Fatty Acids Profile during Anaerobic Digestion of Night Soil-Effect of temperature, Calcium Carbonate and Selectively-enriched Inoculum

Anaerobic biodegradation of night soil was carried out at 5-30 degree centigrade with 1.8-10.62 per cent volatile solids (VS). Biogas production increased with the temperature and VS up to 6.2 per cent. Further increase in VS caused higher Volatile fatty acids (VFA) accumulation resulting in decreased gas production. Acetate and propionate accounted for 62-83 per cent of total VFA. Butyrate to isobutyrate ratio increased with VS. Calcium Carbonate promoted VS degradation, biogas production and VFA degradation. The increased methanogenic and decreased sulphate-reducing bacteria caused proportional changes in CH4 and H2S gases. Enrichment with H2 oxidising methanogenic consortium is beneficial by enhancing VFA utilisation by two to three fold

Thermal Radiation from Nucleons and Mesons

Thermal photon emission rates due to meson-nucleon interactions have been evaluated. An exhaustive set of reactions involving p(\bar p), n(\bar n), rho, omega, a_1, pi and eta is seen to provide a sizeable contribution to the emission rate from hot hadronic matter. Contributions from baryonic resonances are found to be negligibly small

Velocity of sound in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

We have studied the rapidity distribution of secondary hadrons produced in nucleus-nucleus collisions at ultra-relativistic energies within the ambit of the Landau's hydrodynamical model. A reasonable description of the data can also be obtained by using the Bjorken's hydrodynamical model if the boost invariance is restricted to a finite rapidity range. The sensitivity of the hadronic spectra on the equation of state vis- a -vis the velocity of sound has been discussed. The correlation between the velocity of sound and the freeze-out temperature has been indicated. The effects of the non-zero widths of various mesonic and baryonic degrees of freedom up to the mass value ~ 2.5 GeV is seen to be small.Comment: 9 pages and 11 figures. Major changes. To appear in Physical Review

A study of physician collaborations through social network and exponential random graph

Background: Physician collaboration, which evolves among physicians during the course of providing healthcare services to hospitalised patients, has been seen crucial to effective patient outcomes in healthcare organisations and hospitals. This study aims to explore physician collaborations using measures of social network analysis (SNA) and exponential random graph (ERG) model. Methods. Based on the underlying assumption that collaborations evolve among physicians when they visit a common hospitalised patient, this study first proposes an approach to map collaboration network among physicians from the details of their visits to patients. This paper terms this network as physician collaboration network (PCN). Second, SNA measures of degree centralisation, betweenness centralisation and density are used to examine the impact of SNA measures on hospitalisation cost and readmission rate. As a control variable, the impact of patient age on the relation between network measures (i.e. degree centralisation, betweenness centralisation and density) and hospital outcome variables (i.e. hospitalisation cost and readmission rate) are also explored. Finally, ERG models are developed to identify micro-level structural properties of (i) high-cost versus low-cost PCN; and (ii) high-readmission rate versus low-readmission rate PCN. An electronic health insurance claim dataset of a very large Australian health insurance organisation is utilised to construct and explore PCN in this study. Results: It is revealed that the density of PCN is positively correlated with hospitalisation cost and readmission rate. In contrast, betweenness centralisation is found negatively correlated with hospitalisation cost and readmission rate. Degree centralisation shows a negative correlation with readmission rate, but does not show any correlation with hospitalisation cost. Patient age does not have any impact for the relation of SNA measures with hospitalisation cost and hospital readmission rate. The 2-star parameter of ERG model has significant impact on hospitalisation cost. Furthermore, it is found that alternative-k-star and alternative-k-two-path parameters of ERG model have impact on readmission rate. Conclusions: Collaboration structures among physicians affect hospitalisation cost and hospital readmission rate. The implications of the findings of this study in terms of their potentiality in developing guidelines to improve the performance of collaborative environments among healthcare professionals within healthcare organisations are discussed in this paper. © 2013 Uddin et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.published_or_final_versio

Reconstructing the potentials for the quintessence and tachyon dark energy, from the holographic principle

We propose an holographic quintessence and tachyon models of dark energy. The correspondence between the quintessence and tachyon energy densities with the holographic density, allows the reconstruction of the potentials and the dynamics for the quintessence and tachyon fields, in flat FRW background. The proposed infrared cut-off for the holographic energy density works for two cases of the constant $\alpha$: for $\alpha<1$ we reconstructed the holographic quintessence model in the region before the $\omega=-1$ crossing for the EoS parameter. The cosmological dynamics for $\alpha>1$ was also reconstructed for the holographic quintessence and tachyon models.Comment: 21 pages, 18 figures, 2 table

Can Heavy WIMPs Be Captured by the Earth?

If weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in bound solar orbits are systematically driven into the Sun by solar-system resonances (as Farinella et al. have shown is the case for many Earth-crossing asteroids), then the capture of high-mass WIMPs by the Earth would be affected dramatically because high-mass WIMPs are captured primarily from bound orbits. WIMP capture would be eliminated for M_x>630 GeV and would be highly suppressed for M_x>~150 GeV. Annihilation of captured WIMPs and anti-WIMPs is expected to give rise to neutrinos coming from the Earth's center. The absence of such a neutrino signal has been used to place limits on WIMP parameters. At present, one does not know if typical WIMP orbits are in fact affected by these resonances. Until this question is investigated and resolved, one must (conservatively) assume that they are. Hence, limits on high-mass WIMP parameters are significantly weaker than previously believed.Comment: 8 pages + 1 figure. Submitted to Ap

MEAM interatomic potentials of Ni, Re, and Ni–Re alloys for atomistic fracture simulations

Second nearest neighbor modified embedded atom method (2NN-MEAM) interatomic potentials are developed for the Ni, Re, and Ni–Re binaries. To construct the potentials, density functional theory (DFT) calculations have been employed to calculate fundamental physical properties that play a dominant role in fracture. The potentials are validated to accurately reproduce material properties that correlate with material’s fracture behavior. The thus constructed potentials were applied to perform large scale simulations of mode I fracture in Ni and Ni–Re binaries with low Re content. Substitutional Re did not alter the ductile nature of crack propagation, though it resulted in a monotonous increase of the critical stress intensity factor with Re content

On the Prospects for Laser Cooling of TlF

We measure the upper state lifetime and two ratios of vibrational branching fractions f_{v'v} on the B^{3}\Pi_{1}(v') - X^{1}\Sigma^{+}(v) transition of TlF. We find the B state lifetime to be 99(9) ns. We also determine that the off-diagonal vibrational decays are highly suppressed: f_{01}/f_{00} < 2x10^{-4} and f_{02}/f_{00} = 1.10(6)%, in excellent agreement with their predicted values of f_{01}/f_{00} < 8x10^{-4} and f_{02}/f_{00} = 1.0(2)% based on Franck-Condon factors calculated using Morse and RKR potentials. The implications of these results for the possible laser cooling of TlF and fundamental symmetries experiments are discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure