Adhesive Joint Evaluation Using Lamb Wave Modes with Appropriate Displacement, Stress, and Energy Distribution Profiles

One of the most elusive yet critical problem in adhesive joints characterization is that of ‘kissing bond’ wherein good contact exists among the adherend and the adhesive, however with no acceptable levels of adhesion. To date, the kissing bond is difficult to be detected reliably by any of the methods including conventional ultrasound and thermal waves. Kissing bond which is a manufacturing defect/anomaly will substantially compromise the load bearing capability of the adhesive joint by initiating adhesive failure (in contrast to cohesive failure wherein the failure occurs within the thickness of the adhesive layer instead of a failure at the interface). Attempts to develop methods of detection of kissing bonds have been unsuccessful to date

Comparative effectiveness of common therapies for Wilson disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled studies

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Wilson disease (WD) is a rare disorder of copper metabolism. The objective of this systematic review is to determine the comparative effectiveness and safety of common treatments of WD. METHODS: We included WD patients of any age or stage and the study drugs D-penicillamine, zinc salts, trientine, and tetrathiomolybdate. The control could be placebo, no treatment, or any other treatment. We included prospective, retrospective, randomized, and non-randomized studies. We searched Medline and Embase via Ovid, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, and screened reference lists of included articles. Where possible, we applied random-effects meta-analyses. RESULTS: The 23 included studies reported on 2055 patients and mostly compared D-penicillamine to no treatment, zinc, trientine, or succimer. One study compared tetrathiomolybdate and trientine. Post-decoppering maintenance therapy was addressed in one study only. Eleven of 23 studies were of low quality. When compared to no treatment, D-penicillamine was associated with a lower mortality (odds ratio 0.013; 95% CI 0.0010 to 0.17). When compared to zinc, there was no association with mortality (odds ratio 0.73; 95% CI 0.16 to 3.40) and prevention or amelioration of clinical symptoms (odds ratio 0.84; 95% CI 0.48 to 1.48). Conversely, D-penicillamine may have a greater impact on side effects and treatment discontinuations than zinc. CONCLUSIONS: There are some indications that zinc is safer than D-penicillamine therapy while being similarly effective in preventing or reducing hepatic or neurologic WD symptoms. Study quality was low warranting cautious interpretation of our findings

A Co-Opted DEAD-Box RNA Helicase Enhances Tombusvirus Plus-Strand Synthesis

Replication of plus-strand RNA viruses depends on recruited host factors that aid several critical steps during replication. In this paper, we show that an essential translation factor, Ded1p DEAD-box RNA helicase of yeast, directly affects replication of Tomato bushy stunt virus (TBSV). To separate the role of Ded1p in viral protein translation from its putative replication function, we utilized a cell-free TBSV replication assay and recombinant Ded1p. The in vitro data show that Ded1p plays a role in enhancing plus-strand synthesis by the viral replicase. We also find that Ded1p is a component of the tombusvirus replicase complex and Ded1p binds to the 3′-end of the viral minus-stranded RNA. The data obtained with wt and ATPase deficient Ded1p mutants support the model that Ded1p unwinds local structures at the 3′-end of the TBSV (−)RNA, rendering the RNA compatible for initiation of (+)-strand synthesis. Interestingly, we find that Ded1p and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), which is another host factor for TBSV, play non-overlapping functions to enhance (+)-strand synthesis. Altogether, the two host factors enhance TBSV replication synergistically by interacting with the viral (−)RNA and the replication proteins. In addition, we have developed an in vitro assay for Flock house virus (FHV), a small RNA virus of insects, that also demonstrated positive effect on FHV replicase activity by the added Ded1p helicase. Thus, two small RNA viruses, which do not code for their own helicases, seems to recruit a host RNA helicase to aid their replication in infected cells

Classical kinetic energy, quantum fluctuation terms and kinetic-energy functionals

We employ a recently formulated dequantization procedure to obtain an exact expression for the kinetic energy which is applicable to all kinetic-energy functionals. We express the kinetic energy of an N-electron system as the sum of an N-electron classical kinetic energy and an N-electron purely quantum kinetic energy arising from the quantum fluctuations that turn the classical momentum into the quantum momentum. This leads to an interesting analogy with Nelson's stochastic approach to quantum mechanics, which we use to conceptually clarify the physical nature of part of the kinetic-energy functional in terms of statistical fluctuations and in direct correspondence with Fisher Information Theory. We show that the N-electron purely quantum kinetic energy can be written as the sum of the (one-electron) Weizsacker term and an (N-1)-electron kinetic correlation term. We further show that the Weizsacker term results from local fluctuations while the kinetic correlation term results from the nonlocal fluctuations. For one-electron orbitals (where kinetic correlation is neglected) we obtain an exact (albeit impractical) expression for the noninteracting kinetic energy as the sum of the classical kinetic energy and the Weizsacker term. The classical kinetic energy is seen to be explicitly dependent on the electron phase and this has implications for the development of accurate orbital-free kinetic-energy functionals. Also, there is a direct connection between the classical kinetic energy and the angular momentum and, across a row of the periodic table, the classical kinetic energy component of the noninteracting kinetic energy generally increases as Z increases.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. To appear in Theor Chem Ac

Developmental changes in the role of different metalinguistic awareness skills in Chinese reading acquisition from preschool to third grade

Copyright @ 2014 Wei et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.National Natural Science Foundation of China and Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

The Reflection of Ultrasound from Interface Layers in Adhesive Joints

The detection of a weak adhesive/adherend interface in an adhesive joint is one of the major current challenges in NDE; the lack of a satisfactory non destructive test for this region is retarding the exploitation of the advantages of adhesive bonding in safety critical areas. It is the interface layer which is affected by the common problem of slight contamination due to, for example, grease on the adherend surfaces prior to bonding. The interface is particularly important in aluminium-aluminium joints in which an inappropriate interface structure can cause greatly enhanced susceptibility to environmental attack [1]. Inspection of the interface layer is difficult because it is frequently only of the order of lμm thick, compared with an adhesive layer thickness of the order of 100 μm.</p

Neonates’ responses to repeated exposure to a still face

The main aims of the study were to examine whether human neonates' responses to communication disturbance modelled by the still-face paradigm were stable and whether their responses were affected by their previous experience with the still-face paradigm.The still face procedure, as a laboratory model of interpersonal stress, was administered repeatedly, twice, to 84 neonates (0 to 4 day olds), with a delay of an average of 1.25 day.Frame-by-frame analysis of the frequency and duration of gaze, distressed face, crying, sleeping and sucking behaviours showed that the procedure was stressful to them both times, that is, the still face effect was stable after repeated administration and newborns consistently responded to such nonverbal violation of communication. They averted their gaze, showed distress and cried more during the still-face phase in both the first and the second administration. They also showed a carry-over effect in that they continued to avert their gaze and displayed increased distress and crying in the first reunion period, but their gaze behaviour changed with experience, in the second administration. While in the first administration the babies continued averting their gaze even after the stressful still-face phase was over, this carry-over effect disappeared in the second administration, and the babies significantly increased their gaze following the still-face phase.After excluding explanations of fatigue, habituation and random effects, a self-other regulatory model is discussed as a possible explanation for this pattern

Genetic correlations between diabetes and glaucoma: an analysis of continuous and dichotomous phenotypes

Purpose: A genetic correlation is the proportion of phenotypic variance between traits that is shared on a genetic basis. Here we explore genetic correlations between diabetes- and glaucoma-related traits.Design: Cross-sectional study.Methods: We assembled genome-wide association study summary statistics from European-derived participants regarding diabetes-related traits like fasting blood sugar (FBS) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) and glaucoma-related traits (intraocular pressure (IOP), central corneal thickness (CCT), corneal hysteresis (CH), corneal resistance factor (CRF), cup-disc ratio (CDR), and primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG)). We included data from the National Eye Institute Glaucoma Human Genetics Collaboration Heritable Overall Operational Database, the UK Biobank and the International Glaucoma Genetics Consortium. We calculated genetic correlation (rg) between traits using linkage disequilibrium score regression. We also calculated genetic correlations between IOP, CCT and selected diabetes-related traits based on individual level phenotype data in two Northern European population-based samples using pedigree information and Sequential Oligogenic Linkage Analysis Routines (SOLAR).Results: Overall, there was little rg between diabetes- and glaucoma-related traits. Specifically, we found a non-significant negative correlation between T2D and POAG (rg=-0.14; p=0.16). Using SOLAR, the genetic correlations between measured IOP, CCT, FBS, fasting insulin and hemoglobin A1c, were null. In contrast, genetic correlations between IOP and POAG (rg ≥0.45; p≤3.0E-04) and between CDR and POAG were high (rg =0.57; p=2.8E-10). However, genetic correlations between corneal properties (CCT, CRF and CH) and POAG were low (rg range: -0.18 - 0.11) and non-significant (p≥0.07).Conclusion: These analyses suggest there is limited genetic correlation between diabetes- and glaucoma-related traits

Effect of solution saturation state and temperature on diopside dissolution

Steady-state dissolution rates of diopside are measured as a function of solution saturation state using a titanium flow-through reactor at pH 7.5 and temperature ranging from 125 to 175°C. Diopside dissolved stoichiometrically under all experimental conditions and rates were not dependent on sample history. At each temperature, rates continuously decreased by two orders of magnitude as equilibrium was approached and did not exhibit a dissolution plateau of constant rates at high degrees of undersaturation. The variation of diopside dissolution rates with solution saturation can be described equally well with a ion exchange model based on transition state theory or pit nucleation model based on crystal growth/dissolution theory from 125 to 175°C. At 175°C, both models over predict dissolution rates by two orders of magnitude indicating that a secondary phase precipitated in the experiments. The ion exchange model assumes the formation of a Si-rich, Mg-deficient precursor complex. Lack of dependence of rates on steady-state aqueous calcium concentration supports the formation of such a complex, which is formed by exchange of protons for magnesium ions at the surface. Fit to the experimental data yields [Formula: see text] where the Mg-H exchange coefficient, n = 1.39, the apparent activation energy, E(a )= 332 kJ mol(-1), and the apparent rate constant, k = 10(41.2 )mol diopside cm(-2 )s(-1). Fits to the data with the pit nucleation model suggest that diopside dissolution proceeds through retreat of steps developed by nucleation of pits created homogeneously at the mineral surface or at defect sites, where homogeneous nucleation occurs at lower degrees of saturation than defect-assisted nucleation. Rate expressions for each mechanism (i) were fit to [Formula: see text] where the step edge energy (α) for homogeneously nucleated pits were higher (275 to 65 mJ m(-2)) than the pits nucleated at defects (39 to 65 mJ m(-2)) and the activation energy associated with the temperature dependence of site density and the kinetic coefficient for homogeneously nucleated pits (E(b-homogeneous )= 2.59 × 10(-16 )mJ K(-1)) were lower than the pits nucleated at defects (E(b-defect assisted )= 8.44 × 10(-16 )mJ K(-1))