548 research outputs found

    Letter from the Editor

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    Analysis and Treatment of Emerging Polar Contaminants

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    Two major classes of polar compounds have recently become a major focus as sources of contamination of water systems. Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) enter water through wastewater streams, and many of these compounds survive current wastewater treatment processes. High production volume chemicals (HPVCs), defined as chemicals produced in excess of one million pounds per year have numerous entries into surface and drinking waters due to their ubiquity. The commonality between many of these compounds is their polarity, which makes them water-soluble. While both PPCPs and HPVCs have been entering into the environment for decades, advances in analyte detection have increased the ability of scientists to identify these compounds in surface, waste and drinking waters. Methods for polar compound suites have been developed using a number of technologies, however these processes are often time consuming and require specialized instrumentation. In this study, a fast, robust method for the detection and treatment of emerging polar contaminants was developed with accompanying instrumentation. A liquid chromatography system, hyphenated to a universal gas phase detector, flame ionization detector (FID), was designed. By using pure subcritical water as a mobile phase, temperature was used to control chromatographic retention. This instrument may be used for rapid screening of environmental samples with minimal preparation. Using subcritical water chromatography allowed for testing of mass transfer between subcritical water and organic phases, which provides data on the transport of polar contaminants between solvent phases. A second component of the work in this dissertation was to test a treatment protocol for waste streams, which demonstrated the reduction of selected analytes within the PPCP and HPVC classes. Subcritical water wet oxidation allowed for the breakdown of all polar organic molecules dissolved in a water sample. As a thermochemical process, the oxidation reaction further reduced select compounds that remain after current biological waste removal processes, and provided a value-added process to current wastewater treatment, in which a needed process, disinfection, can be coupled to additional contaminant removal

    Interviews with the Apollo lunar surface astronauts in support of planning for EVA systems design

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    Focused interviews were conducted with the Apollo astronauts who landed on the moon. The purpose of these interviews was to help define extravehicular activity (EVA) system requirements for future lunar and planetary missions.RTOP 199-06-1

    Differential herbivory on disk and ray flowers of gynomonoecious asters and goldenrods (Asteraceae)

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    The selective advantage of gynomonoecy, the sexual system wherein plants produce a mixture of female and bisexual flowers, is poorly understood. One hypothesis for the evolution of this system is that the absence of androecia from female flowers reduces herbivore damage to the gynoecia of these flowers. Here, we examined patterns of herbivore damage in 53 collections representing 25 species of asters and goldenrods from Massachusetts, USA. In these taxa flowers are crowded into compact capitula, with bisexual flowers occupying the centre and female flowers situated on the periphery. Damage to gynoecia of bisexual flowers was significantly greater than damage to gynoecia of female flowers overall, and in about half of the individual populations. We also compared damage to central and peripheral flowers in the heads of 16 collections of other Asteraceae that produce only bisexual flowers to see whether the location of flowers rather than their sex might determine the patterns of herbivory. In only one of these 16 collections did we find a significant difference in herbivory between flower positions. We conclude that herbivore damage is influenced by flower type in asters and goldenrods, a pattern consistent with a role for herbivory in the evolution and maintenance of gynomonoecy. © 2010 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society

    The Soft-Excess in Mrk 509: Warm Corona or Relativistic Reflection?

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    We present the analysis of the first NuSTAR observations (220\sim 220 ks), simultaneous with the last SUZAKU observations (50\sim 50 ks), of the active galactic nucleus of the bright Seyfert 1 galaxy Mrk 509. The time-averaged spectrum in the 1791-79 keV X-ray band is dominated by a power-law continuum (Γ1.81.9\Gamma\sim 1.8-1.9), a strong soft excess around 1 keV, and signatures of X-ray reflection in the form of Fe K emission (6.4\sim 6.4 keV), an Fe K absorption edge (7.1\sim 7.1 keV), and a Compton hump due to electron scattering (2030\sim 20-30 keV). We show that these data can be described by two very different prescriptions for the soft excess: a warm (kT0.51kT\sim 0.5-1 keV) and optically thick (τ1020\tau\sim10-20) Comptonizing corona, or a relativistically blurred ionized reflection spectrum from the inner regions of the accretion disk. While these two scenarios cannot be distinguished based on their fit statistics, we argue that the parameters required by the warm corona model are physically incompatible with the conditions of standard coronae. Detailed photoionization calculations show that even in the most favorable conditions, the warm corona should produce strong absorption in the observed spectrum. On the other hand, while the relativistic reflection model provides a satisfactory description of the data, it also requires extreme parameters, such as maximum black hole spin, a very low and compact hot corona, and a very high density for the inner accretion disk. Deeper observations of this source are thus necessary to confirm the presence of relativistic reflection, and to further understand the nature of its soft excess.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 18 pages, 7 figure

    PWD-3DNet: A Deep Learning-Based Fully-Automated Segmentation of Multiple Structures on Temporal Bone CT Scans

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    The temporal bone is a part of the lateral skull surface that contains organs responsible for hearing and balance. Mastering surgery of the temporal bone is challenging because of this complex and microscopic three-dimensional anatomy. Segmentation of intra-temporal anatomy based on computed tomography (CT) images is necessary for applications such as surgical training and rehearsal, amongst others. However, temporal bone segmentation is challenging due to the similar intensities and complicated anatomical relationships among critical structures, undetectable small structures on standard clinical CT, and the amount of time required for manual segmentation. This paper describes a single multi-class deep learning-based pipeline as the first fully automated algorithm for segmenting multiple temporal bone structures from CT volumes, including the sigmoid sinus, facial nerve, inner ear, malleus, incus, stapes, internal carotid artery and internal auditory canal. The proposed fully convolutional network, PWD-3DNet, is a patch-wise densely connected (PWD) three-dimensional (3D) network. The accuracy and speed of the proposed algorithm was shown to surpass current manual and semi-automated segmentation techniques. The experimental results yielded significantly high Dice similarity scores and low Hausdorff distances for all temporal bone structures with an average of 86% and 0.755 millimeter (mm), respectively. We illustrated that overlapping in the inference sub-volumes improves the segmentation performance. Moreover, we proposed augmentation layers by using samples with various transformations and image artefacts to increase the robustness of PWD-3DNet against image acquisition protocols, such as smoothing caused by soft tissue scanner settings and larger voxel sizes used for radiation reduction. The proposed algorithm was tested on low-resolution CTs acquired by another center with different scanner parameters than the ones used to create the algorithm and shows potential for application beyond the particular training data used in the study
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