Friendlier surface treatments - for metals

With only a few exceptions, some degree of surface treatment is applied to all metal surfaces prior to adhesive bonding. The surface treatment applied will depend upon the requirements of the bond and service conditions that it will see and will generally be chosen on a “fit-for-purpose” basis. The minimum preparation which is usually carried out might include a simple degrease to remove processing aids, such as oils and waxes, and contaminants. However, it is recognised that the current state-of-the-art processes for structural or semi-structural metal bonding are highly complex, multi-stage treatments including conversion coating and anodic oxidation. Alternatives to the commonly-used degreasing processes are sought for many reasons, for example: established processes may not be adequate for difficult-to-remove materials; the processes may use VOCs; they can be carcinogenic or ozone depleting. Regarding the higher treatments, the anodising processes, in particular, are difficult, time consuming and costly to carry out. There are also legislative drivers which make utilisation of the more complex processes, especially those which utilise hexavalent chromium, highly undesirable. Other factors such as energy and chemical disposal costs also deserve consideration when considering the need for environmental or operator “friendly” processes. This paper will consider a number of alternative friendly surface treatments which might be considered as drop-in replacements for the current industrial standards. The friendlier surface treatments include two simple cleaning methods, namely: seaweed-based cleaners and CO2 laser ablation. In addition, to cover the spectrum of processes, two novel anodising methods will also be discussed. These are based upon electrolytic phosphoric acid deoxidising plus sulphuric acid anodising (EPAD+SAA) and alternating currentdirect current (ACDC) anodising

The Frequency and Content of Discussions About Alcohol Use in Primary Care and Application of the Chief Medical Officer’s Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines: A Cross-Sectional Survey of General Practitioners and Practice Nurses in the UK

ABSTRACT Aims: To examine how often General Practitioners (GPs) and Practice Nurses (PNs) working in primary care discuss alcohol with patients, what factors prompt discussions, how they approach patient discussions, and whether the Chief Medical Officer’s (CMO’s) revised low-risk drinking guidelines are appropriately advised. Methods: Cross-sectional survey with GPs and PNs working in primary care in the UK, conducted January-March 2017 (n=2,020). A vignette exercise examined what factors would prompt a discussion about alcohol, whether they would discuss before or after a patient reported exceeded the revised CMO guidelines (14 units per week), and whether the CMO’s drinking guidelines were appropriately advised. For all patients, participants were asked how often they discussed alcohol and how they approached the discussion (e.g. used screening tool). Results: The most common prompts to discuss alcohol in the vignette exercise were physical cues (44.7% of participants) or alcohol-related symptoms (23.8%). Most practitioners (70.1%) said they would wait until a patient was exceeding CMO guidelines before instigating discussion. Two-fifths (38.1%) appropriately advised the CMO guidelines in the vignette exercise, with PNs less likely to do so than GPs (OR=0.77, p=0.03). Less than half (44.7%) reportedly asked about alcohol always/often with all patients, with PNs more likely to ask always/often than GPs (OR=2.22, p<0.001). Almost three-quarters said they would enquire by asking about units (70.3%), compared to using screening tools. Conclusion: Further research is required to identify mechanisms to increase the frequency of discussions about alcohol and appropriate recommendation of the CMO drinking guidelines to patients.This research was supported by funding from Cancer Research UK. JMB is supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) (Grant MC_UU_12015/4)

On the correlation between Nd:YAG laser-induced wettability characteristics modification and osteoblast cell bioactivity on a titanium alloy

The factors responsible for modifications to the wettability characteristics of a titanium (Ti6Al4V) alloy bio-metal following Nd:YAG laser treatment and the effects thereof on the response of osteoblast cells were considered in this work. It was found that interaction of the Nd:YAG laser beam with the Ti6Al4V alloy resulted in the wettability characteristics of the bio-metal improving. Such improvements in the wettability characteristics of the Ti6Al4V alloy were found to be due to: an increase in the surface roughness; and increase in the surface oxygen content and an increase in the polar component of the surface energy. From the cell response tests it was determined that the osteoblast cell adhesion and proliferation on the Nd:YAG laser treated Ti6Al4V alloy samples was considerably greater than on the untreated samples. By isolating the effects of surface roughness it was possible to confirm or refute the existence of a correlation between wettability characteristics and osteoblast cell bioactivity for the Nd:YAG laser treated Ti6Al4V alloy. The findings indicated that the aspects of wettability characteristics: surface oxygen content and polar component of the surface energy play an important role in promoting cell proliferation, particularly when surface roughness was simultaneously increased. Thus it was possible to conclude that the wettability characteristics of the Nd:YAG laser treated Ti6Al4V alloy were correlated to osteoblast cell bioactivity

The generalized Robinson-Foulds metric

The Robinson-Foulds (RF) metric is arguably the most widely used measure of phylogenetic tree similarity, despite its well-known shortcomings: For example, moving a single taxon in a tree can result in a tree that has maximum distance to the original one; but the two trees are identical if we remove the single taxon. To this end, we propose a natural extension of the RF metric that does not simply count identical clades but instead, also takes similar clades into consideration. In contrast to previous approaches, our model requires the matching between clades to respect the structure of the two trees, a property that the classical RF metric exhibits, too. We show that computing this generalized RF metric is, unfortunately, NP-hard. We then present a simple Integer Linear Program for its computation, and evaluate it by an all-against-all comparison of 100 trees from a benchmark data set. We find that matchings that respect the tree structure differ significantly from those that do not, underlining the importance of this natural condition.Comment: Peer-reviewed and presented as part of the 13th Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI2013

Status of Grauer’s Gorilla and Chimpanzees in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo: Historical and Current Distribution and Abundance

This report summarises the current state of knowledge on the distribution, densities and trends in abundance of Grauer&rsquo;s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) and the eastern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It summarises the historical knowledge about the distribution of Grauer&rsquo;s gorilla across its range and describes the development of a Conservation Action Plan (CAP) for these two ape species. A result of this CAP was funding to undertake an assessment of the current status of these apes across the range of Grauer&rsquo;s gorilla. Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Fauna &amp; Flora International (FFI) worked with Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) and the Reserve managers of the Reserve des Gorilles de Punia (RGPU) and local communities to undertake surveys across the region using a variety of methods: line transects, recces along paths and patrol data from data collected by rangers while on patrol and entered into SMART software

Tracking Multiple Topics for Finding Interesting Articles

We introduce multiple topic tracking (MTT) for iScore to better recommend news articles for users with multiple interests and to address changes in user interests over time. As an extension of the basic Rocchio algorithm, traditional topic detection and tracking, and single-pass clustering, MTT maintains multiple interest profiles to identify interesting articles for a specific user given user-feedback. Focusing on only interesting topics enables iScore to discard useless profiles to address changes in user interests and to achieve a balance between resource consumption and classification accuracy. iScore is able to achieve higher quality results than traditional methods such as the Rocchio algorithm. We identify several operating parameters that work well for MTT. Using the same parameters, we show that MTT alone yields high quality results for recommending interesting articles from several corpora. The inclusion of MTT improves iScore's performance by 25% in recommending news articles from the Yahoo! News RSS feeds and the TREC11 adaptive filter article collection. And through a small user study, we show that iScore can still perform well when only provided with little user feedback

Louse (Insecta : Phthiraptera) mitochondrial 12S rRNA secondary structure is highly variable

Lice are ectoparasitic insects hosted by birds and mammals. Mitochondrial 12S rRNA sequences obtained from lice show considerable length variation and are very difficult to align. We show that the louse 12S rRNA domain III secondary structure displays considerable variation compared to other insects, in both the shape and number of stems and loops. Phylogenetic trees constructed from tree edit distances between louse 12S rRNA structures do not closely resemble trees constructed from sequence data, suggesting that at least some of this structural variation has arisen independently in different louse lineages. Taken together with previous work on mitochondrial gene order and elevated rates of substitution in louse mitochondrial sequences, the structural variation in louse 12S rRNA confirms the highly distinctive nature of molecular evolution in these insects