A scoping review: Identifying targeted intervention strategies for workers with occupational hearing loss

An apparent disconnect exist in workplaces regarding identification of occupational hearing loss (OHL) and implementation of specific strategies to prevent progression of OHL, evident through continued high incidence of OHL. This scoping review aimed to identify evidence regarding targeted intervention used by industry, specifically to prevent the progression of OHL for workers. The scoping review was undertaken using the PRISMA-ScR methodology. Search terms were based on three broad categories, hearing loss, workplace, and intervention. Initially 1309 articles were identified for screening and 1,207 studies not meeting the criteria were excluded. Full text reviews of 102 articles were completed and a further 93 studies excluded. The scoping review produced nine studies which were quantitatively analysed. All interventions focused primarily on lower order controls, specifically administrative and personal protective equipment. Eight studies focused on awareness training, health monitoring, mandating hearing protection device use and fit testing, and using personal attenuation ratings as a predictor to OHL. Only one study mentioned isolation of workers from noise sources, and this was an interview study with workplace managers, not a specific intervention at a workplace. The result of the review highlights the lack of published literature on targeted interventions for workers with OHL. There is insufficient evidence to inform effective, impactful change in practice to prevent the progression of OHL. It is recommended that a system of collecting and assessing specific interventions and controls for workers with OHL be developed to better inform industry on strategies that will provide adequate protection for these workers

Risk of skin cancer after neonatal phototherapy : retrospective cohort study

Peer reviewedPostprin

Radio Observations of the Hubble Deep Field South region: I. Survey Description and Initial Results

This paper is the first of a series describing the results of the Australia Telescope Hubble Deep Field South (ATHDFS) radio survey. The survey was conducted at four wavelengths - 20, 11, 6, and 3 cm, over a 4-year period, and achieves an rms sensitivity of about 10 microJy at each wavelength. We describe the observations and data reduction processes, and present data on radio sources close to the centre of the HDF-S. We discuss in detail the properties of a subset of these sources. The sources include both starburst galaxies and galaxies powered by an active galactic nucleus, and range in redshift from 0.1 to 2.2. Some of them are characterised by unusually high radio-to-optical luminosities, presumably caused by dust extinction.Comment: Accepted by AJ. 32 pages, 4 tables, 3 figures. PDF with full-resolution figures is on http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rnorris/N197.pd

Identification of thyroid hormone receptor binding sites in developing mouse cerebellum

Background: Thyroid hormones play an essential role in early vertebrate development as well as other key processes. One of its modes of action is to bind to the thyroid hormone receptor (TR) which, in turn, binds to thyroid response elements (TREs) in promoter regions of target genes. The sequence motif for TREs remains largely undefined as does the precise chromosomal location of the TR binding sites. A chromatin immunoprecipitation on microarray (ChIP-chip) experiment was conducted using mouse cerebellum post natal day (PND) 4 and PND15 for the thyroid hormone receptor (TR) beta 1 to map its binding sites on over 5000 gene promoter regions. We have performed a detailed computational analysis of these data.Results: By analysing a recent spike-in study, the optimal normalization and peak identification approaches were determined for our dataset. Application of these techniques led to the identification of 211 ChIP-chip peaks enriched for TR binding in cerebellum samples. ChIP-PCR validation of 25 peaks led to the identification of 16 true positive TREs. Following a detailed literature re

Building on the past, shaping the future: The environmental mutagenesis and genomics society

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97167/1/em21765.pd

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a balloon-borne cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeter designed to search for evidence of inflation by measuring the large-angular scale CMB polarization signal. BICEP2 recently reported a detection of B-mode power corresponding to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.2 on ~2 degree scales. If the BICEP2 signal is caused by inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), then there should be a corresponding increase in B-mode power on angular scales larger than 18 degrees. PIPER is currently the only suborbital instrument capable of fully testing and extending the BICEP2 results by measuring the B-mode power spectrum on angular scales $\theta$ = ~0.6 deg to 90 deg, covering both the reionization bump and recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007, and four frequency bands to distinguish foregrounds. PIPER will accomplish this by mapping 85% of the sky in four frequency bands (200, 270, 350, 600 GHz) over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.5 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto four 32x40-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 140 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs), which rapidly modulate only the polarized sky signal at 3 Hz and allow PIPER to instantaneously measure the full Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) for each pointing. We describe the PIPER instrument and progress towards its first flight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, conference 915

Drug Discovery, Development and Deployment: A Report from the 28th Joint Conference of the U.S.-Japan Parasitic Diseases Panels, Baltimore, Maryland, July 1993

The 28th Joint Conference of the Parasitic Diseases Panels of the U.S.-Japan Cooperative Medical Sciences Program held in Baltimore, Maryland focused on current research within both countries on antiparasitic chemotherapy. This meeting report summarizes presentations of work in progress on antiparasitic drugs currently in use and drugs under development or in clinical trials, as well as reports on potentially unique parasite characteristics that may provide targets for development of future therapeutics

The thermal emission of the exoplanets WASP-1b and WASP-2b

We present a comparative study of the thermal emission of the transiting exoplanets WASP-1b and WASP-2b using the Spitzer Space Telescope. The two planets have very similar masses but suffer different levels of irradiation and are predicted to fall either side of a sharp transition between planets with and without hot stratospheres. WASP-1b is one of the most highly irradiated planets studied to date. We measure planet/star contrast ratios in all four of the IRAC bands for both planets (3.6-8.0um), and our results indicate the presence of a strong temperature inversion in the atmosphere of WASP-1b, particularly apparent at 8um, and no inversion in WASP-2b. In both cases the measured eclipse depths favor models in which incident energy is not redistributed efficiently from the day side to the night side of the planet. We fit the Spitzer light curves simultaneously with the best available radial velocity curves and transit photometry in order to provide updated measurements of system parameters. We do not find significant eccentricity in the orbit of either planet, suggesting that the inflated radius of WASP-1b is unlikely to be the result of tidal heating. Finally, by plotting ratios of secondary eclipse depths at 8um and 4.5um against irradiation for all available planets, we find evidence for a sharp transition in the emission spectra of hot Jupiters at an irradiation level of 2 x 10^9 erg/s/cm^2. We suggest this transition may be due to the presence of TiO in the upper atmospheres of the most strongly irradiated hot Jupiters.Comment: 10 pages, submitted to Ap

A Bright Submillimeter Source in the Bullet Cluster (1E0657--56) Field Detected with BLAST

We present the 250, 350, and 500 micron detection of bright submillimeter emission in the direction of the Bullet Cluster measured by the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST). The 500 micron centroid is coincident with an AzTEC 1.1 mm point-source detection at a position close to the peak lensing magnification produced by the cluster. However, the 250 micron and 350 micron centroids are elongated and shifted toward the south with a differential shift between bands that cannot be explained by pointing uncertainties. We therefore conclude that the BLAST detection is likely contaminated by emission from foreground galaxies associated with the Bullet Cluster. The submillimeter redshift estimate based on 250-1100 micron photometry at the position of the AzTEC source is z_phot = 2.9 (+0.6 -0.3), consistent with the infrared color redshift estimation of the most likely IRAC counterpart. These flux densities indicate an apparent far-infrared luminosity of L_FIR = 2E13 Lsun. When the amplification due to the gravitational lensing of the cluster is removed, the intrinsic far-infrared luminosity of the source is found to be L_FIR <= 10^12 Lsun, consistent with typical luminous infrared galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Maps are available at http://blastexperiment.info