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A Polish musician has created an unusual interactive instrument – a larger-than life music box bristling with xylophones and drums – that he says can help educate children and aid their development through musical play.

The Musicon comprises a rotating wooden drum fitted with removable smaller instruments. Children play notes by placing pegs in holes on the rotating drum’s surface – much like a music box – but one that allows children to play any melody they like.

“Musicon is not only music, it is only a tool for learning, for development,” said Kamil Laszuk, who invented the instrument and has developed it with the help of a team of close friends. “There is also programming here, learning physics, cooperation in a team and also the development of manual skills. Music is the reward.”

Laszuk developed the instrument for a project during his industrial design studies at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Following a positive reaction to his creation, his parents sold their house to help fund its development.

Warsaw’s Synapsis Foundation, which helps children with autism and Asperger syndrome, suggested the instrument could be enjoyable for children suffering from those conditions.

“It is very important that there is no possibility of failure, that they can freely experiment in their own way,” psychologist Joanna Burgiell said.

The instrument is due to go into production by the end of 2017.
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Better treatment strategies for pediatric cancers are helping survivors live longer, with fewer serious health problems related to their treatment, U.S. researchers said Friday.

The finding, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, is based on analysis of data from 23,600 participants in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Overall, severe health conditions arising within 15 years of childhood cancer diagnosis fell to 8.8 percent of survivors in the 1990s, from 12.7 percent in the 1970s, the study found.

The findings show that childhood cancer survivors who were given more modern treatment approaches, such as reduced exposure to radiation and lower doses of chemotherapy, were faring better, said Todd Gibson of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, who led the study.

“Not only are more children being cured, but they also have lower risk for developing serious health problems due to cancer treatments later in life,” he said in a statement.

The researchers focused on severe, disabling, life-threatening or fatal health problems that occurred within 15 years of being diagnosed with a pediatric cancer between 1970 and 1999.

The biggest declines in health problems related to treatment occurred in survivors of Wilms’ tumor, a rare kidney cancer. In this group, serious complications fell to 5 percent of survivors in the 1990s, from a high of 13 percent in the 1970s.

Improvements

In survivors of childhood Hodgkin lymphoma, latent complication rates fell to 11 percent, from 18 percent in the 1970s. Improvements were also seen for astrocytoma, the second most common childhood cancer, and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer.

There were no reductions in long-term side effects among survivors of neuroblastoma, acute myeloid leukemia, soft-tissue sarcoma and osteoscarcoma.

The biggest improvements were seen with regard to endocrine conditions such as diabetes, thyroid disease or growth hormone deficiency. The researchers saw endocrine problems fall to 1.6 percent for childhood cancer survivors surveyed in the 1990s, compared with 4 percent in the 1970s.

The emergence of secondary cancers fell to 1.6 percent in the 1990s, compared with 2.4 percent in the 1970s.

Gastrointestinal and neurological conditions also improved.

But there was no improvement in rates of heart or lung conditions, which the researchers said served as a reminder of the need for close follow-up in childhood cancer survivors.
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It will be a few more days before Space X’s Dragon cargo capsule reaches the International Space Station (ISS). Bad weather postponed the launch scheduled for Thursday until Saturday. Among other supplies for the ISS crew, it carries an unusual telescope designed to look at not-well-known objects called neutron stars. These relatively small celestial bodies have some mind-boggling features, for example, a teaspoon of their matter weighs about 10 million tons.

Looking at a life-size model of the Neutron Star Composition Explorer, or NICER for short, displayed at the Goddard Space Center, one can immediately see that it is not an optical telescope.

The most visible part of Nicer is a one-meter-wide cube, made of solid aluminum with 56 holes drilled through its face. The instrument houses its own array of special lenses that deflect x-rays and focus them towards sensors fixed on the inner wall behind them.

Outside, it looks a little like the WWII Katyusha rocket launcher.

On top, it has a few appendages housing auxiliary equipment, as well as a socket for the ISS’s robotic arm that will eventually install it outside the orbital station.

Neutron stars

Standing next to the cube, deputy principal investigator for the NICER Mission, astrophysicist Zaven Arzoumanian, says that not much is known about neutron stars, the densest objects in the universe.

“They are only about 16 to 20 kilometers across but can contain the mass of up to two of our suns compressed into that tiny volume so we think they are made mostly of neutrons.”

But how is that possible when everything we know is made of atoms?

That’s true, Arzoumanian explains, “but the distance between nuclei of individual atoms is very large and is occupied by electrons that have very little mass, so it’s mostly empty space. If you could imagine having a lump of gold and crushing it to the point where you bring the nuclei closer and closer together until they’re touching, when there’s no more empty space the electrons are absorbed by the protons, they cancel each other out, they turn into neutrons and you’re left with a ball of neutrons.”

The only force that is capable of crushing atoms together to that point is gravity, and for gravity to be strong enough to do that you need one or two times the mass of the Sun collapsing and compressing, crushing itself under its own weight and you’re left with what we think is a neutron star,” he said.

At this point, the physics of a neutron star becomes murky. Perhaps under those conditions, neutrons and protons aren’t able to maintain their identities any more, Arzoumanian suggests. They may dissolve into a soup of even smaller particles – quarks and gluons. What we know, he adds, is that neutron stars rotate at very fast and constant speed and that they are very powerful sources of x-rays.

Pulsating beacons

If the Earth is in the path of the rotating beams, we see them as pulsating sources of light, as well as x-rays, which is why such neutron stars are also called pulsars.

“Imagine that you have a beach ball with a hot spot in the front and a hot spot in the back and the beach ball is spinning,” says Arzoumanian. “You see the hotspot come around towards you, you see the brightness increase, but there’s a hot spot in the back as well and eventually that swings around. So imagine the brightness as a function of time, it goes up and down deeply as the spots swing in and out of view.”

In a simplified way, he says, how deep that light variation is, how deeply it is modulated or how it varies, is a measure of how big the star is, how compact it is and it will tell us about its interior contents.

Spider’s eye

Building the NICER’s 56 eyes, sensitive to x-rays, required some marvelous ingenuity, as those rays don’t behave like visible light. Its lenses are in fact 24 concentric aluminum cylinders, coated with a thin layer of gold, and bent very slightly lengthwise.

“X-rays prefer to pass through things rather than to be focused,” explains Arzoumanian, “so there’s a unique geometry to these mirrors, which is very similar to skimming a stone on a pond. If you drop a pebble into water vertically it passes through. X-rays work the same way. But if you throw the pebble onto the water at a very sharp angle, you can skim it off the surface and these mirrors work the same way, the x-rays come in at a grazing angle and are redirected very slightly to focus at some distance downstream.”

But neutron stars emit all kinds of radiation, from low frequency radio waves to extremely high frequency gamma rays. Why concentrate on x-rays?

There are two reasons, says Arzoumanian, one scientific and one technological.

“The surface of the neutron star is glowing in x-ray light and for us to understand the size of the star, which is a direct way of understanding the interior makeup of the star, we need to be looking at the surface and the surface is glowing and x-rays so we look where we have to look to understand.”

The other technological reason, he says, has to do with the SEXTANT Mission that will use the same telescope.

Celestial GPS

A sextant is the optical instrument that mariners, and later airmen, have used since the 18th century to navigate when far from dry land. It was essential on ships until the U.S. military satellite-based navigation system, now known as GPS, was made available for civilian use.

GPS, which stands for Global Positioning System, relies on a number of satellites in geostationary orbit. When a GPS receiver, now embedded in most smartphones, establishes contact with at least three satellites that are over the horizon, the computer in it automatically calculates its exact position.

SEXTANT stands for Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology. Jason Mitchell, the mission’s project manager, says pulsars are so stable in the rotation that often you’ll hear the analogy of a celestial lighthouse or a celestial clock.

“Their spins are so accurate,” says Mitchell, “they rival atomic clocks here on Earth. So in analogy to GPS global positioning system, you can think about pulsars as objects in very precise orbits that transmit very precise timing signals.”

Mitchell says the worst possible scenario we can think of happening to future manned space explorations would be the inability to communicate with Earth. So we want to make sure that in such an event, the astronauts can perform their function and return home safely. An autonomous navigation system like this could certainly help, he says, as strong x-ray emissions from pulsars could serve as guiding beacons.

Mitchell adds that the SEXTANT team plans to conduct two experiments with the NICER telescope – one relatively early in the mission and another toward the end of its use by NASA researchers, about 18 months after its launch.

After that time, the telescope will become available to scientists and researchers worldwide.
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Earthquakes are a fact of life in Pacific Rim countries, but most are small shocks that don’t do much damage. But a major quake – one registering more than 6.0 on the open-ended Richter scale – can devastate communities, even those that have prepared for disaster. In many urban centers around the Pacific Rim, it could be weeks or a month – or more – before water service gets restored after a major earthquake – not to mention electricity, sewage and fuel supplies too. So leaders on both sides of the Pacific are being forced to make cost-benefit choices.

Japan has a deserved reputation as one of the best prepared countries in the world for earthquakes. But even there, quakes can causes massive and lasting damage.

The magnitude 6.9 earthquake that struck Kobe in 1995 knocked out water and electricity, collapsed a main highway and railway and killed more than 6,000 people. Fires consumed entire neighborhood blocks as firefighters were stymied by the failure of the water supply

Kobe is now in the process of replacing nearly 4,800 kilometers of cast-iron water distribution lines with flexible pipe to make its system earthquake resistant.

Hitoshi Araike, an assistant manager at the city’s Waterworks Bureau, explained “The damage we have received in the earthquake kind of determined that we will do that, replace the pipes.”

Araike and an interpreter led foreign journalists deep underground to see a new large transmission main that can double as emergency water storage. It cost more than $300 million.

Automatic shutoff valves have been installed at reservoirs to keep water from draining away after a quake. Flexible pipes and new-style connectors with reinforced sleeves resist breakage. They’re being deployed at both the waterworks and a rebuilt sewage treatment plant, and once the new technology is in place, Araike expects “zero disruption” of Kobe’s water service after the next great earthquake.

Earthquake resilience elsewhere

Other Pacific Rim countries with memories of great earthquakes are investing in seismic strengthening, notably Chile, Taiwan, China and New Zealand. In any case, it takes a long time and a lot of money to make a difference, at a city or regional level. Lack of resources or building code enforcement can be a barrier in less developed countries such as Pakistan or Cambodia.

A big public utility on the U.S. West Coast also has an ambitious earthquake resilience goal.

“We’d like to get back up and be operating within three to four days,” says Jim Miller, engineering superintendent for Everett Public Works in western Washington state. “That’s our goal from a level of service standpoint.”

Miller says his utility assessed its earthquake vulnerability and has prioritized a list of improvements. First, contractors are reinforcing walls and ceilings to earthquake-proof the operations building at Everett’s drinking water treatment plant, which serves 600,000 people north of Seattle.

Next, the Public Works Department wants to install flexible joints at some pipeline water crossings. Everett’s full list of seismic upgrades could take 20 years – and many millions of dollars – to complete. City residents would have to cover that cost with higher water bills, but Miller says that the price of resilience.

“If we did nothing, that’s more business as usual and you could keep rates lower. But we’ve found people for the most part expect a reliable system,” he said. “Once they understand what it’s for, they seem — In fact our wholesale customers have actually encouraged us to make our system more resilient.”

Other utilities in the region are taking similar steps. Seattle Public Utilities aims to finish a comprehensive vulnerability assessment of its own by the end of this year.  It has already invested $60 million in seismic upgrades to existing water infrastructure to date – such as switching from above-ground to buried reservoirs.

In Oregon, a state resilience plan set a goal for water supply systems to be mostly operational within two weeks after a Cascadia mega-quake.

“We’re nowhere close to that,” admts Theresa Elliott, Portland Water Bureau chief engineer at a conference earlier this year.

Be prepared for a long wait

Earthquake resilience experts in both Pacific Coast states delivered nearly identical recommendations a few years ago. They said Oregon and Washington should require utilities to do vulnerability assessments and make plans to mitigate the deficiencies. But that remains largely a suggestion, not a requirement, and that could limit the effectiveness of efforts to increase resiliency.

A regional water supply group for the greater Seattle area recently estimated outage times for a big offshore earthquake and close-by shallow ones. Their analysis found it currently could take up to 60 days to restore service to most customers.

Those projections for long outages of vital services mean residents need to prepare to survive on their own. State and federal emergency managers used to recommend to stockpile food, water and medicines for three days. Now Oregon and Washington state suggest people in earthquake country prepare a kit with two weeks’ worth of disaster supplies.
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A Russian cosmonaut and a French astronaut returned to Earth on Friday aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule after six months at the International Space Station, while their U.S. crewmate remained on the orbiting laboratory for an extended stay, a NASA television broadcast showed.

Russia’s Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet, with the European Space Agency, strapped themselves inside the spacecraft and left the station at 6:47 a.m. EDT (1047 GMT) as the complex sailed 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

They made a parachute landing southwest of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 10:10 a.m. EDT (1410 GMT).

One seat aboard the capsule was empty as U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson, who flew to the station with Novitskiy and Pesquet in November, will remain in orbit until September. She is filling a vacancy left after Russia scaled down its station crew size to two members from three.

“We of course are going to miss Oleg and Thomas. They are exceptional astronauts,” an emotional Whitson said during a ceremony on Thursday, where she turned over command of the $100 billion station to Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin.

“Peggy is a legend,” Pesquet said. “We’re a little bit sad to leave her behind, but we know she’s in very, very capable hands.”

Whitson, Yurchikhin and astronaut Jack Fischer, also with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will manage the station until a new crew launches in late July.

“That will be a little challenging,” Whitson said during an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. “I was up here on my previous two expeditions and it was only a three-person crew, but it was a much smaller station at that point in time.”

“Still, I think it’s quite doable,” she said.

Whitson, who is serving on the station for a third time, broke the U.S. record in April for cumulative time in space. By the time she returns to Earth in September, she will have accumulated more than 660 days in orbit.

Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, with 878 days in orbit, is the world’s most experienced space flier.
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