Miners' nystagmus

The increase in the number of certified cases of Ifiners' Nystao-qus and the increase in the duration of disability in a large number of cases have made the condition a question of economic importance. The essential factor in the production of the condition appears beyond doubt to be insufficient illumination. Some improvement has been made in the safety lamps both oil and electric in recent years, but the lighting of most mines is still far from satisfactory.The best method of effecting improvement is the introduction of the electric cap lamp as recommended by the Miners' Nystagmus committee. This it is hoped would soon result in the prevention of Miners' Nystagmus. Failing this the candle power of the hand safety lamps must be increased to at least 3 or 4 c.p.Minor improvements can be effected by white - washing the roadways as far as possible and by providing lamp shields for the journey to the working place.The factor of compensation is responsible for a great deal of the increase in the number of new claims and explains the increased duration of incapacity. Incapacity is, in most cases at least, not due to the actual nystagmus but to neurotic states developing either alone or superimposed upon the nystagmus; and it is this aspect of the disease upon which compensation has had so great an influence.Some alteration in compensation regulations is called for. The duration of compensation may be limited to a definite period, or the rate may be reduced after a certain period. Failing this there should be some machinery for periodic assessment of the capacity or incapacity of cases by medical men with special experience of the disease.In the matter of treatment the important point is to impress the patient that his condition is a benign one, and to persuade him to resume work of some sort at the earliest possible date. Prolonged idleness is the worst possible treatment for these cases.Sympathetic action on the part of the management in providing suitable surface work will be well repaid by results.Errors of refraction should be corrected, and any distressing symptoms such as insomnia should receive suitable therapy

Kangaroo disease

In March, 1954, a survey of part of the Murchison area was undertaken by Messrs Gooding and Harrison, Research Officers of the Agricultural Protection Board to investigate a reported outbreak of disease among kangaroos—predominantly Marloos, also known as Red or Plain Kangaroos (Macropus rufus)—which inhabit those areas. At the time the disease was not known by any special name so the name of Lumpy Jaw was officially adopted. Upon their return to Perth, these officers sent out a questionnaire to 67 pastoralists in the area, asking for information on the disease. Only 20 replies have been received but, from these, a lot of useful information has been obtained

Effects of rain shelter or simulated rain during grain filling and maturation on subsequent wheat grain quality in the UK

The effects of simulated additional rain (ear wetting, 25 mm) or of rain shelter imposed at different periods after anthesis on grain quality at maturity and the dynamics of grain filling and desiccation were investigated in UK field-grown crops of wheat (Triticum aestivum L., cvar Tybalt) in 2011 and in 2012 when June–August rainfall was 255.0 and 214.6 mm, respectively, and above the decadal mean (157.4 mm). Grain filling and desiccation were quantified well by broken-stick regressions and Gompertz curves, respectively. Rain shelter for 56 (2011) or 70 d (2012) after anthesis, and to a lesser extent during late maturation only, resulted in more rapid desiccation and hence progress to harvest maturity whereas ear wetting had negligible effects, even when applied four times. Grain-filling duration was also affected as above in 2011, but with no significant effect in 2012. In both years, there were strong positive associations between final grain dry weight and duration of filling. The treatments affected all grain quality traits in 2011: nitrogen (N) and sulphur (S) concentrations, N:S ratio, sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) sedimentation volume, Hagberg Falling Number (HFN), and the incidence of blackpoint. Only N concentration and blackpoint were affected significantly by treatments in 2012. Rain shelter throughout grain filling reduced N concentration, whereas rain shelter reduced the incidence of blackpoint and ear wetting increased it. In 2011, rain shelter throughout reduced S concentration, increased N:S ratio and reduced SDS. Treatment effects on HFN were not consistent within or between years. Nevertheless, a comparison between the extreme treatment means in 2012 indicated damage from late rain combined with ear wetting resulted in a reduction of c. 0.7 s in HFN/mm August rainfall, whilst that between samples taken immediately after ear wetting at harvest maturity or 7 d later suggested recovery from damage to HFN upon re-drying in planta. Hence, the incidence of blackpoint was the only grain quality trait affected consistently by the diverse treatments. The remaining aspects of grain quality were comparatively resilient to rain incident upon developing and maturing ears of cvar Tybalt. No consistent temporal patterns of sensitivity to shelter or ear wetting were detected for any aspect of grain quality

FRET theoretical predictions concerning freely diffusive dyes inside spherical container: how to choose the best pair?

FRET has been massively used to see if biomolecules were bounded or not by labelling both biomolecules by one dye of a FRET pair. This should give a digital answer to the question (fluorescence of the acceptor: high FRET efficency: molecules associated, fluorescence of the donor: low FRET efficency: molecules dissociated). This has been used, inter alia, at the single-molecule scale in containers, such as liposomes. One perspective of the field is to reduce the container’s size to study the effect of confinement on binding. The problem is that if the two dyes are encapsulated inside a small liposome, they could have a significant probability to be close one from the other one (and thus to undergo a high FRET efficiency event without binding). This is why we suggest here a theoretical model which gives mean FRET efficiency as a function of liposome radius (the model applies to any spherical container) and Förster radius to help the experimentalist to choose their experimental set-up. Besides, the influence of side effect on mean FRET efficiency has been studied as well. We show here that if this “background FRET” is most of the time non-quantitative, it can remain significant and which makes data analysis trickier. We could show as well that if this background FRET obviously increases when liposome radius decreases, this variation was lower than the one which could be expected because of side effect. We show as well the FRET efficiency function distribution which let the experimentalist know the probability to get one FRET efficiency value

Optical conductivity of a metal-insulator transition for the Anderson-Hubbard model in 3 dimensions away from 1/2 filling

We have completed a numerical investigation of the Anderson-Hubbard model for three-dimensional simple cubic lattices using a real-space self-consistent Hartree-Fock decoupling approximation for the Hubbard interaction. In this formulation we treat the spatial disorder exactly, and therefore we account for effects arising from localization physics. We have examined the model for electronic densities well away 1/2 filling, thereby avoiding the physics of a Mott insulator. Several recent studies have made clear that the combined effects of electronic interactions and spatial disorder can give rise to a suppression of the electronic density of states, and a subsequent metal-insulator transition can occur. We augment such studies by calculating the ac conductivity for such systems. Our numerical results show that weak interactions enhance the density of states at the Fermi level and the low-frequency conductivity, there are no local magnetic moments, and the ac conductivity is Drude-like. However, with a large enough disorder strength and larger interactions the density of states at the Fermi level and the low-frequency conductivity are both suppressed, the conductivity becomes non-Drude-like, and these phenomena are accompanied by the presence of local magnetic moments. The low-frequency conductivity changes from a sigma-sigma_dc omega^{1/2} behaviour in the metallic phase, to a sigma omega^2 behaviour in the nonmetallic regime. Our numerical results show that the formation of magnetic moments is essential to the suppression of the density of states at the Fermi level, and therefore essential to the metal-insulator transition