Content about Images

  Image of the week - Medical Data Manager Doctors in Amsterdam may soon have more time in their busy schedules to spend with their patients.A new way to access and manage patient data—the EGEE-developed Medical Data Manager, or MDM—was installed in June at the Amsterdam Medical Center, Netherlands, in its first deployment for real use. They hope to finish testing by the end of this year, and use the tool in production in 2009. In development since 2003, the MDM allows secure access to images in the DICOM format from grid resources. Standing for Digital Image and COmmunication in Medicine, DICOM is the prevailing world standard for computerized tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance images (MRI), positron-emission tomography (PET), X-rays and ultrasound images. MDM has several layers of access to comply with strict privacy requirements.“This tool is expected to be a great boon for the doctors and researchers, ” said Johan Montagnat, computing researcher at CNRS. “They c

  Image of the week - CMS CMS In the world of physics, “compact” is a relative term. Here is a view of the “Compact” Muon Solenoid, or CMS, as shot by Peter McCready, who has been creating a series of panoramic views of all the large experiments. Last in the series, this shows CMS in a 360-degree, rotating view, with natural sound, when you click on the picture above. For each image, 102 separate, individual photos were shot,  then stitched together into one seamless 40MP spherical image, much like an old-fashioned cyclorama. Each image takes as much as four weeks to complete in the his digital darkroom. When coupled with ambient sound that he recorded at the site, the user gets what McCready calls a  “Virtual Reality” experience. Image courtesy of Peter McCready    

Image of the week - Fostering conditions to leverage the rich and evolving CI that surround us  Image courtesy of Patricia Hilton and GSA OIS.This mural by Patricia Hilton represents what she heard at a preparatory discussion for the 16 September workshop Strategic Leadership For Networking and Information Technology Education , sponsored by the GSA Office of Intergovernmental Solutions.The office leads monthly Collaborative Expedition workshops to advance the quality of citizen-government dialogue and intergovernmental collaborations. This workshop aimed to create the basis for a broad and successful coordination effort to build leadership in Networking and Information Technology (NIT) education.  It addressed fundamental workforce and educational goals that must be met in order to preserve U.S. leadership in NIT and ensure growth and prosperity: ensure the current generation is prepared to employ NIT capabilities effectively empower the next generation to create new technologies and concepts promote the innovative use

Image of the week - Plus ça change... Then and now Top: Indication of first beam in the main accelerator ring at Fermilab (known then as National Accelerator Lab) in Batavia, Illinois, 30 June 1971.   The captions read:Left: Beam injected at A-11 (a location on the accelerator ring) from Booster Right:1st turn, 21 microseconds later after travelling around 4 miles (the full circumference)This ring was later upgraded with superconducting magnets to become the Tevatron. Image courtesy of Fermilab History and Archives project, Adrienne KolbBottom: Indication of first beam in the LHC at CERN, 10 September 2008.  Analogous to the upper image, the dot at lower left indicates successful injection, the dot at upper right indicates the beam completed its first full circuit of 27 km. Image courtesy of CERN and David Ritchie.Also see: CERN Control Centre video broadcast of first LHC beam  Evidence of first beam—1971 at Fermilab in Illinois, and 2008 at the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border—was

Image of the week - A quest for quiet speed Isosurface of density (3-D surface of constant density) colored by velocity magnitude. Image courtesy of DEISA. Picture yourself at the window of a hillside villa, a glass of Chianti in your hand, a Verdi aria spilling in from the next room. You're contemplating the cyprus trees and olive groves in the Tuscan sunset, relaxing after a hard day's work. Then...Vvrrrroooooomm!!Your glass—and your nerves— shatter, and it wasn't the soprano.Italy is known for the good life—and for fast cars. Fiat wants to make them compatible.To study automotive noise generation, the Fiat Research Center in Italy carried out a number of different computational fluid dynamics and aeroacoustic simulations using the DEISA research infrastructure.“Noise reduction is an important concern in terms of human well-being and health, and is a significant issue for a wide range of applications, including for the automotive industry”, says Roberto Tregnago, researcher at the cent

  Image of the week - One view of the LHC (Click on this link or the photo above to get the rotating, 360-degree, panoramic view, with natural sound.)One view of the Large Hadron Collider To give an idea of the enormity of the project at CERN, Peter McCready took a series of panoramic views of each of the  experiments. Last week, we showed ALICE, here's a view of one portion of the LHC. McCready creates these images using digital cameras mounted atop a customized tripod apparatus that allows him to take wrap-around images of up to a complete 360 rotation. Each image requires more than one hundred separate, individual photoraphs to be shot, which are then stitched together to form one seamless spherical image. The completed photo takes up 40MP. Image courtesy of Peter McCready    

Link of the Week - LHC, the (underground) movie Image courtesy of Alpinekat, some dancers who prefer to remain anonymous, YouTube and US LHC Blog So, you think you have already heard of all the  ways in which the work of the Large Hadron Collider can be described?But have you seen the underground version?A music video was done on-site, in rap form, with portions filmed below ground in the tunnel near the supercooled magnets, making for a truly cool  movie. Posted to YouTube, it was put on the website of US LHC Blog—a neat site which has all kinds of unexpected stuff about particle physics, from A to Z. (Atlas to Z particle.)As for the rap, people posting to the US LHC Blog said it is not only “phat” (an acronym which The Online Slang Dictionary speculates could mean “pretty hot and tasty”) but has “mass.” See for yourself! —Dan Drollette, iSGTW

Image of the week - The Grid takes particle physics everywhere  Image courtesy of Fermilab. You never know where you'll find a passion for physics.So begins the text of this 2003 poster by graphic designer Kyle Romberg and Fermilab. It was part of a series produced to publicize the grid at the Lepton-Photon conference that year.  Five years ago the grid was considerably newer and this poster and its sisters attracted attention. In fact the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation liked them so well, they used them later for grid-related events.“They made everyone smile,” says Judy Jackson, who was involved in their creation. “Physicists who had never heard of the grid before expressed interest. The posters helped us explain an unfamilar concept.” For those of you dying to know, here's the Poster text: Exploring the science of the universe engages the minds and imaginations of people everywhere. Yet historically, only a handful of high-tech laboratories and universi

Image of the week - Live from BudapestImage courtesy of the GridCast blogspot.Wanted to go to Budapest but just couldn’t make it?Want to know what’s happening behind the scenes at the International Summer School for Grid Computing?Well, if you could not attend in person, you can now attend virtually, via Gridcast, and hear what attendees have to say, straight from the source: the blog. (All gridcasts are produced by the GridTalk team.)The first person brave enough to stand in front of our cameras was Ben Sterrett.

Image of the week - Fun factoids “We report, you decide.”Image courtesy of YouTube“Developers of the grid say the net will be obsolete . . . ” “You'll be able to download a full-length feature film in seconds.” “The first test (of the grid) is this gigantic atom-smasher. Assuming it won’t blow up the world, which there is some talk it will do . . .”These were just some of the things said about the grid in a 2-minute story on a well-known cable news channel whose motto is “Fair and Balanced.”However, it is fun to watch what feels like a physics version of the spoof ‘news’ program The Daily Show.But we shouldn’t pick on any one media outlet. engadget summed up some of the more outrageous coverage with the headline “CERN creates a new super-fast internet, invites tons of people to a deathmatch.”In an effort to set the record straight—and give at least some credit wher

Image of the week - A slimmer Milky Way Our sun lies about 25,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, roughly halfway out in the galactic disk. The new mass determination is based on the measured motions of 2,400 “blue horizontal branch” stars in the extended stellar halo that surrounds the disk. These measurements reach distances of nearly 200,000 light years from the galactic center, roughly the edge of the region illustrated above.The visible, stellar part of our Milky Way in the middle is embedded into its much more massive and more extended dark matter halo, indicated in dim red. The 'blue horizontal branch stars' that were found and measured in the SDSS-II study, are orbiting our Milky Way at large distances.From their speeds the researchers were able to estimate much better the mass of the Milky Way's dark matter halo, and found it to be much “slimmer” than thought before.Image courtesy of SDSS Collaboration, Axel Quetz, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, HeidelbergThe

  Image of the week - Heavenly solutions Sergio Andreozzi is a researcher delving into the balance beween grid security and ease of accessibility, and he is working as part of the OMII-Europe team on standards. He is also a photographer, and when he saw this wall painting on the facade of a building in Portland, Oregon, he just could not resist the symbolism. For more on the topic of grid security, see this week’s feature on Securing the multi-platform grid. Image courtesy of Sergio Andreozzi, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), CNAF