Paraffin ingestion - the problem

Paraffin ingestion is the commonest cause of accidental childhood poisoning in South Africa. Children from the lower socio-economic group are affected most. They drink paraffin in the summer months from bottles or intermediate containers, mistaking it for water or colddrink.The children are predominantly male with a mean age of 24 months. The clinical picture is one of respiratory distress with a hospital case fatality rate of 0,74%. The use of paraffin as a source of household energy in South Africa is on the increase. Based on a modernisation index it would seem that this trend will continue into the next century. It can therefore be expected that the number of cases of paraffin ingestion will steadily increase if no active steps are taken to address the problem.Prevention should entail a wide spectrum of measures, the basis of which should be a child-resistant container. An effective durable, low-cost child-resistant container which is easy to pour from should be made available by petroleum companies and/or entrepreneurs and distributed through their network. This should be combined with health education on the danger of paraffin. Health care workers and administrators should be made more aware of the problem and become involved in health education and prevention.Further research should be undertaken on the effect a change in the colour of paraffin and the use of childresistant caps would have on the incidence of paraffin ingestion in South Africa

Light-Cone Quantization of Gauge Fields

Light-cone quantization of gauge field theory is considered. With a careful treatment of the relevant degrees of freedom and where they must be initialized, the results obtained in equal-time quantization are recovered, in particular the Mandelstam-Leibbrandt form of the gauge field propagator. Some aspects of the ``discretized'' light-cone quantization of gauge fields are discussed.Comment: SMUHEP/93-20, 17 pages (one figure available separately from the authors). Plain TeX, all macros include

Metric trees of generalized roundness one

Every finite metric tree has generalized roundness strictly greater than one. On the other hand, some countable metric trees have generalized roundness precisely one. The purpose of this paper is to identify some large classes of countable metric trees that have generalized roundness precisely one. At the outset we consider spherically symmetric trees endowed with the usual combinatorial metric (SSTs). Using a simple geometric argument we show how to determine decent upper bounds on the generalized roundness of finite SSTs that depend only on the downward degree sequence of the tree in question. By considering limits it follows that if the downward degree sequence $(d_{0}, d_{1}, d_{2}...)$ of a SST $(T,\rho)$ satisfies $|\{j \, | \, d_{j} > 1 \}| = \aleph_{0}$, then $(T,\rho)$ has generalized roundness one. Included among the trees that satisfy this condition are all complete $n$-ary trees of depth $\infty$ ($n \geq 2$), all $k$-regular trees ($k \geq 3$) and inductive limits of Cantor trees. The remainder of the paper deals with two classes of countable metric trees of generalized roundness one whose members are not, in general, spherically symmetric. The first such class of trees are merely required to spread out at a sufficient rate (with a restriction on the number of leaves) and the second such class of trees resemble infinite combs.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

Absence of a dose-rate effect in the transformation of C3H 10T1/2 cells by α-particles

The findings of Hill et al. (1984) on the greatly enhanced transformation frequencies at very low dose rates of fission neutrons induced us to perform an analogous study with -particles at comparable dose rates. Transformation frequencies were determined with γ-rays at high dose rate (0·5 Gy/min), and with -particles at high (0·2 Gy/min) and at low dose rates (0·83-2·5 mGy/min) in the C3H 10T1/2 cell system. α-particles were substantially more effective than γ-rays, both for cell inactivation and for neoplastic transformation at high and low dose rates. The relative biological effectiveness (RBE) for cell inactivation and for neoplastic transformation was of similar magnitude, and ranged from about 3 at an -particle dose of 2 Gy to values of the order of 10 at 0·25 Gy. In contrast to the experiments of Hill et al. (1984) with fission neutrons, no increased transformation frequencies were observed when the -particle dose was protracted over several hours

Sputter deposition and characterization of lithium cobalt oxide thin films and their applications in thin-film rechargeable lithium batteries

Li Co oxide thin films were deposited by rf magnetron sputtering of a LiCoO{sub 2} target in a 3:1 Ar/O{sub 2} mixture gas. From proton-induced gamma-ray emission analysis and Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, the average composition of these films was determined to be Li{sub 1.15}CoO{sub 2.16}. X-ray powder diffraction patterns of films annealed in air at 500-700 C were consistent with regular rhombohedral structure of crystalline LiCoO{sub 2}. Discharge curves of thin film lithium cells with amoprohous LiCoO{sub 2} showed no obvious structural transition between 4.2 and 1.5 V. Shape of discharge curves of cells with polycrystalline cathodes were consistent with a two-phase voltage plateau at {similar_to}3.9 V with a relatively large capacity and two additional smaller plateaus at higher voltages. Cells with the 700 C annealed cathodes showed a capacity loss of {similar_to} after 1000 cycles between 4.2 and 3.0 V

The Flare-energy Distributions Generated by Kink-unstable Ensembles of Zero-net-current Coronal Loops

It has been proposed that the million degree temperature of the corona is due to the combined effect of barely-detectable energy releases, so called nanoflares, that occur throughout the solar atmosphere. Alas, the nanoflare density and brightness implied by this hypothesis means that conclusive verification is beyond present observational abilities. Nevertheless, we investigate the plausibility of the nanoflare hypothesis by constructing a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model that can derive the energy of a nanoflare from the nature of an ideal kink instability. The set of energy-releasing instabilities is captured by an instability threshold for linear kink modes. Each point on the threshold is associated with a unique energy release and so we can predict a distribution of nanoflare energies. When the linear instability threshold is crossed, the instability enters a nonlinear phase as it is driven by current sheet reconnection. As the ensuing flare erupts and declines, the field transitions to a lower energy state, which is modelled by relaxation theory, i.e., helicity is conserved and the ratio of current to field becomes invariant within the loop. We apply the model so that all the loops within an ensemble achieve instability followed by energy-releasing relaxation. The result is a nanoflare energy distribution. Furthermore, we produce different distributions by varying the loop aspect ratio, the nature of the path to instability taken by each loop and also the level of radial expansion that may accompany loop relaxation. The heating rate obtained is just sufficient for coronal heating. In addition, we also show that kink instability cannot be associated with a critical magnetic twist value for every point along the instability threshold

Ionic Conductivities of Lithium Phosphorus Oxynitride Glasses, Polycrystals and Thin Films

Various lithium phosphorus oxynitrides have been prepared in the form of glasses, polycrystals, and thin films. The structures of these compounds were investigated by X-ray and neutron diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The ac impedance measurements indicate a significant improvement of ionic conductivity as the result of incorporation of nitrogen into the structure. In the case of polycrystalline Li{sub 2.88}PO{sub 3.73}N{sub 0.14} with the {gamma}-Li{sub 3}PO{sub 4} structure, the conductivity increased by several orders of magnitude on small addition of nitrogen. The highest conductivities in the bulk glasses and thin films were found to be 3.0 {times} 10{sup -7} and 8.9 {times} 10{sup -7} S{center_dot}cm{sup -1} at 25{degrees}C, respectively