Scanning Mechanical Microscopy of Laser Ablated Volumes Related to Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry

Scanning mechanical microscopy based on the point by point sampling of the target surface was used to characterize volumes of minerals ablated by laser pulses (Nd: YAG, = 1064 nm, 140 μs pulse-width). Differentiated volumes resulting from vaporization and exfoliation mechanisms were selectively measured. Ablated volumes of natural pyrite (cubic FeS2), marcasite (orthorhombic FeS2) and arsenopyrite AsFeS, were transported into an inductively coupled plasma torch for subsequent mass analysis. The log of the S34 Fe57, and As75 mass intensities was linearly correlated with the log of the dimensions of the vaporized crater induced by the laser shots while large particles had no effect on the measured intensities. A memory effect for As was observed when a nylon tube was used to carry the ablated materials into the plasma torch. The memory effect was decreased by using a copper tube resulting probably from a difference in the electrical properties of the tubing systems leading to a lower adsorption of As within the copper tube than for the case of the nylon tube

Treatment planning systems dosimetry auditing project in Portugal

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The Medical Physics Division of the Portuguese Physics Society (DFM_SPF) in collaboration with the IAEA, carried out a national auditing project in radiotherapy, between September 2011 and April 2012. The objective of this audit was to ensure the optimal usage of treatment planning systems. The national results are presented in this paper. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The audit methodology simulated all steps of external beam radiotherapy workflow, from image acquisition to treatment planning and dose delivery. A thorax CIRS phantom lend by IAEA was used in 8 planning test-cases for photon beams corresponding to 15 measuring points (33 point dose results, including individual fields in multi-field test cases and 5 sum results) in different phantom materials covering a set of typical clinical delivery techniques in 3D Conformal Radiotherapy. RESULTS: All 24 radiotherapy centers in Portugal have participated. 50 photon beams with energies 4-18 MV have been audited using 25 linear accelerators and 32 calculation algorithms. In general a very good consistency was observed for the same type of algorithm in all centres and for each beam quality. CONCLUSIONS: The overall results confirmed that the national status of TPS calculations and dose delivery for 3D conformal radiotherapy is generally acceptable with no major causes for concern. This project contributed to the strengthening of the cooperation between the centres and professionals, paving the way to further national collaborations

Monitoring Antibiotic Comsumption in the Surgery and Orthopaedics

A monitorização do consumo de antimicrobianos é um instrumento de interesse indiscutível e tem merecido uma atenção particular nos últimos anos, devido às crescentes preocupações com a emergência de estirpes microbianas multi-resistentes. Os objectivos do presente estudo consistiram, por um lado, na monitorização do consumo e na avaliação do impacto económico da prescrição hospitalar de antimicrobianos, em serviços de cirurgia e ortopedia. Por outro lado, pretendeu-se estudar e a relação indicação-prescrição terapêutica e profilática. Tendo presentes estes objectivos realizou-se um estudo-piloto longitudinal, com recolha de dados durante o mês de Maio de 2004, em seis Hospitais SA, incidindo numa amostra total de 1.122 doentes internados. Verificámos uma taxa de incidência de prescrição de 76,9%, com dispensa de 1.154 antimicrobianos, dos quais 71,2% se destinaram, em média, à profilaxia da infecção pós-cirúrgica, atestando a adesão geral à prática da profilaxia da infecção no local cirúrgico. O custo médio da antibioterapia foi mais elevado nos casos de “suspeita de infecção” (€9,09) ou “infecção declarada” (€8,74) e mais baixo quando utilizados para “profilaxia” (€5,67), facto relacionado com a menor duração média dos episódios de profilaxia. Os regimes de profilaxia utilizados apresentaram variações consideráveis entre os diferentes hospitais no que respeita ao tipo de antibiótico utilizado e uma duração média de 2,61 dias, com cerca de metade dos episódios de profilaxia prolongando-se por mais de 24 horas, sugerindo uma implementação insuficiente das actuais recomendações quanto ao tipo de fármaco a utilizar para esta prática, o que aponta para o necessidade duma avaliação da existência nas unidades hospitalares, de recomendações claras para a profilaxia da infecção do local cirúrgico, bem como da adesão dos clínicos a estas

Epigenome-Wide Association Study of Lung Cancer Among Never Smokers in Two Prospective Cohorts in Shanghai, China

BACKGROUND: The aetiology of lung cancer among individuals who never smoked remains elusive, despite 15% of lung cancer cases in men and 53% in women worldwide being unrelated to smoking. Epigenetic alterations, particularly DNA methylation (DNAm) changes, have emerged as potential drivers. Yet, few prospective epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS), primarily focusing on peripheral blood DNAm with limited representation of never smokers, have been conducted. METHODS: We conducted a nested case-control study of 80 never-smoking incident lung cancer cases and 83 never-smoking controls within the Shanghai Women\u27s Health Study and Shanghai Men\u27s Health Study. DNAm was measured in prediagnostic oral rinse samples using Illumina MethylationEPIC array. Initially, we conducted an EWAS to identify differentially methylated positions (DMPs) associated with lung cancer in the discovery sample of 101 subjects. The top 50 DMPs were further evaluated in a replication sample of 62 subjects, and results were pooled using fixed-effect meta-analysis. RESULTS: Our study identified three DMPs significantly associated with lung cancer at the epigenome-wide significance level of p\u3c8.22×10 CONCLUSIONS: While replication in a larger sample size is necessary, our findings suggest that DNAm patterns in prediagnostic oral rinse samples could provide novel insights into the underlying mechanisms of lung cancer in never smokers

Social representations and the politics of participation

Recent work has called for the integration of different perspectives into the field of political psychology (Haste, 2012). This chapter suggests that one possible direction that such efforts can take is studying the role that social representations theory (SRT) can play in understanding political participation and social change. Social representations are systems of common-sense knowledge and social practice; they provide the lens through which to view and create social and political realities, mediate people's relations with these sociopolitical worlds and defend cultural and political identities. Social representations are therefore key for conceptualising participation as the activity that locates individuals and social groups in their sociopolitical world. Political participation is generally seen as conditional to membership of sociopolitical groups and therefore is often linked to citizenship. To be a citizen of a society or a member of any social group one has to participate as such. Often political participation is defined as the ability to communicate one's views to the political elite or to the political establishment (Uhlaner, 2001), or simply explicit involvement in politics and electoral processes (Milbrath, 1965). However, following scholars on ideology (Eagleton, 1991; Thompson, 1990) and social knowledge (Jovchelovitch, 2007), we extend our understanding of political participation to all social relations and also develop a more agentic model where individuals and groups construct, develop and resist their own views, ideas and beliefs. We thus adopt a broader approach to participation in comparison to other political-psychological approaches, such as personality approaches (e.g. Mondak and Halperin, 2008) and cognitive approaches or, more recently, neuropsychological approaches (Hatemi and McDermott, 2012). We move away from a focus on the individual's political behaviour and its antecedents and outline an approach that focuses on the interaction between psychological and political phenomena (Deutsch and Kinnvall, 2002) through examining the politics of social knowledge

Beyond technology: A research agenda for social sciences and humanities research on renewable energy in Europe

This article enriches the existing literature on the importance and role of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in renewable energy sources research by providing a novel approach to instigating the future research agenda in this field. Employing a series of in-depth interviews, deliberative focus group workshops and a systematic horizon scanning process, which utilised the expert knowledge of 85 researchers from the field with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, the paper develops a set of 100 priority questions for future research within SSH scholarship on renewable energy sources. These questions were aggregated into four main directions: (i) deep transformations and connections to the broader economic system (i.e. radical ways of (re)arranging socio-technical, political and economic relations), (ii) cultural and geographical diversity (i.e. contextual cultural, historical, political and socio-economic factors influencing citizen support for energy transitions), (iii) complexifying energy governance (i.e. understanding energy systems from a systems dynamics perspective) and (iv) shifting from instrumental acceptance to value-based objectives (i.e. public support for energy transitions as a normative notion linked to trust-building and citizen engagement). While this agenda is not intended to be—and cannot be—exhaustive or exclusive, we argue that it advances the understanding of SSH research on renewable energy sources and may have important value in the prioritisation of SSH themes needed to enrich dialogues between policymakers, funding institutions and researchers. SSH scholarship should not be treated as instrumental to other research on renewable energy but as intrinsic and of the same hierarchical importance.acceptedVersio

Australians’ views on carbon pricing before and after the 2013 federal election

As climate policies change through the legislative process, public attitudes towards them may change as well. Therefore, it is important to assess how people accept and support controversial climate policies as the policies change over time. Policy acceptance is a positive evaluation of, or attitude towards, an existing policy; policy support adds an active behavioural component1, 3. Acceptance does not necessarily lead to support. We conducted a national survey of Australian residents to investigate acceptance of, and support for, the Australian carbon pricing policy before and after the 2013 federal election, and how perceptions of the policy, economic ideology, and voting behaviour affect acceptance and support. We found acceptance and support were stable across the election period, which was surprising given that climate policy was highly contentious during the election. Policy acceptance was higher than policy support at both times and acceptance was a necessary but insufficient condition of support. We conclude that acceptance is an important process through which perceptions of the policy and economic ideology influence support. Therefore, future climate policy research needs to distinguish between acceptance and support to better understand this process, and to better measure these concepts

A phase II study of sequential 5-fluorouracil, epirubicin and cyclophosphamide (FEC) and paclitaxel in advanced breast cancer (Protocol PV BC 97/01)

Sequential administration of the association of 5-fluorouracil, epirubicin and cyclophosphamide (FEC) and paclitaxel could be better tolerated than the association of an anthracycline and paclitaxel while having a similar antitumour effect. 69 patients with advanced breast cancer previously untreated with anthracyclines or paclitaxel entered a phase II multicentre study in which FEC was followed by paclitaxel. Both regimens were administered 4 times every 21 days. The median follow-up is 20 months and 38/69 patients have died. Grade III–IV toxicity was acceptable. Leukopenia occurred in 26% of patients, thrombocytopenia in 2% and anaemia in 4%. One patient had reversible heart failure during FEC therapy. Peripheral neuropathy and arthralgia-myalgia occurred in 9% and 4% of patients, respectively and one patient had respiratory hypersensitivity during paclitaxel treatment. 9 patients did not complete therapy because of: treatment refusal (n= 1), cardiac toxicity (n= 1), early death during FEC chemotherapy (n= 1), major protocol violations (n= 4), hypersensitivity reaction (n= 1) and early death during paclitaxel chemotherapy (n= 1). The overall response rate was 65% (95% CI = 53–76), and 7% of patients had stable disease. Therapy was defined as having failed in 28% of patients because they were not evaluable (13%) or had progressive disease (15%). The median time to progression and survival are 13.2 and 23.5 months, respectively. Sequential FEC-paclitaxel is a suitable strategy for patients with metastatic breast cancer who have not been previously treated with anthracyclines and/or taxanes. In fact, it avoids major haematologic toxicity and has a good antitumour effect. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer.co