A generalized radial flow model for hydraulic tests in fractured rock

Models commonly used for the analysis of hydraulic test data are generalized by regarding the dimension of the flow to be a parameter which is not necessarily integral and which must be determined empirically. Mathematical solutions for this generalized radial flow model are derived for the standard test conditions: constant rate, constant head, and slug tests. Solutions for the less common, sinusoidal test are contained within the general solutions given. Well bore storage and skin are included and the extension to dual-porosity media outlined. The model is presented as a model of fractured media, for which it is most likely to find application because of the problem of choosing the appropriate flow dimension

Global shortage of neonatal and paediatric antibiotic trials: rapid review.

OBJECTIVES: There have been few clinical trials (CTs) on antibiotics that inform neonatal and paediatric drug labelling. The rate of unlicensed and off-label prescribing in paediatrics remains high. It is unclear whether the current neonatal and paediatric antibiotic research pipeline is adequate to inform optimal drug dosing. Using the ClinicalTrials.gov registry, this review aims to establish the current global status of antibiotic CTs in children up to 18 years of age. METHODS: Studies were identified using key word searches of the ClinicalTrials.gov registry and were manually filtered using prespecified inclusion/exclusion criteria. RESULTS: 76 registered open CTs of antibiotics in children were identified globally; 23 (30%) were recruiting newborns (only 8 (11%) included preterm neonates), 52 (68%) infants and toddlers, 58 (76%) children and 54 (71%) adolescents. The majority of registered trials were late phase (10 (15%) phase 3 and 23 (35%) phase 4/pharmacovigilance). Two-thirds were sponsored by non-profit organisations, compared with pharmaceutical companies (50 (66%) vs 26 (34%), respectively). A greater proportion of non-profit funded trials were efficacy-based strategic trials (n=34, 68%), in comparison with industry-led trials, which were most often focused on safety or pharmacokinetic data (n=17, 65%). Only 2 of the 37 antibiotics listed on the May 2016 Pew Charitable Trusts antibiotic development pipeline, currently being studied in adults, appear to be currently recruiting in open paediatric CTs. CONCLUSIONS: This review highlights that very few paediatric antibiotic CTs are being conducted globally, especially in neonates. There is a striking disparity noted between antibiotic drug development programmes in adults and children

Rotation and Spin in Physics

We delineate the role of rotation and spin in physics, discussing in order Newtonian classical physics, special relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and general relativity. In the latter case, we discuss the generalization of the Kepler formula to post-Newtonian order $(c^{-2}$) including spin effects and two-body effects. Experiments which verify the theoretical results for general relativistic spin-orbit effects are discussed as well as efforts being made to verify the spin-spin effects

Space-use patterns highlight behavioural differences linked to lameness, parity, and days in milk in barn-housed dairy cows

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Public Library of Science (PLoS) via the DOI in this record.Lameness is a key health and welfare issue affecting commercial herds of dairy cattle, with potentially significant economic impacts due to the expense of treatment and lost milk production. Existing lameness detection methods can be time-intensive, and under-detection remains a significant problem leading to delayed or missed treatment. Hence, there is a need for automated monitoring systems that can quickly and accurately detect lameness in individual cows within commercial dairy herds. Recent advances in sensor tracking technology have made it possible to observe the movement, behaviour and space-use of a range of animal species over extended time-scales. However, little is known about how observed movement behaviour and space-use patterns in individual dairy cattle relate to lameness, or to other possible confounding factors such as parity or number of days in milk. In this cross-sectional study, ten lame and ten non-lame barn-housed dairy cows were classified through mobility scoring and subsequently 55 tracked using a wireless local positioning system. Nearly 900,000 spatial locations were recorded in total, allowing a range of movement and space-use measures to be determined for each individual cow. Using linear models, we highlight where lameness, parity, and the number of days in milk have a significant effect on the observed space-use patterns. Non-lame cows spent more time, and had higher site fidelity (on a day-to-day basis they were more likely to revisit areas they had visited previously), in the feeding area. Non-lame cows also had a larger full range size within the barn. In contrast, lame cows spent more time, and had a higher site-fidelity, in the cubicle (resting) areas of the barn than non-lame cows. Higher parity cows were found to spend more time in the right-hand-side area of the barn, closer to the passageway to the milking parlour. The number of days in milk was found to positively affect the core range size, but with a negative interaction effect with lameness. Using a simple predictive model, we demonstrate how it is possible to accurately determine the lameness status of all individual cows within the study using only two observed space-use measures, the proportion of time spent in the feeding area and the full range size. Our findings suggest that differences in individual movement and space-use behaviour could be used as indicators of health status for automated monitoring within a Precision Livestock Farming approach, potentially leading to faster diagnosis and treatment, and improved animal welfare for dairy cattle and other managed animal species

Digital habits of pulmonary rehabilitation service-users following the COVID-19 pandemic

Objective: We previously demonstrated low levels of digital literacy amongst pulmonary rehabilitation service-users prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to identify whether the pandemic accelerated digital literacy in this population, resulting in greater acceptance of remote web-based pulmonary rehabilitation programme models. Methods: We surveyed digital access and behaviours and pulmonary rehabilitation delivery preferences of service-users referred to pulmonary rehabilitation in 2021 (cohort 2021) and propensity score-matched them to a cohort who completed the survey in 2020 (cohort 2020). Results: There were indicators that digital access and confidence were better amongst the Cohort 2021 but no difference was seen in the proportion of patients choosing remote web-based pulmonary rehabilitation as an acceptable method of receiving pulmonary rehabilitation. Conclusion: In an unselected cohort of service-users, remote web-based pulmonary rehabilitation was considered acceptable in only a minority of patients which has implications on healthcare commissioning and delivery of pulmonary rehabilitation

nSharma: Numerical Simulation Heterogeneity Aware Runtime Manager for OpenFOAM

CFD simulations are a fundamental engineering application,implying huge workloads, often with dynamic behaviour due to run-time mesh refinement. Parallel processing over heterogeneous distributedmemory clusters is often used to process such workloads. The executionof dynamic workloads over a set of heterogeneous resources leads to loadimbalances that severely impacts execution time, when static uniformload distribution is used. This paper proposes applying dynamic, het-erogeneity aware, load balancing techniques within CFD simulations.nSharma, a software package that fully integrates with OpenFOAM, ispresented and assessed. Performance gains are demonstrated, achievedby reducing busy times standard deviation among resources, i.e. hetero-geneous computing resources are kept busy with useful work due to aneffective workload distribution. To best of authors’ knowledge, nSharmais the first implementation and integration of heterogeneity aware loadbalancing in OpenFOAM and will be made publicly available in order tofoster its adoption by the large community of OpenFOAM users.The authors would like to thank the financial funding by FEDER through the COMPETE 2020 Program, the National Funds through FCT under the projects UID/CTM/50025/2013. The first author was partially funded by the PT-FLAD Chair on Smart Cities & Smart Governance and also by the School of Engineering, University of Minho within project Performance Portability on Scalable Heterogeneous Computing Systems. The authors also wish to thank Kyle Mooney for making available his code supporting migration of dynamically refined meshes, as well as acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC resources

Preoperative automated fibre quantification predicts postoperative seizure outcome in temporal lobe epilepsy

Approximately one in every two patients with pharmacoresistant temporal lobe epilepsy will not be rendered completely seizure-free after temporal lobe surgery. The reasons for this are unknown and are likely to be multifactorial. Quantitative volumetric magnetic resonance imaging techniques have provided limited insight into the causes of persistent postoperative seizures in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. The relationship between postoperative outcome and preoperative pathology of white matter tracts, which constitute crucial components of epileptogenic networks, is unknown. We investigated regional tissue characteristics of preoperative temporal lobe white matter tracts known to be important in the generation and propagation of temporal lobe seizures in temporal lobe epilepsy, using diffusion tensor imaging and automated fibre quantification. We studied 43 patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy associated with hippocampal sclerosis and 44 healthy controls. Patients underwent preoperative imaging, amygdalohippocampectomy and postoperative assessment using the International League Against Epilepsy seizure outcome scale. From preoperative imaging, the fimbria-fornix, parahippocampal white matter bundle and uncinate fasciculus were reconstructed, and scalar diffusion metrics were calculated along the length of each tract. Altogether, 51.2% of patients were rendered completely seizure-free and 48.8% continued to experience postoperative seizure symptoms. Relative to controls, both patient groups exhibited strong and significant diffusion abnormalities along the length of the uncinate bilaterally, the ipsilateral parahippocampal white matter bundle, and the ipsilateral fimbria-fornix in regions located within the medial temporal lobe. However, only patients with persistent postoperative seizures showed evidence of significant pathology of tract sections located in the ipsilateral dorsal fornix and in the contralateral parahippocampal white matter bundle. Using receiver operating characteristic curves, diffusion characteristics of these regions could classify individual patients according to outcome with 84% sensitivity and 89% specificity. Pathological changes in the dorsal fornix were beyond the margins of resection, and contralateral parahippocampal changes may suggest a bitemporal disorder in some patients. Furthermore, diffusion characteristics of the ipsilateral uncinate could classify patients from controls with a sensitivity of 98%; importantly, by co-registering the preoperative fibre maps to postoperative surgical lacuna maps, we observed that the extent of uncinate resection was significantly greater in patients who were rendered seizure-free, suggesting that a smaller resection of the uncinate may represent insufficient disconnection of an anterior temporal epileptogenic network. These results may have the potential to be developed into imaging prognostic markers of postoperative outcome and provide new insights for why some patients with temporal lobe epilepsy continue to experience postoperative seizures

Discovery of high affinity inhibitors of Leishmania donovani N-myristoyltransferase

N-Myristoyltransferase (NMT) is a potential drug target in Leishmania parasites. Scaffold-hopping from published inhibitors yielded the serendipitous discovery of a chemotype selective for Leishmania donovani NMT; development led to high affinity inhibitors with excellent ligand efficiency. The binding mode was characterised by crystallography and provides a structural rationale for selectivity

The personal experience of parenting a child with Juvenile Huntington’s Disease: perceptions across Europe

The study reported here presents a detailed description of what it is like to parent a child with juvenile Huntington’s disease in families across four European countries. Its primary aim was to develop and extend findings from a previous UK study. The study recruited parents from four European countries: Holland, Italy, Poland and Sweden,. A secondary aim was to see the extent to which the findings from the UK study were repeated across Europe and the degree of commonality or divergence across the different countries. Fourteen parents who were the primary caregiver took part in a semistructured interview. These were analyzed using an established qualitative methodology, interpretative phenomenological analysis. Five analytic themes were derived from the analysis: the early signs of something wrong; parental understanding of juvenile Huntington’s disease; living with the disease; other people’s knowledge and understanding; and need for support. These are discussed in light of the considerable convergence between the experiences of families in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe