Experimental Design for the Evaluation of Detection Techniques of Hidden Corrosion Beneath the Thermal Protective System of the Space Shuttle Orbiter

The United States Space Operational Space Shuttle Fleet Consists of three shuttles with an average age of 19.7 years. Shuttles are exposed to corrosive conditions while undergoing final closeout for missions at the launch pad and extreme conditions during ascent, orbit, and descent that may accelerate the corrosion process. Structural corrosion under TPS could progress undetected (without tile removal) and eventually result in reduction in structural capability sufficient to create negative margins of . safety and ultimate loss of local structural capability

Finding a Concrete Utopia in the Dystopia of a 'Sub-City'

This article examines a ten-year long series of annual short-term interventions with young people living in Dharavi (India) that has led to a number of public theatre events. The partnership offers a unique training experience to students from the UK in theatre facilitation, and a regular opportunity to participate in theatre for young people in Dharavi. It brings together students from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), working collaboratively with an Indian theatre practitioner, an NGO based in Mumbai, and young people who live in Dharavi. In the article, I explore the role theatre plays in the precarious lives of those who live in Dharavi, and the potential of this on-going partnership to develop a theatre of change in a community and site affected by extreme poverty. Focusing on the longevity of this applied theatre project and drawing on the writing of Paul Ricoeur on utopia, I argue that this on-going exchange can be understood both as a form of cultural invasion and, at the same time, a utopian community theatre practice. Whilst the project continues to raise troubling questions about cultural colonisation and power, the integrated investment of partners and participants over time has generated a resilient sense of optimism as well as, to a more limited degree, evidence of long-term positive change

Reclaiming heritage: colourization, culture wars and the politics of nostalgia

This article considers the discursive continuities between a specifically liberal defence of cultural patrimony, evident in the debate over film colourization, and the culture war critique associated with neo-conservatism. It examines how a rhetoric of nostalgia, linked to particular ideas of authenticity,canonicity and tradition,has been mobilized by the right and the left in attempts to stabilize the confguration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity. While different in scale, colourization and multiculturalism were seen to create respective (postmodern) barbarisms against which defenders of culture, heritage and good taste could unite. I argue that in its defence of the ‘classic’ work of art, together with principles of aesthetic distinction and the value of cultural inheritance,the anti-colourization lobby helped enrich and legitimize a discourse of tradition that, at the end of the 1980s, was beginning to reverberate powerfully in the conservative challenge to a ‘crisis’ within higher education and the humanities. This article attempts to complicate the contemporary politics of nostalgia, showing how a defence of cultural patrimony has distinguished major and minor culture wars, engaging left and right quite differently but with similar presuppositions

Holy anorexia: Eating disorders symptomatology and religiosity among Muslim women in the United Arab Emirates

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. There is a substantial body of literature reporting a negative association between religiosity and psychiatric symptoms. In the context of eating disorders, however, this relationship appears to be reversed. The few studies exploring the relationship between religiosity and eating disorders have mostly focused on the Judeo-Christian religious traditions in Western nations. The present study examines this relationship among Muslim college women from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). All participants (N = 1069) independently completed the religious commitment inventory (RCI-10) and the eating attitudes test (EAT-26). As hypothesised, there was a positive association between religiosity and eating disorders symptoms. Furthermore, those scoring above the EAT-26 cut-off reported significantly greater levels of religiosity. These findings suggest that heightened religiosity among young Emirati women may represent a vulnerability factor for eating disorders. Preventative initiatives in the UAE should consider focusing on religiosity

Therapeutic utility of aspirin in the Apc(Min/+) murine model of colon carcinogenesis

BACKGROUND: In recent years it has become evident that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, in particular aspirin represent a potential class of cancer chemotherapeutic agents. Despite the wealth of knowledge gained from epidemiological, clinical and animal studies, the effectiveness of aspirin to treat established gastrointestinal cancer has not been determined. The present study examines the ability of aspirin to treat established polyposis in Min/+ mice. METHODS: Min/+ mice with established polyposis were treated orally once daily from 12–16 weeks of age with either drug vehicle or aspirin (25 mg/kg). Upon completion of treatment, the number, location and size of intestinal tumours was determined. Additional variables examined were the number of apoptotic cells within tumours and COX activity. RESULTS: Administration of aspirin for 4 weeks to Min/+ mice produce no effect on tumour number compared to vehicle-treated Min/+ mice (65 ± 8 vs. 63 ± 9, respectively). In addition, aspirin had no effect on tumour size or location. However, aspirin treatment produced a greater than 2-fold (p < 0.05) increase in the number of apoptotic positive cells within tumours and significantly decreased hepatic PGE(2) content. CONCLUSIONS: Aspirin was found to have no effect on tumour number and size when administered to Min/+ mice with established polyposis. The findings in the present study call in to question the utility of aspirin as a stand-alone treatment for established GI cancer. However, aspirin's ability to significantly promote apoptosis may render it suitable for use in combinatorial chemotherapy

Supersymmetric Dark Matter

There is almost universal agreement among astronomers that most of the mass in the Universe and most of the mass in the Galactic halo is dark. Many lines of reasoning suggest that the dark matter consists of some new, as yet undiscovered, weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP). There is now a vast experimental effort being surmounted to detect WIMPS in the halo. The most promising techniques involve direct detection in low-background laboratory detectors and indirect detection through observation of energetic neutrinos from annihilation of WIMPs that have accumulated in the Sun and/or the Earth. Of the many WIMP candidates, perhaps the best motivated and certainly the most theoretically developed is the neutralino, the lightest superpartner in many supersymmetric theories. We review the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model and discuss prospects for detection of neutralino dark matter. We review in detail how to calculate the cosmological abundance of the neutralino and the event rates for both direct- and indirect-detection schemes, and we discuss astrophysical and laboratory constraints on supersymmetric models. We isolate and clarify the uncertainties from particle physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics that enter at each step in the calculation. We briefly review other related dark-matter candidates and detection techniques.Comment: The complete postscript file is available at ftp://ftp.npac.syr.edu/pub/users/jungman/susyreview/susyreview.ps.Z The TeX source and figures (plain TeX; macros included) are at ftp://ftp.npac.syr.edu/pub/users/jungman/susyreview/susyreview.tar.Z Full paper NOT submitted to lanl archive: table of contents only. To appear in Physics Report

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie