NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase 1 Final Report: Venus Landsailer Zephyr

Imagine sailing across the hot plains of Venus! A design for a craft to do just this was completed by the COncurrent Multidisciplinary Preliminary Assessment of Space Systems (COMPASS) Team for the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project. The robotic craft could explore over 30 km of surface of Venus, driven by the power of the wind

Effects of Policies Designed to Keep Firearms from High-Risk Individuals

This article summarizes and critiques available evidence from studies published between 1999 and August 2014 on the effects of policies designed to keep firearms from high-risk individuals in the United States. Some prohibitions for high-risk individuals (e.g., those under domestic violence restraining orders, violent misdemeanants) and procedures for checking for more types of prohibiting conditions are associated with lower rates of violence. Certain laws intended to prevent prohibited persons from accessing firearms -- rigorous permit-to-purchase, comprehensive background checks, strong regulation and oversight of gun dealers, and requiring gun owners to promptly report lost or stolen firearms -- are negatively associated with the diversion of guns to criminals. Future research is needed to examine whether these laws curtail nonlethal gun violence and whether the effects of expanding prohibiting conditions for firearm possession are modified by the presence of policies to prevent diversion

Bingham Dai, Adolf Storfer, and the tentative beginnings of psychoanalytic culture in China, 1935-1941.

This paper looks at the work of two figures who, while marginal to theoretical developments within the history of psychoanalysis, each briefly played an important role in the dissemination of analytical ideas in China, contributing to an early psychoanalytic culture there. Bingham Dai, a native of China, while studying for a PhD in sociology at Chicago, received instruction from Harry Stack Sullivan and a psychoanalytic training under Karen Horney's supervision. However, the neo-Freudian outlook with which this experience imbued him had its roots in an earlier encounter with his experiments in personality education first conducted on students in a Tientsin high school, and later in Shantung under the direction of the conservative Confucian scholar and reformer, Liang Shu Ming. These experiences convinced him that a less orthodox psychoanalytic perspective was what Chinese patients with psychological problems required. He returned in 1935 to teach medical psychology to doctors at Peking Union Medical College, taking a few into analysis and treating some patients. However, the Sino-Japanese war brought these activities to a close and he left in 1939, just a few months after the former Freud publisher and Viennese émigré, Adolf Storfer, arrived. Storfer set about publishing "Gelbe Post," a German language periodical replete with articles on psychoanalysis, linguistics and Chinese culture. But limited finances, severe competition from a rival publisher, plus his own ill health, forced him to abandon this in spite of the support offered him through the many contributors in the international psychoanalytic community whose articles he published. The paper concludes by considering the relative historiographic fate of the men upon whom subsequent scholarship has been very unevenly focused.published_or_final_versio

Perceptually tuned generation of grayscale fonts

A new approach to grayscale font generation improves on the fuzzy characters produced by existing methods by incorporating the expertise of type designers into rules for character-outline weight and phase control. The method we propose for synthesizing high-contrast grayscale characters relies on the set of visual rules that type designers have derived from their many years of manual design. We call our grayscaling method `perceptually tuned font generation', because it is based on human perception-that of both the designer and the reade

A Clinical Profile of Hepatitis a Patients in Jakarta, Indonesia

Background: To determine the incidence of hepatitis A infections and the clinical profiles of adult patients admitted to public hospitals in Jakarta, Indonesia. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study that utilised consecutive secondary data from internal medicine wards of seven public hospitals in Jakarta between 2011 and 2013. Eligibility criteria included patients over the age of 18 years and an ICD-10 diagnosis code of B15, acute hepatitis A. Case proportion was reported per 1000 people by dividing incidence per year to total in-ward patients. Clinical profiles were reported descriptively. Laboratory results were compared and categorised into groups of patients aged below and above 25 years old. Results: Data revealed that hospitalisations of patients with hepatitis A had decreased from 2011 to 2013. 289 patients were studied, the majority were young adults (18-25 years old) and their common chief complaints were nausea (36%), fever (24%), and jaundice (21%). Higher bilirubin levels were seen in older patients. There were 13 patients coinfected with hepatitis B, one patient coinfected with hepatitis C, and one patient coinfected with HIV. Conclusions: The proportion of hepatitis A infection amongst adults admitted to public hospitals in Jakarta was low and had decreased during the study period. Most of the patients reported classical clinical manifestations. This study found that the targeted age group may benefit from receiving routine hepatitis A vaccinations

In silico identification of the potential natural inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 Guanine-N7 methyltransferase

This study aims at computationally identifying the potential natural inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 Guanine-N7 methyltransferase binding at the active sit

Wp-2 basic investigation of transition effect

An important goal of the TFAST project was to study the effect of the location of transition in relation to the shock wave on the separation size, shock structure and unsteadiness of the interaction area. Boundary layer tripping (by wire or roughness) and flow control devices (Vortex Generators and cold plasma) were used for boundary layer transition induction. As flow control devices were used here in the laminar boundary layer for the first time, their effectiveness in transition induction was an important outcome. It was intended to determine in what way the application of these techniques induces transition. These methods should have a significantly different effect on boundary layer receptivity, i.e. the transition location. Apart from an improved understanding of operation control methods, the main objective was to localize the transition as far downstream as possible while ensuring a turbulent character of interaction. The final objective, involving all the partners, was to build a physical model of transition control devices. Establishing of such model would simplify the numerical approach to flow cases using such devices. This undertaking has strong support from the industry, which wants to include these control devices in the design process. Unfortunately only one method of streamwise vortices was developed and investigated in the presented study

Renin inhibition by substituted piperidines: A novel paradigm for the inhibition of monomeric aspartic proteinases?

BackgroundThe aspartic proteinase renin catalyses the first and rate-limiting step in the conversion of angiotensinogen to the hormone angiotensin II, and therefore plays an important physiological role in the regulation of blood pressure. Numerous potent peptidomimetic inhibitors of this important drug target have been developed, but none of these compounds have progressed past clinical phase II trials. Limited oral bioavailability or excessive production costs have prevented these inhibitors from becoming new antihypertensive drugs. We were interested in developing new nonpeptidomimetic renin inhibitors.ResultsHigh-throughput screening of the Roche compound library identified a simple 3,4-disubstituted piperidine lead compound. We determined the crystal structures of recombinant human renin complexed with two representatives of this new class. Binding of these substituted piperidine derivatives is accompanied by major induced-fit adaptations around the enzyme's active site.ConclusionsThe efficient optimisation of the piperidine inhibitors was facilitated by structural analysis of the renin active site in two renin-inhibitor complexes (some of the piperidine derivatives have picomolar affinities for renin). These structural changes provide the basis for a novel paradigm for inhibition of monomeric aspartic proteinases

A Cubesat Asteroid Mission: Propulsion Trade-offs

A conceptual design was performed for a 6-U cubesat for a technology demonstration to be launched on the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) test launch EM-1, to be launched into a free-return translunar trajectory. The mission purpose was to demonstrate use of electric propulsion systems on a small satellite platform. The candidate objective chosen was a mission to visit a Near-Earth asteroid. Both asteroid fly-by and asteroid rendezvous missions were analyzed. Propulsion systems analyzed included cold-gas thruster systems, Hall and ion thrusters, incorporating either Xenon or Iodine propellant, and an electrospray thruster. The mission takes advantage of the ability of the SLS launch to place it into an initial trajectory of C3=0