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Cook it Safe
Archive Page. Some of these resources may have moved or may no longer be available.
FSIS, the Food and Drug Administration, the Partnership for Food Safety Education, and other "Cook It Safe" task force members to remind you to "Cook It Safe" when preparing convenience foods.
What does it mean to "Cook It Safe?"
The "Cook It Safe" campaign encourages cooks of all ages to read and follow all cooking instructions printed on food packages before preparation. To prevent foodborne illness in your home or dorm room, follow the Cook It Safe Taskforce's four basic messages:
- Read and Follow Package Cooking Instructions.
- Know When to Use a Microwave or Conventional Oven.
- Know Your Microwave Wattage before Microwaving Food.
- Always Use a Food Thermometer to Ensure a Safe Internal Temperature.
Videos (Public Service Announcements) on YouTube
- Cook it Safe Challenge — Read and Follow Package Instructions (Apr 2, 2013; 1:03)
- Food Safety in the College Dorm (YouTube, Nov 9, 2012)
- Cook it Safe - Know your Wattage (Sep 1, 2011; 1:00; MP4)
Make the right decisions about safe food preparation. Read and follow package cooking instructions, and know your microwave wattage.
- Cook it Safe - Microwave or Conventional Oven? (Sep 1, 2011; 1:03; MP4)
Use the proper steps for safe meal preparation. Read and follow package cooking instructions, and know when to use a conventional oven or the microwave.
- YouTube Playlist
- Food Insight (International Food Information Council)
- Cook It Safe in a Crunch (Oct 25, 2012)
- "Cook It Safe" Always Use a Food Thermometer to Ensure a Safe Internal Temperature (Sep 30, 2011)
- Cook it Safe: Know Your Microwave Wattage and Know Your Food is Cooked (Sep 19, 2011)
- Cook it Safe: Read and Follow Cooking Directions Every Time! (Sep 6, 2011)
- Cook it Safe this National Food Safety Education Month (Sep 2, 2011)
- FoodSafety.gov
- When Preparing Convenience Foods, Cook It Safe! (Sep 7, 2011)
Live Chat
Taskforce members hosted a Twitter chat on September 16, 2011 to allow consumers and interested professionals to ask subject matter experts questions about the campaign and microwave cooking. Follow @USDAFoodSafety, @FoodInsight, and @Fight_Bac for more "Cook It Safe" information.
Additional Resources on Safe Cooking
Fact Sheets
- Food Thermometer Placement and Temperatures | En Español
- Microwave Ovens and Food Safety | PDF
- Cooking Safely in the Microwave Oven | PDF | En Español | En Español PDF
- Lots More
MP3 Audio
- Microwaving Convenience Foods Safely | Script | En Español | Transcripción
- Wattage Important to Safe Cooking | Script | En Español | Transcripción
- Microwave Cooking | Script
American Sign Language Video
- Microwaving Convenience Foods (3:00; WMV)
- Wattage Important to Safe Cooking (2:57; WMV)
More Food Safety Information
- Food Safety Basics (FoodSafety.gov)
- Ask Karen a food safety question


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FLORIDA – The Lupus Foundation of Florida presents the St. Petersburg Walk for Life without Lupus. The Walk for Life without Lupus increases community awareness of this debilitating disease. Funds raised support research as well as the educational and public policy advocacy efforts of the Lupus Foundation of Florida.
Lupus is an autoimmune, chronic, inflammatory disease in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissues and organs. There is no cure for lupus. Education for patients, providers and caregivers is essential in the management of lupus. There is no definitive test for diagnosing lupus. There is no cure. Lupus affects 1.5 million people in the United States, and 100,000 in Florida.
About the Walk
The Lupus Walk begins at 5 pm on Saturday, November 4, 2017. Registration is free. Participants who raise more than $50 receive an official Lupus Walk t-shirt on the day of the event
The Walk for Life without Lupus will be held at Crescent Lake Park, 1320 Fifth Street North, St. Petersburg, FL 33704.
Register for the event here
About Lupus Foundation of Florida
Founded in 1979, the Lupus Foundation of Florida serves Floridians affected by lupus through education, advocacy and research. As part of the Lupus Research Alliance network, we work for the day when life without lupus will be a reality. Funding for lupus research is critical. With your help, we will find a cure.
"Lupus Foundation of Florida support groups are places where you can speak freely about the challenges of living with lupus with others who are facing the similar struggles and challenges. Our groups are positive places! We learn from and support one another on the journey."
Media Contact
Company Name: Lupus Foundation of Florida
Contact Person: Linda Ruescher
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
Phone: +17274477075
Address:535 Central Avenue Suite 304
City: St. Petersburg
State: FL 33701
Country: United States
Website: www.lupusflorida.org

subset: commoncrawl


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Yield and Carryover Estimates Slashed
The August Crop Report was extremely bullish and the market is expected to open accordingly this morning. USDA's field samples showed this summer's hot, dry conditions have had a greater-than-expected impact on yield potential.
The corn crop was pegged at only 8.886 billion bushels, down more than 900 million bushels from the estimate released a month ago. The national average yield is expected to be only 125.2 bushels. All major corn producing states are expected to see a big drop in average yield, except Iowa and Minnesota. Higher prices are expected to reduce corn usage somewhat during the next marketing year, but the carryover projection was cut to only 767 million bushels.
It's pretty much the same story in soybeans, except USDA also raised its export projection for the current marketing year by 15 million bushels. The crop is only expected to total 2.628 billion bushels, with a national average yield of 36.5 bushels. If it remains hot and dry in the Midwest, that number could be cut again. This leaves ending stocks for the next marketing year at a squeaky tight 155 million bushels.
The spring wheat crop was also hurt by this year's weather and USDA knocked 38 million bushels off of that projection. Total wheat production is now expected to be down 14% from last year at only 1.686 billion bushels. Plus, wheat production is down around the world. The global ending stocks figure was cut by 8.3 million tons or 7.7% from the month-ago estimate.
Editors note: Richard Brock, Soybean Digest's Marketing Editor, is president of Brock Associates, a farm market advisory firm, and publisher of The Brock Report.
To see more market perspectives, visit Brock's Web site at www.brockreport.com.


text: I want this team to be successful. Which means I want Dantoni to do well. I read somewhere that Dantoni is a realist. He knew the talent on this team years priest was terrible. Ive verb to a dew knicks open practices and he always tempered fans expectations. This year he feels we can win it all. I love his offense. Before he came the biggest complaint was the one on one ball we would play. Since he came that's never been an issue. And since he came we were just bad. Not embarrassing. Now he's no saint. He is very stubborn in winning his way. But I think he know he needs to change things. He knows he's on the hot seat and his career much less his job is on the line. He listened to his superiors and accepted the fact that Mike Woodson will be on board. And he's on done a great job with the media by stating Woodson is a great all around coach and not just a defensive coach. He doesn't want to pigeon hole Woodson. I think he will do a great job this year. And he will make us proud of our NEW YORK KNICKS. Son we stacked and we ready


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Shields out for the season
Scot Shields, one of the Majors' best and most durable relievers, will have surgery on Tuesday to repair patellar tendinitis in his left knee. According to manager Mike Scioscia, Shields is lost for the season.
The Angels will go with a comittee for now to replace Shields in the eighth inning, featuring Darren Oliver, Kevin Jepsen, Justin Speier and Jason Bulger. Kelvim Escobar hopes to join the mix soon and could emerge as the eighth-inning specialist in front of Brian Fuentes if his shoulder holds up to the stress. Escobar threw 92 pitches in his comeback start in Detroit and found that he experiences pain after about 75 pitches, forcing his move to the bullpen.
3 Comments
It's been a frustrating spring for Scotty. This ought to help get him back on track to come back better than ever. Get well soon! . . .BeesGal
So glad that Scot will take care of himself and soon he will return better then ever. He was putting out more then any of us knew. He was trying to hang in for his team. I can only imagine the wear and tear on an athletes body. The schedule of playing everyday with an occasional day off can only create stress on the body beyond our understanding.
You will be in my prayers Scott, for a speedy recovery.
okay, now that Shields has had his surgery, what exactly was wrong to be out for six months? Obviously is was not minor. He sure waited along time to get it taken care of if this has been around since last season. Maybe if he would have taken card of this at last season's end he'd be back around the all-star break. Maybe?


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Alan Richardson
- Yield
- Serves 2
- Active Time
- 18 min
- Total Time
- 18 min
- 1 (7-ounce) filet mignon (2 inches thick)
- 1/2 teaspoon olive oil
- 1 1/2 tablespoons Cognac
- 1/4 cup beef broth
- 1/4 cup water
- 2 tablespoons coarse-grained mustard
- 1 teaspoon unsalted butter
- Halve filet crosswise and season with salt and pepper. Heat oil over moderate heat in a small heavy skillet until hot but not smoking, then cook filets 2 to 3 minutes on each side for rare. Let stand on a cutting board, tented loosely with foil, 5 minutes. While filets are standing, deglaze skillet with Cognac over moderate heat, scraping up brown bits. Add broth and water and boil until reduced to about 1/4 cup. Remove from heat and whisk in mustard, butter, any meat juices from cutting board, and salt and pepper to taste. Thinly slice filets and serve with sauce.
Each serving, including sauce, has about 222 calories and 12 grams fat.


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Firefighters getting control of San Diego wildfire
UPDATED: Tue., May 13, 2014
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The threat of two wildfires pushed by gusty winds eased Tuesday night after they chewed through canyons parched by California's drought. Some residents in San Diego began returning home after the blazes prompted evacuation orders for more than 20,000 homes on the city's outskirts and surrounding areas and another 1,200 homes and businesses in Santa Barbara County 250 miles to the north. No homes were reported damaged in either fire, and authorities said the San Diego-area blaze was dying down. Winds in Santa Barbara County calmed down significantly after sunset, and firefighters were beginning to surround that fire. But the rugged terrain and unseasonably warm temperatures made firefighting difficult, creating some scary moments. "At the point the fire is right now, we believe we have a pretty good handle on it," San Diego Fire Chief Javier Mainar said. "We hope to do some more work through the night and into tomorrow, but I think the largest part of the emergency has passed." The flames that erupted in the fire-prone Rancho Bernardo area of San Diego quickly grew to 700 acres, driven by hot, dry Santa Ana winds. By late afternoon, the flames ripped through canyons to approach expensive homes and new subdivisions on the ridges. It spread to Rancho Santa Fe, one of the nation's wealthiest communities, known for its multimillion-dollar homes, golfing and horseback riding. Black and gray smoke billowed over northern San Diego, filled with whirling ash and embers that created small spot fires. Flames crept within yards of some homes before firefighters doused them. On one road, people on bicycles and skateboards stopped to watch as a plane dumped water on flames a half-mile away. At least two high schools and three elementary schools were evacuated. Cameron Stout, filling his tank at a gas station, got a text from his wife shortly after noon saying that she was packing up and leaving with the family's pictures, laptops and other valuables. Their next-door neighbor's home burned in a fire 15 years ago, he said. "This area's been through this before," he said. "I thought the recent rains would have prevented this from happening. But after a couple days of 100 degrees, it's reversed all that." Katy Ghasemi, 14, was held for hours in her high school classroom before the school let the children go home. Students studied, ate lunch, did yoga and looked out the windows at the fire. "There were a lot of flames. Some were right near the front gate," she said. The city of San Diego issued between 16,000 and 17,000 evacuation orders, according to San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore, including 300 that Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman described as mandatory. Gore said the sheriff's department issued an additional 5,000 evacuation orders outside city limits. By nightfall, an unknown number of San Diego residents began returning home as the fire moved away from the city, Gore said. Meanwhile, in the Santa Barbara County community of Lompoc, 1,200 homes and businesses were under an evacuation order from a fire that quickly grew to more than 500 acres. There were downed power lines and heavy brush in the area, said David Sadecki of the Santa Barbara County Fire Department. Chrissy Cabral, 57, rounded up friends to help her remove 19 head of cattle she keeps at a local ranch after the fire shifted directions. She said firefighters warned her: "Get out now." "I was probably half a mile away from the side of it, but unfortunately for me … the winds twisted and blew it back on top of me," she said. "It was very high flames, very dark," she added. The group used trailers to move the cows five miles away, a repeat of 10 years ago when a fire roared through the area and burned her corral, Cabral said. Months of drought have left much of the landscape ready to burn. Downtown Los Angeles has recorded just 6.08 inches of precipitation with little time left in the July 1-June 30 rain year. That's less than half its annual average rainfall. "Fire season last year never really ended in Southern California," said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. His agency has responded to more than 1,350 fires since Jan. 1, compared with an average of 700 by this time of year.
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The acquittal of 13 people accused in the disappearance of a young woman who was allegedly kidnapped and forced into prostitution for "VIP clients" spread shock and outrage across Argentina on Wednesday, prompting street protests and calls by political leaders to impeach the three judges who delivered the verdict.
Many called the ruling a setback for Argentina's efforts to combat sex trafficking, which began largely as a result of Susana Trimarco's one-woman, decade-long quest to find her missing daughter, Maria de los Angeles "Marita" Veron. Her attorneys said she would pursue appeals.
Trimarco's search exposed an underworld of organized crime figures who operate brothels with protection from authorities across Argentina.
Security Minister Nilda Garre called the verdict "a tremendous slap in the face for the prospect of justice."
"It's not only a reversal for this particular case of the kidnapping and disappearance of Marita Veron, that made society feel deeply the drama of this kind of 21st century slavery, covered up for decades by the customs of a network of machista culture," she said.
It also "renders invisible the suffering of the victims of human-trafficking networks and sexual exploitation, who gave such courageous testimony during the trial, and consecrates judicial impunity for these crimes," Garre said.
Other officials also rallied around Veron's mother, denouncing the verdicts and praising government efforts to save women from prostitution.
"Today, more than ever, we stand united with Susana and her family in their quest to find Marita and we honor the courageous work she has done to defend the victims and the survivors of human trafficking in Argentina and all over the world," U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Ana Duque-Higgins said.
President Cristina Fernandez personally called Trimarco to express her surprise and outrage.
"I thought I would find her destroyed, but I found her more together than ever, more committed to keep fighting," Fernandez said. "I told her, `Susana you can always count on me,' and she told me `President, don't worry, I'm going to keep fighting."
Fernandez also said that while she can't prove it, she's sure that judicial corruption influenced the verdicts, showing the need to reform how judges are picked and allowed to remain in their jobs. Political rivals have called this campaign an attack on judicial independence.
Trimarco's lawyers said the verdict shows that impunity still reigns, and they said they would pursue appeals.
"The reality is that the police are not investigating Marita's disappearance. It's Susana Trimarco who is investigating and it's been this way from the beginning," attorney Carlos Garmendia told The Associated Press.
"The Marita case is emblematic. As a result, much was learned about trafficking networks, how they move (people), how they operate," he said.
When Veron disappeared a decade ago, sexual exploitation and human trafficking got much less attention around the world, let alone in northwestern Argentina, where she was allegedly kept as a sex slave by an organized crime ring with close ties to authorities in the provinces of Tucuman and La Rioja.
Much of the case was built years later, as Trimarco's efforts produced witnesses who said they suffered alongside Veron in the brothels. One said she saw Veron being beaten; another said she saw her being held captive to provide sex to VIP clients.
Andrea D., one of these women, testified that she had seen Veron with her hair dyed blonde wearing blue-tinted contacts at a brothel in La Rioja. She said she had been kidnapped at gunpoint and forced into prostitution by the same organized crime ring, and testified that some of the accused said Marita had been sold off to brothels in Spain.
Defense lawyers dismissed the women's testimony as the lies of unreliable witnesses, and the lack of any physical evidence linking the defendants to Veron proved decisive, the judges said in a brief explanation from the bench. A fuller written justification for their verdicts is expected to be made public in several weeks.
"It's obvious that this process made mistakes," Garmendia acknowledged. "Above all, this ruling is a message that the trafficking business will continue as usual."
Simultaneous demonstrations were held in Buenos Aires on Wednesday night to protest the verdicts.
One led by governing party politicians outside the main federal justice building was peaceful. Another, involving hooded youths outside the Tucuman provincial government's tourism promotion office, quickly got out of hand with protesters smashing windows, throwing rocks and setting fire to two garbage bins they tried to push inside the building.
Reinforcements arrived and riot police pushed back the protesters, regaining control of the situation.
Trimarco called on her supporters to keep the peace, even as she expressed her anger at a news conference Wednesday, accusing the judges of taking bribes.
The lead trial judge, Alberto Piedrabuena, didn't respond to the bribery allegations, but he countered in a local radio interview that the evidence failed to resolve reasonable doubts or overcome the principle of being innocent until proven guilty.
Prostitution remains legal in Argentina, but managing brothels and trafficking in people have been federal crimes since 2008, under a law Congress passed after lobbying by Trimarco.
Garre credited her ministry's enforcement of this law with saving 938 people last year from trafficking - 215 people from the sex trade and 723 from other workplace exploitation. She said more than 800 have been rescued so far this year.
Hundreds of women also have been saved by a foundation Trimarco created in her daughter's name in 2008 with seed money from the U.S. State Department's "Women of Courage" award. The foundation also provides legal help, but its lawyers have found that proving sex slavery is difficult without full support from the same police who often get paid to protect prostitution rings.
To date, the foundation has helped 20 former sex-trafficking victims bring cases against their captors, but they have yet to win a single case. Of these, 12 resulted in federal charges, but a handful were bounced back to even more uncertain justice in provincial courts around Argentina.
"They don't investigate. There's a lack of commitment and capability," said Agustin Araoz Teran, one of the foundation's lawyers, who called the Tuesday night's verdicts "an act of cowardice."
Teran joined Trimarco's movement after his father, a juvenile court judge in Tucuman, was shot to death in his home in 2004 after investigating local police officers who were allegedly freeing juvenile delinquents so that they could peddle drugs on their (the police's) behalf.


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Pushed to the wall after 18 months of bargaining for a first contract, 1,100 faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago went on strike Feb. 18 and 19. It was the first strike in recent memory at a research institution and, as such, generated a lot of media attention both in Chicago, a union town, and across the nation.
Faculty at UIC are represented by UIC United Faculty, a joint affiliate of the AFT, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors. The union was first certified in 2011 as one unit of full-time tenure-track and nontenure-track faculty, but the university immediately appealed—the beginning of a relationship marked by stonewalling. In 2012, the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board separated the faculty into two bargaining units—one unit of 725 tenure-track faculty and another of 425 nontenure-track faculty.
Despite the separation, the union bargains as one and—judging from the wildly successful strike—are stronger together. A key issue is wages, especially the wages of 70 nontenure-track faculty who make $30,000 a year. UICUF has proposed a minimum of $45,000 a year for those faculty. It is also seeking a minimum of $60,000 a year for tenure-track faculty, and merit raises of 4.5 percent this year and 3.25 percent in each of the following two years. The university is proposing 3.25 percent raises for this year, and nonspecific increases—or none—after that.
UICUF notes that the University of Illinois has accumulated more than $275 million in unrestricted profits annually for the last four years and is on track to do so again for the 2014 fiscal year.
"The heart of UIC is its faculty and its students, but the Illinois board of trustees shortchanges them both," UICUF President Joe Persky said. "They take more of our students' tuition money, and even with hundreds of millions in profits each year and more than a billion dollars in reserves, they refuse to pay professors what they're worth."
UICUF also is fighting to give nontenure-track faculty a greater voice. "We're looking to make them real active members of their departments, as opposed to being treated like academic gypsies," Persky told the Chicago Sun-Times.
UIC's students supported the strike, which shut down classes for two days. They joined faculty on picket lines and at a December board of trustees meeting to show their alliance. As UICUF members Lennard Davis and Walter Benn Michaels explain in an article in Jacobin, UIC serves a different demographic from most large flagships; the majority of students "come from immigrant families, live at home, hold full- or part-time jobs, and even have children of their own," they write. They need extra academic attention at the outset to persist to degree:
"The UIC faculty and the UIC administration are completely united on the fact that we don't think that the way to solve these problems is by getting 'stronger' (which is to say, richer) students. In fact, when we put together a 'Strategic Thinking Report' back in 2005, we explicitly said we're not looking to recruit 'better' students; we want to do a better job of educating the students we have."
"What exactly does it mean to insist on the importance of the first-year experience," they ask, "and then pay the people most responsible for that experience a wage that virtually requires them to work a second job?"
Illinois Federation of Teachers President Dan Montgomery, who is an AFT vice president, calls it outrageous that the university has increased tuition and burdened students with debt, all while socking away almost a billion dollars of students' money. "Just as outrageous," he adds, "is that the administration has spent the students' tuition dollars on increasing the number of administrative positions and reducing the number of faculty."
The union returned to the bargaining table Feb. 21. "Despite the university's determined and divisive efforts," AFT President Randi Weingarten says, "the entire UIC community has come together to fight for high-quality higher education."
Meanwhile, faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are also organizing under the IFT-AFT-AAUP auspices. Stay tuned.
[Barbara McKenna, AFT-IFT-AAUP press release/bottom photo by Dawn Tefft]


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The International Fiber Collaborative, the folks who spearheaded a fiber-wrapped gas station last year, are kicking off a new project this year: creating a full-sized tree. This group, based in Huntsville, Alabama, and founded in 2007 by fiber artist Jennifer Marsh, clearly likes to think big. You can see pictures of their "Gas Station Project" here. Participants took an abandoned gas station in upstate New York and, with the permission of its owner, covered it in "crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged three-foot-square fiber panels" that expressed concern about world dependence on oil.
The Tree Project is no less ambitious. Participants are asked to use any of a variety of fiber-related techniques — including knitting — to create five-by-seven–inch leaves for a tree. Entries should express, in an artistic way, how "societies are interdependent on the greater whole, family units, communities, and countries"; Marsh hopes to get up to 30,000 leaves from all over the world. You are required to submit an entry form with your creation, which is due March 15, 2009. Check out the IFC Web site for details, and a downloadable entry form, or e-mail Marsh at email@example.com . The finished tree will be on display in April 2009 at the Big Springs International Park in Huntsville.


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ECO:nomics: Making Climate an Immediate Issue
Thomas Steyer, co-founding director of the Center for the Next Generation, argues that voters must view climate change as an immediate threat before it will change their votes at the polls.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
I ... the belief in ... the need to tackle climate change but not a religion in Europe ... say he or she this issue in Europe in the midst of this terrible economic crisis has almost disappeared ... how do you persuade people ... when they don't see this as an urgent issue that needs to be dealt with when they do see that yields and incomes a man housing in at ... the prospects for the children getting until ... as the gin Palace he persuade them that this masses ... well of course everything you're saying is true ... which is ... if ... someone doesn't perceive an issue as it ... directly affecting ... their family if they don't talk about it the kitchen table ... when they're alone and it doesn't matter ... and in particular in the democracy which is what I believe we live in ... unless you're willing to change your vote over ... it doesn't matter ... so this issue polls in the seventies seventy percent of Americans say ... they understand that the ... earth is warming but it's ... probably caused by people in that we should do something about it and then they would ... like their representatives to do something about ... in the seventy s ... bought ... it is not their number one issue when they're sitting around the kitchen table ... it's not they don't perceive it is their leading jobs issue Unilever ... perceive it is their leading health issue ... they don't perceive it is ... directly impacting our kids ... so the question is how does that happen ... let's let's make one ... distinction that this is a generational issue ... you know if you talk to people ... who are under the age of thirty ... those people out for them they perceived as something that will directly ... significantly impact their lives ... in a major way and a major negative way on less than stellar ... I think this is the I've I've had friends of mine ... by considered to be some of my good friends were around sixty who said to me know honestly I'm never going to deal with this is not impact my life ... so the question about Chilean sea is also question about urgency ... which is the time frame I think ... you know ... when ... George was talking about insurance ... from my point of view almost the biggest strategic question is how long is this can take before we have a real problem which is the silliest question ... because people can look out for ... because they have so many ... actually urgent problems whether it's their health of their kids' education ... for their paycheck or wanting to save for retirement ... so ... looking out ten or fifteen years is just beyond most people's ... on it's a good ability ... to do in a meaningful way ... the way that George Express tightening ... was also the way he expressed the rest ... which was true insurance which is to say ... shouldn't we spend some money now to avoid a huge problem in the future which people are very accustomed to do ... and so that is a way to both take away the issue about risk like is this really true ... I don't need to convince you that you're wrong ... I just need to convince you ... that it's possible that you're wrong you don't have to lose ... you just have to admit that it's possible ... that that we could be right and we should spend some money to afford ... so when I think about St ... the two ways to do it are either are we going to put it in a context ... that Americans can get behind across ... parties in a bipartisan fashion ... or we do know to wait for an event to happen that can change people's money ... in a note ... an event to change people's mind I believe ... House the impact of them ... immediately or their family immediately so that ... Sandy was not a huge event ... in Northern California ... if the Mississippi dried up and couldn't have barge traffic that was not a major event ... in Northern California ... the concept of global warming ... is a way to diffuse it's unimaginable it's also something that overwhelms people they don't know what to do ... so when you ask about selling its ... you hafta to bring it down to some the kitchen table you have to put it in terms ... that they can neither understand and think it's a good deal ... of bargain a bipartisan fashion ... or else something's gonna have to change their mind that so dramatic ... that people go into what ... this really is the biggest issue in the world ...


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What is the best workflow for working on PHP Webpages (local) in "Ubuntu Desktop". My problem is, when i logIn with my Ubuntu Account, and when i open a php file "geany" i cannot save the file any more, because the file is owned by "www-data". Is there a way to open "www-data" owned files -> edit it -> and save them again as www-data?
What is your workflow?


text:
First Time User? Sign Up Now
First Time User? Enroll now.
Home > Fitness & Health > Health Library > Breathing Techniques for Childbirth
As your due date draws nearer, learn and practice controlled breathing techniques for pain management during childbirth. Concentrating on your breathing can help distract you from pain, relax both your muscles and your mind, and keep your oxygen supply up.
If you haven't learned specific breathing techniques (such as Lamaze) in a childbirth education class, practice the following breathing patterns before you go into labor:
Belly breathing
In early labor, try belly breathing. As you inhale, expand your belly outward; as you exhale, relax your belly downward.
Pant-pant-blow breathing
As your contractions become more intense, exhale in a "pant-pant-blow" pattern, about 6 cycles per minute.
Current as of: February 11, 2020
Author: Healthwise StaffMedical Review: Kathleen Romito, MD - Family MedicineAdam Husney, MD - Family MedicineKirtly Jones, MD - Obstetrics and Gynecology, Reproductive Endocrinology
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Current as of: February 11, 2020
Author: Healthwise Staff
Medical Review:Kathleen Romito, MD - Family Medicine & Adam Husney, MD - Family Medicine & Kirtly Jones, MD - Obstetrics and Gynecology, Reproductive Endocrinology
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"Be who you are and be that well." – St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
From the first time I read these words from St. Francis de Sales, the patron of Catholic writers and journalists, I knew I had found a friend. In honor of his upcoming feast day on Jan. 24, I'd like to highlight what a 21st century suburban Denver working mother of two can learn from a 17th century French bishop.
Patience: Francis was a patient man. He knew he wanted to be a priest for 13 years before he said anything to anyone. Throughout his life, he always waited for God's will to be crystal clear before he made a move. That once included God knocking him off his horse three times to get his point across.
For a heart open to God's will, and patience when things don't go the way I'd hoped or expected: St. Francis, pray for me.
Think outside the box: He spent three years trudging through the Swiss countryside with his cousin trying to convert Calvinists back to Catholicism. When no one would listen, Francis started writing his sermons out by hand and slipping them under people's doors. It's estimated that he converted 72,000 people to Catholicism.
To be genuine and effective in all that I say and write, personally and professionally: St. Francis, pray for me.
We're all called to holiness: In his day, holiness was thought to be reserved for monks and nuns. Father de Sales opened up his spiritual direction to lay people. He taught that everyone is called to sainthood, that everyone has a place in the Church.
That the Holy Spirit guide my thoughts, words and actions every day: St. Francis, pray for me.
Eat the elephant one bite at a time: St. Francis provided most of his spiritual direction though letter-writing: one letter in—one letter out. When asked how this process tested his patience, he responded: "I intend neither to hurry or worry… I shall answer as many as I can. Tomorrow I shall do the same and so I shall go on until I have finished."
For perseverance in my duties at home and at work when I'm feeling snowed under: St. Francis, pray for me.
Depend on God: Francis understood that people are busy. Simple, every-day life can entail a lot of time and energy, and therefore, create distractions from what is important. He suggested that busy people retire to the solitude of their own hearts to talk to God even when "outwardly engaged in discussions or transactions with others."
To remember to talk to God first and foremost, and trust all my worries to him: St. Francis, pray for me.
I consider St. Francis a special guardian and protector in my life, a trusted intecessor on my behalf. As a newspaper reporter, blogger, wife, mother and person in the pews: St. Francis, pray for me!
Topics: Faith , Personal Growth , Writings of the Saints


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In pursuit of superpower status during the Cold War, the Soviet Union built 60 science boomtowns. Then in 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed, and funding for the cities ended. Masha Gessen reports from Russia on this grand experiment in failure.
When two protons collide in an accelerator, they are transformed into muons and other particles. One Russian physicist offers this analogy: it's like two Soviet Fiats colliding to produce a bus and a Mercedes Benz 600. That's the thing about high-energy physics: the total is different than the sum of its parts.
So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski's skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.
From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don't know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.
Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.
Because virtually everything connected with nuclear energy was kept secret in the Soviet Union, for more than a decade Bugorski observed an unspoken ban on talking about his accident. About twice a year he went to the Moscow radiation clinic to be examined and to commune with other members of the brotherhood of nuclear-accident victims. "Like former inmates, we are always aware of one another," he says. "There aren't that many of us, and we know one another's life stories. Generally, these are sad tales."
Bugorski thinks of himself as a fortunate exception: a man in reasonable health, able to continue living a full life. For years, he was a poster boy for Soviet and Russian radiation medicine, which was entirely content to take the credit for his good fortune. Last year, though, when Bugorski finally decided to apply for disabled status, which would allow him to receive his epilepsy medication free of charge, the doctors chilled on him.
For his part, now that his fate is no longer secret, he would like to make himself available to Western researchers, but he doesn't have the money to leave the science town of Protvino and go west. He thinks he would make a brilliant object of study for someone: "This is, in effect, an unintended test of proton warfare," he claims. More to the point, he believes, "I am being tested. The human capacity for survival is being tested."
This is the thing about science towns. They should all be dead by now, but they limp along, half frozen and half hopeful. The unglamorous miracle of their survival might indeed make a brilliant object of study. It is, in effect, an unintended experiment in grand failure, an eerie test of the ability of people to live and work after death. That they manage to do it is, perhaps, in part good fortune and in part the nature of the beast: the end result is always different than the sum of history, people, and money.
In the postwar drive to harness the atom, the Soviet government built little towns charged with various scientific tasks. About 60 of these towns were created between the late 1940s and early 1980s. Some of them, towns where new weapons were designed, were not even on the map. Other towns worked on what the Soviets called "the peaceful atom" and were considered "open," which meant that access to them was highly restricted for foreigners and that the residents themselves were closely monitored by the secret police.
In exchange for their isolation - these towns were generally situated at least a couple of hours outside major cities - the researchers enjoyed a standard of living significantly higher than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The towns, usually built in beautiful wooded areas, boasted better town planning - well, any town planning was better than the haphazard warehousing of the citizenry that went on elsewhere - higher salaries, and, paradoxically, a sort of cloistered freedom. The scientists in some of the open towns were allowed to organize performances of singers or exhibits of artists considered too ideologically unreliable for a wider audience. For the intelligentsia living outside, science towns held the allure of romantic impossibility. When I was 8, my translator grandmother married a nuclear physicist living in Dubna, one of the science towns - and it seemed my family's entire Moscow social circle was struck by the glamour of it.
The exchange of talent for the good life made for an extraordinarily productive relationship between the state and the scientists. The science towns helped ensure the Soviet Union's standing as a military and intellectual superpower, and the state paid them back by ensuring their continued comfort.
The top graduates of the country's famous math and science high schools and high- pressure technical colleges were assigned to the science towns, where they received good pay and, usually, an apartment - while their peers had to make do with dorm rooms or communal flats. They were the chosen people.
In 1990 science funding suddenly dropped about 90 percent. With the country on the brink of collapse, international prestige finally had to take a back seat to economic emergencies. Construction in the science towns froze and the trickle of young science graduates dried up. By 1993, many institutes could not afford to keep their electricity turned on, and the life in most labs had ground to a halt. While the economic disaster of the early '90s hit the entire country, the science towns were arguably in the worst position to adjust. Unlike military-factory towns, which also lost their funding overnight, the science towns had no industry to convert to civilian production. Unlike their colleagues living in other cities, the scientists in science towns could not switch to careers in finance or the service industries: most of them lived hours away from anything that wasn't a research institute, and they had no money to move.
While a small scientific lobby is pushing a hopeless bill in the Russian parliament to secure full federal funding for at least a dozen of the towns, salaries and pensions in some science towns are held up for months, even more than a year at a time. When the wages are paid, they generally range between about US$70 and $200 a month. The head of one nuclear institute at the heart of a science town shot himself last year - his colleagues are convinced it was over the lack of funding. For a few years, starting around 1992, various Western foundations, led by American financier-philanthropist George Soros's organization, gave out small grants to Russian exact scientists. Now most of that funding has dried up: Soros, for one, has said he will no longer single-handedly attempt to save Russian science if the Russian government plans to do nothing to help.
Many scientists find occasional teaching gigs in the West: if they are frugal during their semester of lecturing in some Midwestern town, they can save enough money to finance the following year at home. Some get financial infusions from more fortunate relatives living elsewhere. Many find ways to procure cheaper produce, even to live off the land with tiny plots they stake out outside the towns.
But even if each individual survival can be explained separately, the mechanism of the towns' collective endurance remains largely a mystery. Without the infusions of money and people, the towns and their populations are aging steadily, slowing down, and losing their old buzz, but the buildings are not crumbling and the residents are not deserting. In fact, the "brain drain" that has been the bugbear of post-Soviet science and technology, whose best and brightest are lured to the West, has barely affected the science towns. A recent survey of science towns' residents conducted by the Russian Labor Institute found that most young people would like to stay in the towns and in the sciences. Perhaps they are incurable romantics.
Or perhaps, being the best and the brightest among the best and the brightest, they know something we don't; perhaps they are right in believing that they are in possession of something so unique and precious that they should spend the rest of their lives propping up - and touching up - these 60 giant monuments to the power of science, the future ruins of the Nuclear Age.
Protvino, population 40,000, is one of the youngest science towns. The Institute for High Energy Physics was founded in 1963 and its accelerator completed in 1967, with the first experiments run in 1968. The town is built in a moderately impressive pine forest about 100 kilometers outside Moscow, where the small Protva River meets the larger Oka. The problem is, it is haunted. Subterraneanly, that is.
It could have been foreseen: the town was founded on a bunch of dead bodies. In 1941 the southern front line outside Moscow cut through this area, and before the Germans were finally forced out, they retreated and returned seven times. World War II continued for another three and a half years, and, it seems, no one really bothered to clean up the bodies and the ammunition both armies left behind. When the first scientists moved here in the late 1960s and '70s, their kids kept dragging home rusty helmets and unused ammo ribbons they'd found while digging around the old trenches. Construction workers still find human remains.
Too modern to fear bad omens, Soviet scientists and bureaucrats had big plans for Protvino. They built the largest particle accelerator in the world and imported a group of artists and designers from around the Soviet Union to make it into the prettiest of towns. "There was no architecture then in the Soviet Union," remembers Vitaly Gubarev, who headed up the beautification task force until its demise in 1991, "just prefab concrete boxes." It's a wonder, he says, that Protvino has buildings designed especially for the town: two pyramid-shaped brick high-rises and two "saw buildings," long zigzags in gray concrete that may look like a typical Eastern bloc monstrosity to the untrained eye but in fact consist of split-level apartments - an unheard-of luxury. The master plan called for the cluster of these apartment buildings with stores and schools to create a pedestrian-only zone. A miniature beltway around the town, with no exits into Protvino itself, would keep out cars and accidental tourists.
The plan behind the master plan was to win the State Prize - the highest Soviet honor - for the best town plan. But in the mid-1970s construction engineers made a horrifying discovery: this area was what geologists call a karst, a limestone region that contains giant underground hollow caverns. The master plan had to be revised again and again as more caverns were found; the original cluster idea had to be abandoned. A few years later another small town, just outside Moscow, was refashioned as a pedestrian cluster and promptly received the State Prize.
Thus began the tradition of failing to be the first. Other countries, too, were building accelerators, so that by the middle of the 1980s the Protvino machine was only fourth-largest in the world, trailing accelerators in the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. Plus, the US was starting to build the supercollider. To save the prestige of Soviet high-energy physics, in 1987 the government launched the construction of a new accelerator, the biggest ever at 21 kilometers in length. It would in fact be three accelerators in one extralong channel: one "warm" accelerator - that is, one made with regular magnets - and two "cold" accelerators, created with superconducting magnets. All over the Soviet Union, wherever there were large building projects, signs went up inviting construction workers and engineers to come to Protvino. They needed hundreds of people just to create the channel: you'd think the planners would know better, but they were going to put it underground.
Starting in 1990, when science funding was cut, the big project was gradually revised down from three accelerators to the one warm one. As the staff of the institute continued to assemble giant magnets for the accelerator at an ever-decreasing rate, it gradually became clear that the accelerator had no chance of being completed before it became obsolete.
Big dreams leave big traces. Enormous warehouses filled with thousands of magnets and hundreds of generators stand as giant monuments to the accelerator that never was. Most of the equipment is useless for any other purpose and wouldn't be worth much as scrap metal, but ultimately it could be disposed of. The creaky mechanism of assembly, storage, and upkeep of the accelerator parts could ultimately be forced to stop churning.
The problem, of course, is the tunnel. The circle was completed in October 1994, and it now haunts the town from below. Left alone, engineers estimate, it would be destroyed by water in four years. The way of the land is such that the level of groundwater to one side of town is higher than the street level in Protvino itself. In other words, if the tunnel were left to fill with water and collapse, in four years the earth would open up to swallow the town of Protvino.
Alexander Vasilevski, a large, bearded man in his 40s who came to Protvino as a college graduate, is the chief engineer of the accelerator project. He has calculated that it would cost nearly as much to fill in the tunnel as to complete the accelerator: about $200 million. For the last few years the project has been receiving seemingly random amounts ranging anywhere from $3 million to $30 million a year, which Vasilevski has been using to maintain the tunnel and continue, little by little, to assemble the magnets. He does not have any choice but to keep going: it seems the government will never be able to fork up enough cash at one time to make it possible to fill the tunnel. That, of course, is irrelevant: whatever the needs of the scientists, Vasilevski believes the tunnel ought to be built. "The accelerator would only be in use for 20 or 30 years anyway," he argues. "But if we build it right, the tunnel will be there for another 250 years. A structure like this should be used." Yes, it could be the world's longest underground shopping arcade. Or the world's only subway in the woods. Or a nuclear fallout-shelter for forest dwellers.
It is time to stop thinking so big. Protvino may have some trouble coming to terms with this imperative, but 20 kilometers down the road, in the biologists' town of Pushchino, small has come to mean survival. Granted, unlike Protvino, Pushchino was never meant to hit it big: it was too secret for that. Yuri Bespalov, the official local historian, even claims, with some pride, that the town plan was devised to make it impossible to add on to Pushchino. It would always be three finite zones: Zone A for the scientific institutes (all nine of them), Zone B for greenery, and Zone C for living (in any one of three types of nine-story concrete-block buildings). Nearly 30 years after the town was built, its population still only about 20,000, the experiment in stasis can be deemed successful: the new era has managed to insinuate itself into the Pushchino look in just two ways - the glass panes that residents have now been allowed to put on their balconies (in the old days this was believed to spoil the gorgeous uniformity of the façades), and the retirees who gather in front of the store in the morning to find out when their pension might be paid and to beg shyly.
With no money for the institutes, the answer to the townpeople's problems clearly lies outside of Pushchino. About a mile outside, that is. Residents have turned the tracts of land that once guaranteed their isolation into tiny garden plots - 20 or 30 square meters a person. Weekends and evenings year-round, half the town is working the land. The more enterprising types have put up miniature houses - half tool shed, half status symbol - on their plots; others just spend their time pulling old nylon pantyhose onto tiny year-old apple trees.
"People were suffering unnecessarily trying to work on their garden plots," explains Gennadi Bulatkin, head of the Laboratory of Bioproductivity of Agricultural Ecosystems and a chief instructor at the school. "What they needed was scientific knowledge to make their work efficient." Researchers at the Institute of Soil and Photosynthesis have organized the School of Practical Fruit and Vegetable Gardening. Most of the students are scientists - biologists, astronomers, and physicists. Bulatkin plans to devote this year to the study and practice of basic gardening, with instruction on tree-wrapping and crown-trimming, then eventually graduate to beekeeping. "Every plot should have at least two or three beehives," he says emphatically. "That's good for pollination and teaching your children, both."
Bulatkin should know. He has spent his life in science studying complex ecosystems; he claims to head the only lab in the world to study the relative energy consumption and production of natural and agricultural systems. A believer in the efficiency of agricultural ecosystems, he says two thirds of his family's sustenance comes from their little plot. Walking through the gardening tract on a December Saturday, he examines his colleagues' and students' efforts, praising the fir-tree-branch coverings here (they help create a layer of snow to insulate the soil), criticizing the evident lack of attention there. We pass a couple of abandoned plots - an institute director and his grown children have moved abroad - and greet the assistant director of another institute in his garden. This PhD, decked out in a gray cotton quilted jacket and tall rough soldier's boots, clearly relishes his back-to-the-land persona. He poses for the photographer, smoking one of those foul hollow-filter cigarettes found in Russian villages and prisons.
There is something outrageously subversive about staking a small project against the grandeur of Soviet science. Soviet science set itself up for it, though, by creating its little havens: the blueprints for a cozy individualism the residents would eventually come to claim. Long before the state left its scientists to fend for themselves, popular Soviet mythology already portrayed the science towns as oases of progress, modernism, and comfort.
The generic symbol of all the science towns was Dubna, a nuclear physicists' town two and a half hours northwest of Moscow. Here the popular fascination with the romance of science towns got to run wild. One well-known writer waxed sentimental upon visiting the town: "In our days, when even the poles of the earth are becoming inhabited, it is rather difficult to become known for youth and novelty. Yet the young town of Dubna did. The interest in this town of nuclear physics is now universal.... Its streets are cuttings in the forest. Its squares are forest glades. The prevailing sound is the forest stillness. Probably, such will be the towns of the future." Yuli Kim, a quasi-underground singer-songwriter, crooned of Dubna. Alla Pugacheva, the megapopular pop star, sang of future geniuses who "study the Synchrophasotron in Home Ec."
Dubna's Synchrophasotron, a light-nuclei accelerator constructed in the 1950s, captured the imagination of many Russians. Its neoclassical building with a flattened round dome became the symbol of Dubna's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Not that many people from outside the institute had ever seen the mythical structure: though Dubna was an open town and its institute was international, the Synchrophasotron itself hid in the woods behind several fences and a tall embankment. This, of course, only added to the mystique.
As a kid, I spent all my school holidays in Dubna - friends and I killed entire vacations lurking around the Synchro-phasotron fence. Kids elsewhere may have lived for legends of their football or fishing exploits, but all our adventures focused on the Synchrophasotron.
Along most of the inside of the Synchrophasotron fence ran a strip of turned soil, off-limits even to employees: its inside perimeter was marked with barbed wire. This, we were convinced, was like the neutral zone at state borders - an area specially designed for gunning down trespassers. In fact, it appears, it was sealed off to make sure that trespassers left footprints. The summer I was 9 we discovered a small patch of the strip that the guards used for shooting practice. My most trusted friend Anton and I took a few days to dig a tunnel beneath the wooden fence and spent all summer making triumphant, if nerve-racking, forays into the shooting range to collect spent bullet casings (the guards, it turned out, used handguns with tiny copper bullets and shotguns with blanks weighed down with dried peas). We shared the secret passageway with a few other friends with whom we then traded casings and adventure stories.
When all nine years of your life have unfolded against the background of the world's grandest dream, you need a mythology that makes you a part of it. There was never much doubt in our minds that we'd become scientists: we were all attending math schools, the rebel among us wanted to become a geologist.
But making career plans was not enough. We needed romance, and romance was in the Synchrophasotron. We needed conflict, and conflict was in the imaginary gunfire. We performed our job of trespassing on adult territory with the determination and literalism of future scientists. (The rebel did become a geologist and moved to the Russian Far East; his brother, my old friend Anton, is a scientist at the Dubna institute. I lost touch with them when my family emigrated to the US when I was 14. I haven't looked for them in the four years I have been back.)
Pavel Zarubin, the plump youthful scientific secretary - a sort of scholarly PR rep - for the Laboratory of High Energies, which oversees the Synchrophasotron, refuses to believe a bunch of kids managed to breach the accelerator's security 21 years ago. "But we got shot at," I claim in an irrational reach for credibility. "Well, my friends did."
Born and reared in Dubna, Zarubin is, I suppose, either what I would have become had I settled in this town or, alternatively, what I would have had to be to stay. He is a fountain of variously mystical metaphors. In a single run around the dimly lit Synchrophasotron - the institute has to save on electricity - Zarubin manages to compare it to a castle, a monastery, and an abbey. The point is, the Synchrophasotron was built to stand for centuries - not unlike the Protvino tunnel except, of course, that it was actually completed.
The moment of the Synchrophasotron's obsolescence more or less coincided with the end of science funding, so the local researchers, who'd been counting on conducting future experiments in Protvino, came up with the brilliant idea of putting a new accelerator right where the old one was. The Synchrophasotron could not be dismantled, mind you - if the hundreds of tons of steel that comprise it were shifted, the entire castle just might slide into the nearby Dubna river - but they had learned to miniaturize, so they put the Nuclotron, a superconducting accelerator of nuclei and heavy ions, just below the Synchrophasotron. The first Nuclotron experiments were conducted in 1994.
Thus Dubna, population 68,000, became the first and possibly only success story among the struggling science towns. Constructing the Nuclotron, the scientists and engineers had to invent cheaper ways of doing their thing. The traditional way to make the tube that holds the beam, for example, is prohibitively expensive: a high-pressure chamber is generally used to force the metal alloy to conform to the complex shape required of the tube. In Dubna they used water frozen with the aid of liquid nitrogen to do the work of the pressure chamber.
"This is the innovation level of a guy working in his garage," Zarubin claims with a folksy pride. "Guys need their garages. Russian monasteries were always the repositories not only of spirituality, but also of skills. And technical culture, engineering culture, the belief in scientific values - all this has almost a religious quality. In times of trouble Russia often lost its churches, but never its monasteries."
Yes, I say, still sore over his refusal to believe my shooting story, but in Soviet times a lot of the monasteries were turned into prisons. "They became only more sacred for that," Zarubin retorts. One has to cultivate an enlightened disregard for history in these science towns. If Protvino was built on the bodies of soldiers, then Dubna rests on the bones of labor camp inmates. The town sits on an island shaped by the Dubna and Volga Rivers and the Moscow Channel, which connects the Volga with the Moskva River. The channel, a utopian dream of Russian rulers for centuries, was built in the 1930s by prisoners - as many as 700,000 of them, according to sources.
After the war, prisoners were used to build the first accelerator here (the world's biggest, naturally), the Synchrocyclotron, which became operational in 1949. The entire project was the province of the Ministry for Mid-Range Machinery, as the Soviet ministry of atomic warfare was euphemistically named. It was a state unto itself, with Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's police chief, as its czar, and labor camp inmates as its citizens. The first scientists, who moved to Dubna in the 1940s and '50s, remember that the large green between Dubna's luxurious (by Soviet standards) hotel and the Volga used to be the campgrounds. They remember too that the inmates were escorted by armed guards to the Synchrophasotron construction site.
It was all top secret then; the physicists were not even allowed to publish their findings. But then in 1954, Western European physicists joined forces to create CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, now known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and the place where the World Wide Web was invented) on the Swiss-French border. Soviet Science had to retaliate with a Warsaw Pact center, and in 1956 the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was inaugurated around the Synchrophasotron (then the world's biggest) in a freshly built town full of yellow Hungarian-style cottages (for the top scientists) and gray Bulgarian-designed apartment buildings (for the rest). The only memory of the labor camp inmates lay in their unmarked graves. "Where the prisoners' graves are, there is a stream," Zarubin tells me. "Local men use the water for pickling cucumbers, and they don't have to boil it first." He pauses. "It is holy water," he explains. This man can put a good spin on anything.
Even with a correction for Zarubin's PR prowess, the picture that emerges from our circular tour of the venerable Synchrophasotron and the defiant Nuclotron is one of folksy ingenuity riding in on a good old workhorse to save Soviet science. At a time when, in most science towns, salaries have not been paid in months and institute directors have resorted to hunger strikes and even suicide, the mere fact of functioning can be a source of boundless pride. In 1996, the year of the science town's 40th birthday, Dubna put on a lavish celebration of its continued existence. Façades were painted, roads repaved, and new streetlights erected to greet visiting dignitaries. The money ran out before some of the repairs were completed, though; at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, for example, the front entrance is sealed off. This lab, the source of Dubna's greatest prestige, is also the recipient of the largest part of the institute's budget.
Thanks to the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, all of Dubna hopes to immortalize itself in the name of element 105 (one of those blank spaces in the periodic table), which, if all negotiations among international agencies go as planned, will become officially known as dubnium. The Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, with its four small accelerators, synthesizes the nuclei of new elements. It is a source of great pride in Dubna that elements 102, 103, 104, and 105 are generally acknowledged to have been synthesized first in Dubna, and elements 106, 107, and 108 are said to owe a sizable debt to Dubna as well. It is element 114, however, that the lab is pinning its hopes on.
"It has been predicted," explains director of the lab Mikhail Itkis, "that element 114 will live a long time. The nuclei of other elements we have synthesized have been short-lived, dying after milliseconds or microseconds, while this one may live for days or even months." Led by the theoretical predictions, scientists have been looking for it. The prediction, explains Itkis, is that element 114 will have a magical nucleus - that is, a nucleus with magical numbers of neutrons and protons. Like lead, for example: it has 114 protons and 184 neutrons, which makes it doubly magical. The point is, a nucleus possessed of magical numbers is extraordinarily resilient. "We are looking for a new island of stability," says Itkis. Aren't we all. Measured against other science towns, though, Dubna seems to have come closest to finding the magical combination, the correct relationship between scaling down and insisting on the dream. It's just lucky not to be saddled with a dream that's 21 kilometers long.
Tito Pontecorvo is one of Dubna's most famous residents. His father Bruno, the brother of Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, studied with the great Enrico Fermi, then fled fascist Italy, emigrating to Canada and disappearing with his wife, a Swedish communist. As it turned out, the man who was dubbed the Hydrogen Traitor (though he maintained he'd never worked on the H-bomb) went to Finland and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, where, apparently by prior arrangement, he was hidden - in Dubna. A couple of years after Bruno Pontecorvo disappeared in the West, he reappeared at a press conference in Moscow, his transformation into Soviet scientist complete. He lived in Dubna for the rest of his life; his wife, they say, lost her mind.
Dubna myths feed on the memory of Bruno Pontecorvo's flamboyance: he is said to have delivered April Fool's Day lectures and to have ridden his horse through Dubna at midnight wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The latter story, though, seems to conflate his image with that of his youngest son: Pontecorvo the father is most fondly remembered for introducing the Soviets to snorkeling; his son is the one with the horses. Tito Pontecorvo started out as a scientist in oceanology and spent most of his time at sea - but as the son of foreigners, he was not considered reliable enough to disembark in foreign lands. finally, Pontecorvo quit, declaring to anyone who would listen that he had been forced out of science.
Since he was a child, Tito Pontecorvo had had a thing about horses. Enough of a thing, apparently, to do the unimaginable: launch a private enterprise not just anywhere in the Soviet Union, but in one of its showcase towns. In 1979 he built a barn right where the town of Dubna met the forest and started offering riding and horse-grooming lessons.
Having a local riding school appealed to the Dubna ambition for the finer things in life. Tito Pontecorvo and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research entered into a mutually beneficial relationship that lasted a dozen years and produced hundreds of Eastern bloc city kids uncommonly good with horses. In 1991, when Russia legalized private farming, Pontecorvo set about building the dream of his lifetime. He spent more than a million dollars of borrowed money to build the biggest palace the Volga has seen. He situated it on the opposite side of the river from Dubna, where the gray-brown of dilapidated villages unexpectedly gives way to the spectacle of a red-brick rendition of a sugar castle, with tiny turrets and silver-topped towers stretching as far as the eye can see. The castle lies low in a valley, surrounded by the green pastures rolling down to the river, dotted with Pontecorvo's 200 Akhal-Teke, some of the world's most exotic, most expensive and, possibly, most beautiful horses; there are only 2,500 of them on earth.
But the Russian nouveau riche have not rushed to buy these fine animals. And the state is in no hurry to fork over half a million dollars in farming subsidies that Pontecorvo figures he is due. Pontecorvo's plan now is to use his natural charm, native English, and Canadian citizenship to popularize the Akhal-Teke in North America, "so that American snobs start saying to one another, 'What, you still have not bought an Akhal-Teke?'" For now, though, he has sold off most of the farm equipment. His telephone has been turned off for nonpayment. His six employees, his family, and his 200 Akhal-Teke are living in the castle, gates closed tight against the creditors.
The moral of this story, then, is that ambition can trap you - indeed, that if science was among the Soviet Union's greatest ambitions, then the science towns were its best-built traps. As these things go, of course, it is better to be trapped in a castle, like Tito Pontecorvo, than in barracks, like the builders of Protvino's ill-fated accelerator tunnel. When miners and construction workers were called in from all over the country, some of them were temporarily settled in barracks on the outskirts of Protvino. In the years since the money stopped, the 200-family barracks settlement has turned into a town of its own, rife with the complaints, the smells, and the rumors bred by hopelessness and poverty.
As soon as I declare myself as a journalist, the women of this shanty town flock to me and interrupt one another with complaints. "Our children have to travel to school in another town." "The sewers leak everywhere!" "The rats are as big as a soccer ball!" "We were tricked!"
True, they were tricked. They were lured here with high salaries - about the same as a physics PhD's then - and the promise of an apartment in a few years. When the construction came to a standstill, all hope for an apartment vanished. A couple of years ago the local sanitary commission deemed the shanty town unsuitable for living. Some of the wives in the town formed an activist group, and last summer they finally succeeded: they obtained permanent residence registration stamps for all the barracks' residents. Now they have more rights, including the right to stay indefinitely in a place unsuitable for living, playing the raggedy ghosts of Protvino's ambition.
The town retaliates by putting on an aggressively happy face. Protvino is holding a town-anthem contest, in which the front-runner is local celebrity poet Alexandra Kurbakova.
In a scene too heavily symbolic for even the most exploitative of journalists, Kurbakova greets me from her bed in a cramped first-floor studio apartment in the "saw building" by saying she doesn't have long to live. Reclining beneath a wall of portraits of great Russian poets - Alexander Pushkin, Sergei Yesenin, and Kurbakova herself - she performs her hymn to Protvino, a waltz that I present here in my own faithful translation:
Where the scientists are free Like the birds in the trees, Hear the sounds of science In the forest's green silence. You can feel antimatter And the scientists had better Take you down the stairs To the tunnel that's theirs.
Kurbakova's husband, also a local poet, has lit candles and cranked up a crackly mono tape recorder for this performance. I sort through my embarrassment at being the recipient of this ritual, my disgust at this filthy little apartment, my squeamishness at the sight of Kurbakova, who really does not look like she has much time left - and discover that I am not only touched, but also vaguely envious.
There was a time, albeit when I was 9, when I would have been willing to be shot in the butt with a salt bullet just to stake out a place in the science-town mythology. How glamorous it is to be going out as a science town's tragic living classic.
That's the thing about science towns: their projects are so grand they are absurd, their residents are so stubborn they have tunnel vision, their artists are so gloriously provincial they are pathetic, but somehow, even now, the total is different than the sum of its parts.


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An expat's guide to accessing public and private healthcare in France
Expats looking for healthcare in France will no doubt benefit from the modern healthcare facilities available in this country. Considered one of the most medically advanced countries in the world, France is reputed for its revolutionary medical research. For example, in 2008, virologist Luc Montagnier won the Nobel prize for his research in isolating HIV, the disease that causes AIDS.
France is also renown for being one of the largest producers of pharmaceutical products in Europe. Pharmaceutical regulations are also relatively relaxed in France, and as such consumption of pharmaceutical products is considerably higher here compared to other European countries.
There are a few things that expats in France should know about receiving treatment in public and private hospitals, and the health insurance options available.
We asked our friends at Pacific Prime to help with this informative article on accessing both types of healthcare.
Background on healthcare in France
France enjoys one of the leading healthcare systems in the world, thanks to its combination of universal health coverage (known as CMU, more on this below) and high supply of healthcare providers (there are 3 doctors per 1,000 population in the country).
The overall state of health in the country has a positive outlook, especially when looking at the average life expectancy at birth, which is over 82.4 years - 1.8 years higher than the EU average of 80.6). Women in France have the highest life expectancy in the world, with an average 85.6 years.
Medical doctors are highly trained, and many French residents enjoy high standards of service in both public and private sector facilities. However, expats should be aware that not all doctors will speak English, especially in rural parts of the country, so learning some useful health-related vocabulary can really come in handy. It is also worth requesting a list of doctors who speak English in your area from your embassy or consulate.
Hospitals in France are either state-run public hospitals or privately run. You're required to show your health insurance card (carte vitale) so that you can you can prove whether you're entitled to reimbursements for medical treatment. Alternatively, EEA citizens can present their European Health Insurance Card (EHIC), but this does come with many limitations (more on this below).
If you're admitted into hospital for an emergency and do not have health insurance, you won't be denied treatment but you'll have to pay for the fees up front - this can be very expensive, depending on the procedure in question.
Expats and the French national health insurance system
To be compensated for most of your medical fees, expats are highly advised to apply for the French national health insurance scheme, named Couverture Maladie Universelle (CMU). Expats working in France with the intent on residing in France for over 183 days in a year are required to pay a CMU levy of around 6-7% of your income, as governed by French law.
Self-employed individuals can refer to the Regime Social des Indépendants website for information on CMU contributions and reimbursements. Those with a household income below a certain threshold are entitled to free coverage, this scheme is referred to as CMU-C. To register for French healthcare, simply visit your local CPAM (Caisse Primaire Assurance Maladie) office.
The CMU doesn't pay for everything.
What's good about the CMU scheme is that it covers pre-existing conditions. On the other hand, the CMU does not provide compensation for all of your medical treatment costs, as it will only pay for around 80% of fees. This percentage of fees is based on what the CMU guidelines state a procedure should cost, but not the actual cost charge. This means that you will need to pay the rest, and this can amount to a lot.
For treatment in hospitals, there are additional charges (called dépassements) that you will also have to pay. This could include things like private rooms, bedding charges, and food, which will not be covered. There will also be a daily charge of €18. Forking out for dépassements charges can cause a significant drain to your finances, when considering that there has been a recently reported case of someone paying €1,000 for a 2 day hospital stay, even though they are covered by CMU.
What about medicine?
Depending on the necessity of your medication, the CMU will pay either the total cost of your medication, 65%, 30%, 15% or nothing at all. For example, essential medication such as insulin will be deemed as completely necessary, so this will be 100% compensated.
If your medication is considered important, 65% will be reimbursed. Some medicines such as contraceptive pills, and medicines deemed as ineffective will not be reimbursed. It's not uncommon to pay over €100 for medication.
As you can see, the French national health insurance scheme does not pay for everything, and many expats will choose to supplement these costs with an additional health insurance policy.
Public healthcare
There are three main categories of State-run hôpitaux in France, these include:
● Hospital centres/short-stay hospitals (hôpital de court séjou): This category includes general hospitals, specialist hospitals, regional hospitals and Assistance Publique hospitals linked with the University of Paris.
● Medium-stay hospitals (centre de moyen séjour): People who are treated in medium-stay hospitals are usually transferred from short-stay hospitals, for medical care such as physiotherapy, mental health treatment, and rehabilitation.
● Long-stay hospitals (centre et unité de long séjour): Long-stay hospitals are dedicated to people who can no longer take care of themselves on their own, such as elderly care in nursing homes.
Acute, short-term care for severe injuries or illnesses is primarily provided by public hospitals in France, and these facilities offer a broad range of surgeries - more so than in private hospitals. Not every hospital will have an A&E department, so it's important that you check where all the available A&E departments are near you.
Please also keep in mind that hospitals in rural areas of France (usually hospital centres) will not be as well equipped, and medical staff in these facilities will likely not speak English. Many expats who do not speak any French (or only speak basic French) will prefer seeking treatment in private facilities, as most medical staff will speak English.
Private healthcare
Most private profit-making hospitals and clinics will offer specialized services for people who need more specialized care, as these treatments are usually where the profit opportunities lie. This may include a vast array of specialized treatment, such as specialist dermatological care, surgical or orthodontic procedures, and invasive procedures such as endoscopy. Very few private hospitals in France operate entirely out of the public sector, so these facilities are usually as openly accessible as public hospitals.
Many people go to private facilities for outpatient treatment, as not many private facilities operate as full-service hospitals in France, with the exception of a few, one of them being the world renown American Hospital of Paris founded by American expats. Another famous private hospital for expats in Paris is the Hertford British Hospital.
Private hospitals tend to impose higher additional charges, and while most private hospital fees are reimbursable through the French social security system, the remaining percentage (generally a 20% copayment) that you will have to pay can become exorbitant if you do not secure additional health insurance. Additionally, specialists will also charge a higher rate, and if you go directly to them without first receiving a referral from a French doctor, you will only be reimbursed a general doctor's rate, and not the specialist's rate.
Health insurance options available to expats.
Now, let's take a look at the health insurance options commonly secured by expats in France.
The EHIC for EEA citizens only
With a European Health Insurance Card (EHIC), which is available for EEA citizens only, you will be able to receive free or discounted access to public health care when visiting a country within the EEA. If you're going to be living in France, it's definitely not enough to only be covered by the EHIC, as there are a number of costs that the EHIC does not cover for, including:
● Repatriation and rescue services
● Treatment in private hospitals that are not registered to provide state healthcare
● 24/7 support services typically provided by health insurance
● Accommodation you have lost as a result of being in hospital
Regardless of whether you're eligible for an EHIC or not, expats are highly recommended to secure private health insurance to supplement their healthcare costs.
Private health insurance.
In most cases, universal health coverage does not cover 100% of treatment costs, so to avoid paying a mountain of additional fees, some expats and local citizens alike are purchasing additional private health insurance for peace of mind. Of course, there are many types of health insurance available, and your ideal plan will depend on your specific circumstances and requirements.
For example, if you rarely visit your GP and only require hospitalization coverage, you can purchase an inpatient-only plan to enjoy relatively cheaper premiums as opposed to plans that include both inpatient and outpatient plans. If you require additional coverage, such as maternity or dental cover, you can purchase a more comprehensive plan which includes both inpatient and outpatient coverage, as well as the additional coverage benefit(s) you require.
You'll also need to decide on either choosing local health insurance or international health insurance:
● Local health insurance: As the name suggests, local health insurance covers you in one region only, meaning that once you leave France, you will no longer by eligible for making any claims on treatment received outside of the country. People with this type of policy will usually purchase additional travel insurance when travelling outside of their plan's covered region. This type of plan is ideal if you rarely travel or if you're on a tight budget, as premiums charged for this policy will be lower than for international plans.
● International health insurance: This type of insurance is specifically designed for globally mobile expats, meaning that you'll have peace of mind from knowing that you will be covered no matter where you go, whether you're away for business or for pleasure. With global coverage, you won't have to worry about purchasing additional travel policies when travelling abroad. Please keep in mind that as there are significantly more regions are covered by international health insurance, the premiums that you will have to pay will be higher.
It can be confusing looking for additional health insurance to supplement your healthcare costs in France, so if you require some further advice and guidance, it can pay to talk to an insurance advisor to find the best value deal that is tailored to your specific needs.
About the author.
If you are looking for the best health insurance plans on the market, why not visit Pacific Prime, a global insurance broker. Their team of experienced insurance advisors can offer a wealth of experience that you can rely on.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here by Pacific Prime are their own, not those of Expats Paris.
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Anyone familiar with my writings round these parts already knows that I am solipsism central, so I'll just jump right to the point and say what a special and important time of year spring is for me. Seriously, most of the good things in my life aside from my winter birth have happened as the tulips bloom and the trees turn green.
Naturally, the first up is my sixth anniversary this weekend. We had our ceremony on May 5 because, obviously, the best way to celebrate a Vietnamese-Buddhist, white-Southern-Christian gay wedding is to have it on Cinco de Mayo. No matter when we get our real, legal, honest-to-God marriage license later this year, as planned, the 5th of May will always be the day Cavin officially became my husband.
And while I'm creeping up on 10 years together with him — we waited three years before forcing friends and family to buy us wedding presents — I'm also celebrating another anniversary, my time at Metro Weekly. While I've written for the magazine since its launch, it wasn't until 2000 that I joined full-time as editor-in-chief. Here I am 13 years later, now the co-publisher and writing a column that sits underneath a picture of myself in a tie looking all respectable. Time changes everything.
Coming up next week we have the Metro Weekly Next Generation Awards, which will mark their own fifth anniversary. You'll learn more about that in the next issue, but I have to say that I'm incredibly proud and honored to be a part of something that's brought so many talented, energetic and dedicated LGBT people into my life as friends and colleagues.
Which brings me to the big one: This is the issue when Metro Weekly turns 19, when we enter our 20th year of publication. Since our Sweet 16 celebration we haven't done any special issues on our anniversary — there's no need to throw a super-special party for ourselves every year. We want to save up our fun ideas for a big blowout next year on our 20th anniversary.
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll all be invited.
Still, turning 19 as an LGBT newsmagazine that's gone through so many evolutions and revolutions, whether internal with our content and design or external with expanding our scope online, is something to celebrate. It's awe-inspiring to live in Washington and experience LGBT history in the making — marches and protests, heroes and villains, defeats and victories. It's an honor to play some role in recording that history to share with our readers here and, more than ever, across the world.
"If you click here you'll see the masthead of all the people who make Metro Weekly happen — every day, not just every Thursday — and they are some of the most talented individuals I've ever worked with. I've said similar things over the past 13 years because I've been incredibly fortunate to keep hiring some of the most talented people I've ever met. The work we do today is made possible by the work so many of them did in the past, some of them still with us in the world, too many now gone."
I'm not going to do a list of everyone I owe a debt of gratitude to for making Metro Weekly so special because I'll be doing that next year. Right now I just want to say thank you to anyone and everyone who's ever read the magazine, whether to find out the news of the community or to find their friends in our Scene photos or look for an LGBT-friendly business. A magazine and website without readers is like an empty bus: It doesn't matter where it goes because it's not taking anyone anywhere.
We've gone to amazing places at Metro Weekly and I'm glad we've had you along.
Sean Bugg is the co-publisher of Metro Weekly. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter @seanbugg.
These are challenging times for news organizations. And yet it's crucial we stay active and provide vital resources and information to both our local readers and the world. So won't you please take a moment and consider supporting Metro Weekly with a membership? For as little as $5 a month, you can help ensure Metro Weekly magazine and MetroWeekly.com remain free, viable resources as we provide the best, most diverse, culturally-resonant LGBTQ coverage in both the D.C. region and around the world. Memberships come with exclusive perks and discounts, your own personal digital delivery of each week's magazine (and an archive), access to our Member's Lounge when it launches this fall, and exclusive members-only items like Metro Weekly Membership Mugs and Tote Bags! Check out all our membership levels here and please join us today!


text: Jasper Morrison has staged a scenic display on the first level of the VitraHaus in Weil am Rhein. Covering an area of around 150 square metres, the British industrial designer has envisaged a space for a fictional inhabitant based on an individual living concept, which visitors can view and explore from 19 November.The presentation features a living space – part salon, part studio, part office. Jasper Morrison started with an original premise for the design of the scene and fashioned the interior for a fictitious occupant.


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Final Guidelines
Published in the Federal Register on September 3, 2002.
36 CFR Part 1191
[Docket No. 98-5]
AGENCY: Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board.
ACTION: Final rule.
SUMMARY: The Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (Access Board) is issuing final accessibility guidelines to serve as the basis for standards to be adopted by the Department of Justice for new construction and alterations of recreation facilities covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The guidelines include scoping and technical provisions for amusement rides, boating facilities, fishing piers and platforms, golf courses, miniature golf, sports facilities, and swimming pools and spas. The guidelines will ensure that newly constructed and altered recreation facilities meet the requirements of the ADA and are readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities.
DATES: The guidelines are effective October 3, 2002. The incorporation by reference of certain publications listed in the guidelines is approved by the Director of the Federal Register as of October 3, 2002.
Availability of Copies and Electronic Access
Single copies of this publication may be obtained at no cost by calling the Access Board's automated publications order line (202) 272-0080, by pressing 2 on the telephone keypad, then 1, and requesting publication S-43 (Recreation Facilities Final Rule). Persons using a TTY should call (202) 272-0082. Please record a name, address, telephone number and request publication S-43. This document is available in alternate formats upon request. Persons who want a copy in an alternate format should specify the type of format (cassette tape, Braille, large print, or ASCII disk).


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AN EXPERIMENTAL AND MODELING STUDY OF NOx AND SOOT EMISSIONS FROM BIODIESEL AND ITS SURROGATES by Qiyao Feng A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CHEMICAL ENGINEERING) December 2011 Copyright 2011 Qiyao Feng
Object Description
|An experimental and modeling study of NOₓ and soot emissions from biodiesel and its surrogates
|Feng, Qiyao
|Author email
|Doctor of Philosophy
|Document type
|Degree program
|Chemical Engineering
|Viterbi School of Engineering
|Date defended/completed
|Date submitted
|Date approved
|Restricted until
|Date published
|Advisor (committee chair)
|Tsotsis, Theodore T.
|Advisor (committee member)
Shing, Katherine S.
Egolfopoulos, Fokion N.
|The use of biodiesel is attracting substantial attention currently as a potential effective and environmentally friendly solution to the world's dependence on conventional petroleum resources. As with conventional diesel, concerns exist with the use of biodiesel in terms of its emissions, especially NOₓ emissions and particulate matter (PM) due to their potential health effects. Although there is strong incentive for using biodiesel to substitute for petroleum fuels, the NOₓ and soot emissions of those fuels are not yet well characterized and understood. In this study, the NOₓ emissions of a class of model biodiesel fuels, namely fatty acid esters (FAME) were studied systematically in both premixed as well as non-premixed flames. The soot emissions of these model biodiesel fuels were also studied systematically in non-premixed flames. In addition, a diesel surrogate was also studied in order to compare its soot emissions with those of the model biodiesels. ❧ The experiments were conducted in the counter-flow configuration for different fuel/oxidizer ratios (for premixed flames) or fuel/N₂ molar ratios (for non-premixed flames) at atmospheric pressures. The NOₓ measurements were carried out using the quartz microprobe sampling method. The soot volume fractions were determined using the laser extinction method. The experimental data were compared against those obtained in flames of n-alkanes with similar carbon numbers. Additional experiments were carried out, in order to assess the effects of carbon number, type of ester group (methyl or ethyl), and the extent of saturation (presence of double bonds) on the NOₓ emissions and sooting propensity of these model biodiesel fuels. ❧ Recently developed chemical kinetic models were utilized in order to simulate the flames and to investigate the kinetic pathways controlling the formation of key soot precursors, such as C₂H₄, C₂H₂ and C₃H₃, aiming to provide insight into the experimentally observed differences in the sooting propensity among the various fuels. In simulating the NOₓ emissions, a recently developed NOₓ sub-kinetic model was incorporated into the aforementioned fuel combustion mechanisms in order to investigate the relative contributions of the four different reaction pathways to the total NOₓ formation in these flames. Overall, this study constitutes a systematic effort to investigate the fundamental emission characteristics of biofuels, and to provide significant new insight into fatty acid ester combustion leading eventually to the detailed study of real biodiesels.
|methyl esters; laminar flame; soot; NOₓ; biodiesel
|Part of collection
|University of Southern California dissertations and theses
|Publisher (of the original version)
|University of Southern California
|Place of publication (of the original version)
|Los Angeles, California
|Publisher (of the digital version)
|University of Southern California. Libraries
|Electronically uploaded by the author
|Legacy record ID
|Contributing entity
|University of Southern California
|Feng, Qiyao
|Physical access
|The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.
|Repository name
|University of Southern California Digital Library
|Repository address
|USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 7002, 106 University Village, Los Angeles, California 90089-7002, USA
|Repository email
|Archival file
|Page 1
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|University of Southern California
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|AN EXPERIMENTAL AND MODELING STUDY OF NOx AND SOOT EMISSIONS FROM BIODIESEL AND ITS SURROGATES by Qiyao Feng A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CHEMICAL ENGINEERING) December 2011 Copyright 2011 Qiyao Feng