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Home owned by Stanford scientist linked to Manhattan Project lists in CA. See it

Home owned by Stanford scientist linked to Manhattan Project lists in CA. See it

Miami Herald6 days ago

A stunning Dutch Colonial that was built in the early 1900s has landed on the real estate market in Silicon Valley, California. Only thing is, it was there before Silicon Valley was even a concept.
Listed for $5.5 million, the six-bedroom, three-bathroom home sits hidden in Los Altos Hills. It has a phenomenal history that includes the retired sea captain who built it and a physicist named Wolfgang who bought it in 1951.
U.S. Marine Captain Fred M. Munger built the home between 1902-1907 and opted for the Dutch Colonial style, which happened to be a 'rarity in the region.' The house was built as his summer home before the city had electricity, a news release about the listing said.
Later on, a scientist named Wolfgang Panofsky, who was a consultant for the Manhattan Project during World War II bought it with his wife, Adele Panofsky, who was a notable educator. The two got the house when they accepted a position at Stanford University.
The Manhattan Project was a secret program that created the first atomic weapons during WWII. The project was successful with the U.S. creating the weapons before Germany, pushing the world into the nuclear age.
The home served as a hot spot for other intellectuals, such as 'Nobel laureates, global scientists, and cultural icons like Frank Oppenheimer (the brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer),' the release said.
Now, the home is on the market and still has managed to maintain its old world charm, the listing on Illuminate Properties says. It comes with a plethora of high-end features, per the listing, including:
Hardwood floorsPorchFormal dining roomOfficeWood staircaseViewsClawfoot tubEnclosed porchBalcony
The listing is held by Patrice Horvath.
Los Altos Hills is about a 40-mile drive southeast from San Francisco.

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A scientific breakthrough researchers call ‘magic' could transform treatment for a leading cause of death
A scientific breakthrough researchers call ‘magic' could transform treatment for a leading cause of death

Yahoo

time3 days ago

  • Yahoo

A scientific breakthrough researchers call ‘magic' could transform treatment for a leading cause of death

For all of the advancement in treating stroke victims over the past couple of decades, some concerns have remained almost constant. In medicine, we like to say that 'time is brain,' meaning that every moment a stroke goes untreated, the potential for long-term brain damage or death escalates. In fact, every minute that the brain goes without blood flow, the average patient loses around 1.9 million neurons and about a week of independent life, experts say. As the vast majority of strokes are ischemic, with a blood clot blocking the flow of oxygen to the brain, clearing that clot swiftly is critical. This is true whether the clot is small or large and regardless of its density—but reliably removing the densest clots via mechanical means has proved an elusive task. Though these concerns, time and density, are not necessarily linked, both matter—one reason, researchers suggest, that a newly developed technology from Stanford University holds the potential to reshape how stroke patients are treated. The device, called a milli-spinner, is a tiny, powerfully rotating hollow tube outfitted with fins and slits. In action, both lab and swine tests demonstrate the ability to dramatically compact and shrink the size of blood clots, making it easier to remove them quickly and effectively—often on the first try. 'This has the potential to be a game changer,' says Greg Albers, director of the Stanford University Stroke Center and a longtime expert in the field. 'The results are likely to translate well to clinical trials.' Mechanical thrombectomy is a minimally invasive procedure by which blood clots are removed. Existing thrombectomy methods, which involve aspirating clots via a catheter or trying to grab and remove them through a stent, are not designed primarily to reduce the size of blood clots. The milli-spinner appears to do so almost routinely—and very quickly, sometimes in a matter of seconds. In a paper published June 4 in the scientific journal Nature, the milli-spinner boasted some audacious early numbers. In flow model tests and swine experiments, the thrombectomy device, inserted via a catheter, demonstrated the capacity to shrink clots by up to 95%. 'For most cases, we were more than doubling the efficacy of current technology' in terms of opening the artery, says Dr. Jeremy Heit, MD, PhD, chief of neuroimaging and neuro-intervention at Stanford and coauthor of the study. Placed close to a clot, the milli-spinner exerts both compression and shear forces to release red blood cells from the sometimes-dense fibrin that has bound it in a clump—a somewhat unexpected development when it was first observed in the lab, says Renee Zhao, the Stanford engineer who designed the milli-spinner and was lead author of the Nature study. 'It was magic to us, because even after we saw the phenomena, it was not very straightforward to directly figure out the working mechanism,' Zhao tells Fortune. A fibrin core remains tightly bound around the milli-spinner, but it is now dramatically smaller than before, and easily removable. (Imagine placing some cotton candy in your hand and then closing your fist tight.) 'What's crazy is, it works in seconds—it literally will spin this thing into a tiny clot and just suck it into the catheter in seconds,' says Heit. 'It's incredibly fast.' Much work remains, the researchers say, including full-scale human trials. But if the results are even close to what's been achieved in the lab and swine work, the device could alter the treatment path for an all-too-common, all-too-serious medical issue. Strokes are the fifth-leading cause of death in the U.S., with about 160,000 deaths a year among the nearly 800,000 cases diagnosed annually. Roughly nine in 10 strokes are ischemic, or clot-related. Patients with ischemic strokes are often treated with clot-busting drugs like tPA or thrombectomy (sometimes both), but the mechanical techniques still encounter failures. In some cases, a clot is simply too large to be extracted by a stent or aspiration device, or it may be too firmly adhered to a vessel wall. In others, because clots are crumbly, small bits may break off during the retrieval attempt. The blood flow can take them further into the brain, potentially making the size of a stroke bigger or causing a new deficit, says Heit. 'Both aspiration and stent retrievers have a high risk of generating fragmentation,' Zhao says. 'The milli-spinner actually prevents it from happening,' at least in the lab. Current thrombectomy devices successfully remove clots less than 50% of the time on the first try, and in about 15% of cases they fail altogether, experts say. It's important because people in whom the blockage is removed on the first attempt with thrombectomy have better clinical outcomes than those who require multiple passes. 'The outcomes are much better than if it takes you two, three, four tries to get everything open,' says Maresh Jayaraman, chair of diagnostic imaging at Brown University. 'Obviously, we need to know that (the milli-spinner) can be safe and effective in humans. If it is, it has the potential to dramatically revolutionize how we think about removing blood clots from the brain.' Zhao says she and her colleagues weren't actually trying to solve this issue, at least not initially. Rather, the engineer had been working on millirobots—tiny, origami-based spinning devices capable of swimming untethered through the bloodstream. Propelled by an external magnetic field, the millirobots, which are still in development, may be able to deliver medicine to targeted regions in the body, perform diagnostic tasks, or perhaps one day even carry instruments or cameras. The spinning millirobots generate 'a highly localized, very strong suction,' says Zhao. 'We were thinking, okay, can we use that suction to suck a clot? It was just extremely simple—I mean, a very straightforward way of thinking.' In the cerebral artery flow model in the lab, Heit says, the milli-spinner was 100% effective at removing clots in more than 500 attempts. In pigs, the device restored at least half of blood flow to blocked blood vessels 90.3% of the time on the first try, nearly twice the average achieved by aspiration. And it was nearly fourfold better at completely opening the artery for the toughest clots. 'I expect (the device) to be a sea-change in technology for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke patients,' Heit says. 'If blood clots are removed at the high success rates in humans as they are in our experiments, which we expect to be the case, the milli-spinner will save tens of thousands of lives or more, and substantially reduce disability in treated patients.' Human clinical trials are the next step. Areas to watch, says Arthur Adam, a neurosurgeon and stroke expert at University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, include how human brain tissue is affected by the new thrombectomy method, and how the cells and debris behave once they're liberated from the fibrin by the milli-spinner. 'Human trials are essential, and they sometimes show very different results than what we see in early results,' says Adam. Still, the development appears promising. 'It is a very exciting new device, with great potential,' says Colin Derdeyn, chair of radiology and medical imaging at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. 'If it performs in people as well as it does in these models, it will improve recanalization rates—how frequently we are able to open a blocked artery in the brain, heart, or lung. This will lead to better outcomes in patients with stroke, heart attack and pulmonary embolism.' It may also represent only the front end of the technology. Zhao and her colleagues think the untethered, robotic version of the milli-spinner will be able to swim directly inside blood vessels to treat blood clots, brain aneurysms, kidney stones, and other conditions. In the meantime, the team has formed a company in California to proceed with clinical trials on the milli-spinner. 'Considering the growing patient pool and this very promising technology, I think we can potentially save a lot of patients' lives,' Zhao says. 'We want to see this technology in humans—and the sooner, the better.' This story was originally featured on

Energy secretary's dreams collide with Trump's cuts
Energy secretary's dreams collide with Trump's cuts

Politico

time4 days ago

  • Politico

Energy secretary's dreams collide with Trump's cuts

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has big plans for technologies like advanced nuclear reactors and geothermal energy — but they could be hobbled by the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts to national labs. As Brian Dabbs and I write today, Wright has vowed to 'make it vastly easier to build power plants in the United States.' The secretary is pushing for the Department of Energy's 17 labs, which have been central to energy research since the Manhattan Project during World War II, to help jumpstart the administration's 'energy dominance' agenda. The Idaho National Laboratory, for example, announced results this week of a first-of-its-kind test to lower the amount of waste produced by reactors. Wright has also publicly supported lab research on nuclear fusion, a potential zero-carbon form of electricity that involves the same reaction powering the sun. Here comes the White HouseBut President Donald Trump's proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would slash the budget of the National Energy Technology Laboratory — which supports fossil fuel research — by 32 percent and cut fusion programs at multiple labs, including Argonne, Brookhaven and Idaho. 'As much as the secretary is talking about how excited he is about fusion, the budget they proposed cut it,' said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association. Wind, solar, electric vehicles and building efficiency research would also be cut sharply under Trump's plan, a shift that analysts say could slow development of those technologies. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado would see some of the sharpest cuts overall, with funding declining by more than 56 percent from current levels under Trump's plan. DOE says many programs are being reorganized. 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Prescribed burns can help reduce fire intensity and smoke pollution: Study
Prescribed burns can help reduce fire intensity and smoke pollution: Study

The Hill

time5 days ago

  • The Hill

Prescribed burns can help reduce fire intensity and smoke pollution: Study

Prescribed burns can decrease the severity of future fires by about 16 percent and slash smoke pollution by 14 percent, a new study has found. These controlled blazes are much more effective outside the wildland-urban interface (WUI) — the area where homes meet wild vegetation — than within it, according to the study, published on Thursday in AGU Advances. 'Prescribed fire is often promoted as a promising tool in theory to dampen wildfire impacts, but we show clear empirical evidence that prescribed burning works in practice,' lead author Makoto Kelp, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, said in a statement. 'It's not a cure-all, but it's a strategy that can reduce harm from extreme wildfires when used effectively,' Kelp added. Experts already consider prescribed burns to be an effective strategy for curbing the threat of wildfires, the researchers acknowledged, noting that $2 billion in federal funds are allocated to such treatments. Yet they also pointed out that the use of these controlled blazes across the U.S. West has only expanded slightly in recent years. This discrepancy, they surmised, could be due to the lack of research quantifying the practice's effectiveness and mixed public opinions on the matter. To enumerate the benefits of the burns, the scientists used high-resolution satellite imagery, land management records and smoke emission inventories to compare outcomes of treated and untreated areas in the extreme 2020 fire season. Specifically, they focused on places treated with controlled fire between late 2018 and spring 2020 and at adjacent untreated zones. Their analysis ultimately showed that areas treated with prescribed fire burned less severely and generated much less smoke. That finding was particularly important to the authors, who stressed that fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) emitted by wildfires has been linked to cardiovascular and respiratory issues. 'Smoke is a silent and far-reaching hazard, and prescribed fire may be one of the few tools that actually reduces total smoke exposure,' co-author Marshall Burke, an associate professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford, said in a statement. Meanwhile, the scientists found that controlled burns produce only about 17 percent of the PM 2.6 smoke that would result from a wildfire in the same area. They estimated that if California achieved its goals of treating a million acres with prescribed fire annually, the Golden State could slash PM 2.5 emissions by 655,000 tons over five years. That quantity would be equivalent to 52 percent of the total smoke pollution generated during California's 2020 wildfire season, according to the study. As far as the different effects in WUI and non-WUI zones are concerned, the authors found that prescribed burns led to an 8.5 percent drop in fire severity in the former and a 20 percent decline in the latter. In WUI zones, they noted, agencies usually opt for mechanical thinning over prescribed burns due to smoke and safety concerns. Although the researchers could not yet offer an explanation behind the discrepancy, they said that gaining further insight into the matter would be critical. Senior author Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, noted the rapid population growth in WUI areas, where plants are 'most sensitive to climate-induced intensification of wildfire risk.' As such, he stressed that understanding why prescribed burns are less effective in these areas 'is a key priority for effectively managing that intensifying risk.'

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