Ovarian and cervical cancer awareness: development of two validated measurement tools.

The aim of the study was to develop and validate measures of awareness of symptoms and risk factors for ovarian and cervical cancer (Ovarian and Cervical Cancer Awareness Measures)

Discussion of a physical optics method and its application to absorbing smooth and slightly rough hexagonal prisms

Three different mathematical solutions of a physical optics model for far field diffraction by an aperture due to Karczewski and Wolf are discussed. Only one of them properly describes diffraction by an aperture and can, by applying Babinet's principle, be used to model diffraction by the corresponding plane obstacle, and by further approximation, diffraction by a particle. Studying absorbing scatterers allows a closer investigation of the external diffraction component because transmission is negligible. The physical optics model has been improved on two aspects: (i) To apply the diffraction model based on two-dimensional apertures more accurately to three-dimensional objects, a size parameter dependent volume obliquity factor is introduced, thus reducing the slightly overestimated side scattering computed for three-dimensional objects. (ii) To compensate simplifications in the underlying physical optics diffraction model for two-dimensional apertures [26] a size parameter dependent cross polarisation factor is implemented. It improves cross polarisation for diffraction and reflection by small particle facets. 2D patterns of P 11, –P 12/P 11 and P 22/P 11 and their azimuthal averages for slightly rough absorbing hexagonal prisms in fixed orientation are obtained and compared with results from the discrete dipole approximation. For particle orientations where shadowing is not negligible, improved phase functions are obtained by using a new method where the incident beam is divided into sub-beams with small triangular cross sections. The intersection points of the three sub-beam edges with the prism define the vertices of a triangle, which is treated by the beam tracer as an incidence-facing facet. This ensures that incident facing but shadowed crystal facets or regions thereof do not contribute to the phase functions. The method captures much of the fine detail contained in 2D scattering patterns obtained with DDA. This is important as speckle can be used for characterizing the size and roughness of small particles such as ice crystals.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Prediction of the aerodynamic performance of re-usable single stage to orbit vehicles

Re-usable single stage to orbit launch vehicles promise to reduce the cost of access to space, but their success will be particularly reliant on accurate modelling of their aero-thermodynamic characteristics. Non-equilibrium effects due to the rarefaction of the gas in the atmosphere are important at the very high altitudes at which lifting R-SSTO configurations will experience their greatest thermal load during re-entry. Current limitations in modelling the behaviour of the gas and hence in capturing these effects have a strong impact on the accuracy with which the thermal and aerodynamic loading on the surface of the vehicle can be predicted during this design-critical flight regime. The problem is most apparent in the presence of strong shock interactions, and this is likely to exacerbate the problem of aerodynamic characterisation of re-usable single stage to orbit vehicles, especially given design pressures towards increased geometric complexity compared to historical spacecraft designs, and hence the complexity of the shock structures that the vehicle will produce in high-speed flight. The development of this class of vehicles will thus very likely be paced by the development of the specialised modelling tools that will be required to account fully for the properties of the gas at the high speeds and altitudes that are characteristic of their re-entry into the atmosphere of the earth

Charge confinement and Klein tunneling from doping graphene

In the present work, we investigate how structural defects in graphene can change its transport properties. In particular, we show that breaking of the sublattice symmetry in a graphene monolayer overcomes the Klein effect, leading to confined states of massless Dirac fermions. Experimentally, this corresponds to chemical bonding of foreign atoms to carbon atoms, which attach themselves to preferential positions on one of the two sublattices. In addition, we consider the scattering off a tensor barrier, which describes the rotation of the honeycomb cells of a given region around an axis perpendicular to the graphene layer. We demonstrate that in this case the intervalley mixing between the Dirac points emerges, and that Klein tunneling occurs.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Intelligence-based medicine

Despite seven hundred thousand new medical references last year, the relationship between a given set of medical features and specific pathophysiology, treatment, and criteria of improvement is often weak. Moreover, the generalization of evidences obtained in specific settings may lead to under-treat or to over-treat a significant proportion of patients. We expose an application of the cybernetic loop, based on traditional medical steps: nosology, semeiology, pathophysiology, therapy and on the four transitions between these steps. This approach leads to formulate eight basic questions evaluating the steps in terms of reproducibility and the transitions in terms of predictivity. We detail two practical applications: 1) the evaluation of a medical decision (implantation of an internal cardioverter-defibrillator) and 2) the evaluation of a specific study (EPHESUS). Using this loop allows to determine clearly when evidence is lacking and/or to which extend an evidence really increases the medical knowledge or just creates a market

Broadband telecom transparency of semiconductor-coated metal nanowires: more transparent than glass

Metallic nanowires (NW) coated with a high permittivity dielectric are proposed as means to strongly reduce the light scattering of the conducting NW, rendering them transparent at infrared wavelengths of interest in telecommunications. Based on a simple, universal law derived from electrostatics arguments, we find appropriate parameters to reduce the scattering efficiency of hybrid metal-dielectric NW by up to three orders of magnitude as compared with the scattering efficiency of the homogeneous metallic NW. We show that metal@dielectric structures are much more robust against fabrication imperfections than analogous dielectric@metal ones. The bandwidth of the transparent region entirely covers the near IR telecommunications range. Although this effect is optimum at normal incidence and for a given polarization, rigorous theoretical and numerical calculations reveal that transparency is robust against changes in polarization and angle of incidence, and also holds for relatively dense periodic or random arrangements. A wealth of applications based on metal-NWs may benefit from such invisibility

Paired cut-wire arrays for enhanced transmission of transverse-electric fields through sub-wavelength slits in a thin metallic screen

It has recently been shown that the transmission of electromagnetic fields through sub-wavelength slits (parallel to the electric field direction) in a thin metallic screen can be greatly enhanced by covering one side of the screen with a metallic cut-wire array laid on a dielectric layer. In this Letter, we show that a richer phenomenology (which involves both electric- and magnetic-type resonances) can be attained by pairing a second cut-wire array at the other side of the screen. Via a full-wave comprehensive parametric study, we illustrate the underlying mechanisms and explore the additional degrees of freedom endowed, as well as their possible implications in the engineering of enhanced transmission phenomena.Comment: 4 pages, 8 figures; slight corrections in Figs. 1, 2, and