Are Mock Jurors Influenced by the Defendants Gender, Socio-Economic Status and Emotional State in Forensic Medicine?

The aim of this study was to investigate whether mock jurors’ decisions were affected by the defendant’s gender, socio-economic status and emotional state in mock cases. The implications are far reaching, especially in trials that involve forensic medicine. An experimental design was used where a total of 24 participants from Bournemouth University took part, and were assigned to one of four groups. In these groups, the three independent variables were manipulated. Participants were presented with two murder/manslaughter cases. The results suggest male defendants received harsher judgements than female defendants. More female defendants were found not guilty than male defendants. Male defendants from a high socio-economic background received harsher judgements than male defendants from a low socio-economic background. Female defendants from a low socio-economic background received harsher judgements than female defendants from a high socio-economic background. Female defendants were found to be more trustworthy than male defendants. These findings are discussed are discussed in the context of the jury’s verdict, sentence length and personal opinion of the defendant

The Penetration of Solar Radiation into Water and Carbon Dioxide Snow, with reference to Mars

The depth to which solar radiation can penetrate through ice is an important factor in understanding surface‐atmosphere interactions for icy planetary surfaces. Mars hosts both water and carbon dioxide ice on the surface and in the subsurface. At high latitudes during autumn and winter carbon dioxide condenses to form the seasonal polar cap. This has been both modelled and observed to, in part, occur as snowfall. As snow accumulates, the thermal properties of the surface are changed, whether the underlying surface was rocky, regolith or a solid ice sheet. This results in a change (usually increase) in albedo, affecting the proportion of the incident solar energy reflected, or transmitted below the surface of the snow layer. The depth to which light can penetrate through this layer is an important parameter in heat transfer models for the Martian surface, and is often quantified using the e‐folding scale. We present the first measurements of the e‐folding scale in pure carbon dioxide snow for the wavelengths 300 nm to 1100 nm alongside new measurements of water snow

Precession of a Freely Rotating Rigid Body. Inelastic Relaxation in the Vicinity of Poles

When a solid body is freely rotating at an angular velocity ${\bf \Omega}$, the ellipsoid of constant angular momentum, in the space $\Omega_1, \Omega_2, \Omega_3$, has poles corresponding to spinning about the minimal-inertia and maximal-inertia axes. The first pole may be considered stable if we neglect the inner dissipation, but becomes unstable if the dissipation is taken into account. This happens because the bodies dissipate energy when they rotate about any axis different from principal. In the case of an oblate symmetrical body, the angular velocity describes a circular cone about the vector of (conserved) angular momentum. In the course of relaxation, the angle of this cone decreases, so that both the angular velocity and the maximal-inertia axis of the body align along the angular momentum. The generic case of an asymmetric body is far more involved. Even the symmetrical prolate body exhibits a sophisticated behaviour, because an infinitesimally small deviation of the body's shape from a rotational symmetry (i.e., a small difference between the largest and second largest moments of inertia) yields libration: the precession trajectory is not a circle but an ellipse. In this article we show that often the most effective internal dissipation takes place at twice the frequency of the body's precession. Applications to precessing asteroids, cosmic-dust alignment, and rotating satellites are discussed.Comment: 47 pages, 1 figur

Questionnaire study to gain an insight into the manufacturing and fitting process of artificial eyes in children: an ocularist perspective

Purpose To gain an insight into the manufacturing and fitting of artificial eyes in children and potential improvements to the process. Method An online qualitative survey was distributed to 39 ocularists/prosthetists in Europe and Canada. Participants were recruited through purposive sampling, specifically maximum variation sampling from the researcher’s contacts and an online search. Results The findings highlighted the current impression technique as being the most difficult yet most important part of the current process for both the ocularist and child patient. Negatively affecting obtaining a good impression, the child patients distress can be reduced by their parents by providing encouragement, reassurance, practicing the insertion and removal of the artificial eye and being matter of fact. Whilst improvements to the current process provided mixed views, the incorporation of current technology was perceived as not being able to meet the requirements to produce aesthetically pleasing artificial eyes. Conclusion The current artificial eye process can be seen as an interaction with its success being dependent on the child patient’s acceptance and adjustment which is dependent on the factors associated to the process. Investigation into the needs of the patient and whether technology can improve the process are the next steps in its advancement

OPA1 mutations cause cytochrome c oxidase deficiency due to loss of wild-type mtDNA molecules.

Pathogenic OPA1 mutations cause autosomal dominant optic atrophy (DOA), a condition characterized by the preferential loss of retinal ganglion cells and progressive optic nerve degeneration. Approximately 20% of affected patients will also develop more severe neuromuscular complications, an important disease subgroup known as DOA(+). Cytochrome c oxidase (COX)-negative fibres and multiple mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) deletions have been identified in skeletal muscle biopsies from patients manifesting both the pure and syndromal variants, raising the possibility that the accumulation of somatic mtDNA defects contribute to the disease process. In this study, we investigated the mtDNA changes induced by OPA1 mutations in skeletal muscle biopsies from 15 patients with both pure DOA and DOA(+) phenotypes. We observed a 2- to 4-fold increase in mtDNA copy number at the single-fibre level, and patients with DOA(+) features had significantly greater mtDNA proliferation in their COX-negative skeletal muscle fibres compared with patients with isolated optic neuropathy. Low levels of wild-type mtDNA molecules were present in COX-deficient muscle fibres from both pure DOA and DOA(+) patients, implicating haplo-insufficiency as the mechanism responsible for the biochemical defect. Our findings are consistent with the 'maintenance of wild-type' hypothesis, the secondary mtDNA deletions induced by OPA1 mutations triggering a compensatory mitochondrial proliferative response in order to maintain an optimal level of wild-type mtDNA genomes. However, when deletion levels reach a critical level, further mitochondrial proliferation leads to replication of the mutant species at the expense of wild-type mtDNA, resulting in the loss of respiratory chain COX activity

Maternal age effect and severe germ-line bottleneck in the inheritance of human mitochondrial DNA

The manifestation of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diseases depends on the frequency of heteroplasmy (the presence of several alleles in an individual), yet its transmission across generations cannot be readily predicted owing to a lack of data on the size of the mtDNA bottleneck during oogenesis. For deleterious heteroplasmies, a severe bottleneck may abruptly transform a benign (low) frequency in a mother into a disease-causing (high) frequency in her child. Here we present a high-resolution study of heteroplasmy transmission conducted on blood and buccal mtDNA of 39 healthy mother–child pairs of European ancestry (a total of 156 samples, each sequenced at ∼20,000× per site). On average, each individual carried one heteroplasmy, and one in eight individuals carried a disease-associated heteroplasmy, with minor allele frequency ≥1%. We observed frequent drastic heteroplasmy frequency shifts between generations and estimated the effective size of the germ-line mtDNA bottleneck at only ∼30–35 (interquartile range from 9 to 141). Accounting for heteroplasmies, we estimated the mtDNA germ-line mutation rate at 1.3 × 10−8 (interquartile range from 4.2 × 10−9 to 4.1 × 10−8) mutations per site per year, an order of magnitude higher than for nuclear DNA. Notably, we found a positive association between the number of heteroplasmies in a child and maternal age at fertilization, likely attributable to oocyte aging. This study also took advantage of droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) to validate heteroplasmies and confirm a de novo mutation. Our results can be used to predict the transmission of disease-causing mtDNA variants and illuminate evolutionary dynamics of the mitochondrial genome

Dynamical system analysis and forecasting of deformation produced by an earthquake fault

We present a method of constructing low-dimensional nonlinear models describing the main dynamical features of a discrete 2D cellular fault zone, with many degrees of freedom, embedded in a 3D elastic solid. A given fault system is characterized by a set of parameters that describe the dynamics, rheology, property disorder, and fault geometry. Depending on the location in the system parameter space we show that the coarse dynamics of the fault can be confined to an attractor whose dimension is significantly smaller than the space in which the dynamics takes place. Our strategy of system reduction is to search for a few coherent structures that dominate the dynamics and to capture the interaction between these coherent structures. The identification of the basic interacting structures is obtained by applying the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) to the surface deformations fields that accompany strike-slip faulting accumulated over equal time intervals. We use a feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) architecture for the identification of the system dynamics projected onto the subspace (model space) spanned by the most energetic coherent structures. The ANN is trained using a standard back-propagation algorithm to predict (map) the values of the observed model state at a future time given the observed model state at the present time. This ANN provides an approximate, large scale, dynamical model for the fault.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figure