Small-Cell Lung Cancer: 8 Years Experience of a Single Multidisciplinary Team

Aims. We have audited the changes in treatment practice for small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) presented to a single multidisciplinary team (MDT) at Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals between January 1998 and December 2005. Materials and Methods. The MDT database was used to identify all patients with SCLC. Anonymised demographic, treatment, and outcome details were extracted from the database supplemented by patient records. Results. 235 patients were identified. 112 (48%) had limited disease at presentation. Chemotherapy was the initial treatment for 195 patients, 77% of whom had a documented radiological response with a complete response in 24%. Chemotherapy regimes evolved during the study period with the increasing use of platinum-based chemotherapy. Anthracycline-based chemotherapy was most used before 2004 and was given to 57% of all patients. 42% received consolidation thoracic radiotherapy and 24% prophylactic cranial irradiation. The median and 2-year survival were 8 months and 18%, respectively, for patients with limited disease and 5 months and 5%, respectively, for extensive disease. Conclusion. We have documented changes in treatment practice and service delivery of SCLC over the 8 years during which the MDT has been operating. However, there has not achieve any significant improvement in outcome for the population of patients with SCLC

Liquefaction Potential of Recent Fills versus Natural Sands Located in High-Seismicity Regions Using Shear-Wave Velocity

The liquefaction potential of clean and silty sands is examined on the basis of the field measurement of the shear-wave velocity, Vs. The starting point is the database of 225 case histories supporting the Andrus-Stokoe Vs-based liquefaction chart for sands, silts, and gravels. Only clean and silty sands with nonplastic fines are considered, resulting in a reduced database of 110 case histories, which are plotted separately by type of deposit. A line of constant cyclic shear strain, γcl≈0.03%, is recommended for liquefaction evaluation of recent uncompacted clean and silty sand fills and earthquake magnitude, Mw=7.5. The geologically recent natural silty sand sites in the Imperial Valley of southern California have significantly higher liquefaction resistance as a result of preshaking caused by the high seismic activity in the valley. A line of constant cyclic shear strain, γcl≈0.1–0.2%, is recommended for practical use in the Imperial Valley. Additional research including revisiting available Vs-based and penetration-based databases is proposed to generalize the results of the paper and develop liquefaction charts that account more realistically for deposit type, seismic history, and geologic age

Analysis of operating system diversity for intrusion tolerance

One of the key benefits of using intrusion-tolerant systems is the possibility of ensuring correct behavior in the presence of attacks and intrusions. These security gains are directly dependent on the components exhibiting failure diversity. To what extent failure diversity is observed in practical deployment depends on how diverse are the components that constitute the system. In this paper, we present a study with operating system's (OS's) vulnerability data from the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). We have analyzed the vulnerabilities of 11 different OSs over a period of 18 years, to check how many of these vulnerabilities occur in more than one OS. We found this number to be low for several combinations of OSs. Hence, although there are a few caveats on the use of NVD data to support definitive conclusions, our analysis shows that by selecting appropriate OSs, one can preclude (or reduce substantially) common vulnerabilities from occurring in the replicas of the intrusion-tolerant system

Design and Properties of Novel Substituted Borosilicate Bioactive Glasses and Their Glass-Ceramic Derivatives

Three novel borosilicate bioactive glasses (BBGs) of general formula of 0.05Na2O·0.35x·0.20B2O3·0.40SiO2 (molar ratio, where x = MgO or CaO or SrO) were prepared and used to investigate the effect of crystallization on their properties including cytotoxicity. The three postmelt compositions were determined using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and crystallization events were studied using differential thermal analysis and X-ray diffraction. This information was used to determine heat treatments to prepare glass-ceramics by controlled crystallization. X-ray diffraction analysis and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy showed that, after higher heat treatment temperatures (800–900 °C), borosilicate bioactive glass-ceramics (BBGCs) contained mainly borate and silicate crystalline phases. Specifically, BBG-Mg, BBG-Ca, and BBG-Sr glass-ceramics detected the presence of magnesium silicate-Mg2(SiO3)2 and magnesium borate-Mg2B2O5; wollastonite-2M-CaSiO3 and calcium borate-Ca(BO2)2; and strontium silicate-SrSiO3 and strontium borate-Sr2B2O5, respectively. In vitro cytotoxicity tests were performed using the mouse fibroblast cell line (L929). Glass and glass ceramic at concentrations lower than 50 mg/mL did not exhibit any level of cytotoxicity when compared with the control. However, quantitative evaluation indicated that greater cell growth occurred in the presence of materials with crystalline phases. Control of BBGs crystallization may therefore be used to influence the biocompatibility of these glass-ceramic systems

Palaeogenomics of the Hydrocarbon Producing Microalga Botryococcus braunii.

Botryococcus braunii is a colonial microalga that appears early in the fossil record and is a sensitive proxy of environmental and hydroclimatic conditions. Palaeozoic Botryococcus fossils which contribute up to 90% of oil shales and approximately 1% of crude oil, co-localise with diagnostic geolipids from the degradation of source-signature hydrocarbons. However more recent Holocene sediments demonstrate no such association. Consequently, Botryococcus are identified in younger sediments by morphology alone, where potential misclassifications could lead to inaccurate paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Here we show that a combination of flow cytometry and ancient DNA (aDNA) sequencing can unambiguously identify Botryococcus microfossils in Holocene sediments with hitherto unparalleled accuracy and rapidity. The application of aDNA sequencing to microfossils offers a far-reaching opportunity for understanding environmental change in the recent geological record. When allied with other high-resolution palaeoenvironmental information such as aDNA sequencing of humans and megafauna, aDNA from microfossils may allow a deeper and more precise understanding of past environments, ecologies and migrations

The fully connected N-dimensional skeleton: probing the evolution of the cosmic web

A method to compute the full hierarchy of the critical subsets of a density field is presented. It is based on a watershed technique and uses a probability propagation scheme to improve the quality of the segmentation by circumventing the discreteness of the sampling. It can be applied within spaces of arbitrary dimensions and geometry. This recursive segmentation of space yields, for a $d$-dimensional space, a $d-1$ succession of $n$-dimensional subspaces that fully characterize the topology of the density field. The final 1D manifold of the hierarchy is the fully connected network of the primary critical lines of the field : the skeleton. It corresponds to the subset of lines linking maxima to saddle points, and provides a definition of the filaments that compose the cosmic web as a precise physical object, which makes it possible to compute any of its properties such as its length, curvature, connectivity etc... When the skeleton extraction is applied to initial conditions of cosmological N-body simulations and their present day non linear counterparts, it is shown that the time evolution of the cosmic web, as traced by the skeleton, is well accounted for by the Zel'dovich approximation. Comparing this skeleton to the initial skeleton undergoing the Zel'dovich mapping shows that two effects are competing during the formation of the cosmic web: a general dilation of the larger filaments that is captured by a simple deformation of the skeleton of the initial conditions on the one hand, and the shrinking, fusion and disappearance of the more numerous smaller filaments on the other hand. Other applications of the N dimensional skeleton and its peak patch hierarchy are discussed.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

Serotonin tranporter methylation and response to cognitive behaviour therapy in children with anxiety disorders

Anxiety disorders that are the most commonly occurring psychiatric disorders in childhood, are associated with a range of social and educational impairments and often continue into adulthood. Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment option for the majority of cases, although up to 35-45% of children do not achieve remission. Recent research suggests that some genetic variants may be associated with a more beneficial response to psychological therapy. Epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation work at the interface between genetic and environmental influences. Furthermore, epigenetic alterations at the serotonin transporter (SERT) promoter region have been associated with environmental influences such as stressful life experiences. In this study, we measured DNA methylation upstream of SERT in 116 children with an anxiety disorder, before and after receiving CBT. Change during treatment in percentage DNA methylation was significantly different in treatment responders vs nonresponders. This effect was driven by one CpG site in particular, at which responders increased in methylation, whereas nonresponders showed a decrease in DNA methylation. This is the first study to demonstrate differences in SERT methylation change in association with response to a purely psychological therapy. These findings confirm that biological changes occur alongside changes in symptomatology following a psychological therapy such as CBT

Calculating the QED correction to the hadronic vacuum polarisation on the lattice

Isospin-breaking corrections to the hadron vacuum polarization component of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon are needed to ensure the theoretical precision of gμ - 2 is below the experimental precision. We describe the status of our work calculating, using lattice QCD, the QED correction to the light and strange connected hadronic vacuum polarization in a Dashen scheme. We report results using physical N f = 2 + 1 + 1 HISQ ensembles at three lattice spacings and three heavier-than-light valence quark masses

The Impact of Feedback on Disk Galaxy Scaling Relations

We use a disk galaxy evolution model to investigate the impact of mass outflows (a.k.a. feedback) on disk galaxy scaling relations. Our model follows the accretion, cooling, star formation and ejection of baryonic mass inside growing dark matter haloes, with cosmologically motivated specific angular momentum distributions. Models without feedback produce disks that are too small and rotate too fast. Feedback reduces the baryonic masses of galaxies, resulting in larger disks with lower rotation velocities. Models with feedback can reproduce the zero points of the scaling relations between rotation velocity, stellar mass and disk size, but only in the absence of adiabatic contraction. Our feedback mechanism is maximally efficient in expelling mass, but our successful models require 25% of the SN energy, or 100% of the SN momentum, to drive the outflows. It remains to be seen whether such high efficiencies are realistic or not. Our energy and momentum driven wind models result in different slopes of various scaling relations, such as size - stellar mass, stellar mass - halo mass, and metallicity - stellar mass. Observations favor the energy driven wind at stellar masses below Mstar = 10^{10.5} Msun, but the momentum driven wind model at high masses. The ratio between the specific angular momentum of the baryons to that of the halo, (j_gal/m_gal), is not unity in our models. Yet this is the standard assumption in models of disk galaxy formation. Feedback preferentially ejects low angular momentum material because star formation is more efficient at smaller galactic radii. This results in (j_gal/m_gal) increasing with decreasing halo mass. This effect helps to resolve the discrepancy between the high spin parameters observed for dwarf galaxies with the low spin parameters predicted from LCDM. [Abridged]Comment: 27 pages, 16 figures, accepted to MNRAS, two new figure

Addressing the migration of health professionals: the role of working conditions and educational placements

This article provides a brief overview of the global health-worker shortage, which could undermine the Millennium Development Goal to halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS. The current situation suggests that long-term solutions to shortages can only be found by addressing the problem from a global perspective; that is, to eliminate shortages through substantial investments in training and retaining health workers in developed and developing countries, and not through policies that do not work towards solving this underlying problem, such as ones that restrict migration