77 research outputs found
Roadkill...Design and Structure of an Electric Race Car
This year, senior engineers have worked on building an electric car that will be used now and for future capstone teams to improve on, and to one day race in FSAE Competition..The goal of this capstone is to not only build a drivable car, but to challenge students within the topics of engineering and exploring what it takes to perform in complex projects. Each team member was assigned a role, these roles include, 3D designer, welder, electronics assembler, and team manager, as well as being joined by Junior Directed Research students
Impact of Aircraft Noise on Health
Aircraft noise exposure is an environmental stressor and has been linked to various adverse health outcomes, such as annoyance, sleep disturbance, and cardiovascular diseases. Aircraft noise can trigger both psychological (annoyance and disturbance) and physiological stress responses (e.g. activation of the cardiovascular system and release of stress hormones). People are usually able to deal with this kind of stressor. However, a constant exposure to aircraft noise can cause a continuous state of stress. This in turn can constrain a person’s ability to regenerate and restore its resources to cope with the noise situation. As a consequence, the risk for certain negative health outcomes can be increased. Within the ANIMA project, literature reviews on the effects of aircraft noise on health outcomes have been performed. This chapter gives an overview of the relevant health outcomes affected by aircraft noise and summarises the results of different reviews and studies on these outcomes. Additionally, the underlying mechanisms of how noise impacts health are explained for daytime as well as night-time aircraft noise exposure (i.e. while sleeping). Further, the relevance of considering not only the general population, but vulnerable groups as well (such as children and elderly people) is described. Lastly, open questions for further studies are presented and discussed
Astro2020 Project White Paper: The Cosmic Accelerometer
We propose an experiment, the Cosmic Accelerometer, designed to yield
velocity precision of cm/s with measurement stability over years to
decades. The first-phase Cosmic Accelerometer, which is at the scale of the
Astro2020 Small programs, will be ideal for precision radial velocity
measurements of terrestrial exoplanets in the Habitable Zone of Sun-like stars.
At the same time, this experiment will serve as the technical pathfinder and
facility core for a second-phase larger facility at the Medium scale, which can
provide a significant detection of cosmological redshift drift on a 6-year
timescale. This larger facility will naturally provide further detection/study
of Earth twin planet systems as part of its external calibration process. This
experiment is fundamentally enabled by a novel low-cost telescope technology
called PolyOculus, which harnesses recent advances in commercial off the shelf
equipment (telescopes, CCD cameras, and control computers) combined with a
novel optical architecture to produce telescope collecting areas equivalent to
standard telescopes with large mirror diameters. Combining a PolyOculus array
with an actively-stabilized high-precision radial velocity spectrograph
provides a unique facility with novel calibration features to achieve the
performance requirements for the Cosmic Accelerometer
Coping with Aviation Noise: Non-Acoustic Factors Influencing Annoyance and Sleep Disturbance from Noise
Annoyance and sleep disturbances due to aircraft noise represent a major burden of disease. They are considered as health effects as well as part of the causal pathway from exposure to long-term effects such as cardiovascular and metabolic diseases as well as mental disorders (e.g. depression). Both annoyance and sleep disturbance are not only determined by the noise exposure, but also to a considerable extent by non-acoustic factors. This chapter summarises the most relevant non-acoustic factors and briefly explains their mechanisms on annoyance and sleep as well as the potential to address these factors via intervention methods aiming at the reduction of adverse noise outcomes and an increase in the quality of life of airport residents. Here, the focus is on airport management measures that are considered to help improve the residents’ coping capacity. Findings from the ANIMA case studies with regard to main aspects of quality of life in airport residents around European airports are briefly reported and recommendations for a community-oriented airport management are derived
Exemplification case studies as a focus for the implementation of best practices related to aircraft noise management at airports
This study presents the analysis of six airport exemplification case studies undertaken in the European project “Aviation Noise Impact Management through Novel Approaches - ANIMA”. Best practices related to aircraft noise management at airports in individual airport contexts were implemented and evaluated. Case studies on communication and community engagement in airport noise management were investigated at Heathrow (United Kingdom), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Rotterdam The Hague (The Netherlands) airports. For Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine) and Iasi (Romania) airports, the implementation of interventions related to land-use planning was examined. The interdependencies between noise and emissions were studied for Cluj (Romania) airport. All case studies were performed under the scope of the corresponding national legislation and guidelines. Individual characteristics of airport operations were taken into account. The case studies were aligned with expectations and priorities of all involved stakeholders, such as representatives of airport operators, local communities, civil aviation authorities and policy makers. The efficacy of the noise management case studies is assessed in terms of: the capacity to negotiate consensus outcomes, the extent to which noise impact reductions were achieved; and the participants' satisfaction with the process and outcomes. Experience gained from these studies will be used to distill best practices for future interventions
Homeosis in a scorpion supports a telopodal origin of pectines and components of the book lungs
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated
Application of the rainbow trout derived intestinal cell line (RTgutGC) for ecotoxicological studies: molecular and cellular responses following exposure to copper.
There is an acknowledged need for in vitro fish intestinal model to help understand dietary exposure to chemicals in the aquatic environment. The presence and use of such models is however largely restrictive due to technical difficulties in the culturing of enterocytes in general and the availability of appropriate established cell lines in particular. In this study, the rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) intestinal derived cell line (RTgutGC) was used as a surrogate for the "gut sac" method. To facilitate comparison, RTgutGC cells were grown as monolayers (double-seeded) on permeable Transwell supports leading to a two-compartment intestinal model consisting of polarised epithelium. This two-compartment model divides the system into an upper apical (lumen) and a lower basolateral (portal blood) compartment. In our studies, these cells stained weakly for mucosubstances, expressed the tight junction protein ZO-1 in addition to E-cadherin and revealed the presence of polarised epithelium in addition to microvilli protrusions. The cells also revealed a comparable transepithelial electrical resistance (TEER) to the in vivo situation. Importantly, the cell line tolerated apical saline (1:1 ratio) thus mimicking the intact organ to allow assessment of uptake of compounds across the intestine. Following an exposure over 72 h, our study demonstrated that the RTgutGC cell line under sub-lethal concentrations of copper sulphate (Cu) and modified saline solutions demonstrated uptake of the metal with saturation levels comparable to short term ex situ gut sac preparations. Gene expression analysis revealed no significant influence of pH or time on mRNA expression levels of key stress related genes (i.e. CYP3A, GST, mtA, Pgp and SOD) in the Transwell model. However, significant positive correlations were found between all genes investigated suggesting a co-operative relationship amongst the genes studied. When the outlined characteristics of the cell line are combined with the division of compartments, the RTgutGC double seeded model represents a potential animal replacement model for ecotoxicological studies. Overall, this model could be used to study the effects and predict aquatic gastrointestinal permeability of metals and other environmentally relevant contaminants in a cost effective and high throughput manner
On the discovery of stars, quasars, and galaxies in the Southern Hemisphere with S-PLUS DR2
This paper provides a catalogue of stars, quasars, and galaxies for the Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey Data Release 2 (S-PLUS DR2) in the Stripe 82 region. We show that a 12-band filter system (5 Sloan-like and 7 narrow bands) allows better performance for object classification than the usual analysis based solely on broad bands (regardless of infrared information). Moreover, we show that our classification is robust against missing values. Using spectroscopically confirmed sources retrieved from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR16 and DR14Q, we train a random forest classifier with the 12 S-PLUS magnitudes + 4 morphological features. A second random forest classifier is trained with the addition of the W1 (3.4 μm) and W2 (4.6 μm) magnitudes from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Forty-four per cent of our catalogue have WISE counterparts and are provided with classification from both models. We achieve 95.76 per cent (52.47 per cent) of quasar purity, 95.88 per cent (92.24 per cent) of quasar completeness, 99.44 per cent (98.17 per cent) of star purity, 98.22 per cent (78.56 per cent) of star completeness, 98.04 per cent (81.39 per cent) of galaxy purity, and 98.8 per cent (85.37 per cent) of galaxy completeness for the first (second) classifier, for which the metrics were calculated on objects with (without) WISE counterpart. A total of 2926 787 objects that are not in our spectroscopic sample were labelled, obtaining 335 956 quasars, 1347 340 stars, and 1243 391 galaxies. From those, 7.4 per cent, 76.0 per cent, and 58.4 per cent were classified with probabilities above 80 per cent. The catalogue with classification and probabilities for Stripe 82 S-PLUS DR2 is available for download. © 2021 The Author(s).This work has been supported by a PhD fellowship to the lead author from Fundacao de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo (FAPESP), 2019/01312-2. LN also acknowledges the support of Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior -Brasil (CAPES) -Finance Code 001 and FAPESP through process number 2014/10566-4. LN also thanks the staff of the Astronomy department from the University of Florida, where part of this work was done; Marco Antonio dos Santos and Ulisses Manzo Castello for the technical support; Luis Manrique for the technical support, feedback, and discussions about Machine Learning; Christian Massao Tsujiguchi Takagi and Vin ' icius Amaral Haga for the feedback on the accessibility of the figures in this paper; Gustavo Oliveira Schwarz for building the database. CMdO acknowledges funding from FAPESP through grants 2009/542028 and 2019/26492-3 and funding from the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq), through grant 309209/2019-6. NSTH acknowledges FAPESP (grants 2017/25835-9 and 2015/22308-2). CQ acknowledges support from FAPESP (grants 2015/11442-0 and 2019/06766-1). AM acknowledges FAPESP scholarship grant 2018/25671-9. CEB acknowledges FAPESP, grant 2016/12331-0. FA-F acknowledges funding for this work from FAPESP grant 2018/20977-2. LSJ acknowledges support from Brazilian agencies FAPESP (2019/10923-5) and CNPq (304819/201794). AAC acknowledges support from Fundacao de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ; grant E26/203.186/2016) and CNPq (grants 304971/2016-2 and 401669/2016-5). EVL acknowledges funding for this work from CNPq grant 169181/2017-0 and CAPES grant 88887.470064/2019-00. MLB acknowledges FAPESP, grants 2018/09165-6 and 2019/23388-0. KMD acknowledges support from FAPERJ (grant E-26/203.184/2017), CNPq (grant 312702/2017-5) and the Serrapilheira Institute (grant Serra-1709-17357). AAC acknowledges support from FAPERJ (grant E26/203.186/2016), CNPq (grants 304971/2016-2 and 401669/2016-5), from the Universidad de Alicante under contract UATALENTO18-02, and from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the `Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa' award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). ARL acknowledges the financial support from CNPq through the PCI (Programa de Capacitacao Institucional) fellowship. The S-PLUS project, including the T80-South robotic telescope and the S-PLUS scientific survey, was founded as a partnership between FAPESP, the Observatorio Nacional (ON), the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), and the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), with important financial and practical contributions from other collaborating institutes in Brazil, Chile (Universidad de La Serena), and Spain (Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón, CEFCA). We further acknowledge financial support from FAPESP, CNPq, CAPES, FAPERJ, and the Brazilian Innovation Agency (FINEP).Peer reviewe
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