Preparing your organization's training program for ICD-10.

Training for ICD-10 is going to be expensive, though predictions of how expensive vary widely. Healthcare finance executives should create a flexible, multiyear capital and operating budget to prepare for ICD-10 conversion and the training and support that will be required. Healthcare organizations also should assess staff knowledge in the critical ICD-10 areas and begin training now to be ready for go-live by early 2013.

An ancient nova shell around the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis.

Cataclysmic variables (classical novae and dwarf novae) are binary star systems in which a red dwarf transfers hydrogen-rich matter, by way of an accretion disk, to its white dwarf companion. In dwarf novae, an instability is believed to episodically dump much of the accretion disk onto the white dwarf. The liberation of gravitational potential energy then brightens these systems by up to 100-fold every few weeks or months. Thermonuclear-powered eruptions thousands of times more luminous occur in classical novae, accompanied by significant mass ejection and formation of clearly visible shells from the ejected material. Theory predicts that the white dwarfs in all dwarf novae must eventually accrete enough mass to undergo classical nova eruptions. Here we report a shell, an order of magnitude more extended than those detected around many classical novae, surrounding the prototypical dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis. The derived shell mass matches that of classical novae, and is inconsistent with the mass expected from a dwarf nova wind or a planetary nebula. The shell observationally links the prototypical dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis with an ancient nova eruption and the classical nova process.

Probing the faintest stars in a globular star cluster.

NGC 6397 is the second closest globular star cluster to the Sun. Using 5 days of time on the Hubble Space Telescope, we have constructed an ultradeep color-magnitude diagram for this cluster. We see a clear truncation in each of its two major stellar sequences. Faint red main-sequence stars run out well above our observational limit and near to the theoretical prediction for the lowest mass stars capable of stable hydrogen burning in their cores. We also see a truncation in the number counts of faint blue stars, namely white dwarfs. This reflects the limit to which the bulk of the white dwarfs can cool over the lifetime of the cluster. There is also a turn toward bluer colors in the least luminous of these objects. This was predicted for the very coolest white dwarfs with hydrogen-rich atmospheres as the formation of H(2) and the resultant collision-induced absorption cause their atmospheres to become largely opaque to infrared radiation.