Toxicological safeguards in the manned Mars missions

Safeguards against toxic chemical exposures during manned Mars missions (MMMs) will be important for the maintenance of crew health and the accomplishment of mission objectives. Potential sources include offgassing, thermodegradation or combustion of materials, metabolic products of crew members, and escape of chemical from containment. Spacecraft maximum allowable concentration (SMAC) limits will have to be established for potential contaminants during the MMMs. The following factors will be used in establishing these limits: duration of mission, simultaneous exposure to other contaminants, deconditioning of crew members after long periods of reduced gravity, and simultaneous exposure to ionizing radiation. Atmospheric contaminant levels in all compartments of the transit spacecraft and Manned Mars Station (MMS) will be monitored at frequent intervals with a real time analyzer. This analyzer will be highly automated, requiring minimal crew time and expertise. The atmospheric analyzer will find other usages during the MMMs such as analyzing Martian atmospheres and soils, exhaled breath and body fluids of crew members, and reaction products in chemical processing facilities

Could the Hercules satellite be a stellar stream in the Milky Way halo?

We investigate the possibility that Hercules, a recently discovered Milky Way (MW) satellite, is a stellar stream in the process of formation. This hypothesis is motivated by Hercules' highly elongated shape as well as the measurement of a tentative radial velocity gradient along its body. The application of simple analytical techniques on radial velocity data of its member stars provides tight constraints on the tangential velocity of the system (v_t = -16^{+6}_{-22} km/s, relative to the Galactic Standard of Rest). Combining this with its large receding velocity (145 km/s) and distance (138 kpc) yields an orbit that would have taken Hercules to within 6^{+9}_{-2} kpc of the Galactic centre approximately 0.6 Gyr ago. This very small perigalacticon can naturally explain the violent tidal destruction of the dwarf galaxy in the MW's gravitational potential, inducing its transformation into a stellar stream.Comment: Conference proceedings of "A Universe of dwarf galaxies: Observations, Theories, Simulations" held in Lyon, France (June 14-18, 2010

Gauge Group TQFT and Improved Perturbative Yang-Mills Theory

We reinterpret the Faddeev-Popov gauge-fixing procedure of Yang-Mills theories as the definition of a topological quantum field theory for gauge group elements depending on a background connection. This has the advantage of relating topological gauge-fixing ambiguities to the global breaking of a supersymmetry. The global zero modes of the Faddeev-Popov ghosts are handled in the context of an equivariant cohomology without breaking translational invariance. The gauge-fixing involves constant fields which play the role of moduli and modify the behavior of Green functions at subasymptotic scales. At the one loop level physical implications from these power corrections are gauge invariant.Comment: 28 pages, uuencoded and compressed tar-file, LATEX+4 PS-figures, uses psfig.sty. New appendix and some clarifying modifications, references adde

Ideal Friendship, Actual Friends

Friendship, on George Santayana’s account, is a form of human society made possible by consciousness of ideals while simultaneously rooted in the experience of embodied creatures spontaneously drawn to each other. His philosophical and autobiographical writings on friendship (particularly his friendship with Frank Russell) exemplify a practice of cultivating wisdom and suggest how we can come to understand our own actual friendships and the opportunities for self-knowledge and sanity in them.Friendship, on George Santayana’s account, is a form of human society made possible by consciousness of ideals while simultaneously rooted in the experience of embodied creatures spontaneously drawn to each other. His philosophical and autobiographical writings on friendship (particularly his friendship with Frank Russell) exemplify a practice of cultivating wisdom and suggest how we can come to understand our own actual friendships and the opportunities for self-knowledge and sanity in them

Determining Tidal Elevations in Dry Elements within a Coastal Salt Marsh Model

An integrated hydrodynamic/marsh biomass model is a useful tool for analyzing multiple hydrologic activities on a shoreline. A key component of this type of model is the location of local tidal elevations. During astronomic tide simulations, nodes in the finite element mesh are either wet or dry. At nodes that are continuously wet during the simulation, tidal elevations are computed from ADCIRC-2DDI (ADvanced CIRCulation) output. In areas that are intermittently wetted, tidal constituents cannot be determined using ADCIRC because the drying of nodes leaves a gap in the water-level time series. The Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) interpolation method can be used to interpolate unknown groundwater elevations over dried areas that are then used to calculate tidal elevations. The Dupuit equation is examined as a method to simplify and/or replace the interpolation method. Dry nodes in the ADCIRC output are post-processed using the Dupuit equation to calculate groundwater elevation. The author completed a field study on Apalachicola Bay to compare the interpolation method to the Dupuit method. A transect between two known water surface elevations was selected as a test site. The mean high water (MHW) and mean low water (MLW) tidal elevations were calculated by averaging the local high tide and low tide water surface elevations, respectively, throughout the time-series output. Nodes that were dry at some point in the simulation were treated using the IDW and Dupuit to fill in water surface elevations during those dry periods. After finding the unknown water surface elevations using the Dupuit and interpolation method, the Dupuit estimation was on average 3.4% higher for MHW and 52% lower for MLW. This indicates that this process is sensitive to both the method and parameters used

Communication and Freedom: Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Correspondence of John Dewey, Volumes 1-3: 1871-1952\u3c/i\u3e, Past Masters Series. Edited by Larry A. Hickman, General Editor; Barbara Levine, Editor; Anne Sharp, Editor; Harriet Furst Simon, Editor.

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful, wrote American philosopher, psychologist, educator, social scientist, and political activist John Dewey (L.W.5.132). His enthusiasm for communication is apparent in the latest edition of The Correspondence of John Dewey. The CD-ROM contains over 21,600 letters as well as photographs, facsimiles, and assorted transcribed documents, including the FBI\u27s 1943 report on Dewey, which notes that the [s]ubject.. . apparently does nothing but write

Trends and inequalities in laryngeal cancer survival in men and women: England and Wales 1991-2006.

Laryngeal cancer in men is a relatively common malignancy, with a marked socioeconomic gradient in survival between affluent and deprived patients. Cancer of the larynx in women is rare. Survival tends to lower than for men, and little is known about the association between deprivation and survival in women with laryngeal cancer. This paper explores the trends and socio-economic inequalities in laryngeal cancer survival in women, with comparison to men. We examined relative survival among men and women diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in England and Wales during 1991-2006, followed up to 31 December 2007. We estimated the difference in survival between the most deprived and most affluent groups (the 'deprivation gap') at one and five years after diagnosis, for each sex, anatomical subsite and calendar period. Five year survival for all laryngeal cancers combined was up to 8% lower in women than in men. This difference is only partially explained by the differential distribution of anatomical subsites in men and women. Disparities in survival between men and women were also present within specific subsites. In contrast to men, there was little evidence of a consistent deprivation gap in survival for women at any of the anatomical subsites. The stark socioeconomic inequalities in laryngeal cancer survival in men do not appear to be replicated in women. The origins of the socio-economic inequalities in survival among men, and the disparities in survival between men and women at specific tumour subsites remains unclear