An EBSD study of the deformation of service-aged 316 austenitic steel

Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) has been used to examine the plastic deformation of an ex-service 316 austenitic stainless steel at 297K and 823K (24 °C and 550 °C)at strain rates 3.5x10-3 to 4 x 10-7 s-1. The distribution of local misorientations was found to depend on the imposed plastic strain following a lognormal distribution at true strains 0.1. At 823 K (550 °C), the distribution of misorientations depended on the applied strain rate. The evolution of lattice misorientations with increasing plastic strain up to 0.23 was quantified using the metrics kernel average misorientation, average intragrain misorientation, and low angle misorientation fraction. For strain rate down to 10-5 s-1 all metrics were insensitive to deformation temperature, mode (tension vs. compression) and orientation of the measurement plane. The strain sensitivity of the different metrics was found to depend on the misorientation ranges considered in their calculation. A simple new metric, proportion of undeformed grains, is proposed for assessing strain in both aged and unaged material. Lattice misorientations build up with strain faster in aged steel than in un-aged material and most of the metrics were sensitive to the effects of thermal aging. Ignoring aging effects leads to significant overestimation of the strains around welds. The EBSD results were compared with nanohardness measurements and good agreement established between the two techniques of assessing plastic strain in aged 316 steel

Associations of autozygosity with a broad range of human phenotypes

In many species, the offspring of related parents suffer reduced reproductive success, a phenomenon known as inbreeding depression. In humans, the importance of this effect has remained unclear, partly because reproduction between close relatives is both rare and frequently associated with confounding social factors. Here, using genomic inbreeding coefficients (FROH) for >1.4 million individuals, we show that FROH is significantly associated (p < 0.0005) with apparently deleterious changes in 32 out of 100 traits analysed. These changes are associated with runs of homozygosity (ROH), but not with common variant homozygosity, suggesting that genetic variants associated with inbreeding depression are predominantly rare. The effect on fertility is striking: FROH equivalent to the offspring of first cousins is associated with a 55% decrease [95% CI 44–66%] in the odds of having children. Finally, the effects of FROH are confirmed within full-sibling pairs, where the variation in FROH is independent of all environmental confounding

Urinary incontinence among the elderly people of Singapore

Age and Ageing204262-266AANG