Announcement – IEEE Student Members’ Designs to Aid Humanitarian Efforts
By Jay Pearlman, posted on October 20th, 2009 in Announcements, Health, Technology
IEEE is sponsoring a Regional Student Design Competition for solutions to one of three humanitarian problems as part of the joint IEEE-United Nations Foundation Humanitarian Technology Challenge (HTC). The competition runs from Oct. 2009 to May 2010.
HTC is a partnership among humanitarians, technologists, funders, and others, to develop implementable technological solutions to some key challenges facing humanitarian health and disaster workers today. These participants volunteer their time to collaborate for the benefit of humanity.
If you are a student IEEE member, you can join in as an individual or as the leader of a team.
Three challenges have been identified
1. Reliable Electricity: The availability of electric power for lighting and other electronic devices in resource-constrained environments is important for education, communications, and economic development.
2. Data Connectivity of Rural District Health Offices: It’s critical that health workers have the capability of exchanging data among remote field offices and central health facilities in order to access treatment protocols, create and monitor health trends, and share results of treatments.
3. Individual ID Tied to Health Records: Consistent availability of patient medical records is important for ongoing treatment of patients, especially migrants and those with long-term diseases.
The Regional Student Design Competition challenges students to provide a working prototype, scale model or detailed engineering design specifications for a project that satisfies one of the three challenges. The project can be developed by student individuals or by student teams. Teams must be led by an IEEE student member.
More information about the HTC project, and detailed descriptions of the challenges, can be found at www.ieeehtc.org. Rules for the Regional Student Design Competition can be found at www.ieeehtc.org/students.
Contact – Harold Tepper
h.tepper@ieee.org
NASA Daily Image
Remnant of a Supernova
Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has studied many of these supernova remnants sprinkled across the galaxy. The latest example of this important investigation is Chandra's new image of the supernova remnant known as G350.1-0.3. This stellar debris field is located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of the Milky Way. Evidence from Chandra and from ESA's XMM-Newton telescope suggest that a compact object within G350.1+0.3 may be the dense core of the star that exploded. The position of this likely neutron star, seen by the arrow pointing to "neutron star" in the inset image, is well away from the center of the X-ray emission. If the supernova explosion occurred near the center of the X-ray emission then the neutron star must have received a powerful kick in the supernova explosion. Data suggest this supernova remnant, as it appears in the image, is 600 and 1,200 years old. If the estimated location of the explosion is correct, this means the neutron star has been moving at a speed of at least 3 million miles per hour since the explosion. Another intriguing aspect of G350.1-0.3 is its unusual shape. Many supernova remnants are nearly circular, but G350.1-0.3 is strikingly asymmetrical as seen in the Chandra data in this image (gold). Infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (light blue) also trace the morphology found by Chandra. Astronomers think that this bizarre shape is due to stellar debris field expanding into a nearby cloud of cold molecular gas. The age of 600-1,200 years puts the explosion that created G350.1-0.3 in the same time frame as other famous supernovas that formed the Crab and SN 1006 supernova remnants. However, it is unlikely that anyone on Earth would have seen the explosion because of the obscuring gas and dust that lies along our line of sight to the remnant. These results appeared in the April 10, 2011 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/I. Lovchinsky et al; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech