Mr Buckley's exploding trousers and other scientific observations
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PROVIDER: S-EPMC1255830 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Oct
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Purpose The significant individual and societal burden of work disability could be reduced if supportive workplace strategies could be added to evidence-based clinical treatment and rehabilitation to improve return-to-work (RTW) and other disability outcomes. The goal of this article is to summarize existing research on workplace interventions to prevent disability, relate these to employer disability management practices, and recommend future research priorities. Methods The authors participated in a year-long collaboration that ultimately led to an invited 3-day conference, Improving Research of Employer Practices to Prevent Disability, held October 14-16, 2015, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA. The collaboration included a topical review of the literature, group conference calls to identify key areas and challenges, drafting of initial documents, review of industry publications, and a conference presentation that included feedback from peer researchers and a question/answer session with an expert panel with direct employer experience. Results Evidence from randomized trials and other research designs has shown general support for job modification, RTW coordination, and organizational support, but evidence is still lacking for interventions at a more granular level. Grey literature reports focused mainly on job re-design and work organization. Panel feedback focused on organizational readiness and the beliefs and values of senior managers as critical factors in facilitating changes to disability management practices. While the scientific literature is focused on facilitating improved coping and reducing discomforts for individual workers, the employer-directed grey literature is focused on making group-level changes to policies and procedures. Conclusions Future research might better target employer practices by tying interventions to positive workplace influences and determinants, by developing more participatory interventions and research designs, and by designing interventions that address factors of organizational change.
| S-EPMC5104758 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundWe address the goal of curating observations from published experiments in a generalizable form; reasoning over these observations to generate interpretations and then querying this interpreted knowledge to supply the supporting evidence. We present web-application software as part of the 'BioScholar' project (R01-GM083871) that fully instantiates this process for a well-defined domain: using tract-tracing experiments to study the neural connectivity of the rat brain.ResultsThe main contribution of this work is to provide the first instantiation of a knowledge representation for experimental observations called 'Knowledge Engineering from Experimental Design' (KEfED) based on experimental variables and their interdependencies. The software has three parts: (a) the KEfED model editor - a design editor for creating KEfED models by drawing a flow diagram of an experimental protocol; (b) the KEfED data interface - a spreadsheet-like tool that permits users to enter experimental data pertaining to a specific model; (c) a 'neural connection matrix' interface that presents neural connectivity as a table of ordinal connection strengths representing the interpretations of tract-tracing data. This tool also allows the user to view experimental evidence pertaining to a specific connection. BioScholar is built in Flex 3.5. It uses Persevere (a noSQL database) as a flexible data store and PowerLoom® (a mature First Order Logic reasoning system) to execute queries using spatial reasoning over the BAMS neuroanatomical ontology.ConclusionsWe first introduce the KEfED approach as a general approach and describe its possible role as a way of introducing structured reasoning into models of argumentation within new models of scientific publication. We then describe the design and implementation of our example application: the BioScholar software. This is presented as a possible biocuration interface and supplementary reasoning toolkit for a larger, more specialized bioinformatics system: the Brain Architecture Management System (BAMS).
| S-EPMC3176268 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between emotions and development of scientific understanding by examining (1) how students perform in scientific sensemaking in the context of a three-cycle predict-observe-explain (POE) activity, (2) what kind of trajectories of situational epistemic emotions students show when making sense of the phenomenon, and (3) how students' performance in sensemaking is related to their emotional trajectories. Data from 109 participant students were collected in six upper secondary physics classes. Students' performance in sensemaking was evaluated based on their answers on POE items and categorised through qualitative content analysis. Situational epistemic emotions (surprise, curiosity, confusion, and boredom) were measured using a four-point Likert scale after each POE cycle. Latent class growth analysis was used to identify groups of students with distinctive emotional trajectories. The relationship between the performance in POE activity and emotional trajectories was explored by a chi-square test. The results indicate that students' inability to make relevant observations is significantly related to experienced boredom. Furthermore, students who perform better in making sense of the phenomenon are more likely to experience surprise, curiosity, and confusion. This implies that engaging students to be curious when they observe and test predictions is an important mission for curriculum designers and teachers in practice. The findings underline the importance of epistemic emotions in educational settings and the complexity of the interplay between cognitive and affective factors in learning situations.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10763-022-10310-5.
| S-EPMC9442553 | biostudies-literature
Project description:To the best of our knowledge, we report here for the first time a case of exploding head syndrome (EHS) that caused repeating panic attacks. A 62-year-old woman experienced a sudden sensation of a loud noise just before going to sleep. The frequency of these episodes rapidly increased to multiple times per night, and she soon began to fear sleep, which led to the occurrence of nighttime panic attacks. She was diagnosed with EHS at our sleep clinic, and clonazepam was prescribed accompanied by reassurance about the benign nature of this syndrome. The intensity of the loud noise gradually reduced, and her fear of sleep and panic attacks disappeared at around the same time. In this report, we argue the importance of gaining further knowledge about EHS, including that about complicating psychiatric symptoms and that about its treatment.
| S-EPMC7862109 | biostudies-literature
Project description:An introduction to exploding bridge-wire (EBW) detonators is given followed by an extensive critical review of open source literature pertaining to these devices. The aim is to better establish the mechanism of operation. Some authors state that the key mechanism is shock-to-detonation while others maintain it is more thermal in nature, or a complex combination of both. In addition to EBW detonators, arc detonators and direct optical initiation detonators are also reviewed, and it is demonstrated that in this manner the usually coupled effects from both shock and deflagration can be somewhat decoupled. As a result, it is hypothesized that the mechanism of operation in all three detonators is in fact the same: the formation of a hot plasma with a power of ≈1 MW and emission in the ultraviolet drives a thermal explosion process.
| S-EPMC6694310 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Understanding of TMZ therapy during and after treatment in a mouse model
2023-08-10 | GSE227348 | GEO
Project description:Wnt signaling has emerged as a central regulator of skeletal modeling and remodeling. Loss- or gain-of-function mutations in two Wnt co-receptors, Lrp5 and (more recently) Lrp6, have drawn attention to the importance of the Wnt pathway in bone biology. This review summarizes our current understanding of how the Wnt pathway operates on bone and the implications this has for skeletal physiology and drug discovery. Over the past 9 yr, rapid advances have been made in our understanding of the cellular targets for Wnt signaling and of the important regulatory molecules in this metabolic pathway. Both canonical and noncanonical signaling pathways seem to be important for mediating the effects of Wnt in bone. A rapidly expanding catalog of genetically engineered mice has been used to establish the importance of downstream effector molecules (such as beta-catenin) in the Wnt pathway, as well as the critical role of endogenous inhibitors of Wnt signaling (such as Dkk1 and sclerostin) in bone metabolism. Indeed, regulation of sclerostin in osteocytes is emerging as an important final pathway for regulating bone anabolism in response to diverse trophic stimuli, from mechnotransduction to the anabolic actions of PTH. From the outset, it had been assumed that the effects of Wnt signaling in bone were caused by direct actions in osteoblast precursors, osteoblasts, and osteocytes. However, startling recent findings have challenged this view and suggest that a key target, at least in mice, is the duodenal enterochromaffin cell. There, Wnt signaling transduced by Lrp5 regulates serotonin synthesis, which acts in an endocrine fashion to regulate bone cell metabolism. It will take time to reconcile this new information with the considerable body of information we already have regarding the actions of Wnt in bone. The Wnt pathway has rapidly emerged as a therapeutic target for drug discovery. Neutralizing antibodies and small-molecule inhibitors of endogenous Wnt inhibitors have shown early promise as bone anabolic agents. However, given the central role of the Wnt pathway in regulating growth and development in extraskeletal tissues, as well as our still rudimentary understanding of how this signaling cascade actually affects bone metabolism, considerable work will be needed to ensure the safety of these new therapies.
| S-EPMC3276354 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Precipitation represents a life-critical energy and hydrologic exchange between the Earth's atmosphere and its surface. As such, knowledge of where, when, and how much rain and snow falls is essential for scientific research and societal applications. Building on the 17-year success of the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory (GPM-CO) is the first U.S. National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) satellite mission specifically designed with sensors to observe the structure and intensities of both rain and falling snow. The GPM-CO has proved to be a worthy successor to TRMM, extending and improving high-quality active and passive microwave observations across all times of day. The GPM-CO launched in early 2014, is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with sensors that include the NASA-provided GPM Microwave Imager and the JAXA-provided Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar. These sensors were devised with high accuracy standards enabling them to be used as a reference for inter-calibrating a constellation of partner satellite data. These intercalibrated partner satellite retrievals are used with infrared data to produce merged precipitation estimates at temporal scales of 30 minutes and spatial scales of 0.1° × 0.1°. Precipitation estimates from the GPM-CO and partner constellation satellites, provided in near real time and later reprocessed with all ancillary data, are an indispensable source of precipitation data for operational and scientific users. Advances have been made using GPM data, primarily in improving sensor calibration, retrieval algorithms, and ground validation measurements, and used to further our understanding of the characteristics of liquid and frozen precipitation and the science of water and hydrological cycles for climate/weather forecasting. These advances have extended to societal benefits related to water resources, operational numerical weather prediction, hurricane monitoring, prediction, and disaster response, extremes, and disease.
| S-EPMC6581458 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Electrically exploded wires find uses throughout high-energy physics. For example, they are commonly used as high-temperature sources, X-ray generators, and in precision timing detonators. However, the detailed and complete physics that occurs is complex and still poorly understood. A full mechanistic description of these complex phenomena is beyond the scope of a single paper. Instead, we focus on the formation of metal vapor and its transition to plasma. This single transition is commonly assumed to comprise "bridge-burst". We use a suite of diagnostics including a novel, fiber-based, high-speed, optical pyrometer to better characterize this transition. The primary finding from this project is that peak light output from an exploding wire does not temporally match the peak temperature. Additionally, it is found that peak light does not align with peak bridge-burst voltage and that the peak temperature is not voltage-dependent. These findings are non-intuitive and will allow for the correction of false assumptions previously made about this topic.
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Project description:This study analyses the relation between image quality and contrast kinetics in bolus-timed carotid magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and interprets the findings by Fourier-based numerical modelling. One hundred patients prone to carotid stenosis were studied using contrast-enhanced carotid MRA with bolus timing. The carotid MRAs were timed to start relatively early without accounting for the injection time of the contrast medium. For interpretation different starting times were modelled, utilising the spectral information of the test bolus series. In the test bolus series the arterial time-to-peak showed a large 95% confidence interval of 12-27 s, indicating the need for individual MRA timing. All bolus-timed MRAs were of good diagnostic quality. The mean (+/-SD) arterial contrast-to-noise ratio was 53.0 (+/-12.8) and thus high, and 95% of the MRAs showed a slight venous contamination of 11.8% or less (median 5.6%). According to the Fourier-based modelling the central k-space may be acquired about 2 s before the arterial contrast peak. This results in carotid MRAs with sufficiently high arterial enhancement and little venous contamination. In conclusion, in bolus-timed carotid MRA a relatively short timing provides good arterial contrast with little venous contamination, which can be explained by Fourier-based numerical modelling of the contrast kinetics.
| S-EPMC2762047 | biostudies-other