Optical study of sonic and supersonic jet penetration from a flat plate into a Mach 2 airstream

Optical study of sonic and supersonic jet penetration from flat plate into Mach 2 airstrea

New and Improved Estimates of Qualification Discrimination

The early offer reform proposal for medical malpractice provides an option for claimants to receive prompt payment of all their net economic Losses and reasonable attorney fees. Using a Large sample of closed individual medical malpractice claims from Texas supplemented by data from Florida, this article provides an empirical assessment of the consequences of the early offer reform. Noneconomic damages make up about two-thirds of paid claim amounts. The minimum payment amount for serious injuries will affect the magnitude of insurer savings and claimant compensation. Payments to claimants will be expedited by 2 years by the early offer reform, and Litigation costs will be reduced by an average of $100,000-$200,000 per claim

Improving communication about cancer screening: moving towards informed decision making

For decades, public communications about cancer screening have used persuasive techniques with the aim of maximising the number of people being screened. However, perspectives have changed more recently to acknowledge that screening can lead to harm as well as benefit, and that it is important for service users to consider both. For some types of cancer screening, there is professional contention about whether benefits clearly outweigh harms. In light of this, an emerging trend in cancer screening communication is to try to support informed decision making - that is, to help people understand both the advantages and disadvantages of screening, allowing them to make individual decisions about their screening participation that reflect their informed preferences. In this review, we provide an overview of key theoretical and practical aspects of improving communication and supporting informed decision making about cancer screening, highlight relevant research and discuss future implications

The current state of biomarker research for Friedreich's ataxia: a report from the 2018 FARA biomarker meeting

The 2018 FARA Biomarker Meeting highlighted the current state of development of biomarkers for Friedreich's ataxia. A mass spectroscopy assay to sensitively measure mature frataxin (reduction of which is the root cause of disease) is being developed. Biomarkers to monitor neurological disease progression include imaging, electrophysiological measures and measures of nerve function, which may be measured either in serum and/or through imaging-based technologies. Potential pharmacodynamic biomarkers include metabolic and protein biomarkers and markers of nerve damage. Cardiac imaging and serum biomarkers may reflect cardiac disease progression. Considerable progress has been made in the development of biomarkers for various contexts of use, but further work is needed in terms of larger longitudinal multisite studies, and identification of novel biomarkers for additional use cases

High capacity in G protein-coupled receptor signaling.

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) constitute a large family of receptors that activate intracellular signaling pathways upon detecting specific extracellular ligands. While many aspects of GPCR signaling have been uncovered through decades of studies, some fundamental properties, like its channel capacity-a measure of how much information a given transmission system can reliably transduce-are still debated. Previous studies concluded that GPCRs in individual cells could transmit around one bit of information about the concentration of the ligands, allowing only for a reliable on or off response. Using muscarinic receptor-induced calcium response measured in individual cells upon repeated stimulation, we show that GPCR signaling systems possess a significantly higher capacity. We estimate the channel capacity of this system to be above two, implying that at least four concentration levels of the agonist can be distinguished reliably. These findings shed light on the basic principles of GPCR signaling

A Model for Imitating Human Reaching Movements

We present a model of human-like reaching movements. This model is then used to give a humanoid robot the ability to imitate human reaching motions. It illustrates that having a robot control similar to human control can greatly ease the human-robot interaction

A Biologically-Inspired Model of Reaching Movements

This paper presents a robotic arm controller for reaching motions. This controller applies two principles inspired by current theories of human reaching motions, namely the multi-referential control of movements and the dynamical system approach to biological control. The controller consists of a stable dynamical system active in a hybrid cartesian-joint angle frame of reference. Our results show that this controller has interesting properties in terms of stability and robustness to perturbations, and that its redundancy can be exploited for a simple solution to the joint limit avoidance problem

Maximizing Neumann fundamental tones of triangles

We prove sharp isoperimetric inequalities for Neumann eigenvalues of the Laplacian on triangular domains. The first nonzero Neumann eigenvalue is shown to be maximal for the equilateral triangle among all triangles of given perimeter, and hence among all triangles of given area. Similar results are proved for the harmonic and arithmetic means of the first two nonzero eigenvalues

Observation of diffractive orbits in the spectrum of excited NO in a magnetic field

We investigate the experimental spectra of excited NO molecules in the diamagnetic regime and develop a quantitative semiclassical framework to account for the results. We show the dynamics can be interpreted in terms of classical orbits provided that in addition to the geometric orbits, diffractive effects are appropriately taken into account. We also show how individual orbits can be extracted from the experimental signal and use this procedure to reveal the first experimental manifestation of inelastic diffractive orbits.Comment: 4 fig