Safety Stroller

ME450 Capstone Design and Manufacturing Experience: Winter 2010Kids in Danger desires to guide a team of engineers towards building a redesigned child stroller to address certain safety hazards. Common accidents from current strollers include rolling into traffic, invisibility at night, entrapment of the child, difficult setup, and pinching points. Nancy Cowles of Kids in Danger provided us with basic information regarding stroller malfunctions and what needs to be addressed. Our redesigned stroller targets these safety concerns and reduces the possibility of stroller accidents. In addition, this prototype introduces new technology that addresses safety concerns not currently covered by the ASTM F833 standards. The new features target safety hazards that are responsible for numerous child injuries each year, using an engineering approach to provide solutions.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109379/1/me450w10project21_report.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109379/2/me450w10project21_photo.jp

Nonstructural Protein-2 and the Replication of Canine Parvovirus

AbstractThe nonstructural protein-2 (NS2) of canine parvovirus (CPV) is produced from the left-hand open reading frame of the viral genome and contains 87 amino-terminal amino acids in common with nonstructural protein 1 (NS1) joined to 78 amino acids from an alternative open reading frame. In the minute virus of mice parvovirus NS2 plays a role in controlling capsid protein assembly and translation in a host-specific manner. The predicted NS2 of CPV is divergent from the proteins of the rodent parvoviruses, and the protein and its functions have not been described. We characterized the large and the small splices of CPV using reverse transcriptase–PCR. NS2 was identified using anti-peptide antibodies against the predicted C-terminal sequence and also by expressing the protein from a plasmid vector. The protein could be detected at low levels in the nucleus and the cytoplasm of a proportion of CPV-infected cells, as well as in cells transfected with the expression plasmid. Virus genomes were prepared with mutations in the splice donor or acceptor sites of the NS2-specific intron or with three different termination codons in the NS2-unique exon. Both splice donor and acceptor mutations resulted in the use of previously cryptic splice sites, and the virus containing the splice donor mutation replicated inefficiently. However, the other four mutant viruses were all viable and replicated efficiently in cat and dog cells, and two mutant viruses that were tested appeared to assemble their capsids in the same manner as did the wildtype. After inoculation of dogs an NS2 mutant virus with a termination codon in the NS2-unique exon replicated to titers similar to those seen for wildtype CPV in several tissues examined

Nanoscale Proximity Effect in the High Temperature Superconductor Bi-2212

High temperature cuprate superconductors exhibit extremely local nanoscale phenomena and strong sensitivity to doping. While other experiments have looked at nanoscale interfaces between layers of different dopings, we focus on the interplay between naturally inhomogeneous nanoscale regions. Using scanning tunneling microscopy to carefully track the same region of the sample as a function of temperature, we show that regions with weak superconductivity can persist to elevated temperatures if bordered by regions of strong superconductivity. This suggests that it may be possible to increase the maximum possible transition temperature by controlling the distribution of dopants.Comment: To appear in Physical Review Letter

A novel quark-field creation operator construction for hadronic physics in lattice QCD

A new quark-field smearing algorithm is defined which enables efficient calculations of a broad range of hadron correlation functions. The technique applies a low-rank operator to define smooth fields that are to be used in hadron creation operators. The resulting space of smooth fields is small enough that all elements of the reduced quark propagator can be computed exactly at reasonable computational cost. Correlations between arbitrary sources, including multi hadron operators can be computed a posteriori without requiring new lattice Dirac operator inversions. The method is tested on realistic lattice sizes with light dynamical quarks.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

Conformational plasticity of NaK2K and TREK2 potassium channel selectivity filters

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Early experience with an opt-in research register - Scottish Health Research Register (SHARE):a multi-method evaluation of participant recruitment performance

WS is a PhD student funded by the University of St Andrews.Background: Recruiting participants to a clinical study is a resource-intensive process with a high failure rate. The Scottish Health Research Register (SHARE) provides recruitment support service which helps researchers recruit participants by searching patients’ Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The current study aims to evaluate the performance of SHARE in participant recruitment. Methods: Recruitment projects eligible for evaluation were those that were conducted for clinical trials or observational studies and finished before 2020. For analysis of recruitment data, projects with incomplete data were excluded. For each project we calculated, from SHARE records, 1) the fraction of the participants recruited through SHARE as a percentage of the number requested by researchers (percentage fulfilled), 2) the percentage of the potential candidates provided by SHARE to researchers that were actually recruited (percentage provided and recruited), 3) the percentage of the participants recruited through SHARE of all the potentially eligible candidates identified by searching registrants’ EHRs (percentage identified and recruited). Research teams of the eligible projects were invited to participate in an anonymised online survey. Two metrics were derived from research teams’ responses, including a) the fraction of the recruited over the study target number of participants (percentage fulfilled), and b) the percentage of the participants recruited through SHARE among the candidates received from SHARE (percentage provided and recruited). Results: Forty-four projects were eligible for inclusion. Recruitment data for 24 projects were available (20 excluded because of missingness or incompleteness). Survey invites were sent to all the eligible research teams and received 12 responses. Analysis of recruitment data shows the overall percentage fulfilled was 34.2% (interquartile 13.3–45.1%), the percentage provided and recruited 29.3% (interquartile 20.6–52.4%) and percentage identified and recruited 4.9% (interquartile 2.6–10.2%). Based on the data reported by researchers, percentage fulfilled was 31.7% (interquartile 5.8–59.6%) and percentage provided and recruited was 20.2% (interquartile 8.2–31.0%). Conclusions: SHARE may be a valuable resource for recruiting participants for some clinical studies. Potential improvements are to expand the registrant base and to incorporate more data generated during patients’ different health care encounters into the candidate-searching step.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe