HORA CERO, (ESA).- Live from the Royal Society in London, watch the unveiling of the first map of the winter 2010–11 changes in Arctic sea-ice thickness measured by ESA’s CryoSat satellite. Join the event via live web stream Tuesday starting at 07:30 GMT (09:30 CEST – 08:30 UK time).

HORA CERO, (ESA).- Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus hangs below the gas giant’s rings while Titan lurks in the background, in this new image taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
Faint detail of the tiger stripe markings can be seen on Enceladus’ surface, which is framed against Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. With jets of water ice and vapour streaming from Enceladus’ south pole, and liquid hydrocarbon lakes pooling beneath Titan’s thick atmosphere, these are two of Saturn’s most enigmatic moons.

The northern, sun-lit side of Saturn’s rings are seen from just above the ring plane in this image, which was taken in visible green light by Cassini’s narrow-angle camera on 12 March while it was approximately one million kilometres from Enceladus. The image scale is six kilometres per pixel on Enceladus.

ANN ARBOR, (UDM).- Two U-M researchers have been awarded a $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a five-year study that will try to explain the changing patterns of whooping cough incidence in the United States since the 1980s.

Thanks to widespread childhood vaccination, whooping cough (pertussis) once seemed to be under control. But the bacterial illness, which in infants causes violent, gasping coughing spells, has made a comeback in the United States and other developed countries since the '80s. In addition, there's been a shift in who's getting sick, with fewer cases seen in preschool children and more in teenagers.

The reasons for the changing patterns are unclear. Some researchers have suggested the changes indicate that the childhood vaccine for pertussis wears off quicker than experts had previously believed. But U-M population ecologists Pejman Rohani and Aaron King, who will lead the new NIH-funded U-M study, say it may not be that simple.

"That's probably the easiest hypothesis to understand because it's fairly straightforward, but infectious disease systems are usually much more complicated," said King, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-principal investigator, along with Pejman Rohani, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

"We're trying to understand why we see these patterns of pertussis, both the resurgence in the total number of cases and the change in the age distribution of those cases," King said. "We don't really understand either of those things, and we see it happening across the United States."

King is also an associate professor of mathematics. Rohani, in addition to his position in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is a professor of complex systems and a professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health.

Unlike a conventional epidemiological investigation of a disease outbreak, the new U-M study will rely heavily on the use of mathematical models of pertussis transmission and statistical methods for extracting information from data.

Archival data from pertussis outbreaks that occurred in the pre-vaccination era will be used to pin down some of the fundamental biology of pertussis: the duration of infection-derived immunity and the epidemiological impact of repeat infections, as well as the respective contributions of population demography, age-specific contacts and seasonality.

A second phase of the research will address the vaccine-specific aspects of the problem by focusing on countries with known vaccine usage and immunization schedules.

"The ultimate test of whether our understanding of pertussis has significantly advanced will be to explain an enigmatic body of data, namely the changing patterns of pertussis incidence in the United States over the past 30 years," Rohani said.

"What we have proposed to do would, we believe, represent the most comprehensive stab at a systematic examination of pertussis," he said.
New insights provided by the study could, for example, lead to recommendations about revising the pertussis immunization schedule for children, Rohani and King said.

Currently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that infants and children receive the diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine at 2 months, 4 months, 6 months and 15 to 18 months of age. A booster of DTaP is given at 4 through 6 years of age and another dose of whooping cough vaccine, known as Tdap, is recommended for adolescents.

In 2010, 27,550 cases of pertussis were reported nationally with 27 deaths – 25 of which were infants. Worldwide, there are 30 million to 50 million cases of whooping cough each year, resulting in about 300,000 deaths, according to CDC.

In 2010, 9,143 cases of pertussis (including 10 infant deaths) were reported in California, the most cases reported in that state since 1947.

The state of Washington reported 965 cases in 2011, compared to 608 cases in 2010. Through April 7, 776 cases have been reported in Washington in 2012, according to the CDC.

HORA CERO, (ESA).- century ago, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg while crossing the North Atlantic and sank at the cost of over 1500 passengers and crew. Today, thousands of boats cross the same iceberg-ridden path with no loss of life – and satellites are helping.
Frederick Fleet had the unenviable task of being the lookout on the Titanic during the night of 14 April 1912. The ice information provided by Frederick was the only intelligence that Captain Edward John Smith had for navigating the ship through these treacherous waters.
One of the most important legacies of the Titanic disaster was the establishment of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea and the International Ice Patrol (IIP).

The role of the IIP today is to monitor icebergs and establish an iceberg danger area based on observations that are being fed into drift and melt models.

At any time, there may be tens to hundreds of thousands of icebergs in Arctic waters. The Ice Patrol’s challenge is to determine the number of icebergs that will drift south towards shipping lanes in the North Atlantic between Europe and the major ports of the United States and Canada.

To date, no vessel that has heeded the Ice Patrol’s published ‘iceberg limit’ has collided with an iceberg.

The IIP first used marine vessels to perform routine ice patrols, but switched to aerial surveillance after World War II. Today, aerial surveillance is the primary ice reconnaissance method, but IIP aims to replace expensive ice flights, and has been looking to satellite observations as the successor technology. 
 
“The IIP currently uses satellite-based radar observations to supplement its aerial iceberg reconnaissance, and expects that satellites will play a greater role in the future,” said Dr Donald L. Murphy, IIP Chief Scientist.

“In particular, the planned launch of a new generation of public good satellites – such as Sentinel-1 – will dramatically increase the availability of radar data and reduce the revisit time in the IIP area of responsibility.

“In addition, the new higher resolution generation satellites will improve the ability to detect small icebergs.”

Radars on satellites are particularly suited to iceberg monitoring because they can acquire images through clouds and darkness.

The use of satellites for iceberg surveillance first caught the attention of scientists in 1992 when ESA’s ERS-1 satellite, carrying the synthetic aperture radar, was launched.

Investigations into the use of satellites for iceberg detection continued through the 1990s, but it wasn’t until the initiation of ESA’s Global Monitoring for Environmental Security (GMES) programme that wide-scale operational demonstrations began.
 
Since 2003 and with the assistance of GMES, the Canadian research and development company C-CORE has been working with IIP to develop innovative iceberg detection technologies based on satellite radar images.

Discriminating between icebergs and vessels based solely on the radar images remains a challenge, but C-CORE, IIP and others are working to improve the reliability of this process.

Under GMES, the Sentinel-1 constellation envisaged for launch in 2013 will provide complete coverage of the Arctic every 24 hours and therefore play an important role for iceberg monitoring.

Data from the current CryoSat-2 and forthcoming Sentinel-3 missions will complement this by providing information on extreme sea-ice features.

ESA’s Envisat satellite, which also carries a radar used for iceberg monitoring, is currently experiencing technical problems.

ESA has since activated a contingency agreement with the Canadian Space Agency to continue to fulfil some of the user requirements with Radarsat-1 and Radarsat-2 data.