Agribusiness, Agriculture, Veterinary Medicine, Cassava, Garri, food security, Agritech and the Red Meat Value Chain.
Showing posts with label MRI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MRI. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Helium discovery a 'game-changer'.
Scientists have discovered a large helium gas field in Tanzania. With world supplies running out, the find is a "game-changer", say geologists at Durham and Oxford universities. Helium is used in hospitals in MRI scanners as well as in spacecraft, telescopes and radiation monitors.
The precious gas has been discovered only in small quantities during oil and gas drilling.Using a new exploration approach, researchers found large quantities of helium within the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley.
They say resources in just one part of the Rift valley are enough to fill more than a million medical MRI scanners. Prof Chris Ballentine, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, said: "This is a game-changer for the future security of society's helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away."Dr Pete Barry added: 'We can apply this same strategy to other parts of the world with a similar geological history to find new helium resources.
Helium is formed by the slow and steady radioactive decay of terrestrial rock. However, global supplies are running low, with warnings that supplies cannot be guaranteed in the long term.
Prof Jon Gluyas, of the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University, who collaborated on the project, said the price of helium had gone up 500% in the last 15 years.
"Helium is the second most abundant element in the Universe but it's exceedingly rare on Earth," Prof Gluyas told BBC News. "Moreover, any helium that you do find if you're not careful, will escape, just like a party balloon it rises and rises in the atmosphere and eventually escapes the Earth's gravity altogether. "It's used in a whole array of key instrumentation, particularly medical MRI scanning and so on, and so we have to keep finding more."
The researchers say volcanic activity in the Rift Valley releases helium buried in ancient rocks, which rises up and becomes trapped in shallower gas fields.The amount of helium is estimated at more than 54 billion cubic feet - which could potentially meet global demand for several years. The next step is to find the best place to drill to exploit the gas and bring it to the surface.
Helium is used for 1)It is used in the space industry to keep satellite instruments cool, to clean out rocket engines and was used to cool the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that powered the Apollo space vehicles
2) Helium is used as a cooling medium for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the superconducting magnets in medical MRI scanners
3)Helium is used to fill party balloons, weather balloons and airships because of its low density
4) A mixture of 80% helium and 20% oxygen is used by deep-sea divers and others working under pressurized conditions.
5) Helium-neon gas lasers are used to scan barcodes at supermarket checkouts.
contributed by BBC NEWS.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Agribusiness ideas.
Popular Posts
-
Israeli gov't to fund medical cannabis research. The Ministries of Agriculture and Health will provide NIS 8 million in funding for 1...
-
Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his futuristic ideas and his latest suggestion might just save us from being irrelevant as artificial i...
-
Keeping pet trim is good for pet's health and owners' money. Feeding pets indiscriminately with food high in sugar, fat and cert...
-
Farmers, who regularly irrigate bananas, can boot the weight of the fruit by more than 30 per cent. More than 90 per cent of famers in K...
-
The regulations require producers who raise cattle, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals to obtain a veterinarian’s approval b...
-
Across one-fourth of the globe, people aren’t getting the nutrients they need to stay healthy, according to the newly released Global Hung...
AGRIBUSINESS EDUCATION.
Translate
I-CONNECT -AGRICULTURE
AGRIBUSINESS TIPS.
AGRIBUSINESS.
The Agriculture Daily
veterinarymedicineechbeebolanle-ojuri.blogspot.com Cassava: benefits of garri as a fermented food. Cassava processing involves fermentation which is a plus for gut health. The fermentation process removes the cyanogenic glucosides present in the fres...