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Nobel medicine prize goes to US, British scientists
US scientist Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Peter Mansfield were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for medicine Monday, the Nobel jury announced.
The two scientists "have made seminal discoveries concerning the use of magnetic resonance to visualize different structures, which represents a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research," said the jury.
Lauterbur, 74, a faculty member of the University of Illinois in Urbana, the United States, discovered the possibility of creating a two-dimensional picture by producing variations in a magnetic field.
Meanwhile, Mansfield, 70, a faculty member at the University of Nottingham, Britain, utilized gradients in the magnetic field in order to more precisely show differences in the resonance. He showed how the detected signals rapidly and effectively could be analyzed and transformed to an image, a essential step in order to obtain a practical method.
The prize includes a check of 1.3 million US dollars. The awards always are presented on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
The Nobel Prize was established according to the will of Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel. The first Noble prize was awarded in 1901.
Last year's winners were Briton Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, and American H. Robert Horvitz for their discoveries about how genes regulate organ growth and a process of programmed cell suicide.
US condemns suicide bombing in Israel
The United States on Saturday condemned the latest suicide bombing in Israel, urging the Palestinian Authority to crack down on terrorist groups.
"I condemn unequivocally the vicious act of terrorism," US President George W. Bush said in a statement.
Bush responded after a Palestinian woman reportedly blew herself up in a crowded restaurant in Israel's Haifa on Saturday, killing at least 18 others.
He said that the attack "underscores once again the responsibility of Palestinian authorities to fight terror, which remains the foremost obstacle to achieving the vision of two states living side by side in peace and security."
Bush urged Palestinian leadership to dismantle "the infrastructure of terror" and prevent the kind of attacks which took place in Haifa.
Meanwhile, the US State Department on Saturday also condemned the Haifa attack "in the strongest possible terms."
"This clearly illustrates why the Palestinian Authority must act now to dismantle terrorist capacity and networks that perpetrate such attacks and prevent any future attacks," State Department spokeswoman Joanne Moore said.
US government considers video cameras
inside commercial planes
The US government could install monitoring video cameras inside commercial airplanes soon in order
to get an early warning of hijackings or other trouble on board, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials said Friday.
The Boeing Co. demonstrated a satellite system to FAA
officials in two test flights early this year, showing how images could be sent from a plane to the ground, said John Loynes, an FAA program manager in Washington.
A Boeing 737, equipped with seven cameras, transmitted images of the cockpit and cabin during the test flights in January and February.
About 20 federal and Boeing workers, most of them engineers, were on board the round-trip flights from Seattle. Federal air marshals also tested Boeing technology that allows the use of hand-held devices to communicate with the ground control through sending video, voice and data.
One camera showed the pilots from behind, one was in the first class area and the others showed the rest of the passenger area. Workers on the ground could choose which camera view to look at
by touching a computer screen, said Joseph Tedino, a Boeing spokesman.
The FAA officials stressed the tests were preliminary, adding that the agency's focus is purely on whether the technology would affect air safety.
There will be further tests and other agencies could decide whether or how to use the technology, said Greg Martin, FAA chief spokesman.
Pilots have fiercely opposed efforts to put cameras in
cockpits as an infringement of their authority. But passenger advocates have supported cameras as a way to prevent terrorist acts.
The US government has tightened security at airports around
the country since the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, in which terrorists slammed hijacked commercial airliners into World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
Meanwhile, the US military revealed Thursday that they have been practicing frequently how to shoot down hijacked commercial airliners as a way to thwart future terrorist attacks on American cities from the air.
During the drills, the North American Aerospace Defense
Command (Norad) rented commercial jets, loaded them with military volunteers and carried out mock hijackings up to the point where airborne Air Force fighter pilots would fire air-to-air missiles, said General Ralph Eberhart of the Air Force, who heads Norad.
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