X-ray astronomy in the new Millenium. A Summary

Recent X-ray observations have had a major impact on topics ranging from protostars to cosmology. They have also drawn attention to important and general physical processes that currently limit our understanding of thermal and nonthermal X-ray sources. These include unmeasured atomic astrophysics data (wavelengths, oscillator strengths etc.), basic hydromagnetic processes (e.g. shock structure, reconnection), plasma processes (such as electron-ion equipartition and heat conduction) and radiative transfer (in disks and accretion columns). Progress on these problems will probably come from integrative studies that draw upon observations, throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, of different classes of source. X-ray observations are also giving a new perspective on astronomical subjects, like the nature of galactic nuclei and the evolution of stellar populations. They are contributing to answering central cosmological questions including the measurement of the matter content of the universe, understanding its overall luminosity density, describing its chemical evolution and locating the first luminous objects. X-ray astronomy has a healthy future with several international space missions under construction and in development.Comment: 12 page

Effects of the Energy Error Distribution of Fluorescence Telescopes on the UHECR energy spectrum

The measurement of the ultra high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) spectrum is strongly affected by uncertainties on the reconstructed energy. The determination of the presence or absence of the GZK cutoff and its position in the energy spectrum depends not only on high statistics but also on the shape of the energy error distribution. Here we determine the energy error distribution for fluorescence telescopes, based on a Monte Carlo simulation. The HiRes and Auger fluorescence telescopes are simulated in detail. We analyze the UHECR spectrum convolved with this energy error distribution. We compare this spectrum with one convolved with a lognormal error distribution as well as with a Gaussian error distribution. We show that the energy error distribution for fluorescence detectors can not be represented by these known distributions. We conclude that the convolved energy spectrum will be smeared but not enough to affect the GZK cutoff detection. This conclusion stands for both HiRes and Auger fluorescence telescopes. This result differs from the effect of the energy error distribution obtained with ground detectors and reinforces the importance of the fluorescence energy measurement. We also investigate the effect of possible fluorescence yield measurement errors in the energy spectrum.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figure

Van Wyk-Grumbach syndrome: a rare presentation of a common endocrine disorder

Not required for Clinical Vignette

Thiamine and Neuropsychiatry

Thiamine (C12H17N4OS) or vitamin B1, a sulfurcontaining vitamin, is a vitamin of the family ‘B complex’. An essential nutrients, not synthesized within human body, exclusively has to replaced by dietary source to maintain optimal functioning of the central and peripheral nervous system as thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) is an important coenzyme in the catabolism of sugars and amino acids. Subacute or chronic deficiencies due to many reasons were evidenced to cause various neuropsychiatric disorders from peripheral neuropathy, beriberi, Wernicke’s encephalopathy, Korsakoff’s syndrome to metabolic coma and death. As early deficiency conditions are reversible with thiamine replacement, the preventable and potentially treatable nature of these disorders makes this an important subject.</jats:p

Leadership Development in Social Care – A Study of the Entrepreneurs and Managers of Elder Care in India and Sweden

The developing world is going grey. Amidst the claims of demographic dividend of India due to its predominant young population, there is a growing population of people above 60 years of age, who constitute the aged population. There is also epidemiological evidence of growing mental health issues amongst elders in developing countries like India. The Indian elder care industry in recent years has seen tremendous growth both in terms of business and the number of opportunities for entrepreneurial start-ups. In this paper, we share the findings of an inductive (qualitative) study based on constructivist grounded theory approach, to uncover the themes that help us arrive at a conceptual model for leadership development in social care. The study was conducted on the top or senior management of elder care organizations in two different institutional contexts: India (where the elder care sector is at an initial stage of development driven by private players) and Sweden (a matured well-developed elder care system mostly organized by public sector and funded by taxes). The emerging themes helped us arrive at important values in caregiving and leadership in elder care viz., purpose, passion, patience, patient-centricity (people), and practical wisdom. This establishes the relevance of Bhattacharjee and Singh's (2017) 4P model of leadership and paves the way for future research on practicing servant leadership models in elder care (e.g. Gunnarsdóttir et al., 2018)

Printed Temperature Sensor based on Graphene oxide/PEDOT:PSS

Temperature is an important physical parameter which need to be monitored for various applications ranging from health monitoring to robotics [1] , [2]. In humans, accurate measurement of the variations in the skin temperature is utilized for investigation of homeostasis, physical activities, cardiovascular health and several other health diagnostics methods [1] - [5]. For robotics, the integrated temperature sensing can help in distinguishing the hot and cold objects. Among a variety of temperature sensors (e.g. thermocouple, mercury thermometer etc.) the resistive method based temperature detection is widely used due to its rapid response, stability and accuracy [4], [6]. Various materials (e.g. semiconductors, metals, graphite , metal oxides and ceramics etc.) have been used to develop the temperature sensors [7] - [11]. However, owing to the complex processing steps along with the lack of flexibility, many times it is difficult to integrate these sensors on surfaces that can confirm to curvy body parts of a robot or prosthetic limb. In this context, printing technologies with simplified processing steps are aimed to provide low cost route for flexible/bendable sensors [12] - [15]