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Know the Score About Dangerous Drugs Like Steroids

Anabolic steroids, human growth hormones and nutritional supplements can be all too tempting for young athletes trying to maximize their performance.

Now, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has adopted a Web-based drug education and wellness program for student athletes to help them make the right decisions.

It's called "Choices in Sports" and was developed by Oregon State University faculty members. The project was directed by Ray Tricker, an associate professor in OSU's College of Health and Human Sciences, and is an extension of his teaching and research for the past 16 years.

"The NCAA is confident this site will provide student athletes and athletic staff alike with a trusted resource that will be maintained by the National Center for Drug Free Sport, the company selected by the NCAA to administer its drug-testing collections process," says Mary E. Wilfert, NCAA program coordinator for education outreach. "With this effort, the NCAA reinforces its programming to prevent drug abuse and promote the health and well-being of its student athletes," Wilfert says.

More information http://www.drugfreesport.com/choices/drugs/index.html

Scientists Create Antihydrogen
By ALEX DOMINGUEZ, Associated Press Writer

European scientists say they have created enough antihydrogen — a type of the mirror-image, antimatter stuff that fictionally powers spaceships on Star Trek — to test a widely held basic model of the universe.

While antihydrogen has been made before, the more than 50,000 atoms created at the CERN web sites) particle accelerator in Geneva are "by far, the most produced," said Jeffrey Hangst, a leader of the ATHENA collaboration, one of two groups of physicists working on antihydrogen at CERN.

Not all particle physicists agree with the new finding. A spokesman for the competing ATRAP Collaboration at CERN said he doubts that antihydrogen had been produced in the latest experiment. "Our long experience with these very difficult experiments warns that observing simultaneous positron and antiproton annihilation does not ensure that antihydrogen has really been produced," Gabrielse said.

ATHENA researchers, whose work appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, plan to make more antihydrogen to test the Standard Model, equations that explain the nature of matter and energy.
If the antihydrogen doesn't behave the same as normal hydrogen "the textbooks would have to be rewritten," said Hangst, who is a physicist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, along with his CERN work.

Antimatter is the mirror image of conventional matter with opposite properties. Antimatter is destroyed whenever it collides with matter, turning both into bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Scientists believe this process was crucial to the fiery creation of the universe billions of years ago.

Why so little antimatter is made now in nature remains one of physics' great dilemmas. Only modest levels have been detected in cosmic ray showers and the nuclei of distant galaxies.

Antimatter is difficult to make in the lab, too. Giant particle accelerators at CERN and Fermilab near Chicago specialize in the quest. In the first antimatter experiments a few years ago, only dozens of short-lived antimatter particles were created. Hydrogen, the most abundant element, consists of an electron orbiting a proton. Antihydrogen is the exact opposite; a positron — an electron with a positive charge — orbiting an antiproton, or a proton with a negative charge.

The antimatter was short-lived; Hangst said it was annihilated when it bumped into normal matter. Detectors picked up the unique signatures of antimatter as it was destroyed, he said.

David Christian of Fermilab said the ATHENA group appears to have made antimatter in greater quantities. "They've got a lot more big steps they need to make, but this one is a big step,"

However, Gabrielse said upcoming publications by his group "will show how it is possible to be fooled. Our initial understanding of the recent report makes it likely that we will present the case that the reported observations do not prove that any antihydrogen was observed," he said.

They also want to study gravity's effect on antihydrogen. Some speculate antimatter "falls up," but most scientists don't believe that is the case, Hangst said. Using antimatter to power a starship or create a weapon, meanwhile, is still in the realm of science fiction, he said. Making antiprotons requires 10 billion times more energy than it produces. For example, the antimatter produced each year at CERN could power a 100 watt light bulb for 15 minutes, Hangst said.