Alla prossima generale, il <IP_ADDRESS>. Io non credo da aver bisogno. Benvenuti a tutti. Oggi, con il Ceremonio di Degri, fermiamo il quattro ciclo del 2017 e del 2018 di la Fesica Medico-Mastro di Giuntamenti graviando 16 nuove studenti che sono qui. Nel prossimo gennaio, i studenti del quattro ciclo procederanno per il secondo anno del treno clinico nei hospitali. Nel prossimo tempo, i nuovi studenti del quattro ciclo avranno iniziato il primo anno. Non voglio farvi sapere le statistiche dettagli. Soprattutto a quelli che avranno avuto il prossimo anno, il numero di studenti avrà quasi 100. Abbiamo avuto 100, ma poi 2 o 3 di prossimo anno. Abbiamo avuto quasi 100, ma anche molto più importante sono i numeri dei paesi che sono rappresentati, che hanno totali 43, 22 di loro da Africa. Africa ha la maggiorità dei paesi e dei studenti. Nel prossimo anno, 2018, abbiamo avuto i paesi di Papua Nugini, Latvia, Oman, Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Mali, Zambia, e Zamaica. Non l'ho mai scoperto, l'ho scoperto anche alcuni di loro. Nel prossimo anno, avremo avuto i paesi di Afghanistan, Chad, Ivory Coast, e Venezuela. Poi posso dire che l'unicef Abdu Salama, l'Università di Trieste Master, in Fesica Medico, è un programma molto estabile. È anche attraverso il supporto entusiastico dei due headi dell'instituzione, il professore Fernando Quevedo, direttore di Abdu Salama, CTP, e il professore Maurizio Fermeia, direttore di Trieste Università. È un vero piti che tutti i loro non saranno presenti, almeno nella capacità presenta, nel prossimo ceremonio di gradazione, nel 2019. I suoi termini, tutti i suoi termini, sono expiati prima di quel giorno. Mi credo che i suoi successori faranno al Master il stesso supporto che hanno fatto. I suoi supporti hanno percolato a tutti i livelli attraverso l'Università di Trieste, o l'Università di Trieste, perché il Master è al Departemento di Fisica, l'Università, e l'ACTP. È solo grazie al supporto di tutti i livelli a tutti i livelli che abbiamo potuto coprire con molte difficilità burocratiche, anche a l'Università e anche a l'ACTP. Per me è piacere di nominare tutti i personaggi e gli office che hanno aiutato, nominando solo a Mrs. Radosic, il Master Secretario per l'ACTP, e a Pieri e a Mr. Roveredo dell'Università del Master Office per l'Università, mi intendo ad estendere i miei gravi a tutti i personaggi che hanno aiutato. A questo punto, devo aggiungere un altro commento, un commento molto importante per noi. In ogni anno, in l'occasione dell'International Day di Fisica Medico, l'Università Marie Curie, le diverse organizzazioni regionale dell'Università Medico-Fisica are giving special awards. Questo anno, per esempio, l'Augustino per l'Asia ha fatto un'ACTP associata da Bangladesh, Mrs. Alzari, ma per noi è extremamente ricordato che il prezzo per l'Europa ha fatto, ha fatto Renato Padovani, il coordinatore del Master. Grazie per l'applauso. Poi, iniziamo con la lista delle persone che raccontano i briptochi. Il direcciore dell'Augustino per l'Augustino per l'Augustino, Prof. Fernando Cvedo, è oftente raccontando il nostro master in Fisica Medico, che è il master della casa, e si inizia con lui. Fernando. Grazie per l'Augustino. Buongiorno a tutti e a tutti. Grazie per questo evento speciale. È un grande piacere di iniziare questa attività qui. È il quarto tempo che facciamo. Questo è un inizio come Lochano ha detto. Abbiamo iniziato alcuni anni fa. Ho bisogno di confessare che ero totalmente ignorante di la reale importanza della Fisica Medico prima di arrivare qui. Poi parliamo con Lochano, con Prof. Tomacov e altre organizzazioni delle scuole che avevamo qui ogni anno. La Fisica Medico mi ha apprezzato come è importante e come è importante per i nostri contagi, per i nostri contagi in particolare. Quindi, come puoi vedere, lo lochano è molto persuasivo. All'inizio, abbiamo accelto a creare questo master. Un po' di rischio perché non era molto chiaro come il fondamento. All'inizio, come Lochano ha detto, è una storia successiva di collaborazione di molte parti. Ci sono molte individuose. Abbiamo preso un importante ruolo, ma anche molte institutioni. Perché abbiamo accelto la Fisica Medico e l'Università Trieste, l'IAEA, che ha provato molti dei sottotitoli e anche noi. In questo senso, è un arrangiamento molto complicato ma ha lavorato molto bene. Ho avuto un lancio con la mia figa e vi invito i studenti ogni anno per i studenti. Quindi, i studenti per questo anno e l'ultimo anno hanno avuto un lancio la settimana e sono molto felici. È una cosa che è un piacere per me perché come si può immaginare nel mio lavoro, ci sono molte problemi. Quindi, avendo un lancio con un po' di persone per molte persone come Loceano e sono molto felici. È molto ricordante e molto speciale e penso che è quello che fa questo programma molto buono. Quindi, questo anno, la graduzione, l'ho capito, c'erano 16 studenti gradutati da 12 differenti paesi, se sono certo, che è una molto, molto, molto buona diversità. E, penso che hanno avuto per ogni anno quello che è fatto e penso che è la combinazione di avere un anno qui e un anno nel hospital fa una grande differenza e fa che sei un professionale reale. Quindi, tutti i tuoi piaceremo un ruolo importante nel tuo paese. Sì, alcuni di voi sarebbero i personaggi più qualificati nel tuo paese, nel tuo paese. E, questo è un importante responsabile ma penso che con il training che hai fatto da persone qui, che, devo dire, sono usati a raccontare ovviamente l'importanza dei lectori e io lo so che è un key factor che ho capito dai studenti che i lectori hanno da diversi sorgi che sono ottenenti e motivati e poi provano tutti i sviluppi e i soggetti. Quindi, penso che è molto importante. Quindi, ora, sei molto attraverso e hai una grande responsabilità per aiutare il tuo paese e il tuo paese ma anche per aiutare gli altri studenti e anche per raccomandare gli studenti per questo maestro. Penso che questo maestro è ora un maestro standardo che, a IAEA, ha tentato di esplorare il mondo e penso che queste cose potrebbero essere più grande e più grande. Quindi, tutti i tuoi hanno un ruolo per giocare. Poi posso vedere i tuoi studenti che, sicuramente, hanno visto i tuoi come esplorare i tuoi studenti che sono parte di un molto buono comunità speciale e penso che è importante che dovevamo integrare con altri non solo da questa generazione ma anche da i agenti del futuro. Penso che questa è un'iniziale che cresce e ha un'armi confessa ai targeti e è molto importante ai nostri migliori è un onore per noi per avere l'opportunità di aiutare a provare questo servizio. Congratulazioni a tutti i tuoi, e grazie molto. Grazie, Fernando. Quando prepariamo il Master, già alcuni anni fa, avevamo immediatamente il supporto entusiastico del progetto universitario, Professor Maurizio Vermeglia. Il supporto è sempre continuato durante tutti i anni. È presente nel ceremonio di inaugurazione, al ceremonio di graviazione, e è ancora qui con noi. Maurizio. Grazie, grazie molto al canale. Prima di tutto, è davvero un grande piacere, ma è un onore essere qui con te oggi. E hai già detto molto di questa idea. Quando ero il rector di 5,5 anni fa, una delle prime cose che mi hanno chiesto, era il Master in Medico-Physics. E, in realtà, anche se sono un ingegnero, non pensavo molto a l'answer. L'answer era, sì, dobbiamo. C'era un grande piacere verso l'Italia di Bureaucrasia. Perché, come si può immaginare, quando si marica, hai molto buon riso per fare questo, altrimenti, sì, aspetta. Abbiamo molto buoni risi, e abbiamo fatto il piacere e il venire contro l'Italia di Bureaucrasia. È definitivamente non facile di preparare un programma, un programma internazionale, con l'organizzazione non-Italiana. Abbiamo anche l'organizzazione non-Italiana, anche nei hospitali. La complessità del problema è più o meno simile alla complessità di mangiare quello che è in città dell'Italia di questi giorni. È magari più complesso, quindi non c'è soluzione per questo. Ma abbiamo trovato la soluzione, perché abbiamo credo che questo fosse il right thing to do. E abbiamo soltato molti problemi, e sono ancora convinto che questo fosse il right thing to do, perché ho visto questo master crescendo e crescendo, magari non in termini di numero di studenti, ma in termini di idee, in termini di percezione dell'importanza di lavorare in questa direzione. In realtà, una delle razioni che ho detto entusiasticamente è che, perché questo master è un compasso, la più importante e la più strategica issue della mia università, che è una università di ricerca, internazionalizzazione, molta attenzione alla multidisciplinaria, e di supporto a sviluppare il mondo, e di supporto a quello che è chiamato la diplomacia di scienzo. Siamo qui per questo. Bieste ha perso per molte anni dopo la guerra seconda, prima di la guerra seconda, durante la guerra, dopo la guerra, perché magari non c'è nessuno, ma potete sapere, la storia ci deve raccontare. Abbiamo avuto i cartoni ironici qui, e quando ho detto qui, ho detto qui, due chilometri a questo punto, 150 metri dal mio paese, e io ancora ricordo quei anni. Tenere Europa, essere parte di Europa, significa qualcosa. E quando io avrò la borda di former, non c'è più borda con Lovini, quindi avrò avuto, e dico, vedo tutte queste stone, e avrò avuto una, e avevo il mio figlio e il mio figlio con me, e dico, ora mi sono in Lovini e ora mi sono in Italia, ora mi sono in Lovini e ora mi sono in Italia, e questi ragazzi, guarda, mi sono disgustato, cosa the hell are you doing? You can't understand, you cannot understand what this means for us. So please no border, science is important because there's no borders for science, there's no borders for cooperation, so now I just say to all of you, please go back in your countries, and tell to all the people in your countries, science is important, listen to science, don't believe that the earth is flat because it's not flat, okay, it's not flat, it's true, and it's the science that test this. There's no, you cannot vote on this, there's no vote, one counts one for something else, not for science, not for cooperation, because we have to remember that science and cooperation brings peace, and this is actually what the world needs now. So really, really a good, hope you will have a good opportunity to apply what you have learned here and you will keep in your heart a good remembering of the university of Trieste, Trieste, Trieste system and this part of the world, thanks a lot. Thank you very much Maurizio. The third pillar of our master is the International Atomic Energy Agency. From the scientific viewpoint, they gave us an invaluable support in designing the master, designing this program and providing teaching material. But there is another aspect, equally important, of the cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is the assistance of the technical cooperation of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is the IAAETC that contributes most of the fellowships for the master students. Without the cooperation of the agency TEC in terms of fellowship, the master could not continue. The agency is represented here today by Mr. Martin Krause, director, program support and coordination division of the technical cooperation department of the agency. Welcome at the ACTP, Mr. Krause. Please. Good morning. Dear Professor Kevedo, Professor Familia, Professor Bertucci, Dear Professor Parovani, Professor Longo, Dear colleagues, fellows and graduates. On behalf of the IAA, it is my great pleasure to be here with you to celebrate your graduation of the IAAICTP International Masters of Medical Physics from the University of Trieste. First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your graduation and I want to sincerely thank you for having participated and successfully completed this challenging program. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the IACTP and its staff for providing their expertise and their facilities for hosting and organizing this program. Special thanks from our side goes, of course, to Professor Bertucci, Professor Parovani and Ms. Susi Rarussik for their enthusiasm and dedication to organizing this program. Allow me now to highlight a few things. This MMP program is one of our flagship programs in the department of technical cooperation. In fact, we are trying to do what the professor has said, science diplomacy, international cooperation around scientific issues related to nuclear, of course. It is one of our flagship programs. We implement currently about 900 technical cooperation projects across the world in 144 countries. Each project has several activities, but this MMP program stands out, it is special. It combines a number of very important features which makes it so unique. It is a long-term program for two years. Most of our activities are short-term, training courses for one week or two, or a scientific visit. But if you have a long-term program, of course, the chance for knowledge uptake is much greater. So we are very proud of this program because it's a long-term program. It combines also the classroom learning with practical learning. It brings together fellows from all around the world. It brings together partners and institutions such as Italian hospitals and the ICTP. This program can be looked at from our perspective as a perfect example of providing support in human capacity building, skills development, networking and knowledge sharing. With your successful graduation today, a total of 64 students have completed this program in the past four years. You have, and your graduation marks confirm this, significantly expanded your knowledge about medical physics. I am confident that all of you will apply and carry on the learning which you have gained during these two years, two-year hospitals in your home countries around the world. The impact of your training on patient care in your home countries is tremendous. Let me mention also that 25% of all our projects that we are implementing across the world are in the area of human health. 25% is a significant proportion of our program. And why is it so? It is so because the countries where you come from, the member states of our organization, they demand our support in implementing human health type of projects. So they are on the one hand the demand from the countries, on the other hand, you might know that we are living in the age of the sustainable development goals, the SDGs, which were adopted by the United Nations, by all countries in the world basically, and there is a SDG number three, the Sustainable Development Goal number three, which says we must all work together to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. Your training, what you have done here, and when you're going back to your home countries, working hopefully in hospitals, you're contributing to the Sustainable Development Goal number three. I'm also aware that for many of you, this has been a great sacrifice, actually, to come here to Italy two years, one can go for 10 days, it's nice, but for two years that means a significant commitment, a sacrifice, actually, in terms of leaving your families maybe behind, organizzando, you know, practical things at home, so it has been a great sacrifice, but I also believe that you will reap a great reward from having participated here in this course. I would also like to highlight the valuable network that you have created with each other and with your supervisors in the hospitals and the professors here at the ICTP. You spent the last two years together and of course, you also learned not only from the professors and supervisors, but also from each other. You not only established a network of professional collaboration, but also friendships, and I believe that your paths will cross each others in the future. I advise you to nurture this network and the friendships that you have made. Finally, it is not all over now with the graduation. All of us at the IEA look forward to the fellowship reports from those students that were supported by the IEA.  These reports are very important for us. Why? We need to learn more about your experience of this program and you need to help us to guide those who come after you. Some of them are here actually in the room. So this is very important for us to learn the lessons from your experience and apply those lessons in the future courses that we intend to support. I don't want to take more of your time.  I wish you all the best, especially for your future careers. And I also want to wish you a safe and pleasant journey back home. Thank you and congratulations again. Thank you very much, Mr. Krause, for your supported words. When with the help of the agency, we had designed the structure of the master, we wanted to be sure that external experts at the international level would control and guarantee the excellence of the master. Therefore, in the agreement with the university which instituted the master, it was stated that international experts will act as external advisors. This year we have a new external advisor, Dr. Debbie Fandermerve, who is the new head of the Physics Division of the Human Health Department of the Agency. Debbie. Thank you, Luciano. Here, distinguished people in the room. I will try to keep this short and I will end with a special message for the students from the IAEA and from myself. I'm also a medical physicist from a developing country, so I think I know what you all feel like. This is an age of globalization an era of globalization and I think that this can be used either to highlight differences between ourselves or we can see it as an opportunity to cooperate with each other more. And I think that this program is a really good example of how with increased globalization we can cooperate better and achieve good things together. I think the partnership between the IAEA and the RCTP and the University of Trieste and the hospitals throughout Italy that have made a lot of efforts in the second year. And the IAEA to create this and sustain this program is a great example of how we can use globalization to our benefit. The IAEA has a history of producing a lot of documents in education and training and recognition and trying to improve awareness of medical physics. And we have done a lot of work especially together with the IRMP to uplift medical physics as a profession. And it's very nice to see that this is realized to some degree in these efforts. What struck me over the last two days because this is the first time I've been involved in the examination process was how open the whole group is to continually improving this masters in medical physics and that's unusual and it's exceptional. And I think you can congratulate yourselves in this respect. So I think even in four years there's still opportunity to improve and this is a very good thing. To the students, as my colleague said to you before you've now been launched into an international network. You're very privileged to have this opportunity to know each other and I do hope you do keep contact and if I can say it in a different way from Mr. Krause in health education it's very important to see one, to do one and then to teach one because that's how you know you're really competent. So at this stage you've seen and you've done your next job is to teach. So yes, you can start looking at yourselves as the next generation of clinical trainers and educators and that's good. Please remember that you need to learn something every single day for the rest of your lives as medical physicists. The learning doesn't stop here and to the graduates in particular you have every reason to be very proud of your achievements today and congratulations. Well, thank you Debbie. I might add that she's new as the external advisor of the ICTP but this is not new to the ICTP. She was here before directing the joint activities between the agency and the ICTP. The recognition and cooperation of the international organizations for medical physics is very important for us. Dr. Slavik Tabakov is here both in his capacity of past president of IOMP the international organization for medical physics and also as one of our external advisors. I met also I had that Slavik has directed many, many colleges of medical physics here at the ICTP. Slavik, rispetto al Professor Kuverde e al Professor Fimilier, distinguisciutri ufficials, d-air, colleghi e studenti. L'anno, ho parlato di un paese di medical physics e di ingegneria in contemporanea cura. E come l'Avoio Nobel ha iniziato perché il fisico era applicato per la medicina, per il discovery di l'X-Race, con Rangan. This time I should speak about two philosophical categories. Distinguish, but very important. So this is direct and indirect categories. We all know the physical meaning of these two categories. So let us see them from a social point of view. The incredible support which the Italian Association of Medical Physics, the ICTP, the University of Trieste, the International Atomic Energy Agency and other contributors give to medical physics here indirectly helps thousands of people around the world. The College of Medical Physics, which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary, has participated from 104 countries. This unique college takes a step further and it trains young specialists to directly apply their knowledge and their skills in the healthcare of their countries. On behalf of IMP, I would like specifically to thank the leadership of the ICTP, of the University of Trieste, of the Italian Association of Medical Physics with all its members who support this course. And of course the people who are driving the course, Professor Bertocchi, Professor Padavani, Professor Longo, Mrs. Susira Dosage, Dr. Mario Dedenaro from the local hospital, without whom this wouldn't have happened. This is a unique course in the world. So due to this, dear graduates, when I witnessed your high quality master courses yesterday, I was thinking how you should return in your hospitals and you should be directly involved in dealing with the health of at least 500 people per year. Through each one of them, you should be indirectly related to at least 10 friends and family of those patients. This means that for only one year, you will indirectly affect at least 5,000 people. When you do this, always remember the professionalism, the generosity, and the cordiality of your teachers from Italy who actually made you to this level. And never forget to directly transfer your knowledge to your students and to the colleagues in your countries. This way, you shall additionally help indirectly thousands of people. In all your professional life, as we all medical physicists have, you shall be related to about half a million people, each one of you. So if you multiply the number of students by these people, you'll see to how many people this college and this master course is related. Our profession, medical physics, is not only one of the most dynamic branches of applied physics, but also one of the most human and fulfilling one. So practice it with professionalism, with responsibility, with humanity and pride. Good luck. Thank you very much, Slavic. In addition to a UMP, another important international body is IFOM, the European Federation of the Realization of Medical Physics. Incidentally, it is IFOM who gave the prize to Renato Padovani this year. IFOM is represented here by Dr. Marco Brambilla, the president of UMP. Marco? Dear colleagues, dear students, undoubtedly the ICTB master is by far the most successful program of education and training in medical physics devoted to low and middle income countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and also part of Europe. But another value of this program is also to create a community of medical physicists, which is made by individuals, you. And this is definitely, in my opinion, one of the most important added value beside of the professional and technical learning that you have achieved in these years. And I invite you during the progression of your career, which I'm sure will be brilliant and rich of success, to keep this value of being part of a community. At the European level, we are trying to do the same to establish a community of medical physicists. We now have a congress, a journal, a school. And since you have been hosted in an excellent Italian network, which is a European country, I invite you also to keep the contact with this network and to try to duplicate this model. First in your country and secondly in your continent. And this is my wish for you to become very well known and respected professional, but to keep the sense of being part of a wonderful community, the one of medical physicists. Many congratulations to all of you. Thank you very much, Marco. There is another important for us, organization of medical physics, the Italian association, IFM, association italiana di fisica medica. Renato Padovani will later illustrate better the importance of the cooperation of the Italian hospitals for the second clinical year. IFM is represented here by Dr. Roberto Matud, who is also an old friend of the center, member of the IFM board, representing here the president, Dr. Stasi. Roberto? Good morning everybody. It's a very great pleasure to be here to represent the Italian Association of Physica Medica. And to take part to this really exciting and touching ceremony. For every one of you, it's a very important moment. It's the final, it's the conclusion of an important happy, I think, but also difficult path you have made through these two years of study. It has been really difficult to be far from your country, for sure, to integrate in local community hospital. It's not easy, I know. But I hope that this experience you had will be a real, deep part of one of you and gave you a very great knowledge from one side of the aspects of medical physics that you can take with you and brought to your home country. So I congratulate every one of you and best wishes for your life. Thank you. Thank you, Roberto. As you know, the second clinical year of the master is spent by our students as residents in Italian hospitals. But also during the first year, a number of practicals are taking place at the Trieste Hospital. For this, but also for other similar purposes, the ACTP has signed a formal agreement with Trieste Hospital, agreement which incidentally has been just renewed in these days for the next two years. I give therefore the floor to Dr. Mario Del Denaro, the head of the medical physics department or section, or whatever it is, of the Trieste Hospital. Mario. Well, thank you, Luciano. Thank you very much. This year is ten years of collaboration with ACTP. And it started ten years ago, and we as hospital make this agreement, as you know, and the aim of this agreement is to contribute to the development of medical physics all around the world. Thanks to the commitments of our department, that means six medical physicists of our department who give this contribution and give their experience more than ten years of experience for this medical physicist, we offer this experience to the student of the master. The master starts in 2014. We have already one experience with ACTP, and we would like, of course, to continue with this collaboration. Well, how consistent the collaboration of the hospital? First of all, we are able to allow the student to enter the hospital. And this is not so simple, because there are many bureaucratic difficulties on that, of course, but we were able to allow these people to enter and to work together with our staff. From this decade, I evaluated that more than 2,000 people entered the hospital. And this, in my opinion, is a good result, because it is very easy when you work close together with other medical physicists to know what is our job, and we are able to give many suggestions, many to share our experience with these people. So, from my side, I am very satisfied of this experience, and I think that I can speak also for my collaborator, because for two reasons. The first reason that we have the feeling that sharing our job is a value for the student, but also it is a value for our self, because we share, but also we have some enrichment from these people, also from a human point of view. And the second aspect, of course, is that this collaboration is grown also for us. Why? Because we have the opportunity to collaborate with the university, with the physics department of the University of Trieste, with ICTP, and of course, we have the opportunity to work in close contact with IAA, and as we all know, IAA is a fundamental institution to give all the publication that we use daily in our everyday work, because from IAA we are able to understand how is the good practice inside the hospital. And this is very important, and we thank very much this institution for this support to the everyday work. And finally, I would like to congratulate for the student of this year, and I want to wish to all these people to go on with their job and their adventure when they go back in their own country. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mario. Starting from last year, we have added to the formal gradation ceremony a scientific lecture. Last year, Professor Alberto Del Guerra, gave from the PISA University, spoke about positron emission tomography and its role in medical imaging after 65 years. This year, Professor Frau Giesel Harberg from the University Tate Clinicum Tubingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biological-Kibernetics Tubingen. I'm very proud of our German accent. We'll give a lecture which involves also sociological aspects with the title Medical Physics, Connecting Science with Clinical Care. Professor Habgeb. So, thank you so much for this nice invitation. Let's wait for everybody for me to have my talk. So, I will allow myself to try to be a little bit philosophical. We have heard so many nice things today and it has given a lot of thoughts. So, I feel very pleasure and an honor to stand here in front of you and also to see the enthusiasm in your eyes for the future that you are now going ahead. And this is the Tower of Pisa. And for me, this is the Tower of Physics. So, here Galileo did his first experiments and this is where everything started. So, if you go up these stairs, they are amazing. So, if you look carefully, you can see that they will they have some, as well as some, they're wear, worn and torn of all these feet who went up there. And among these feets who went up there, there were your fellows, physicists, who started before you. So, you have colleagues sitting here in this room together, but you have also colleagues from 500 years ago. And that's a fine thing. So, if you walk up these stairs, there's a funny things happening because you feel gravitation. So, what you do, basically, is that you feel the gravitation and when the tower is leaning, you are pressed towards the outer wall. And then when you feel the tower is leaning on the other side, when you go up, it's a spiral staircase, you're pressed towards the inner wall. And that's also something very real. So, physics is something very main and very close to us. However, if you're a physicist, who studied the equations of motions. So, you know about gravity and you can trick him, you can use him. So, you can walk straight ahead to the top without underlating too much. So, this is also what has been done in two of the realms, I think are really essential parts of medical physics. And of course, I'm a magnetic resonance scientist, I have to tell you. But I have to think a lot about ionizing radiation because this is what most of us do and this is the nuclear physics containing. Ionizing radiation is so much more important just for the sheer amount of it for us as medical physicists than the little spin quantum numbers are. Sorry about that. To myself, I mean. So, this is a timeline starting more than 100 years ago. And there is a red line there. This is us now. And this is just 100 years. So, let's have a look back. So, it all started, I guess, with Röntgen who observed the very basic phenomena lying at the basis of nuclear physics used for medical applications. Just one year after this description, the first radiotherapy was done and it was mainly done to take care of skin problems. More or less at the same time, Maria and Paul Curie in Paris, they discovered radium. And although they were just playing around with it in the bidding and they were fascinating, mani glowed in the dark and Marie was carrying the stone with her in her pocket the whole day. They made such fundamental contributions not only as physicists in these basic sciences. They also looked further, they looked ahead. When the First World War broke up, Marie was personally carrying around sources to the battle lines to be able to image and make images of wounded soldiers. And that's an amazing thing to do. Another thing which is nice is how physics shaped our way of conceiving ourselves as human beings. So here you find a citation from the magic mountain by Thomas Mann that was written shortly after and you also see the hand of Conrad Runken's wife. Why didn't he do that experiment on himself, by the way? Anyways, under the powers of the light ray, the flesh in which he walked disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved in vacant mist and there within it was the finely tuned skeleton of his own hand. The signet ring he had inherited from his grandfather hanging loose and black on the joint of his ring finger, a hard material object with which man adorns the body that is faded to melt away and beneath it, when he passes on to another flesh that can wear it for yet a little while. And this beautiful words is all about the skeleton which you can see perfectly well with ionizing radiation. So let's go on.  And soon the first concerns about safety went up and people got organized very early on and this is also a thing for us to remember. Another thing, putting up here, you see there are some oops, color codes in here. So we have this fundamental discoveries here and we have the application to health here. We have the international organization here and up here I put something else which actually is quite important too for our business and that is technological development which then are sold on the market. And the brothers of Varian's wish to protect the Panama Canal from the Germans alleged bombs led to the invention of the Kleistern and then in itself was such a potent thing because it contained the vacuum tube and the vacuum tube has been used for so many things. Not only for you guys for the ionizing radiation but also for all of us being keen on magnetic resonance and we will come back to the brother Varian's in a one. So in the end we had the second world war and this is something we never want to see again and I think the lessons that have been learned will impede that because we know how devastating it can be and it comes as a matter of luck that still we can build on the bad experiences that we had. So people were severely injured and there were effects during the generations to come but somehow physicists managed to quantify that by looking at bricks and I think that is also a beautiful story of medical physics and the birth of dosimetry. The rest of the last century saw the development from single sources to actually being able to create ionizing radiation from vacuum tubes and again we needed something to control all these things. We needed a concerted action to help to teach people also how to handle ionizing radiation. Things got more and more developed and you could use other types of ionizing radiation particle beams for actually curing people. So the advent of proton RT is a beautiful thing and something very, very useful for accurately and clean in a clean way treat people. Another revolution which continues into our times is the advent of computers and digitization. Many of the techniques that we use today wouldn't have been possible without them. We can use mathematical algorithms people dreamt of 100 years ago. So that also leads to new possibilities of making images and of planning treatment and that is what we have today. Let me now switch to something I'm personally more like. This is magnetic resonance imaging. So let's look at the timeline for magnetic resonance imaging. So I have left the brother varian up there. I have left the computers and the digitization which are milestones for our business too. So one of the varian brothers, he was... I mean they had this company in Stanford and Stanford Han, Evan Han was sitting and they were doing NMR all the time basically. So he also had some patent on it. Although people have been discussing a lot if he was really the first. Anyways, the fundamental observations were made in 1938. So more than 40 years after the first observation of ionizing radiation. So Zawaiski and Blach, Purcell and Han, they're all great scientists who contributed and developed the magnetic resonance imaging field without knowing it that they were doing imaging because nobody, everybody said, well you can't do imaging with that. But Lauterbohr, he actually used his own hand and he stuck the finger in his Zeugmatograph and he got an image of his finger and he showed to the world that yes, it is possible to do imaging with MRI and we'll come back to that point a little bit later. The first MRI scanner was up and working in 1980. That's not a long time ago. Safety is not such a big issue in MRI. There are terrible things we can have happened with the preactual effect, but there are a few things. But in a way it's not so complicated which leaves less to a medical physicist to do. But also there, there have been efforts in trying to make the technique as safe as possible and give us guidelines along which we can work. The turn of the century saw the advent of an era of new techniques. So you could not just look at the water inside the tissue and the fundamental magnetic resonance properties that Felix Bloch described, the T1 and T2 decay. You could actually see how water moves and then later on you could see your own thoughts. So that was that with our fMRI. Technology-wise, parallel imaging has made us make quantum leaps ahead. So when I started my PhD, that was around 1990, it took more than 20 minutes to do a spin echo imaging of the head and we had a slice thickness of five millimeter or an in-plane resolution of five millimeter. So like PET today, old PET. And it just took ages, yeah? And then smart physicists came up, I'm thinking here about Henning who said that we can encode the images in different ways. So it got down the time to 10 minutes, that was a revolution, parallel imaging, the fact that we can acquire the MR signal at the same time in multiple radiofrequency coils has brought that time down to two minutes. So, and it while increasing the resolution. So it's a massive improvement. But of course the data rate, the amount of observation that we have to gather and store per unit of time has increased more than exponentially in that time. So, of course MR wouldn't have been possible without tremendous developments in magnetic resonance gradients to get that resolution that you can't get through the wavelength alone. Magnet itself to build stronger magnets and we'll come back to that in a while too. And radiofrequency coils. So if you can now compare these two lines, I think it's fun. So you see it's MRI is shifting towards more to the end of the last century. And I think if you now would do a similar graph or optics, it will bring us then towards the future. So what will the future bring for us? If you look at the number of publication on PubMed, which is an important portal for health sciences, you see that they have increased tremendously over the last years. And these number of publications, they will continue to grow, that's for sure. So I just did this the other day and I also wanted to see, well, if I now instead of medical physics look at the word medical physicist, maybe that can tell something about what we will be doing looking ahead. So the first thing, which was interesting and nice, was that we're still trying to see what our profession is. And we're trying to harmonize that profession across countries. Of course that will also depend on the local technology you have at hand and the local needs. But still we're talking to each other and this is a very nice thing. There are new things coming in. We have genetics. So genetics will play an increasing role, not just for imaging like in this case, but also for treatment and treatment planning. Artificial intelligence. My view is that we still don't know what to do with that and we have to think a lot, I think, together, yeah? Because until now we have done everything which is just possible. But maybe the next step for us will be to do not everything which is possible, but the right thing, to pick from the possible things and pick the right things to do. Okay, this is where some science come in. This is my passion. I like magnetic resonance and therefore I like strong magnetic fields. And what I like about it is that it actually gives us a possibility to look into tissue, microstructure with people that are alive and that I can put into the scanner several times and I can do follow-up studies. So it's because I don't do any harm to my subjects. Sorry, just repetition. I know you're now experts also on these kind of things but I think today maybe you're a bit obfuscated because this is such a great day and you are just an emotional cloud, perhaps. So this is some basic physics. So without magnetic field, no NMR because the energy states are degenerate. We cannot see any difference between them. So we need a magnetic field and only like that we can split up the energy states. We get the Zeeman effect and there is an energy splitting there that will depend on the applied magnetic field. And we have the Laumour frequency which will be then the resonance frequency that we actually use to have our MR signal. In order to be able to see something we need radiofrequency to excite our spins and then we follow these spins in time and we look at their behavior in three dimensions in the transverse plane relative to the orientation of the external static magnetic field and also along the static magnetic field itself. The energy difference here is in the microwave range that corresponds to a wavelength of between half a meter which covers the whole body to 10 centimeter if we let actually less than 10 centimeter around 8 centimeter in the magnet I use it's 9.4 tesla. This wavelength now starts to get too small and you will see in a while what happens then. So let's get on. A general concern about MRI is that it's so little signal. It's not a sensitive technique and the reason behind that comes from Mr. Boltzmann. So we have the polarization that will depend on this energy gap between the two energy levels and how hot it is and in the body it's hot, it's 37 degrees. So how many spins are we actually observing now? Well, in terms of dynamic equilibrium at 1.5 tesla it's maybe one spin out of 100,000. So water molecule has two spins, it has two protons. So we would then see 51 out of 50,000 water molecules at 1.5 tesla. So what does that mean? Ah, by the way, and you see that it also increases because the energy gap increases with the energy gap. So therefore we like to go to higher fields. So let's look at what we're actually looking at when we look at MRI images. So these are some voxels. It's a digitized square area that we get our MRI signal from. We already solved that thing of spatial encoding. It's not complicated, but we don't talk about that today. So we said we have quite a little, so if you increase the magnetic field strength you see that we increase the number a little bit. It's proportional to the number of teslas because not only does the effect increase, and that increases quadratically, but also the noise increases. So effectively speaking, the signal to noise increases linearly with the field, taking it a bit simpler. So let's see how much water we have in our body because water is what we mainly look at. So we have 55 molar, that's a lot of molecules per litre. But in this year we have 70% of water. So at 3 teslas we are looking at 2.3 times 10 to the power of 11 water molecules. As we increase the field we really want to make use of the fact that we get more sensitive, so we want to measure smaller voxels because how can we else see microstructure? It's hard to see microstructure in one millimeter, although I have to say that the mechanism as diffusion and other things all happen at the sub-voxel level and also susceptibility effects, they are all there at the sub-voxel level which makes actually it possible to look at things which are really, really small in scale, although we use voxel sizes of one millimeter. But let's move to 7 teslas and let's make a voxel that is 100 micron big. This is really at the very, very edge of what is possible today. Maybe it's better than what is possible today actually. The best papers now which are published are around 300 micron, 500 micron. And there we see 4.6 times 10 to the power of 8 molecules, water. Let's now move to 14 teslas. So at 14 teslas we don't have a human scanner anymore, we're then looking on preclinical research or we're looking on post-mortem material. We have less than 1 million water molecules that we look at. So we're almost, and that's less item, so to say that there are persons in the world, so we can almost look at these water molecules one by one. This is amazing. And this is, I think, what really fascinates me so much about MRI. And a lot of what you can find with MRI is synthesized in this image. So this is a T2 star map acquired at 9.4 tesla from my brain, I think. And this is the brain stem map so you can go in here and see microstructure. You can see structure in the cerebellum at an unprecedented level of detail. You can see moving spins inside the arteries. You can start looking at post-mortem data and see highly detailed things. You can do spectroscopy with solving a lot of problems that you have due to overlapping spins and coupling of the equations. You can use the signal for doing functional MRI imaging like here. And that's thanks to water molecules moving inside this complex MRI tissue structure. So this was all the, I'm sorry, just talking things. So let's now briefly browse through some results. So here are some results from doing research on epilepsy using high-field scanners. And you start to see at the border between the gray matter and the white matter the cause of epileptic seizures in form of a cortical thickening and altered T2 star behavior. And that can help in the future for doctors who have to treat these kind of conditions surgically or with a stereotaxic surgery based on ionizing radiation. You can look on Alzheimer disease. So here we see susceptibility maps from an Alzheimer patient and a healthy volunteer. And there are alterations in these images that we cannot yet interpret completely. We are looking into the use of post-mortem tissue to try to understand the phenomena we are observing better and we try to push the voxel size more and more. We also go to 14th Tesla and at the time it seems that it's a con joint effect of the iron inside the beta-milliode plaques and the surrounding lipids that is driving the signal changes that we can observe using dedicated MRI techniques. So here you see MRI images and here you see histology from exactly the same specimen. Another fascinating area of research is regards to the microstructure of the brainstem. Brainstem is an interesting area because for doing deep brain stimulation people would like to put electrodes in these different nuclei. But at the time there are no ways of actually finding the right place for putting these electrodes because there is an information gap between histology made by hand in postmortem and what we can observe in vivo. So these are all in vivo images. And you see we start to be able to see some fine features inside these tissues that may help tomorrow guide the positioning of such electrodes. However we also need to look at our own technique. We cannot say okay MRI is the best thing you just use it and you get answers to all your questions because it's not true. So what is the exact relation at different field strengths with what histologists and neuropathologists are able to see and our actual MRI images. And this is an intense area of research that is of high of central importance to the field. So we use postmortem brain samples for this and there is a theoretical possibility that we actually can bridge the knowledge gap with histology. And we can also verify MRI-based indentification of microstructure inside the brain. However we also know that the MR parameters in fixed tissue they also change. And then we are confronted with another reality and that is the wavelength problem we have talked about a little today. Because we have strong problems with the transmit field so the field that we need to excite the spin is not homogenous anymore. And that is what is meant with B1 in homogeneity. And how does that look like? Well this is the image of a whole brain postmortem sample that we imaged at 3 Tesla and at 9.4 Tesla. And the difference between the two is striking. So basically we cannot excite the spins inside the brain at 9.4 Tesla. And this is all linked to the wavelength of the RF field we are using. Remember I said it was like 8 cm. But it's not only linked to that. It's also linked to the dielectric properties of these tissues. So we go back to physics, fundamental physics. So we go back to Maxwell actually. I should have put Maxwell on that timeline. But it was before my timeline. So maybe that's why it wasn't on that. So we look at permittivity and conductivity and we look at the real part and the imaginary part of the B1 field. And we try to arrange these problems. So we did that. Basically we played around with the conductivity and increased that a little bit. And we managed to get homogenous images through that modification. So these are all postmortem samples. But the fixatives used were different. And the fixatives used here had another better improved dielectric properties. To cope with the problems we encounter at 9.4 Tesla. So with that we could go on forever. So we could take this brain and we can cut out and we can investigate little pieces. And from these little pieces we then go on and do histology. And this is the way we're going right now. So here are some examples. We have the image from the in vivo. So this is from a single subject and not average of several subjects. We have the postmortem samples and we also have microscopy using alternative light microscopic techniques that can help us to interpret the MR signal a bit better. And we can also use MR techniques of course. So this is diffusion tensor images of the human brainstem. You see all the major white matter fibers coming up here through the brainstem. And this is the tectum sitting on top of it, which is the area which interests us for the moment. So this is the kind of results you can get at 14 Tesla using postmortem imaging. So if I know as an MR physicist and a medical physicist should try to come up with an idea of how my working agenda could be, this is what I would put up. So if I have to start to use a new MRI methodology and for targeting the microstructure inside a new organ that has not been studied hitherto, I would first talk to fellows, pathologists and histologists to try and identify typical patterns of the microstructure. And then I would set up my biophysical modeling model for this kind of tissue and based on known MR behavior of the tissue, I could then model that, define the necessary MRI protocol and what would happen then. I would probably have measurements that last three days and no patient would be happy to lie on the scanner that long. So then I would have to go down here, think again, try to shorten it up and make it happen in an hour or so and simplify my assumptions, find the correct constraints to put on it. Simplify this MRI protocol and reiterate this several times until I can come up with a MRI protocol which is then compatible with the clinical reality. So, now back to you. This is the world you are living in and you have, nowadays we have incredible technical possibilities and it's up to you to really sit down and think about the technologies that you have at hand and look what you want to see with these technologies to find out what level of detail you should put yourself on and finally with that try to bridge the gap between, I call you true physicists, those are the theoretical physicists that are hosting, our hosts here and our, us more applied physicists, the medical physicists who work in the clinical reality. We have to bridge many gaps and I wish you the best of luck in that endeavor for your future. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Professor Harbour, it was really fascinating lecture. When we started designing the project of the master, we have been very fortunate to have the enthusiastic operation of two professional medical physicists, Professor Renato Longo, who is professor of medical physics at Trieste University and Dr Renato Padovani, who at that time was the head of the medical physics at the Udine Hospital. Renato is now the director of the master and Renato is the coordinator. Renata. Thank you. It's not easy to be the last speaker. Yes, okay, that's true. But what I mean is that why my colleagues have the speech, I say, okay, this is said, this another thing is said. So I have no more. So only a few ideas. The first one is that as a director I'm very proud to present to the colleagues, to the director of the ICTP, to the director of the university, these young colleagues. I'm very proud of them. They work hard. They spend two years far from their family working very hard. And now they are ready. They are ready to serve as medical physicists in their own countries or where they will be during their lives. And that's the first point. To be honest, every year I'm very much touched when I realized what is your motivation in order to be far from your family, from your children, from your partner in life in order to stay here and work and study with us. So this is the first point. The second point is that on Monday we celebrated the 7th, 7th anniversary of the universal declaration of the human rights. And the article 25 says that everyone has the right to medical care. And I think that our master is a very small contribution to this ambitious project of mankind because I think that the universal declaration of human rights is a project for the whole mankind. And the last but not the least is that one of the ambition of our master is to create a network, a community as Marco Brambilla says. So please never forget that you are not alone. If you are in trouble in your professional task, you are part of a network. So we will be happy to exchange with you our experience. And please not be shy, offer your experience to your colleagues. Obviously you are responsible of your continuous learning but you are also the responsibility of sharing your knowledge with all your colleagues. And congratulations and good luck. Thank you very much Renata. Then the last speaker before the real award ceremony will be the coordinator of the master. Thank you Luciano, which is as everybody knows the father of this adventure, the grandfather of this adventure. First of all I'd like to thank everybody, all the institutions, the organizations who are inspiring us, are continuing inspiring us, advising us, supporting us in this, for me, for my personal experience, fantastic experience, to work with young people, with so motivated people, it's only a pleasure, it's not a work. I don't know why, this is calling a work. So it's not a work. The awards to the colleagues that graduates today they have a great experience to work with you, to stay with you, to learn from you, to learn your difficulties, to understand your difficulties, but also to see your progress, your good results. I was very surprised positively of your presentations on these days.  In most of the cases you are the most educated medical physicist in the country. Your responsibility is to share the knowledge or experience to train people to grow the medical physics community in your country. It's not a easy task. Some of you will find a difficult situation in the country, but the everyday work you will see in some years the results and better with the IEA we are making service so we will follow you in the years learning from what you are doing. You are now, as has been mentioned before, part of the large community, you are part of the international community. So you can have support advices and as I'm seeing, IEA is supporting you a lot in providing grants participation to conferences, supporting you in the country. IEA next week is organizing a meeting in Nigeria, collecting people involved in training in different countries, very few countries now. What is very important, two of the participants of this meeting are two of our graduates. So they are still moving the first steps in training, in sharing knowledge and experience.  Ok, thank you. Just a few words, so we have in this fantastic experience we have several pillars in our, but one important pillar that is making the difference our experience with others is the clinical training. So I can say that more than 200 people is supporting, 200 medical physicists are supporting this program, so we have to thank all of these fantastic people doing this sometimes not easy, not easy job, but I think with these results we are supporting this. Thank you everybody again. Thank you Renato, so we are at the end, my role is finished since we can now proceed with the actual degrees awarding and the degrees will be awarded by Professors Kevedo and Fermelia assisted by Professor Renato Longo. I think it's ok. The first one is Festo Kiraga from Uganda. Aboma Guraccia Nagasa from Ethiopia. Islaka Arbeze Messele from Ethiopia. Juman Dachi Kizukari from Tanzania. Abebe Tagumafeye from Ethiopia. Canesius Uyajayemana from Burundi. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Tanzas Jaya Maitov from Kazakhstan. Everardo Piccardo Blanco from Nicaragua. Aurelia Lassitati from Gabon. Abbas Eliatt from Bahrain. Saraswati Baichu from Mauritius. Indaira Elanafi from Sudan. Elusen Cyril Katim from Sudan. Aorbir Omer Gafur from Kurdistan. Solomon Tadez Hagos from Ethiopia. Mohamed Al-Dabbas from Jordan. Together for the final picture.


We're here at the start of the 2013 World Solar Challenge. None of us have slept all night, waking every hour in anticipation of the day. For the next couple of days, our team will be driving around 2,000 miles across the Australian Outback. Across this inhospitable land on the planet.  One of the cool things about our team is that we're completely student run. I'm an economics major at Stanford. I'm majoring in mechanical engineering. I'm an electrical engineer on the project. My major is computer science. Computer science. Most of the students in our team find it really easy to find really great jobs when they graduate from Stanford. I think it matters more than most classes you can take. Just the absolute best training ground for new engineers. Wonderful experience. This past race was one of the most exciting in our recent history. We're looking for a top five finish hopefully in this year's race. There's always an after a little bit of a competition between Michigan and Stanford. We wanted to beat them. They wanted to beat us. That's a good rivalry. With a solar panel you can see your power drop to near zero with a cloud in front of the sun. It's really a scary game to play when you don't know if you're going to make it to the very end. It was a nail biter. Made it! Yeah! There will be classes that you took that you don't remember at all. But going to Australia and driving your car across a continent under the power of the sun and only under the power of the sun together with your friends is a defining experience that you will remember until the day you die.


Welcome to this edition of Abledin on Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns and achievements of the differently able. I'm always your host, Lauren Syla. I'm Lauren Syla. And on this interesting program, we will focus on new directions, which we will talk about in a minute. But first, recently Abledin on Air was at Good Samaritan Haven in Barrie and Froggy FM was there and there was a broadcast and a fundraiser which Good Samaritan raised funds as well as Green Mountain Transit, which is in Vermont, gave 500, and as you can see from the video here, gave 500 bus passes to people at Good Samaritan Haven to use to go on job interviews and other appointments. But right now, we are also going to talk about the Poor People's Campaign, which has been in at the State House for the last six weeks. And we have video of that. Let's take a look at this. Good afternoon. Come on, you guys can do better than that. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Poor People's Campaign. For the last couple of weeks, I've been here taping through Arkham Media. I'm a journalist and my wife and I, thanks to Arkham Media, host and produce a television program for people with special needs called Abledin on Air, the program that focuses on the needs, concerns, and achievements of the differently abled, not disabled. But we don't suffer with disabilities. We're abled people. In 1964, these are facts. In 1964, President Kennedy signed the Act for Mental Retardation and Mental Health Services for people. We don't want to get rid of those services. We need them. Okay? Why is it that people in certain states have to wait for hospital care and not one hour, but they have to remain in the hospital for about 15 or more hours? That's immoral. Why is it that we in the state of Vermont have to pay for co-pays for Medicare and Medicaid? Why is it that people sometimes have to go to other countries, like Israel, for free healthcare? Why can't the United States give us free healthcare? We want free healthcare. Let's say it. We want free healthcare. We want free healthcare. Why is it that Social Security, when you pass away, doesn't give your family enough death benefit and you have to pay thousands of dollars for a funeral? Why? That's immoral. It is immoral. Why is it that disabled veterans are homeless when they come home from helping the United States? Why is it that disabled veterans are also hungry? Why is it that people like my wife, who is a survivor of the World Trade Center, who survived 68 flights? Why is it that people who survived the World Trade Center, who cannot get their compensation because of the fact that the World Trade Center compensation fund said they have to wait for first responders first? That's a shame. And the last several other things here, why is it that President Trump, who is supposed to be our president, still mocks people with disabilities? And why is it that we are, during the national anthem, they say that we are the land of the free and home of the brave? We still live in a slavery state. Let's repeat, we still live in a slavery state. Give us what we need. Thank you. Well, today on Abled and on Air, we are focusing on new directions of Montpelier, which deals with substance abuse, tobacco, and other substances. We would like to welcome the Director of New Directions, and thank you for joining us. Thank you, Larry. Your last name is? Gilbert. And Gilbert of New Directions, which the Substance Abuse Coalition here in Montpelier. Welcome to Abled and on Air. Thank you, Larry. And what are the missions and goals of New Directions? Substance Abuse Coalition. Yeah, Central Vermont New Directions Coalition is a Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition. So our mission is really to encourage healthy behavior and decrease substance abuse, especially in Washington County. When you say decrease substance abuse, what exactly does that mean? Well, the key word is prevention. We really want to stop something before it starts. So we want to decrease the number of kids who are starting to try cigarettes. We want to decrease the number of smokers and where it's causing harm to their health. We want to lower the number of people abusing prescription drugs, and we want to limit underage drinking of alcohol. Okay. When you're dealing with tobacco, okay, tobacco cessation, patches, the chewing tobacco and that kind of thing, because now we know that it's a federal mandate to anyone that rents an apartment in HUD subsidized housing, that there's going to be no smoking as of July 30th or 31st. Explain what you've been doing in terms of those applications. Right. So that is a big change. And several years ago, it was optional. So some public housing units started to go smoke-free or tobacco-free over the years, and now you're right. It is a requirement. So New Directions has funding, some grant funding, through the Vermont Department of Health to really assist with this initiative. So the Department of Health and 802 quits has put out a smoke-free housing toolkit, which really helps. It's a whole booklet. It is. And what it has in there are the reasons why, you know, because of to limit fires and burns and decrease the cost of having to redo an apartment from all the problems, and especially the secondhand smoke. What do you mean redo an apartment from all the problems? Explain some of that. Right. So secondhand smoke, which, you know, comes off of the lit end of a cigarette, gets into the air. And thirdhand smoke actually settles in the walls, on the floor, in the linoleum, in the drapes. So all of those things add toxic layers to inside of an apartment. There could be sticky nicotine residue. So when an apartment is turned over, there has to be a lot of repainting and cleaning and sanding or repurchasing new carpeting in order to make that happen, which is much more expensive than if there was a non-smoker there. We also know that there's no safe level of secondhand smoke, and it gets into the HVAC system. And so people in all the apartments can are breathing that same air and sometimes those toxins that come with secondhand smoke. Did you want to ask a question? Mm-hmm. Did you want to ask a question? Yeah, how does, um, the reaction is going to, going to stop people from smoking and telling them they're going to have a... Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So we do want to promote cessation. And so it's not just about the smoker, it's really just about the smoke. And we really want to help people with this challenge. Well, obviously you can't stop someone from completing. Can you stop someone, can new directors stop someone from completing smoking? Well, we partner with Central Vermont Hospital that has a program called 802 quits. Mm-hmm. And 802 quits provides, when you sign up for this, you can get phone support or online or you can attend a group meeting. And so there can even be a meeting at every of the public housing areas.  And sometimes it doesn't take just once or twice. It may take several times. And so I just wanted to encourage people who tried to smoke and said, oh, I started again to try again, because every try counts. And it is very difficult to break the habit. In terms of some of the other situations, like, okay, you said that secondhand smoke gets on carpet and HUD or any apartment dwelling has to pay extra money. I've also heard that it's gotten into appliances, like stoves, refrigerators, lighting. Can you explain some of that? Like, how expensive can it really get for a secondhand smoke to get into an apartment? You're right, Larry, to replace appliances or lighting is very, very costly. So it could cost thousands and thousands of dollars. And a lot of the housing authorities really want to be able to keep the prices down. People lose their security deposit because of this problem. They do. They do. And so that's why we're trying to, I mean, now that we know, now that the Surgeon General has said there's no safe level of secondhand smoke and we see the evidence of fires and illnesses and having to redo the apartments, it's time to make a move that will really be more healthy for all the residents in the long run. Okay, let's talk about tobacco companies for a minute. Okay. In terms of Philip Morris and others, some years back there was a huge PSA, a public service announcement situation, because these companies have gotten sued for lying to consumers in terms of smoke. Oh, it's wonderful. It's great. That type of thing. It costs a lot of money for a carton of cigarettes these days. Half your rent. Explain that situation and how your nonprofit basically helps with smoking cessation in terms of that whole thing. Why did they lie to consumers? Big tobacco is very, very powerful and they continue, even though it's been going on for years and years, they continue to tell lies or not tell the whole truth about a lot of the products and about the harmful effects of smoking and the secondhand smoke. They've really skirted the issues in a lot of ways and we're concerned about that. Right now, there are a lot of electronic cigarettes and vape pens and jewels and rubies which are vaping devices which do not fall under the same legislation as regular cigarettes. We really need to get more legislation around those so that they are taxed heavily. There are a lot of flavors in tobaccos now. There are almost 7,000 different flavors of different tobacco products and nicotine liquid and one of the reasons big tobacco is really putting a lot of flavors into these products and not telling the whole truth is because so many of their customers are dying off. So what do they need to do? They need to make more customers and they know that they can target kids if they put signs on doors that are at eye level, is by level. Joe Camel stickers used to be about three feet off the ground when you walked into a convenience store. Now luckily, there are a lot more rules about what kind of signage there can be but when I was growing up there were jingles on the radio and TV all the time. There were billboards, there were ads and now they're not allowed to do that but what we're really hoping is that the cigarettes will be taxed even more that they'll raise the age of purchase to 21. We call that tobacco 21 so that we can keep people from starting and they won't be saddled with this habit. It's expensive. It's expensive. The other products and you know it's first amendment speech so we can mention like the other products like Skull which is the chewing tobacco. Cartons and cigarettes cost a lot of money. $100 to $200 of a carton depending on the brand. But this stuff causes mouth cancer. We have family members that died of cancer. Oh another thing I want to talk about, birth defects. How does that, I mean there's another agency March of Dines that deals with birth defects. How does smoking really increase birth defects? Yeah we're really really trying to help more people be aware of the harms and have the skills to quit smoking and really take action and you know the harms for women who are pregnant whether they're smoking tobacco or tobacco products like vaping or chew or even marijuana. It's all harmful to the developing fetus. If it's harmful to developing fetus then why are they making marijuana legal? That's a good question you know. We know that there really needs to be a lot more prevention education and public awareness about the harms of tobacco about marijuana. It's not for everybody certainly not for kids and teens whether brains are still developing. And especially I'm originally from the Bronx okay. My wife's originally from Brooklyn. We're talking about 1970s 1980s here. Crack, crack pipes, crack smoke all of that stuff is just you know there's something in the 70s the Bronx is burning right. People were smoking crack and doing drugs and all that other stuff. You're talking about so much harm to a person's body. Now vaping, how does that come into play? Why is that considered I mean not really smoke in terms of like versus tobacco smoke in an apartment building. Right. Why is that considered safe versus? Well actually the the vaping is not safe either. There are a lot of things we don't yet know about it but what we do know are a number of the chemicals that are in vape pens or vaping devices are also in combustible like cigarettes, tobaccos and so you know these are things like formaldehyde or you know dry cleaning fluid. Lots of things that are harmful. Wide out. I took culinary classes and we had to bring a sharpie pen to glass so to underline stuff. So sharpie pens and those vapors are harmful to people. Right there's toxicity in that and. Lead paint. Well you know lead paint is a good point because. Am I making a wrong assumption here? No but a lot of people say well you know why why does our housing have to be smoke free? It's because we know so much more now than we used to know. For instance lead paint. We don't use lead paint anymore that's not allowed in any of your housing because we know how toxic that can be and so now that we know so much more about the chemicals. They don't even have lead pencils too much anymore. I remember when I was a kid if I got nervous I would chew a pencil but you know they don't do that anymore. They don't. Right and so the vaping the electronic cigarettes is still a form of a tobacco substitute. Electronic cigarettes and those are not safe either. Do they plug them into the wall and smoke? Well they plug them into their computer to recharge them. It has a battery on it and then they can. It's a battery. It's an actual battery you plug into your computer. That will heat the coil. Yeah yeah it doesn't have to be plugged in in order to vape so it's very concealable it could just be in your hand. It doesn't have that same odor as a lot of regular cigarettes. Okay I'm plugging in a cigarette now. But there's lots of flavors involved in those which are very toxic and there's been a lot of nicotine poisonings especially among children and youth from these little bottles that come of the liquid and so there are laws now that they have to be marked with how much nicotine is in them and they have to have a child proof cap. However the FDA is not regulating all of those chemicals the same way they do with other things and in fact some of the additives in vaping have been approved for ingestion like those flavors might be okay if it was in candy but they were never intended to be heated and inhaled. Candy cigarettes I remember those. Oh right yep yep and as a matter of fact back in the early 60s 70s Winston Cigarettes we might show a piece of that Winston Cigarettes and the Flintstones there was an old commercial with the Flintstones Winston Cigarettes you know taste great it's the same thing like bush beer I know this is you know about smoking and other harmful but Flintstones did a bush beer commercial well you're you're playing right into children you are you are that's really true and the more that there are bright colors and fancy flavors and so actually we have several groups at a number of schools that are funded to be part of the counterbalance campaign and counterbalance is they're going to counter the advertising that big tobacco is putting out there of you know having flavors in lots of different chew and tobacco and really just to lure kids because what we know now from surveys is that kids who would not would not normally have smoked cigarettes do try some of these products only because of the flavors like bubblegum or or even the idea of a flavor like fancy unicorn I mean what does that taste like but people think oh I'm gonna get I'm gonna get that flavor or ice cream yes yeah cotton candy ice cream or something yeah crème brûlée yeah interesting but disgusting yeah um no crème brûlée is a good food but not in a cigarette you know even though you use a blow torch to to cook it right at the end yeah I think so yeah but anyway um let's get to the other programs that you guys have trash tramps for example oh okay that let's um what exactly is trash trash tramps and I noticed you have a oh yeah I brought a couple things to show you that's right so we did a survey with some student interns a few summers ago all around Montpelier to pedestrian's and we surveyed um uh store owners to see if they if smoking was bothersome at their stores or on the streets and would they like to have a smoke-free zone well yes cigarette smoke was bothersome people were concerned about where people would go and smoke but the number one thing was the cigarette butts were a real problem in Montpelier so Central Vermont New Directions Coalition partnered because Montpelier doesn't really have the sanitation department and it gets all nasty with garbage and other stuff well yeah so a lot of the trash does get picked up but who wants to pick up all the cigarette butts so here's where the trash tramps come in and they're volunteers from the Montpelier area senior activity center and so we partnered with them and with Montpelier alive and with Central Vermont Solid Waste District to purchase these sidewalk butlers now these are made by a man in Portland Maine and they have these in Maine and now they have them in a lot of other cities so we started with six and then we were able to get 10 more and some kids in Barrie even purchased 10 to put up in downtown Barrie so we have our logos on here we want to let people know that we're recycling the cigarette butts new directions they cost about $99 but that doesn't include emptying so who's going to empty these so the trash tramps get together every Tuesday afternoon from two o'clock to three o'clock and anyone can join they meet at the cedar center and they go around and they pick up trash on the streets with tongs and they they have a master key that unlocks these and empties the cigarette butts which all get recycled but what we're finding is that they're picking up about 2,000 cigarette butts every Tuesday sometimes more than that even with these so what we really need to do is promote the use of these either through the tourist center or smokers on the street please don't throw it on the ground or in the tree grates or down the sewer that goes right to the river there's no filter in there put put them right in the sidewalk butler and you'll see these on signs around you know signposts around state street main street and we put them wherever we found big piles of cigarette butts in the past but we're ready to install some more so you can purchase those also our group can purchase those to combat smoking yes we really want to have cigarette receptacles we want to try to get people out of the habit of just throwing them on the ground you know people don't throw their coffee cup down or their their empty bag from their chips but for some reason uh cigarette butts get thrown on the ground or in the river or something and we really want to try to change that culture okay um now how long has new direction has been around well since 1998 um i'll tell you that there was uh very unfortunate tragic alcohol related car crash two Montpelier high school students were killed in east Montpelier coming home from a party in adamant that was hosted by two necky students so you can see that there were four or more communities um involved in this uh it was an underage drinking party and when these uh two boys died a lot of the people in the community came together and said we cannot let this happen again so is this similar well is this group is your group similar to because there's been other groups like mothers against drug driving and uh yeah students against drug driving so is it we we partner with those other organizations but it's not just on underage drinking anymore because what we see is there are so many substances and youth are very vulnerable drugs yeah tobacco uh vaping marijuana underage drinking binge drinking which is drinking four or five drinks at a time you know within a two hour period in a fat house or hazing when they do all that stuff yeah and even other underage parties kids drink too much at one time and they don't understand the harmful effects going on in their body yeah and we're very concerned about prescription drugs now also and i'd like to tell you about that yeah so how exactly does your organization help with that well one of the things that we found Larry and Arlene is that most of the people who were using prescription drugs that were not prescribed to them we're not stealing them example what do you mean by the difference between prescription and unprescribed okay so prescription drugs like painkillers something very strong something that's not just in over the counter oxy cotton yes absolutely years per cassette has been has been off the market because of situations people would eat them like candy too much misuse and not enough warning on that so in vermont um we have a prescription monitoring system so it's not easy for people to get you know too many too many pills from a lot of different pharmacies and um doctors are prescribing very low doses or offering alternatives maybe going to a chiropractor or trying some other alternative method of acupuncture or something else to manage pain but what we do know is that there's still a lot of misuse because people are getting them from families and friends and when we think about crime sometimes it's because people have broken into someone's home or their car to get prescription drugs so our one main issue right now in working with the health department is to get prescription drugs out of people's homes so if you had a shoulder injury or your kid had their wisdom teeth taken out and you still have those drugs don't keep them around for if you might need them someday we're really encouraging people to get rid of them and a number of ways to do that we call them vermont's most dangerous leftovers and so we really want to promote that's why police are getting involved and they have commercials on tv or psas um the my premier police department is hosting a drug take-back day or something like that and you bring your unused medication to them or any drop off centers and they'll take your medication exactly what do they do with that well i'm glad you've heard about that the garbage how do they no they they get picked up so this is what one of the drop boxes look like and here in washington county um that's on facebook or is it on yes yeah um here in washington county we now have a drop box in every police station and at the washington county sheriff's office so you can walk right into the police station and um get rid of your old drugs if you can't do that you want to do a little spring cleaning twice a year there's a drug take-back day like you said that happened in april april and every october and we publicized this because the law enforcement locally um they monitor different areas and people can come and drop off all their drugs and then they get picked up by the national guard and they're taken to be incinerated now if neither of those work we certainly don't want anybody flushing them down the toilet or throwing them in the compost what happens when you do that well it goes into the water supply and um you know there can be levels of drugs uh in the water and we don't want that so another option that we have are we now have mailers and we're putting up these displays at a number of places around town um so you can mail in your unused medication so if it's not convenient for you to get to the police station or wait till take-back day you can go to the library or your doctor's office and pick up one of these envelopes it's postage paid all you have to do is put your you know cross off your name on the prescription bottle stick it right in seal it up and take it to the post office or put it in the mailbox and that will get no no charge to you but we're just really making every effort to get all drugs out of people's homes right now so they're not just sitting around um for to fall into the wrong hands any more any questions you want to ask yeah um what uh what are the new things that new directions are doing um in terms of how can I say um you know new things that are happening or or in the future what is it holding for new directions in the future well we're really focused on prevention and we really want to help people understand that um a lot of substance abuse uh disorders can be prevented you know there's a lot of focus on treatment and recovery which are both so important but we're trying to back it up and you know stop it before it even starts one of the things that we find is really really important is to uh teach a parenting class called guiding good choices and this is a course can you hold that a little bit more sure yeah so this is a workbook that the parents get and we pull parents together for um two hours to meet for five weeks one of the weeks they bring their kids with them but it's really focused on how to have family meetings think about what your values are in the family um learn about why marijuana for instance is very harmful to kids so the parents can make decisions and then communicate those decisions and guidelines family rules to their kids on a regular basis and have conversations before it's too late and it's really important to start talking to kids when they're you know 10 years old even because then they're more receptive to understanding the harms and the um health problems down the road yeah start young yeah and continue through middle school and high school and even college yeah we understand that new directions is grant funded yes uh and you told me before the show began that you guys were not funded for um to help people to get off heroin and some other powerful drugs why is that um i thought that drug prevention was a whole thing you're right drug prevention does cover all of the substances and one of the things that we know is some substances actually lead to other things that's how is that well we don't even want kids starting to feel uh high or change their brain from nicotine in something that people think is harmless like a a vape pen or you know what they call a jewel now or even a cigarette but you know it many times using one substance people are more likely to then use another substance and you know when they can't have prescription drugs they they might move on to heroin now there we do carry Narcan you know in case there is Narcan is what Narcan is a naloxone which will reverse the effects of you know heroin overdose for instance and um we're really trying to promote that in the state so if there are family members and loved ones of people who are addicted and are using heroin that all the family members make sure that they do have Narcan in their home so that they can save a life if there is an unfortunate overdose yep no uh what are the misconceptions that people have around cigarette smoking and drugs that aren't necessarily and because it's not good for you yeah right um you know it can cause in this program deals with we we deal with special needs and we deal with families and um because you can get birth defects from it you can get other situations from it so what are the misconceptions that I know that's a long-winded question but yeah well I think first of all there's um there's a low perception of harm there are a lot of oh it's not gonna harm you and adults who think you know parents might say well I smoked weed I smoked pot when I was younger or I still like to smoke it it's okay but what we know is the THC the active psychoactive ingredient what is THC is there for yeah tetrahydrochloride yeah tetrahydrochloride okay um um I think uh the THC level in um marijuana used to be much lower than it is now I'm talking about used to be three or five percent and now some of the products have 80 or 95 percent and that's way too much for a lot of people's brains and it really is way too much for for kids it's almost the same thing similar well something similar the driver's manual any driver's manual would say what has more alcohol a beer a shot of a shot of whiskey or something else it just it depends but it all can cause the same harm when you get behind a wheel it can and the other factor that plays into that is if people have a family history of mental illness or dependence on alcohol or other drugs those kids or even those grandkids can be much more vulnerable and susceptible to uh having a problem dependence or addiction and kids need to know that all people need to know what their family history is just the way you know a doctor would say well do you have diabetes in your family or heart disease in your family everybody needs to know if there is a problem with substance of dependence or mental illness um and then they can make better choices you know I think when there's more knowledge then people are better informed to be able to say that's not good for me or I can have one or I can't do that right now or you know uh you know my family is allergic to that pretty much you know it just doesn't work for them and so I think getting back to you know your question the perception of harm some some people think oh what has more yeah it's all it all does the same harm especially when you get behind a wheel if if marijuana smoke you get behind a wheel is I mean not marijuana smoke uh alcohol yes you get behind a wheel you're gonna kill somebody well alcohol is very dangerous you know don't drink and drive don't drive and drink you know but um the marijuana impairment is a really big deal and that's why one of the reasons that New Directions was promoting let's wait until we have this figured out or what we were watching Colorado and Washington state who had legalized before us how are you gonna handle you know the the driving problems with impairment and it is a big problem because there's something called a lot of people don't realize vehicular homicide you get behind the wheel yeah yeah yeah you kill somebody and it's compounded if someone uses marijuana and they have a drink or they have a pill in their system all of those things compounded really um uh change their level of impairment and we're worried about that yep yeah so um we would like to thank you for joining us on on this informing episode of Ableton on air before we go how can people we're gonna put it on the bottom of the screen how can people read you okay so um you can see we're at www.cvndc.org and that stands for central Vermont new directions coalition we have a website we have a facebook page and we're going to um be at city hall um meeting with the city council on uh June 27th to talk about and we'll be there as well oh good we're going to propose we've got a petition going around right now and we have over 1500 signatures for people who are open to smoke-free zones maybe parts of the sidewalk in downtown Montpelier because there's so many people suffering from disabilities of you know lung problems and um and breathing problems and so to eliminate second hand smoke in our downtown public area would be helpful last thing before we end yeah last thing before we end restaurants yeah okay we didn't get really get into that but yeah restaurants and other public places yes um smoking non-smoking why did they start the trend of a smoke-free restaurant or casino or a smoke-free place well you know when surveyed most people would prefer to be in a smoke-free environment um because they they appreciate breathing clean air sometimes because if they're not around smoke which triggers them to have a cigarette it helps them cut down or quit and um then there and it saves money too and it saves money and there was a ruling you know that uh no there's no safe level of second hand smoke even indoors so now we have the clean indoor air act but we also you know in Vermont especially in Montpelier all of our parks are smoke-free the parklets that we have downtown are smoke-free and even the state house lawn which is going to make a big difference this July 3rd when people are at the parade and watching the fireworks that um they won't be bothered by people smoking around them or it would be okay to say on the state house lawn did you know there's no smoking on the state house lawn so appreciate you not smoking around my family yeah well we would like to thank you for joining us on this edition um that puts an end to this edition of Able Dead on Air I'm Lauren Seiler I'm Lauren Seiler see you next time


mitochondria are essential for cellular functioning and have been shown to play a role in the development of Alzheimer's disease. In this study, researchers found that mitochondrial dysfunction can lead to increased levels of the Alzheimer's disease risk factor apolipoprotein E, APO. This was observed when either the electron transport chain was disrupted directly or indirectly via gene editing of specific mitochondrial membrane transporters. The researchers also found that these changes in APO levels were associated with an inflammatory gene expression profile. They concluded that mitochondria may be involved in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. This article was authored by Megan E. Wynne, Holloway's An Open Boner, Alicia Arlene, and others.