Quantum Gravity - Testing Time for Theories

The extreme smallness of both the Planck length, on the one side, and the ratio of the gravitational to the electrical forces between, say, two electrons, on the other side has led to a widespread belief that the realm of quantum gravity is beyond terrestrial experiments. A series of classical and quantum arguments are put forward to dispel this view. It is concluded that whereas the smallness of the Planck length and the ratio of gravitational to electrical forces, does play its own essential role in nature, it does not make quantum gravity a science where humans cannot venture to probe her secrets. In particular attention is drawn to the latest neutron and atomic interferometry experiments, and to gravity wave interferometers. The latter, as Giovanni Amelino-Camelia argues [Nature 398, 216 (1999)], can be treated as probes of space-time fuzziness down to Planck length for certain quantum-gravity models

Interventions for autumn exacerbations of asthma in children

The objectives are as follows: To assess the effects of pharmacotherapy and behavioural interventions enacted in the lead-up to the school return during autumn which are designed to reduce asthma exacerbations in school-aged children during this period

Standardising the clinical assessment of coronal knee laxity

Clinical laxity tests are used for assessing knee ligament injuries and for soft tissue balancing in total knee arthroplasty. This study reports the development and validation of a quantitative technique of assessing collateral knee laxity through accurate measurement of potential variables during routine clinical examination. The hypothesis was that standardisation of a clinical stress test would result in a repeatable range of laxity measurements.Non- invasive infrared tracking technology with kinematic registration of joint centres gave real-time measurement of both coronal and sagittal mechanical tibiofemoral alignment. Knee flexion, moment arm and magnitude of the applied force were all measured and standardised. Three clinicians then performed six knee laxity examinations on a single volunteer using a target moment of 18Nm. Standardised laxity measurements had small standard deviations (within 1.1°) for each clinician and similar mean values between clinicians, with the valgus laxity assessment (mean of 3°) being slightly more consistent than varus (means of 4° or 5°).The manual technique of coronal knee laxity assessment was successfully quantified and standardised, leading to a narrow range of measurements (within the accuracy of the measurement system). Minimising the subjective variables of clinical examination could improve current knowledge of soft tissue knee behaviour

A rapid method to map mutations in Drosophila.

BACKGROUND: Genetic screens in Drosophila have provided a wealth of information about a variety of cellular and developmental processes. It is now possible to screen for mutant phenotypes in virtually any cell at any stage of development by performing clonal screens using the flp/FRT system. The rate-limiting step in the analysis of these mutants is often the identification of the mutated gene, however, because traditional mapping strategies rely mainly on genetic and cytological markers that are not easily linked to the molecular map. RESULTS: Here we describe the development of a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) map for chromosome arm 3R. The map contains 73 polymorphisms between the standard FRT chromosome, and a mapping chromosome that carries several visible markers (rucuca), at an average density of one SNP per 370 kilobases (kb). Using this collection, we show that mutants can be mapped to a 400 kb interval in a single meiotic mapping cross, with only a few hundred SNP detection reactions. Discovery of further SNPs in the region of interest allows the mutation to be mapped with the same recombinants to a region of about 50 kb. CONCLUSION: The combined use of standard visible markers and molecular polymorphisms in a single mapping strategy greatly reduces both the time and cost of mapping mutations, because it requires at least four times fewer SNP detection reactions than a standard approach. The use of this map, or others developed along the same lines, will greatly facilitate the identification of the molecular lesions in mutants from clonal screens.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Cervical spine disease in Asian populations

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Feeding poultry litter to beef cattle (2005)

Beef cattle have the ability to digest low-cost feedstuffs that are not usable by other livestock species. One such feedstuff is poultry litter, which provides opportunities or both the poultry producer and the beef cattle producer.New 2/01/5M; Revised 10/0

Child Well-being in the Pacific Rim

This study extends previous efforts to compare the well-being of children using multi-dimensional indicators derived from sample survey and administrative series to thirteen countries in the Pacific Rim. The framework for the analysis of child well-being is to organise 46 indicators into 21 components and organise the components into 6 domains: material situation, health, education, subjective well-being, living environment, as well as risk and safety. Overall, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan have the highest child well-being and Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines the lowest. However, there are substantial variations between the domains. Japan and Korea perform best on the material well-being of children and also do well on health and education but they have the lowest subjective well-being among their children by some margin. There is a relationship between child well-being and GDP per capita but children in China have higher well-being than you would expect given their GDP and children in Australia have lower well-being. The analysis is constrained by missing data particularly that the Health Behaviour of School-Aged Children Survey is not undertaken in any of these countries

Feed ingredient composition for beef cattle (2005)

It is essential to know feedstuff nutrient content in order to properly formulate beef cattle diets. This publication provides estimates of the nutrient composition of feedstuffs that are used commonly in Missouri.Revised October 2005 -- Extension website

Multi-objective improvement of software using co-evolution and smart seeding

Optimising non-functional properties of software is an important part of the implementation process. One such property is execution time, and compilers target a reduction in execution time using a variety of optimisation techniques. Compiler optimisation is not always able to produce semantically equivalent alternatives that improve execution times, even if such alternatives are known to exist. Often, this is due to the local nature of such optimisations. In this paper we present a novel framework for optimising existing software using a hybrid of evolutionary optimisation techniques. Given as input the implementation of a program or function, we use Genetic Programming to evolve a new semantically equivalent version, optimised to reduce execution time subject to a given probability distribution of inputs. We employ a co-evolved population of test cases to encourage the preservation of the program’s semantics, and exploit the original program through seeding of the population in order to focus the search. We carry out experiments to identify the important factors in maximising efficiency gains. Although in this work we have optimised execution time, other non-functional criteria could be optimised in a similar manner