Drilling around the globe

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Drilling around the globe Posted: 13 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) On 15 January the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program ICDP heads into a new round. About a dozen proposals for drilling projects to explore our planet have been filed for the year 2012. The topics cover a wide range of research projects, ranging from earthquake research over paleao -climate research to the exploration of natural resources. The planned drill sites span the globe, from Iceland to South Africa. New is also the Chairman of the Executive Committee, Professor Brian Horsfield of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, who now directs the evaluation of the proposals and the planning of the suggested research. New in the office but in business for a long time: Brian Horsfield heads the Center for Integrated Hydrocarbon Research at the GFZ, holds the Chair of Organic Geochemistry and Hydrocarbon Systems at the Technical University Berlin, and is a member of acatech, the National Academy of Science and Engineering. He has over 30 years of experience in the petroleum industry and research. About his ideas concerning the importance of scientific research boreholes, he says: Drilling the Earth's crust is an indispensable tool for the geosciences and ICDP is the global leader in the effort to contribute to the understanding and sustainable use of our planet, be it the protection against natural disasters, serving an ever-growing population with natural resources or exploring the natural and anthropogenic processes of our dynamic earth. In December last year, Brian Horsfield took over the chair of the ICDP from Professor Rolf Emmermann, formerly the founding Director of the GFZ. It was Professor Emmerman who initiated the founding of the ICDP. In February 1996 in Tokyo, he encouraged China, the United States and Germany to sign an agreement establishing the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, which serves the exploration of the active processes on the continents. The research topics... http://www.rxpgnews.com

'Open-source' robotic surgery platform going to top medical research labs Posted: 12 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) SANTA CRUZ, CA--Robotics experts at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Washington (UW) have completed a set of seven advanced robotic surgery systems for use by major medical research laboratories throughout the United States. After a round of final tests, five of the systems will be shipped to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Nebraska, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, while the other two systems will remain at UC Santa Cruz and UW. We decided to follow an open-source model, because if all of these labs have a common research platform for doing robotic surgery, the whole field will be able to advance more quickly, said Jacob Rosen, associate professor of computer engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and principal investigator on the project. Rosen and Blake Hannaford, director of the UW Biorobotics Laboratory, lead the research groups that developed the Raven II robotic surgery system and its predecessor, Raven I. A grant from the National Science Foundation funded their work to create seven identical Raven II systems. Hannaford said the systems will be shipped out from UW by the end of January. After they are delivered and installed, all seven systems will be networked together over the Internet for collaborative experiments. Robotic surgery has the potential to enable new surgical procedures that are less invasive than existing techniques. For some procedures, such as prostate surgery, the use of surgical robots is already standard practice. In addition, telesurgery, in which the surgeon operates a robotic system from a remote location, offers the potential to provide better access to expert care in remote areas and the developing world. Having a network of laboratories working on a common platform will make it easier for researchers to share software, replicate experiments, and collaborate in other ways. Even though it... http://www.rxpgnews.com

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