Everyone blames the oil. We should not ship oil by train.
It is not the oil. Rail lines ship a lot more hazardous material than just oil. The train could have been filled with gravel or lumber, chemicals, ammunition for Afghanistan (oh, I forgot, we are coming home from that) etc., and there would still have been a lot of trouble at the crash but no fire?maybe.
When operating a 73-car+ oil train, the operator and the owner are responsible for the ?safe? parking of this line of fuel, especially when a sloped rail line is to either end of the train.
There again, it is not the oil?s fault, it is the operators.
Then ask, why is such a line of oil cars left unattended if our national government is so afraid of terrorist? If it is so easy to let this train of oil slip loose and run into town for a large destruction of people and assets, should more emphasis not be put on its ?safe parking,? ie: someone responsible for its safe parking or an attendant for overnight. There used to be cabooses on all trains, now we just have a little smart box taped to the end car. I assume the little smart box could not stop the train or ask for help or alert the trouble to head office?
In driver training for automobiles, we are taught to park our cars with the wheels turned in the correct direction for parking on a hill or slope and to use our parking brake.
Many companies want fewer and fewer workers but still want safe operations and make more money. What is this accident not going to cost the operating company?lawyers, suits and compensation.
Please do not forget the many lost lives and the families and friends left behind with the memories.
In our Rocky Mountains there are long freight trains going both ways every 20 minutes and they have to park many times to allow for hill climbing and passing trains but these don?t seem to have the same problems. Attention to detail and routine operation could be the answer, along with training of staff who are qualified to do the work.
I believe this operating company and others can and should do better in the future. Let us hope something good comes from this ie: regulations regards parking, attendants etc.
Of course, we could all change our ways and not use any oil products again?ever?no matter if the oil comes by pipe, boat or train. Yes, we could go back to the days of horse and buggy. Do I hear any takers? It would be a simpler life but then there could be a runaway horse and buggy because someone forgot to tie the horse up or set the park brake.
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Education for girls is key
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CIMB Bank Brings the Color Run to Singapore
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More natural gas deposit found in Myanmar offshore block
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June 30, 2013 ? Anyone who's ever heard a Beethoven sonata or a Beatles song knows how powerfully sound can affect our emotions. But it can work the other way as well -- our emotions can actually affect how we hear and process sound. When certain types of sounds become associated in our brains with strong emotions, hearing similar sounds can evoke those same feelings, even far removed from their original context. It's a phenomenon commonly seen in combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in whom harrowing memories of the battlefield can be triggered by something as common as the sound of thunder. But the brain mechanisms responsible for creating those troubling associations remain unknown. Now, a pair of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has discovered how fear can actually increase or decrease the ability to discriminate among sounds depending on context, providing new insight into the distorted perceptions of victims of PTSD.
Their study is published in Nature Neuroscience.
"Emotions are closely linked to perception and very often our emotional response really helps us deal with reality," says senior study author Maria N. Geffen, PhD, assistant professor of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery and Neuroscience at Penn. "For example, a fear response helps you escape potentially dangerous situations and react quickly. But there are also situations where things can go wrong in the way the fear response develops. That's what happens in anxiety and also in PTSD -- the emotional response to the events is generalized to the point where the fear response starts getting developed to a very broad range of stimuli."
Geffen and the first author of the study, Mark Aizenberg, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in her laboratory, used emotional conditioning in mice to investigate how hearing acuity (the ability to distinguish between tones of different frequencies) can change following a traumatic event, known as emotional learning. In these experiments, which are based on classical (Pavlovian) conditioning, animals learn to distinguish between potentially dangerous and safe sounds -- called "emotional discrimination learning." This type of conditioning tends to result in relatively poor learning, but Aizenberg and Geffen designed a series of learning tasks intended to create progressively greater emotional discrimination in the mice, varying the difficulty of the task. What really interested them was how different levels of emotional discrimination would affect hearing acuity -- in other words, how emotional responses affect perception and discrimination of sounds. This study established the link between emotions and perception of the world -- something that has not been understood before.
The researchers found that, as expected, fine emotional learning tasks produced greater learning specificity than tests in which the tones were farther apart in frequency. As Geffen explains, "The animals presented with sounds that were very far apart generalize the fear that they developed to the danger tone over a whole range of frequencies, whereas the animals presented with the two sounds that were very similar exhibited specialization of their emotional response. Following the fine conditioning task, they figured out that it's a very narrow range of pitches that are potentially dangerous."
When pitch discrimination abilities were measured in the animals, the mice with more specific responses displayed much finer auditory acuity than the mice who were frightened by a broader range of frequencies. "There was a relationship between how much their emotional response generalized and how well they could tell different tones apart," says Geffen. "In the animals that specialized their emotional response, pitch discrimination actually became sharper. They could discriminate two tones that they previously could not tell apart."
Another interesting finding of this study is that the effects of emotional learning on hearing perception were mediated by a specific brain region, the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex has been known as an important area responsible for auditory plasticity. Surprisingly, Aizenberg and Geffen found that the auditory cortex did not play a role in emotional learning. Likely, the specificity of emotional learning is controlled by the amygdala and sub-cortical auditory areas. "We know the auditory cortex is involved, we know that the emotional response is important so the amygdala is involved, but how do the amygdala and cortex interact together?" says Geffen. "Our hypothesis is that the amygdala and cortex are modifying subcortical auditory processing areas. The sensory cortex is responsible for the changes in frequency discrimination, but it's not necessary for developing specialized or generalized emotional responses. So it's kind of a puzzle."
Solving that puzzle promises new insight into the causes and possible treatment of PTSD, and the question of why some individuals develop it and others subjected to the same events do not. "We think there's a strong link between mechanisms that control emotional learning, including fear generalization, and the brain mechanisms responsible for PTSD, where generalization of fear is abnormal," Geffen notes. Future research will focus on defining and studying that link.
Contact: Robert J. Hamers rjhamers@wisc.edu 608-262-6371 University of Wisconsin-Madison
MADISON -- In the world, there are a lot of small molecules people would like to get rid of, or at least convert to something useful, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison chemist Robert J. Hamers.
Think carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most responsible for far-reaching effects on global climate. Nitrogen is another ubiquitous small-molecule gas that can be transformed into the valuable agricultural fertilizer ammonia. Plants perform the chemical reduction of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia as a matter of course, but for humans to do that in an industrial setting, a necessity for modern agriculture, requires subjecting nitrogen to massive amounts of energy under high pressure.
"The current process for reducing nitrogen to ammonia is done under extreme conditions," explains Hamers, a UW-Madison professor of chemistry. "There is an enormous barrier you have to overcome to get your final product."
Breaching that barrier more efficiently and reducing the huge amounts of energy used to convert nitrogen to ammonia by some estimates 10 percent of the world's electrical output has been a grail for the agricultural chemical industry. Now, that goal may be on the horizon, thanks to a technique devised by Hamers and his colleagues and published today (June 30, 2013) in the journal Nature Methods.
Like many chemical reactions, reducing nitrogen to ammonia is a product of catalysis, where the catalytic agent used in the traditional energy-intensive reduction process is iron. The iron, combined with high temperature and high pressure, accelerates the reaction rate for converting nitrogen to ammonia by lowering the activation barrier that otherwise keeps nitrogen, one of the most ubiquitous gases on the planet, intact.
"The nitrogen molecule is one of the happiest molecules around," notes Hamers. "It is incredibly stable. It doesn't do anything."
One of the big obstacles, according to Hamers, is that nitrogen binds poorly to catalytic materials like iron.
Hamers and his team, including Di Zhu, Linghong Zhang and Rose E. Ruther, all of UW-Madison, turned to synthetic industrial diamond a cheap, gritty, versatile material as a potential new catalyst for the reduction process. Diamond, the Wisconsin team found, can facilitate the reduction of nitrogen to ammonia under ambient temperatures and pressures.
Like all chemical reactions, the reduction of nitrogen to ammonia involves moving electrons from one molecule to another. Using hydrogen-coated diamond illuminated by deep ultraviolet light, the Wisconsin team was able to induce a ready stream of electrons into water, which served as a reactant liquid that reduced nitrogen to ammonia under temperature and pressure conditions far more efficient than those required by traditional industrial methods.
"From a chemist's standpoint, nothing is more efficient than electrons in water," says Hamers, whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation. With the diamond catalyst, "the electrons are unconfined. They flow like lemmings to the sea."
While the method was demonstrated in the context of reducing nitrogen to a valuable agricultural product, the new diamond-centric approach is exciting, Hamers argues, because it can potentially fit a wide range of processes that require catalysis. "This is truly a different way of thinking about inducing reactions that may have more efficiency and applicability. We're doing this with diamond grit. It is infinitely reusable."
The technique devised by Hamers and his colleagues, he notes, still has kinks that need to be worked out to make it a viable alternative to traditional methods. The use of deep ultraviolet light, for example, is a limiting factor. Inducing reactions with visible light is a goal that would enhance the promise of the new technique for applications such as antipollution technology.
###
Contact:
Terry Devitt
608-262-8282 trdevitt@wisc.edu
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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.
Contact: Robert J. Hamers rjhamers@wisc.edu 608-262-6371 University of Wisconsin-Madison
MADISON -- In the world, there are a lot of small molecules people would like to get rid of, or at least convert to something useful, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison chemist Robert J. Hamers.
Think carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most responsible for far-reaching effects on global climate. Nitrogen is another ubiquitous small-molecule gas that can be transformed into the valuable agricultural fertilizer ammonia. Plants perform the chemical reduction of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia as a matter of course, but for humans to do that in an industrial setting, a necessity for modern agriculture, requires subjecting nitrogen to massive amounts of energy under high pressure.
"The current process for reducing nitrogen to ammonia is done under extreme conditions," explains Hamers, a UW-Madison professor of chemistry. "There is an enormous barrier you have to overcome to get your final product."
Breaching that barrier more efficiently and reducing the huge amounts of energy used to convert nitrogen to ammonia by some estimates 10 percent of the world's electrical output has been a grail for the agricultural chemical industry. Now, that goal may be on the horizon, thanks to a technique devised by Hamers and his colleagues and published today (June 30, 2013) in the journal Nature Methods.
Like many chemical reactions, reducing nitrogen to ammonia is a product of catalysis, where the catalytic agent used in the traditional energy-intensive reduction process is iron. The iron, combined with high temperature and high pressure, accelerates the reaction rate for converting nitrogen to ammonia by lowering the activation barrier that otherwise keeps nitrogen, one of the most ubiquitous gases on the planet, intact.
"The nitrogen molecule is one of the happiest molecules around," notes Hamers. "It is incredibly stable. It doesn't do anything."
One of the big obstacles, according to Hamers, is that nitrogen binds poorly to catalytic materials like iron.
Hamers and his team, including Di Zhu, Linghong Zhang and Rose E. Ruther, all of UW-Madison, turned to synthetic industrial diamond a cheap, gritty, versatile material as a potential new catalyst for the reduction process. Diamond, the Wisconsin team found, can facilitate the reduction of nitrogen to ammonia under ambient temperatures and pressures.
Like all chemical reactions, the reduction of nitrogen to ammonia involves moving electrons from one molecule to another. Using hydrogen-coated diamond illuminated by deep ultraviolet light, the Wisconsin team was able to induce a ready stream of electrons into water, which served as a reactant liquid that reduced nitrogen to ammonia under temperature and pressure conditions far more efficient than those required by traditional industrial methods.
"From a chemist's standpoint, nothing is more efficient than electrons in water," says Hamers, whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation. With the diamond catalyst, "the electrons are unconfined. They flow like lemmings to the sea."
While the method was demonstrated in the context of reducing nitrogen to a valuable agricultural product, the new diamond-centric approach is exciting, Hamers argues, because it can potentially fit a wide range of processes that require catalysis. "This is truly a different way of thinking about inducing reactions that may have more efficiency and applicability. We're doing this with diamond grit. It is infinitely reusable."
The technique devised by Hamers and his colleagues, he notes, still has kinks that need to be worked out to make it a viable alternative to traditional methods. The use of deep ultraviolet light, for example, is a limiting factor. Inducing reactions with visible light is a goal that would enhance the promise of the new technique for applications such as antipollution technology.
###
Contact:
Terry Devitt
608-262-8282 trdevitt@wisc.edu
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
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.
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Public release date: 30-Jun-2013
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