Design of a homeopathic solution for chronic cough

Chronic cough is most commonly defined as a cough that persists for more than eight weeks and is estimated to affect more than 30 million people in the United States at any given time. Diseases contributing to the onset of chronic cough include asthma, pulmonary fibrosis, lung cancer, postnasal drip, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and bronchitis, and may include lifestyle choices such as smoking. For those who seek medical advice, pharmaceuticals and speech therapy are two common methods of combating chronic cough but serve to mask the symptoms rather than treat the problem; frequently, chronic cough is misdiagnosed or cannot be treated. Chronic cough negatively impacts an affected individual’s quality of life and often makes sleeping, eating, working, and speaking difficult. New hypotheses suggest hypersensitivity of the airway is the root cause of chronic cough in a large number of individuals. Though patients may experience different symptoms provoked by certain irritating factors such as postnasal drip, and GERD, it is hypothesized hypersensitivity is the link between a large quantity of chronic cough cases. The purpose of this research project was to design a prototype based on the patent pending method developed by Dr. Christy Ludlow to further investigate the relationship between hypersensitivity and chronic cough. The device enables researchers to control and monitor varying levels of vibration stimulus applied to the tracheal region of the neck with the goal of suppressing the urge to cough in persons with idiopathic cough. Through multiple iterations of user-centered design, a non-invasive wearable prototype was created for the first round of participant testing to assess the feasibility of the technology. Further testing and refinement of the device will validate vibration stimulus treatment for coughing

Chemical nonlinearities in relating intercontinental ozone pollution to anthropogenic emissions

Model studies typically estimate intercontinental influence on surface ozone by perturbing emissions from a source continent and diagnosing the ozone response in the receptor continent. Since the response to perturbations is non-linear due to chemistry, conclusions drawn from different studies may depend on the magnitude of the applied perturbation. We investigate this issue for intercontinental transport between North America, Europe, and Asia with sensitivity simulations in three global chemical transport models. In each region, we decrease anthropogenic emissions of NOx and nonmethane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) by 20% and 100%. We find strong nonlinearity in the response to NOx perturbations outside summer, reflecting transitions in the chemical regime for ozone production. In contrast, we find no significant nonlinearity to NOx perturbations in summer or to NMVOC perturbations year-round. The relative benefit of decreasing NOx vs. NMVOC from current levels to abate intercontinental pollution increases with the magnitude of emission reductions

Effects of stratosphere-troposphere chemistry coupling on tropospheric ozone

A new, computationally efficient coupled stratosphere-troposphere chemistry-climate model (S/T-CCM) has been developed based on three well-documented components: a 64-level general circulation model from the UK Met Office Unified Model, the tropospheric chemistry transport model (STOCHEM), and the UMSLIMCAT stratospheric chemistry module. This newly developed S/T-CCM has been evaluated with various observations, and it shows good performance in simulating important chemical species and their interdependence in both the troposphere and stratosphere. The modeled total column ozone agrees well with Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer observations. Modeled ozone profiles in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere are significantly improved compared to runs with the stratospheric chemistry and tropospheric chemistry models alone, and they are in good agreement with Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding satellite ozone profiles. The observed CO tape recorder is also successfully captured by the new CCM, and ozone-CO correlations are in accordance with Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment observations. However, because of limitations in vertical resolution, intrusion of CO-rich air in the stratosphere from the mesosphere could not be simulated in the current version of S/T-CCM. Additionally, the simulated stratosphere-to-troposphere ozone flux, which controls upper tropospheric OH and O3 concentrations, is found to be more realistic in the new coupled model compared to STOCHEM. © 2010 by the American Geophysical Union

What Is It Like to Be a Bot? : Toward More Immediate Wizard-of-Oz Control in Social Human–Robot Interaction

Several Wizard-of-Oz techniques have been developed to make robots appear autonomous and more social in human-robot interaction. Many of the existing solutions use control interfaces that introduce significant time delays and hamper the robot operator's ability to produce socially appropriate responses in real time interactions. We present work in progress on a novel wizard control interface designed to overcome these limitations:a motion tracking-based system which allows the wizard to act as if he or she is the robot. The wizard sees the other through the robot's perspective, and uses his or her own bodily movements to control it. We discuss potential applications and extensions of this system, and conclude by discussing possible methodological advantages and disadvantages

The Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS): Design, commissioning, data release, and detection of the first five fast radio bursts

Full list of authors: van Leeuwen, Joeri; Kooistra, Eric; Oostrum, Leon; Connor, Liam; Hargreaves, Jonathan E.; Maan, Yogesh; Pastor-Marazuela, Ines; Petroff, Emily; van der Schuur, Daniel; Sclocco, Alessio; Straal, Samayra M.; Vohl, Dany; Wijnholds, Stefan J.; Adams, Elizabeth A. K.; Adebahr, Bjoern; Attema, Jisk; Bassa, Cees; Bast, Jeanette E.; Bilous, Anna; de Blok, Willem J. G.; Boersma, Oliver M.; van Cappellen, Wim A.; Coolen, Arthur H. W. M.; Damstra, Sieds; Denes, Helga; van Diepen, Ger N. J.; Gardenier, David W.; Grange, Yan G.; Gunst, Andre W.; Hess, Kelley M.; Holties, Hanno; van der Hulst, Thijs; Hut, Boudewijn; Kutkin, Alexander; Loose, G. Marcel; Lucero, Danielle M.; Mika, Agnes; Mikhailov, Klim; Morganti, Raffaella; Moss, Vanessa A.; Mulder, Henk; Norden, Menno J.; Oosterloo, Tom A.; Orru, Emaneula; Paragi, Zsolt; de Reijer, Jan-Pieter R.; Schoenmakers, Arno P.; Stuurwold, Klaas J. C.; ter Veen, Sander; Wang, Yu-Yang; Zanting, Alwin W.; Ziemke, Jacob.--This is an Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Fast radio bursts (FRBs) must be powered by uniquely energetic emission mechanisms. This requirement has eliminated a number of possible source types, but several remain. Identifying the physical nature of FRB emitters arguably requires good localisation of more detections, as well as broad-band studies enabled by real-time alerting. In this paper, we present the Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS), a supercomputing radio-telescope instrument that performs real-time FRB detection and localisation on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) interferometer. It reaches coherent-addition sensitivity over the entire field of the view of the primary-dish beam. After commissioning results verified that the system performed as planned, we initiated the Apertif FRB survey (ALERT). Over the first 5 weeks we observed at design sensitivity in 2019, we detected five new FRBs, and interferometrically localised each of them to 0.4–10 sq. arcmin. All detections are broad band, very narrow, of the order of 1 ms in duration, and unscattered. Dispersion measures are generally high. Only through the very high time and frequency resolution of ARTS are these hard-to-find FRBs detected, producing an unbiased view of the intrinsic population properties. Most localisation regions are small enough to rule out the presence of associated persistent radio sources. Three FRBs cut through the halos of M31 and M33. We demonstrate that Apertif can localise one-off FRBs with an accuracy that maps magneto-ionic material along well-defined lines of sight. The rate of one every ~7 days ensures a considerable number of new sources are detected for such a study. The combination of the detection rate and localisation accuracy exemplified by the first five ARTS FRBs thus marks a new phase in which a growing number of bursts can be used to probe our Universe. © The Authors 2023.This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 617199 ('ALERT'); by Vici research programme 'ARGO' with project number 639.043.815, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO); by the Netherlands eScience Center under the project 'AA-ALERT' (027.015.G09, grant ASDI.15.406); by the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy, NOVA, under 'NOVA-NW3', and 'NOVA5-NW3-10.3.5.14'; and through CORTEX (NWA.1160.18.316), under the research programme NWA-ORC, financed by NWO. Instrumentation development was supported by NWO (grant 614.061.613 'ARTS') and NOVA ('NOVA4-ARTS'). PI of aforementioned grants is JvL. EP acknowledges funding from an NWO Veni Fellowship. The contributions of SMS were supported by NASA grant NNX17AL74G issued through the NNH16ZDA001N Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP). EAKA is supported by the WISE research programme, which is financed by NWO. BA acknowledges funding from the German Science Foundation DFG, within the Collaborative Research Center SFB1491 "Cosmic Interacting Matters - From Source to Signal". KMH acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" awarded to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (SEV-2017-0709), from the coordination of the participation in SKA-SPAIN, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN). KMH and TvdH acknowledge funding from the ERC under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 291531 ('HIStoryNU'). RM acknowledges support from the same programme under ERC Advanced Grant RADIOLIFE-320745. This work makes use of data from the Apertif system installed at the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope owned by ASTRON. ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, is an institute of NWO.With funding from the Spanish government through the "Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence" accreditation (CEX2021-001131-S).Peer reviewe

Detection of a lightning influence on tropical tropospheric ozone

Empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) are used to analyze a 14-year record of tropical tropospheric ozone columns (TTOCs) determined from satellite measurements. The first EOF explains 54% of TTOC variance and represents biomass burning in Africa and South America. The second EOF explains 20% of the variance and has a distinct lightning signature.Engineering and Applied Science

LOFAR discovery and wide-band characterisation of an ultra-steep spectrum AGN radio remnant associated with Abell 1318

We present the discovery of a very extended (550 kpc) and low-surface-brightness (3.3 µJy arcsec−2 at 144 MHz) radio emission region in Abell 1318. These properties are consistent with its characterisation as an active galactic nucleus (AGN) remnant radio plasma, based on its morphology and radio spectral properties. We performed a broad-band (54–1400 MHz) radio spectral index and curvature analysis using LOFAR, uGMRT, and WSRT-APERTIF data. We also derived the radiative age of the detected emission, estimating a maximum age of 250 Myr. The morphology of the source is remarkably intriguing, with two larger, oval-shaped components and a thinner, elongated, and filamentary structure in between, plausibly reminiscent of two aged lobes and a jet. Based on archival Swift as well as SDSS data we performed an X-ray and optical characterisation of the system, whose virial mass was estimated to be ∼7.4 × 1013 M. This places A1318 in the galaxy group regime. Interestingly, the radio source does not have a clear optical counterpart embedded in it, thus, we propose that it is most likely an unusual AGN remnant of previous episode(s) of activity of the AGN hosted by the brightest group galaxy (∼2.6 × 1012 M), which is located at a projected distance of ∼170 kpc in the current epoch. This relatively high offset may be a result of IGrM sloshing sourced by a minor merger. The filamentary morphology of the source may suggest that the remnant plasma has been perturbed by the system dynamics, however, only future deeper X-ray observations will be able to address this question.</p