail
Once the fix was made, Dragon returned to the 30-meter checkpoint and moved in for the final approach.?When the craft reached a distance of 10 meters (33 feet), NASA astronaut Don Pettit used the station's 17-meter-long (60-foot-long) robotic arm to grab hold of the Dragon's grapple attachment at 9:56 a.m. ET.

"It looks like we've got us a Dragon by the tail," Pettit told NASA's Mission Control.

"?Congratulations on a wonderful capture," Mission Control's Megan Behnken replied. "?You've made a lot of folks happy down here, over in Hawthorne and right here in Houston."?

Pettit joked that the operation went so smoothly it felt like a computer simulation.?"This sim went really well," he said. "We're ready to turn it around and do it for real."?

It took another couple of hours to pull in the Dragon and get it fully hooked up to the station's Harmony module. NASA and SpaceX refer to this operation as a "berthing" rather than a "docking," because the Dragon is being passively pulled in rather than powering itself into the docking port.

The completion of berthing at 12:02 p.m. ET put SpaceX in the company of four governmental space ventures?? NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ? that have built vehicles capable of hooking up with the space station.

Musk said that he'd probably have to relax SpaceX's rule against drinking alcohol at its Hawthorne headquarters to accommodate a champagne celebration, but it was clear that the hundreds of employees who gathered to watch the berthing were already on a natural high. They cheered for Musk as he spoke to reporters over a video link???and when he told them, "I love you guys, too," they broke into a chant of "E-lon, E-lon, E-lon!"?

Unloading the cargo
Dragon's hatch is scheduled to be opened early Saturday morning. The station's six astronauts will unload about 1,000 pounds (460 kilograms) of cargo, including food, clothes, batteries and a laptop, plus 15 student-designed experiments. Then about 1,455 pounds (660 kilograms) of Earth-bound cargo?? including personal items from the crew as well as completed experiments and old equipment?? will be loaded up on the Dragon. These payloads don't come anywhere close to the Dragon's capacity (6 tons going up, 3 tons coming down), but they were made part of the mission as non-essential ride-alongs.

On May 31, the capsule will be detached from the station and sent back down toward a Pacific Ocean splashdown and recovery off the coast of Southern California. That part of the operation went off successfully during Dragon's first orbital test mission in December 2010, but this would mark the first-ever return of a commercial spacecraft from the space station. Russia's Soyuz capsule is the only other existing space vehicle capable of returning space station payloads.

A fully successful mission would open the way for commercial space station resupply missions to begin in earnest. SpaceX already has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA for 12 Dragon shipments through 2016. If all goes well, the first flight covered by that contract could lift off in September, said Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager. Another company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., is developing a cargo spacecraft known as Cygnus to take on space station shipments as well, under the terms of a $1.9 billion contract. The Cygnus has yet to be flight-tested, however.

In addition to the cargo contract, SpaceX is one of four companies that is receiving millions of dollars from NASA to produce spaceships capable of carrying astronauts. In SpaceX's case, the Dragon would be modified with a launch escape system, while the other companies ? Blue Origin, the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp.?? are working on other spaceship concepts, ranging from capsules to Sierra Nevada's mini-space plane. The first astronaut flights could take place as early as 2017.

Until that time, NASA will have to depend on the Russians to transport U.S. astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft, at a cost of more than $60 million a seat. SpaceX and other players in the commercial space race say they can meet or beat that price.

The transition to commercial operations for orbital transport is a key part of the Obama administration's plan for future space exploration.

"We?re handing off to the private sector our transportation to the International Space Station so that NASA can focus on what we do best ? exploring even deeper into our solar system, with missions to an asteroid and Mars on the horizon," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said after the Dragon's launch. "We?re committed to ending the outsourcing of work on America?s space program and bringing these jobs back to the United States."?

More about the mission:


Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the?Cosmic Log?community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?or adding?Cosmic Log's Google+ page?to your circle. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

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