cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Pigeons ( Columba livia ) show change blindness in a color-change detection task

Change blindness is a phenomenon whereby changes to a stimulus are more likely go unnoticed under certain circumstances. Pigeons learned a change detection task, in which they observed sequential stimulus displays consisting of individual colors back-projected onto three response keys. The color of one response key changed during each sequence and pecks to the key that displayed the change were reinforced. Pigeons showed a change blindness effect, in that change detection accuracy was worse when there was an inter-stimulus interval interrupting the transition between consecutive stimulus displays. Birds successfully transferred to stimulus displays involving novel colors, indicating that pigeons learned a general change detection rule. Furthermore, analysis of responses to specific color combinations showed that pigeons could detect changes involving both spectral and non-spectral colors and that accuracy was better for changes involving greater differences in wavelength. These results build upon previous investigations of change blindness in both humans and pigeons and suggest that change blindness may be a general consequence of selective visual attention relevant to multiple species and stimulus dimensions.
Contextualizing and scaling up science information literacy in introductory biology laboratories.

Contributing to ongoing research on the pedagogy of science information literacy, this article describes the contextualization of instruction within a consequential, biology-related public health i...
Network Quality of Service for the Enterprise: A Broad Overview

One of the biggest challenges facing the Internet today is to scale to an infrastructure that can provide quality-of-service (QoS) to a wide variety of applications and traffic types. As the Internet continues to grow at a rapid pace and new applications emerge, the task of managing bandwidth becomes more important. This implies that the traditional “best-effort” service that is provided by TCP/IP is no longer sufficient in many cases. The concept of QoS has evolved to meet the increasing need for bandwidth management. This paper provides an overview of what QoS is why we need it, and what the current approaches for implementing it are. The paper also compares some existing vendor products in the QoS space and finally provides insights into some of the vexing problems that still remain difficult to solve for QoS designers.
The Evolving Role of the Psychologist

In the past decade the widespread expansion of the American waistline has driven the increased demand for bariatric surgery. Although obesity surgery has been extant for over 30 years, recent improvements in surgical techniques and the dramatic rise in public awareness have accelerated the pace of both its development and utilization. The changing role of the psychologist in the university-based weight management center has been part of this evolution. The major sources of the change in the psychologist’s role are the following: problems with patient adherence to medical and surgical treatments, developments in the areas of health psychology and behavioral medicine, psychology billing code expansion by the American Medical Association’s Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Editorial Panel, recommendations from published guidelines for bariatric surgery practice and research, clinical implications of obesity surgery outcome research, and the recent developments in our understanding of the change process.
Total synthesis of the dictyodendrins as an arena to highlight emerging synthetic technologies.

Covering: 1993–2017 This review discusses the isolation, biological activity, and syntheses of the dictyodendrin class of natural products, covering the years 1993–2017. The dictyodendrins are a family of alkaloids isolated from marine sponges, Dictyodendrilla verongiformis and Ianthella sp., which possess a highly substituted pyrrolo[2,3-c]carbazole core at the phenol or quinone oxidation states. Dictyodendrins exhibit a wide range of biological activities, such as telomerase inhibition, BACE1 enzyme inhibition, and cytotoxicity against several cancer cell lines. The unique structure and interesting biological activities of dictyodendrins provided a platform for the application of novel synthetic methods including C–H insertion, C–H arylation, and electrocyclization cascades.
“Tears of joy” & “smiles of joy” prompt distinct patterns of interpersonal emotion regulation

Close relationship partners often respond to happiness expressed through smiles with capitalization, i.e. they join in attempting to up-regulate and prolong the individual's positive emotion, and they often respond to crying with interpersonal down-regulation of negative emotions, attempting to dampen the negative emotions. We investigated how people responded when happiness was expressed through tears, an expression termed dimorphous. We hypothesised that the physical expression of crying would prompt interpersonal down-regulation of emotion when the onlooker perceived that the expresser was experiencing negative or positive emotions. When participants were asked how they would behave when faced with smiles of joy, we expected capitalization responses, and when faced with tears of joy, we expected down-regulation responses. In six experimental studies using video and photographic stimuli, we found support for our hypotheses. Throughout our investigations we test and discuss boundaries of and possible mechanisms for such responsiveness.
Recent advances in surface hardening of titanium

Titanium and its alloys are used significantly in defense, aerospace and biomedical device components. However, their poor wear resistance and surface integrity leads to galling and seizure of surfaces when contact or relative motions of surfaces are involved. Surface hardening of Ti is therefore actively pursued to minimize the wear and fretting of components in these applications. The purpose of this review is to highlight some of the recent advances in surface hardening of Ti and its alloys, especially by diffusion of interstitial elements such as nitrogen, oxygen, and boron. These interstitial elements react with Ti to form hard and wear resistant compound layers at the surface and thereby, enhance the wear/abrasion properties. The recent developments pertaining to these surface hardening techniques in terms of the process parameters, microstructural details and enhancement in mechanical/wear properties are summarized in this review.
Satisfaction With Health Care Among Patients Navigated for Preventive Cancer Screening.

Background:Patient navigation (PN) programs can improve cancer screening in underserved populations. PN may advance quality and equity of care by supporting individuals at increased risk of not rec...
Introduction: Dynamics of an Individual Charged Particle

We start with an introduction to the dynamics of a single charged particle, and then progress to rigid clusters, and then flowing systems.
Pedicle Subtraction Osteotomy

Pedicle subtraction osteotomy (PSO) is a surgical procedure that can be used to help correct fixed sagittal plane deformities. These deformities may have a variety of etiologies, including degenerative, posttraumatic, neoplastic, infectious, metabolic, and congenital disorders [1–3]. The aging population and rising expectations for quality of life are leading to increasing numbers of patients seeking medical and surgical evaluation for symptomatic fixed sagittal deformity. With the advent of polysegmental three-column fixation with pedicle screws and advances in spinal instrumentation, posterior-only approaches for correcting kyphotic or kyphoscoliotic deformities have become feasible and more common in recent years, avoiding the need of anterior approaches [4]. The use of posterior-only osteotomies with pedicle screw instrumentation can provide significant alignment correction in all three dimensions, whereas greater pedicle screw pullout strength and stiffness limit the number of levels fused, allowing for preservation of more mobile spinal segment [4, 5].
The Discovery and Rediscovery of Mathematical Genius—A Review of “The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan”

This is a review of Robert Kanigel’s highly influential biography on Srinivasa Ramanujan, the first detailed account of his most remarkable life.
Gene frequencies of APOB alleles in a sample of random Italian individuals (Central and Southern Italy)

The region s1tuatea downstream or the apolipoprotein B exon contains a hypervariable sequence (APO B HVR, APO B) organized in tandem repeat units. Its polymorphism was described by Boherwinkle et al (1989) using the polymerase chain reaction technique (PCR). These authors reported the existence of 12 allelomorphic fragments in Caucasians with a heterozygosity index amounting to 0.75. Since then, APOB has become a widespread marker, frequently used in forensics. In view of the application of this polymorphism to our routine casework, we have undertaken a population survey on the distribution of its alleles in the population of Central and Southern Italy. Here we report data referring to a first share of typed samples (109 unrelated individuals) from our reference population.
The sequel: The fifteenth amendment, the nineteenth amendment, and southern black women's struggle to vote

This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
Measuring circadian lighting through high dynamic range photography

The human ocular system functions in a dual manner. While the most well-known function is to facilitate vision, a growing body of research demonstrates its role in resetting the internal body clock...
Will Human Potential Carry Us Beyond Human? A Humanistic Inquiry Into Transhumanism:

Humanism has long celebrated the human, including those qualities that make us uniquely human, as well as the vastness of human potential. Humanistic psychology has further sought to understand wha...
Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy and Principal Component Analysis for the Classification of Spectra from Gold-Bearing Ores:

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and principal component analysis (PCA) were applied to the classification of LIBS spectra from gold ores prepared as pressed pellets from pulverized bulk samples. For each sample, 5000 single-shot LIBS spectra were obtained. Although the gold concentrations in the samples were as high as 7.7 µg/g, Au emission lines were not observed in most single-shot LIBS spectra, rendering the application of the usual ensemble-averaging approach for spectral processing to be infeasible. Instead, a PCA approach was utilized to analyze the collection of single-shot LIBS spectra. Two spectral ranges of 21 nm and 0.15 nm wide were considered, and LIBS variables (i.e., wavelengths) reduced to no more than three principal components. Single-shot spectra containing Au emission lines (positive spectra) were discriminated by PCA from those without the spectral feature (negative spectra) in a spectral range of less than 1 nm wide around the Au(I) 267.59 nm emission line. Assuming a discrete gold distribution at very low concentration, LIBS sampling of gold particles seemed unlikely; therefore, positive spectra were considered as data outliers. Detection of data outliers was possible using two PCA statistical parameters, i.e., sample residual and Mahalanobis distance. Results from such a classification were compared with a standard database created with positive spectra identified with a filtering algorithm that rejected spectra with an Au intensity below the smallest detectable analytical LIBS signal (i.e., below the LIBS limit of detection). The PCA approach successfully identified 100% of the data outliers when compared with the standard database. False identifications in the multivariate approach were attributed to variations in shot-to-shot intensity and the presence of interfering emission lines.
Revisiting the Sensorium: Olfactory Opportunities in Fashion and Textiles

Fragrance has long been connected to the fashion and apparel industry and has played an integral part in branding, marketing, experiential retailing, textiles, appearance management, consumer behavior, and communication. Fragrance offers sensual, expressive, and symbolic qualities and is one of the components of a multi-sensory aesthetic experience where apparel, the body, and the environment interact (Fiore, 1993, 2010). Like fashion and textiles, fragrance evolves and innovates with the world we live in, and its place in the fashion and apparel industry should be revisited for new opportunities that capitalize on its unique characteristics.
Target sites: respiratory

Abstract The respiratory tract is a common site of toxicant-induced injury. This chapter provides resources for toxicologists interested in understanding the anatomy and function of the respiratory tract, gas/particle disposition, and mechanisms of toxicity in respiratory tract tissues.
Familial Adenomatous Polyposis

Familial adenomatous polyposis is a hereditary polyposis syndrome characterized by colorectal polyposis and eventually cancer if untreated, as well as a variety of benign and malignant extra-colonic features. Genetic testing and counselling is crucial for patients. A surveillance program for at-risk organs is essential to mitigate the risk of developing cancer. Risk reducing colectomy or proctocolectomy is a key component of management. The choice of which procedure to perform and the optimal timing depends on patient phenotype and preferences.
Barriers to Learning Clinical Reasoning: a Qualitative Study of Medicine Clerkship Students.

Clinical reasoning is crucial to good patient care, but both learning and applying clinical reasoning skills in the context of a complex working environment can be challenging. We sought to understand the perceived barriers to learning clinical reasoning, as experienced by internal medicine clerkship students at our institution. We invited internal medicine clerkship students to participate in focus groups to discuss their experiences with and barriers to learning clinical reasoning. A survey was administered to gather additional responses. Responses were reviewed, coded, and synthesized to identify key themes. Twenty-nine medicine clerkship students (male = 14, female = 15) participated in six 60-minute focus groups, and 121 (61% response rate) students responded to the barriers to clinical reasoning survey from March 2018 to May 2019. We identified three themes (clerkship acclimation, data access, and practice optimization) and ten subthemes as aspects of the clerkship environment that impacted students’ ability to develop clinical reasoning skills. Students identified barriers to learning clinical reasoning during the internal medicine clerkship. The themes “clerkship acclimation” and “data access” were identified as prerequisites to clinical reasoning while the theme “practice optimization” described key components of the deliberate practice of clinical reasoning. Educators and health systems may improve the development of clinical reasoning by recognizing and overcoming these barriers within clinical learning environments.
Reality and History

In this chapter, the author takes Taiwan’s political transformation caused by the environmental protection movements in cooperation with the non-party movements in the 1980s as a mirror, to discuss the air pollution in Beijing, the rise of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) movement and the possible political crisis in China; At the same time, he also put his eyes on the Wukan Protests which broke out in Guangdong in 2012, revealing the institutional and historical roots of the deprivation of rural land and farmers’ rights in the radical urbanization process, taking the “depoliticization” operation of farmers in the “rights defense”(weiquan) movement as a kind of “new politics” invented under the current system, and affirming farmers’ self-organization ability. After examining the reality of China’s city and countryside, the author returns to history, tracing back the evolution from the Rural Reconstruction Movement of the Republican Era represented by James Yen and Liang Shuming to the contemporary New Rural Reconstruction Movement led by Wen Tiejun, looking for their inspiration for solving the current realistic problems. These discussions show the author’s cognition of China’s social crisis and the ideological path leading to his own Bishan Project.
Abstract IA-05: Immune health and intratumoral immune heterogeneity: Barriers to the efficacy of immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has shown remarkable resistance to immunotherapy including immune checkpoint blockade, vaccines, and other immunomodulatory agents. In cancer, immunosurveillance can be regulated at both the priming and effector phases of an immune response. Based on this reasoning, we investigated a role for the CD40 pathway in mice and humans as a strategy to prime for tumor-reactive T cells. Our studies showed that systemic CD40 activation triggers productive innate immunosurveillance that sensitizes PDAC tumors to chemotherapy but is insufficient to provoke T cell dependent anti-tumor immunity. However, CD40 activation can restore the functional capacity of peritumoral T cells. Consistent with this, PDAC development associates with progressive loss in T cell priming capacity along with a deficiency in circulating dendritic cells. This biology observed in mouse models is mirrored in humans where patients with PDAC show a decrease in circulating dendritic cells and an increase in T cell dysfunction. To overcome these defects in T cell priming and deficiencies in immune health, we studied adoptive transfer of tumor-reactive chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-modified autologous T cells in patients. Our findings show that the persistence of adoptively transferred T cells is markedly impaired in patients with PDAC compared to hematologic malignancies. In addition, CAR-T cells show limited anti-tumor activity in PDAC. This lack of efficacy has prompted our investigation into the biology of the tumor microenvironment which displays remarkable spatial heterogeneity in immune cell infiltrates. In our studies, we have identified phenotypically distinct cellular communities marked by weak (“cold”) and strong (“hot”) infiltration of T cells. We find that these distinct regions of PDAC tumors are orchestrated by unique immunoregulatory mechanisms with therapeutic implications. Overall, our findings demonstrate that immunological barriers residing both within and outside the tumor microenvironment have the potential to impair the efficacy of immunotherapy in PDAC. In addition, our data suggest that the immunogenicity of PDAC varies spatially throughout tumors raising the likelihood that multiple, distinct mechanisms of immune evasion will need to be circumvented for immunotherapy to produce benefit for most patients. Citation Format: Gregory Beatty. Immune health and intratumoral immune heterogeneity: Barriers to the efficacy of immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Special Conference on Pancreatic Cancer; 2020 Sep 29-30. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(22 Suppl):Abstract nr IA-05.
Seismic velocity change in sandstone during CO2 injection

This paper presents analytical and experimental studies of the effects of supercritical CO2 injection on the seismic velocity of sandstone initially saturated with saline water. The analytical model is based on poroelasticity theory, particularly the application of the Biot-Gassmann substitution theory in the modeling of the acoustic velocity of porous rocks containing two-phase immiscible fluids. The experimental study used a high pressure and high temperature triaxial cell to clarify the seismic response of samples of Berea sandstone to supercritical CO2 injection under deep saline aquifer conditions. Measured ultrasonic wave velocity changes during CO2 injection in the sandstone sample showed the effects of pore fluid distribution in the seismic velocity of porous rocks. CO2 injection was shown to decrease the P-wave velocity with increasing CO2 saturation whereas the S-wave velocity was almost constant. The results confirm that the Biot-Gassmann theory can be used to model the changes in the acoustic P-wave velocity of sandstone containing different mixtures of supercritical CO2 and saline water provided the distribution of the two fluids in the sandstone pore space is accounted for in the calculation of the pore fluid bulk modulus.
A topolectrical higher-order Chern insulator

We propose a scheme to realize a higher-order Chern insulator in an electrical circuit. By utilizing basic circuit elements synthesizing complex hoppings between sites of the lattice, we observe multiple topological phases of the three-dimensional circuit array, including higher-order Chern number and crystalline topological phase. In addition to nonreciprocal propagation of topological chiral hinge states, we find that these chiral states do not flow into the hinge opposite to the excitation, opening interesting opportunities for multiplexing.
Outcomes in Guideline-Based Class I Indication Versus Earlier Referral for Surgical Myectomy in Hypertrophic Obstructive Cardiomyopathy.

Background In patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, surgical myectomy (SM) is indicated for severe symptoms. We sought to compare long‐term outcomes of patients with obstructive hy...
Study on Sound Field Distribution Rule for Tank Structures of Large Oil-immersed Transformers

Large oil-immersed transformers are an important part of the transmission and distribution network in power systems. Power transformers are the main noise source of substations. Because of the uneven manufacturing process, aging equipment, long-term operation, and close distance from sensitive points, the problem of transformer noise pollution has become increasingly prominent. In this paper, the transmission and analysis model is established for transformer sound waves on the interface between insulating oil and tank body according to the sound wave propagation rule in complicated medium, and the simplified acoustic simulation model is constructed for large oil-immersed transformers by simulating the vibration noise of transformer core with monopole sound source, with which, the sound field distribution rule inside and outside the transformer tank structure is obtained, and finally, the influence factors for noise distribution are given. The results of the study provide control basis for reducing transformer noise.
Food Deserts and Residential Real Estate Prices

The prevalence of neighborhoods with inadequate access to grocery stores, classified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as “food deserts,” has become an issue of concern in recent years given th...
The Antibiotic Efflux Protein TolC Is a Highly Evolvable Target under Colicin E1 or TLS Phage Selection.

Bacteriophages and bacterial toxins are promising antibacterial agents to treat infections caused by multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria. In fact, bacteriophages have recently been successfully used to treat life-threatening infections caused by MDR bacteria (Schooley RT, Biswas B, Gill JJ, Hernandez-Morales A, Lancaster J, Lessor L, Barr JJ, Reed SL, Rohwer F, Benler S, et al. 2017. Development and use of personalized bacteriophage-based therapeutic cocktails to treat a patient with a disseminated resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection. Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 61(10); Chan BK, Turner PE, Kim S, Mojibian HR, Elefteriades JA, Narayan D. 2018. Phage treatment of an aortic graft infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Evol Med Public Health. 2018(1):60-66; Petrovic Fabijan A, Lin RCY, Ho J, Maddocks S, Ben Zakour NL, Iredell JR, Westmead Bacteriophage Therapy Team. 2020. Safety of bacteriophage therapy in severe Staphylococcus aureus infection. Nat Microbiol. 5(3):465-472). One potential problem with using these antibacterial agents is the evolution of resistance against them in the long term. Here, we studied the fitness landscape of the Escherichia coli TolC protein, an outer membrane efflux protein that is exploited by a pore forming toxin called colicin E1 and by TLS phage (Pagie L, Hogeweg P. 1999. Colicin diversity: a result of eco-evolutionary dynamics. J Theor Biol. 196(2):251-261; Andersen C, Hughes C, Koronakis V. 2000. Chunnel vision. Export and efflux through bacterial channel-tunnels. EMBO Rep. 1(4):313-318; Koronakis V, Andersen C, Hughes C. 2001. Channel-tunnels. Curr Opin Struct Biol. 11(4):403-407; Czaran TL, Hoekstra RF, Pagie L. 2002. Chemical warfare between microbes promotes biodiversity. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 99(2):786-790; Cascales E, Buchanan SK, Duche D, Kleanthous C, Lloubes R, Postle K, Riley M, Slatin S, Cavard D. 2007. Colicin biology. Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 71(1):158-229). By systematically assessing the distribution of fitness effects of ∼9,000 single amino acid replacements in TolC using either positive (antibiotics and bile salts) or negative (colicin E1 and TLS phage) selection pressures, we quantified evolvability of the TolC. We demonstrated that the TolC is highly optimized for the efflux of antibiotics and bile salts. In contrast, under colicin E1 and TLS phage selection, TolC sequence is very sensitive to mutations. Finally, we have identified a large set of mutations in TolC that increase resistance of E. coli against colicin E1 or TLS phage without changing antibiotic susceptibility of bacterial cells. Our findings suggest that TolC is a highly evolvable target under negative selection which may limit the potential clinical use of bacteriophages and bacterial toxins if evolutionary aspects are not taken into account.
Physician Use of Stigmatizing Language in Patient Medical Records.

Importance Negative attitudes toward patients can adversely impact health care quality and contribute to health disparities. Stigmatizing language written in a patient’s medical record can perpetuate negative attitudes and influence decision-making of clinicians subsequently caring for that patient. Objective To identify and describe physician language in patient health records that may reflect, or engender in others, negative and positive attitudes toward the patient. Design, Setting, and Participants This qualitative study analyzed randomly selected encounter notes from electronic medical records in the ambulatory internal medicine setting at an urban academic medical center. The 600 encounter notes were written by 138 physicians in 2017. Data were analyzed in 2019. Main Outcomes and Measures Common linguistic characteristics reflecting an overall positive or negative attitude toward the patient. Results A total of 138 clinicians wrote encounter notes about 507 patients. Of these patients, 350 (69%) were identified as female, 406 (80%) were identified as Black/African American, and 76 (15%) were identified as White. Of 600 encounter notes included in this study, there were 5 major themes representing negative language and 6 themes representing positive language. The majority of negative language was not explicit and generally fell into one or more of the following categories: (1) questioning patient credibility, (2) expressing disapproval of patient reasoning or self-care, (3) stereotyping by race or social class, (4) portraying the patient as difficult, and (5) emphasizing physician authority over the patient. Positive language was more often more explicit and included (1) direct compliments, (2) expressions of approval, (3) self-disclosure of the physician’s own positive feelings toward the patient, (4) minimization of blame, (5) personalization, and (6) highlighting patient authority for their own decisions. Conclusions and Relevance This qualitative study found that physicians express negative and positive attitudes toward patients when documenting in the medical record. Although often not explicit, this language could potentially transmit bias and affect the quality of care that patients subsequently receive. These findings suggest that increased physician awareness when writing and reading medical records is needed to prevent the perpetuation of negative bias in medical care.
COMPUTATIONAL STRATEGIES FOR FLEXIBLE MULTIBODY SYSTEMS

The status and some recent developments in computational modeling of flexible multibody systems are summarized. Discussion focuses on a number of aspects of flexible multibody dynamics including: modeling of the flexible components, constraint modeling, solution techniques, control strategies, coupled problems, design, and experimental studies. The characteristics of the three types of reference frames used in modeling flexible multibody systems, namely, floating frame, corotational frame, and inertial frame, are compared. Future directions of research are identified. These include new applications such as micro- and nano-mechanical systems; techniques and strategies for increasing the fidelity and computational efficiency of the models; and tools that can improve the design process of flexible multibody systems. This review article cites 877 references.
Computational Flow Modeling of a Simplified Integrated Tractor-Trailer Geometry

For several years, Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have been part of a consortium funded by the Department of Energy to improve fuel efficiency of heavy vehicles such as Class 8 trucks through aerodynamic drag reduction. The objective of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility of using the steady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach to predict the flow field around heavy vehicles, with special emphasis on the base region of the trailer, and to compute the aerodynamic forces. In particular, Sandia's computational fluid dynamics code, SACCARA, was used to simulate the flow on a simplified model of a tractor-trailer vehicle. The results are presented and compared with NASA Ames experimental data to assess the predictive capability of RANS to model the flow field and predict the aerodynamic forces.
Entrainment of segmental small intestinal slow waves with electrical stimulation in dogs.

The aim of this study was to derive effective pacing parameters for the entrainment of segmental intestinal myoelectrical activity. The study was performed in 12 dogs. Four pairs of electrodes were implanted on the serosa of the jejunum. Electrical stimulation of the small intestine was performed via the most proximal pair. For the slow waves within a distance of 5 cm, a complete entrainment was achieved with a pacing frequency of 1.1 times the intrinsic frequency (IF), a pulse width of 140 msec, and an amplitude of 4 mA. The time required for the entrainment was 25.6 ± 2.7 sec. The maximum driven frequency was 1.38 ± 0.03 IF. The percentage of the entrainment at this frequency was 44.0 ± 3.9%. The data indicate that pacing is able to completely entrain segmental intestinal myoelectrical activity, suggesting that normalization of intestinal myoelectrical dysrhythmia is feasible with pacing.
THE INFLUENCE OF HIGH HYDROSTATIC PRESSURE ON COCAINE AND VERATRINE ACTION IN A VERTEBRATE NERVE

The application of high hydrostatic pressure to toad sciatic nerve causes a gain in sodium and a loss of potassium which are not affected by cocaine. However, cocaine action is enhanced by high pressure when counteracting veratrine depolarization and when blocking the action potential. Various effects of elevated pressure on the after-potentials are presented and the role of ions in these processes is discussed.
Ethics for Psychotherapists and Counselors: A Proactive Approach

Part One: Taking Stock. 1. Introduction. 2. Basics of Awareness: Knowing Yourself. 3. Basics of Awareness: Privilege and Social Responsibility. 4. The Process of Acculturation: Developing Your Professional Ethical Identity. Part Two: The Nuts and Bolts of Psychotherapy Ethics. 5. The Ethical Culture of Psychotherapy. 6. "I Can't Believe It's Not Therapy!": Boundaries of the Psychotherapy Relationship. 7. Confidentiality: A Critical Element of Trust in the Relationship. 8. Informed Consent: The Three-Legged Stool. 9. Making the Most of Supervision. 10. Ending Psychotherapy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ethical. Part Three: The Ethical Ceiling. 11. Putting It All Together: Toward Ethical Excellence. Appendix A: Possible Information to be Shared With Clients. Appendix B: Policy Areas. References
Why Barring Settlement Bars Legitimate Suits

Professors David Rosenberg and Steven Shavell recently proposed granting defendants an "option to bar settlement" to discourage frivolous suits filed for a mere "nuisance"-value settlement. By exercising the option, a defendant prevents judicial enforcement of any ensuing settlement agreement between the parties. Rosenberg and Shavell contend that if settlement were foreclosed, a plaintiff would drop its nuisance-value suit, because its costs of litigating to judgment would exceed its expected benefits. They conclude that because defendants would only exercise the option if faced with a nuisance-value suit, adopting it would be socially beneficial. Although an option to bar settlement is an innovative proposal and an important scholarly contribution, this article shows that it could be highly problematic. First, a defendant would often exercise the option in small-stakes, high-cost, meritorious suits, which would decrease social welfare. Second, the option would fail to prevent many high-stakes, low-cost, frivolous suits. Moreover, Rosenberg and Shavell's analysis depends on a problematic definition of "nuisance suit," questionable simplifying assumptions, and speculative empirical assertions. In sum, without additional investigation, it would be folly to adopt an option to bar settlement.
Treatment of Keratomycosis with Amphotericin B 0.15

Amphotericin B 0.15% was tolerated and effective in the treatment of fungal ulcers of the cornea. In a series of 12 ulcers, four from which Fusarium was cultured, all responded to medical treatment. The mean final visual acuity in 11 of the 12 eyes with an adequate follow-up was 20/40.
Enthalpy of fusion and cryoscopic constant for ethylene carbonate

Abstract Because of a discrepancy in the literature, the enthalpy of fusion of ethylene carbonate has been redetermined. The value obtained is (35.80 ± 0.20) cal th g −1 which leads to (5.32 ± 0.03) K kg mol −1 for the molar frezing-temperature-depression constant.
Is ‘Holy Scripture’ Christian?: A Lucan perspective

The view of large sections of the Church that the Bible alone is the source for Christian thought and living is tested against the writings of Luke. While Luke took Scripture to be important, he co...
Beenome soon: honey bees as a model ‘non-model’ system for comparative genomics

While the explosion of genomic data and tools is fully apparent for model organisms, these tools are arguably changing paradigms most quickly in those species for which genetic studies are most challenging. One such species is the honey bee, Apis mellifera. New tools and resources for this species (e.g. [2,17]), an impending genome-sequencing project and new interdisciplinary teams will help bring the unique traits of honey bees into the world of comparative genomics. Several factors make honey bees a compelling choice for genomic studies. First, bees are outstanding experimental subjects for animal behaviour and learning, thanks to a well-known reward system [12], symbolic language [9,16] and phenomenal learning abilities [13]. Honey bees and other social insects also provide extreme examples of developmental switches, or polyphenisms — the generation of distinct phenotypes from an equivalent genetic background [5,6]. Associated with this switch are two traits that pique the interest of medical researchers — fertility and longevity. While workers are nearly sterile, queens lay hundreds of thousands of eggs each year, and live 10–20 times longer than workers. The causes and consequences of the queen–worker split, long known from the standpoint of nutrition, are ripe for genomic analyses. Honey bees also show promise as a unique disease model. Since their domestication several thousand years ago, it has been recognized that bees are targeted by many of the same pests that affect human health, viz. viruses, protozoa, bacteria, fungi and other arthropods. Given this range of pathogens and a living environment that resembles culture media in humidity, warmth and available nutrients, honey bee colonies remain remarkably refractory to disease. Genomic studies clarifying how honey bees tolerate and resist disease offer exciting parallels both with other insects, such as Drosophila [4,8] and Anopheles [3], and with mammalian systems. Bees and other social insects provide an important twist on the study of disease, by allowing investigations of social elements in both the transmission and progression of disease (e.g. in termites, where diseases can be slowed by an emergent ‘social immunity’ caused by contact between nestmates [15]). Bees also have direct effects on human health, and genetic studies are beginning to unravel the bases of both foraging behaviour [1,11] and aggressive behaviour [7], showing fascinating parallels with Drosophila and other model organisms. While the collective knowledge from thousands of years of bee breeding and research has given
Germany and the Arab Question Before World War I

(1996). Germany and the Arab Question Before World War I. The Historian: Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 311-325.
Binding of radioactive tetrodotoxin to nerve membrane preparations.

Tetrodotoxin has been tritiated by the Wilzbach method and purified to 60 % radiochemical purity. Tetrodotoxin binds to rabbit brain nerve endings, but not to rabbit liver mitochondria or bovine red blood cell ghosts. Tetrodotoxin also binds to lobster walking leg nerves. The density of tetrodotoxin binding sites on lobster nerve is 22/μm2. The sites are half saturated at about 25 nM.
Stability of the gate-dielectric/a-Si:H interface with hydrogen plasma treatment

Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin film transistors (TFTs) with single-layer gate insulator have been stressed with DC bias to investigate the device performance. A low defect density interface between the gate insulator (SiNx) and the a-Si:H film is one of the most important factors to obtain high device performance. For the back-channel-etched (BCE) type TFTs, gate SiNx is deposited before a-Si:H film, and the hydrogen plasma was used to treat the SiNx insulator surfaces. From the results of stress experiments, exposing SiNx to hydrogen plasma leads to the charge trapping in SiNx insulator and the state creation in the a-Si:H film. Consequently, the hydrogen plasma treatment of SiNx surface affects not only the SiNx insulator but also the post-deposited a-Si:H film.© (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
1/f noise due to temperature fluctuations in heat conduction in bipolar transistors

Abstract Noise is an important consideration in the reliability of microelectronic circuits and often sets a lower bound on their sensitivity and limits operation. High device temperature which result from high power operation is shown to result in an additional noise source or mechanism which can become important, become a limiting factor on circuit operation, and limit reliability. Power dissipation at high currents and voltages in bipolar transistors results in significant heat generation and heat conduction towards the heat sink. As might be expected the device temperature is only an average value and there are, as a consequence of the diffusion equation for heat flow itself, temperature fluctuations about this average value. It will be shown that these temperature fluctuations can result in 1/ f noise at moderately low frequencies where these frequencies are determined by the physical dimensions over which the heat flows and the diffusion transit time. This physical phenomena is another mechanism which can be explained by the equivalent circuit representations to obtain frequency dependent solutions to the diffusion equation. The results presented here are then related to the shot noise or white noise due to the collector current allowing a determination of the l/ f noise corner frequency.
Nicotine-induced taste aversion: characterization and preexposure effects in rats.

Rats were trained to drink their 24 hr water intake during a single daily 30 min period. After stabilization, rats were presented with 0.1% (w/v) of sodium saccharin for 30 min. Immediately after removal of the saccharin solution, the animals were injected with saline, mecamylamine hydrochloride or hexamethonium hydrobromide; thirty minutes later, saline or nicotine, 0,05, 0.16, or 0.50 mg/kg were administered. Twenty-four hr later, rats were allowed access to both water and saccharin. Nicotine caused a dose-related decrease in the proportion of fluid consumed as saccharin solution during the 30 min testing situation. Neither mecamylamine nor hexamethonium alone decreased saccharin preference; however, 3 mg/kg of mecamylamine blocked the decrease of saccharin preference induced by nicotine. Preexposure of drug-naive rats to 0.5 mg/kg of nicotine for 2 or 4 days abolished the nicotine-induced taste aversions to saccharin when tested one day, or one week, after conditioning.
Integrating economics and ecology to protect nature on private lands: models, methods, and mindsets

Protecting nature on private lands presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to protect both private landowner concerns and the biological needs of the environment; the opportunity is the need to better integrate the disciplines of ecology and economics. Such integration offers scientists the prospect of gaining more understanding about the complexities that arise in the protection of human-dominated environments. Integration also can help policy-makers make more informed decisions about how to manage private lands by adding insight into the efficacy and efficiency of alternative choices that try to balance private rights with the public gains. Integration occurs at several different levels, ranging from accounting for feedbacks between both economics and ecology within formal models to incorporating diverse methods of control to link the multiple objectives of various interest groups and people. In this paper, we discuss three illustrative examples of integration—models, methods, and mindsets—that show how one can combine economics and ecology to address the challenge of protecting nature on private lands. We explore how the explicit process of connecting disciplines can help create and refine economic incentive mechanisms that satisfy the goals set by biological needs, landowner choices, and political realities.
Assessing optic nerve pathology with diffusion MRI: from mouse to human.

Optic nerve is often affected in patients with glaucoma and multiple sclerosis (MS). Conventional MRI can detect nerve damage but it does not accurately assess the underlying pathologies. Mean diffusivity and diffusion anisotropy indices derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have been shown to be sensitive to a variety of central nervous system (CNS) white matter pathologies. Despite being sensitive, the lack of specificity limits the ability of these measures to differentiate the underlying pathology in CNS white matter tissues. Directional (axial and radial) diffusivities, measuring water diffusion parallel and perpendicular to the axonal tracts, have been shown to be specific to axonal and myelin damages in mouse models of optic nerve injury, including retinal ischemia and experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE). The progression of Wallerian degeneration has also been detected using directional diffusivities after retinal ischemia. However, translating these findings to human optic nerve is technically challenging. The current status of human optic nerve diffusion MRI, including the imaging sequences and protocols, are summarized herein. Despite lacking a consensus of the optimal sequence or protocol among different groups, increased mean diffusivity and decreased diffusion anisotropy has been observed in injured optic nerve from chronic optic neuritis patients. Decreased λ∥, correlating with visual function and recovery, was observed recently in acute optic neuritis patients in a pilot study, suggesting the specificity of λ∥ to axonal injury. From different mouse models of optic nerve injuries to the emerging studies on optic neuritis patients, directional diffusivities demonstrate great potential to be specific biomarkers for axonal and myelin injury.
Inflammatory monocyte effector mechanisms

Monocytes are blood-derived mononuclear phagocytic cells that traffic throughout the body and can provide rapid innate immune effector responses in response to microbial pathogen infections. Among blood monocytes, the most abundant subset in mice is represented by inflammatory Ly6C(+) CCR2(+) monocytes and is the functional equivalent of the CD14(+) monocytes in humans. Herein we focus on published evidence describing the exquisite functional plasticity of these cells, and we extend this overview to their multiples roles in vivo during host immune defenses against microbial pathogen infections, as antigen-presenting cells, inflammatory cells or Trojan horse cells.
Differential biological activities of mammalian Id proteins in muscle cells

Id proteins are helix-loop-helix (HLH) transcription factors that lack DNA-binding domains. These proteins form inactive heterodimers with basic HLH (bHLH) factors, inhibiting their DNA-binding and transcriptional activities. Consistent with a proposed role for Id proteins as inhibitors of terminal differentiation, Id1 and Id3 have been shown to negatively regulate myogenesis in cultured muscle cells. Here we have investigated the possibility that Id2 and/or Id4 can act in a similar manner. Surprisingly, while overexpression of Id2 resulted in inhibition of differentiation of Sol 8 myoblast cells, overexpression of Id4 did not. Sol 8 cells stably transfected with Id4 showed no apparent changes in expression of muscle-specific genes upon differentiation. DNA-binding activities present at the muscle creatine kinase (MCK) enhancer E-box and transcription of the MCK enhancer were not altered in Id4-overexpressing cells, compared with vector-transfected cells. Id2 is also a more potent inhibitor of protein/DNA complex formation at the MCK-R enhancer E-box than Identified in vitro. Therefore, our data support the notion that members of the Id family might be involved in the regulation of distinct developmental pathways.