https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/free-narcan-dispenser-in-waukesha-seeks-to-stop-the-rise-of-opioid-overdoses/ar-AA118ejm

Free Narcan dispenser in Waukesha seeks to stop the rise of opioid overdoses

Waukesha residents can now get free Narcan kits at a vending machine in the Alano Club.

The machine has dispensed about 200 kits since opening in June, and Addiction Resource Council Inc. specialist Jessica Brost said the more Narcan that is out in the county, the better.

“Every dose that is taken as a success in our eyes. We think it should be accessible and free to get Narcan,” Brost said. “Everybody should have it, so that's why it's there.”

The vending machine is an effort to curb rising opioid overdoses in the county. The county has seen a spike in drug-related overdoses in the past three years, going from 56 in 2019 to 92 in 2021.

The Alano Club, which hosts 12-step programs for drug and alcohol users, hosts the vending machine in the lobby at 318 W. Broadway, Waukesha. The machine dispenses free kits with instructions and two doses of Narcan, for community members to administer in case of an opioid overdose.

Symptoms of an opioid overdose can include shallow or stopped breathing, blue lips or fingertips, small pupils, unresponsiveness or unconsciousness, cold or clammy skin and snoring or gurgling sounds, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

If someone is experiencing an opioid overdose, Narcan may temporarily reverse the effects, but it is still encouraged to seek medical attention.

Waukesha’s Department of Health and Human Services financed the Narcan, and the Addiction Resource Council installed and maintains the vending machine.

John Kettler, integrated services coordinator for Waukesha County Health and Human Services, said the spikes in overdoses were partly driven by the increase in fentanyl availability. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin, and Kettler said it is particularly dangerous, as even small doses can trigger an overdose.

“Right now, fentanyl is being found in all kinds of different substances, including fake pills,” Kettler said.

Brost said the Addiction Resource CounciI distributes free fentanyl testing strips at their location in Pewaukee for people to apply to pills or substances in order to stay safe.

Naloxone, colloquially known as Narcan, can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose. Brost said the side effects of Narcan are minimal or nonexistent, and it cannot be overdosed on. Each kit comes with instructions and a QR code that links to video instructions.

The Addiction Resource Council will restock it as needed. Each kit is valid for about three years before expiration.

Kettler said they placed the vending machine at the Alano Club to be accessible to current and former opioid users.

“Most folks going to the Alamo Club would be in recovery … They may still know some folks who are actively using,” Kettler said. “So it is a targeted attempt to try to get a better penetration to the using community, those who are still struggling, to get [Narcan] out to them.”

Lydia Morrell can be reached at 320-444-2339 or lmorrell@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @lydia_morrell.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Free Narcan dispenser in Waukesha seeks to stop the rise of opioid overdoses

AssocAmerPhys&Surg

@AAPSonline

"A healthy 12-year-old girl with no previous medical history presented 6 days after her first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) vaccine…. She was estimated to have epidermal detachment over 40% of the body surface area." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pde.15074

https://twitter.com/AAPSonline/status/1562651374298415104

Lebanon in countrywide blackout on Friday due to fuel oil shortage

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/lebanon-in-countrywide-blackout-on-friday-due-to-fuel-oil-sh

The state-run power company Electricite du Liban (EDL) has revealed that the country will be in complete blackout this week.

Lebanon's only working power station will stop operating on Friday due to fuel oil shortages, which will cause a nationwide blackout, the state-run power company Electricite du Liban (EDL) said on Thursday.

"The only working power station in Zahrani will be forced to stop operating due to the deficit of fuel oil reserves, which will lead to a power cut across the entire country," EDL said in a statement, quoted by the state-run National News Agency.

The company said it had not received any fuel oil shipments this month under the agreement between Lebanon and Iraq, which was the only option left for Lebanon to have fuel for energy production. At the same time, the dates of electric power supply from Jordan and the beginning of natural gas imports from Egypt are still undecided.

Read: First shipment of Iraqi fuel arrives in Lebanon

Lebanon has been mired in several years of a political and economic crisis that has led to the resignation of two cabinets since protests against the government erupted in October 2019.

A year ago, the United Nations revealed that half of the Lebanese people live in poverty and the poverty levels increased from 8% in 2019 to 23% in 2020.

According to a United Nations report revealing the tragic situation the Lebanese have reached due to the economic crisis, the consumption index rose between 2019 and 2021 by 280%, and food prices rose by 670%.

New low-cost aluminum-sulfur battery tech promises fast charging and safety

https://www.inceptivemind.com/mit-low-cost-aluminum-sulfur-battery-tech-promises-fast-charging-safety/25965/

Batteries fitted with a metal negative electrode are attractive for their higher energy density and lower complexity, the latter making them more easily recyclable. However, the threat of cell shorting by dendrites has stalled the deployment of the technology.

Now, researchers at MIT have developed a new kind of battery, made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials – aluminum, sulfur, and salt, that could help to fill that gap. In addition to being inexpensive, the new battery is resistant to fire and failures and can be charged very fast, which could make it useful for powering a home or charging electric vehicles.

Today’s lithium-ion batteries are still too expensive for most such applications and contain a flammable electrolyte. So researchers started looking for cheap, Earth-abundant metals that might be able to substitute for lithium. After a search and some trial and error, they settled for aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with an electrolyte of molten chloro-aluminate salt in between. All these ingredients are cheap, readily available, and not flammable, which means there is no risk of fire or explosion.

In tests, the team showed that the new aluminum-sulfur battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F).

The team chose molten salt as an electrolyte simply because its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. It is very good at preventing the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short circuit and hampering efficiency.

The chloro-aluminate salt they chose “essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging,” says MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, one of the authors of the study describing the design. “We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting.”

Importantly, researchers say the aluminum-sulfur battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. “As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat,” Sadoway says.

According to the MIT team, the new battery formulation would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations. Other technologies might be more effective, including liquid metal batteries, for larger installations, up to a utility-scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours.

The new technology is already the basis for a new spinoff company called Avanti, which has licensed the patents to the system, co-founded by Sadoway. The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale and then subject it to a series of stress tests.

(why the subliminal Ukraine flag colors…?)

New quantum technology combines free electrons and photons

https://www.techexplorist.com/new-quantum-technology-combines-free-electrons-photons/53268/

The findings of the study expand the toolbox of quantum technology.

electron-photon pair states

An artistic view of the generation of electron-photon pair states. © Ryan Allen / Second Bay Studios

Quantum information, communication, and sensing rely on generating and controlling quantum correlations in complementary degrees of freedom. Experts worldwide are trying to implement findings from basic research into quantum technologies.

Sometimes they require individual particles, including photons with special properties. However, getting individual particles is challenging and calls very sophisticated techniques. Free electrons are already used in many applications to produce light, such as X-ray tubes.

In a new study, scientists from EPFL‘s Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurement, Göttingen Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences (MPI-NAT), and the University of Göttingen demonstrate a novel method for generating cavity-photons using free electrons, in the form of pair states. They created electron-photon pairs using integrated photonic circuits on a chip in an electron microscope.

In an experiment, scientists pass the beam of an electron microscope on a built-in integrated photonic chip. The chip consists of a micro-ring resonator and optical fiber output ports. This new approach uses photonic structures fabricated at EPFL for transmission electron microscope (TEM) experiments performed at MPI-NAT.

optical chip

An optical chip with ring-shaped light storage, called a microring resonator, and a fiber-optic coupling. The chip is only three millimeters wide, and the ring resonator at its tip has a radius of 0.114 millimeters. © Armin Feist / Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences

A photon can be produced whenever an electron interacts with the ring resonator’s vacuum evanescent field. The electron loses the energy quantum of a single photon in this process while adhering to energy and momentum conservation principles. The system develops into a pair state as a result of this interaction. The scientists’ accurate simultaneous detection of electron energy and produced photons, made possible by a newly created measurement technique, revealed the underlying electron-photon pair states.

Besides observing this process for the first time at the single particle level, these findings implement a novel concept for generating a single-photon or electron. Specifically, the measurement of the pair state enables heralded particle sources, where detecting one particle signals the generation of the other. This is necessary for many applications in quantum technology and adds to its growing toolset.

Claus Ropers, MPI-NAT Director, said, “The method opens up fascinating new possibilities in electron microscopy. In the field of quantum optics, entangled photon pairs already improve imaging. With our work, such concepts can now be explored with electrons.”

In experiment, scientists used the generated correlated electron-photon pairs for photonic mode imaging. They were able to achieve a three-orders of magnitude contrast enhancement.

Dr. Yujia Yang, a postdoc at EPFL and a co-lead author of the study, adds: “We believe our work has a substantial impact on the future development in electron microscopy by harnessing the power of quantum technology.”

Tobias Kippenberg, professor at EPFL and head of the Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurement, said, “A particular challenge for future quantum technology is how to interface different physical systems. For the first time, we bring free electrons into the toolbox of quantum information science. More broadly, coupling free electrons and light using integrated photonics could open the way to a new class of hybrid quantum technologies.”

The study could lead to the currently emerging field of free-electron quantum optics. It could also demonstrate a powerful experimental platform for event-based and photon-gated electron spectroscopy and imaging.

Guanhao Huang, a Ph.D. student at EPFL and co-lead author of the study, said, “Our work represents a critical step to utilize quantum optics concepts in electron microscopy. We plan to explore further future directions like electron-heralded exotic photonic states and noise reduction in electron microscopy.”

Journal Reference:

Armin Feist, Guanhao Huang, et al. Cavity-mediated electron-photon pairs. Science, 377(6607), 777-780. DOI: 10.1126/science.abo5037

Newly discovered material can learn like the brain

It’s a novel discovery: no other material behaves in this way.

BY

PRANJAL MEHAR

AUGUST 23, 2022

https://www.techexplorist.com/newly-discovered-material-learn-like-brain/53252/

EPFL researchers have discovered a compound that can remember the entire history of previous external stimuli. Vanadium Dioxide (VO2) has an insulating phase when relaxed at room temperature and undergoes a steep insulator-to-metal transition at 68 °C, where its lattice structure changes.

Classically, VO2 has a volatile memory: The material returns to the insulating condition immediately when the excitation is removed. Scientists sought to learn how long it takes for VO2 to change states. After doing many measurements, they discovered a memory effect in the material’s structure, which changed the course of their research.’

Scientists applied an electric current to a sample of VO2.

Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo, a Ph.D. student at EPFL‘s Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (PowerLab), said, “The current moved across the material, following a path until it exited on the other side. The current heated up the sample and caused the VO2 to change state. And once the current had passed, the material returned to its initial state.”

Scientists then applied a second current pulse to the material and saw that the time it took to change state was directly linked to the history of the material.

Prof. Elison Mattioli, who heads the PowerLab, said, “The VO2 seemed to ‘remember’ the first phase transition and anticipate the next. We didn’t expect to see this kind of memory effect, and it has nothing to do with electronic states but rather with the material’s physical structure. It’s a novel discovery: no other material behaves this way.”

“We found that VO2 can remember its most recent external stimulus for up to three hours. The memory effect could persist for several days, but we don’t currently have the instruments needed to measure that.”

This is a significant discovery as the memory effect they observed is an intrinsic property of the material itself. Engineers use memory to perform various calculations, and there is a considerable need for materials that could improve computation performance by providing more capacity, speed, and compactness. All three of these criteria are met by VO2. Furthermore, it differs from traditional materials that store data as binary information dependent on modifying electrical states due to its persistent, structural memory.

To reach their conclusions, the scientists used a variety of measurements. By using the novel method on various materials at other facilities worldwide, they could confirm their findings. VO2 switches behave exactly like neurons in this discovery, perfectly mimicking what occurs in the brain.

Journal Reference:

M. Samizadeh Nikoo, R. Soleimanzadeh, A. Krammer, G. Migliato Marega, Y. Park, J. Son, A. Schueler, A. Kis, P. Moll, and E. Mattioli, “Electrical Control of Glass-like Dynamics in Vanadium Dioxide for Data Storage and Processing,” Nature Electronics, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41928-022-00812-z

Star Wars' Last Jedi May Use The Force Of Quantum Science

https://sciencevshollywood.com/star-wars-the-force-and-quantum-entanglement/