Plasma neuronal specific enolase : a potential stage diagnostic marker in human African trypanosomiasis

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. Funding: This work was supported through grants from the Wellcome Trust [082786] and Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Urban systems of survival: Building a resilient capacity of food and housing in the city

As people migrate to cities in increasing numbers, infrastructure, resources and resilience becomes taxed and fragile. An urban challenge is to create a more sustainable and resilient city that can provide affordable food and housing for it’s inhabitants. This paper identifies key related issues, and explores a number of systemic approaches to integrating food and housing to build capacity and create a more resilient city ecology. Considered, as a systemic problem, Toronto being a large multicultural centre is a good case study with a serious need for affordable access to nutritious, culturally appropriate food, and housing to serve families, the working poor, and new Canadians, many of which are looking for rental accommodations. Consideration of mixed-use space that includes low, medium and high-density residential space, and possible options of urban food production highlights opportunities. The need for a local self sufficient food system, is paired with the competing need of an affordable place to live, to consider merged alternatives of growing local food within the emerging new contexts of affordable urban communities. Summary points are outlined as a series of next step recommendations to suggest a way forward to the built environment of the alternative city of the future, which must be self-sufficient, and build the capacity to generate its own resources in terms of energy and food from within the city itself

Morpheus Lander Testing Campaign

NASA s Morpheus Project has developed and tested a prototype planetary lander capable of vertical takeoff and landing designed to serve as a testbed for advanced spacecraft technologies. The Morpheus vehicle has successfully performed a set of integrated vehicle test flights including hot-fire and tether tests, ultimately culminating in an un-tethered "free-flight" This development and testing campaign was conducted on-site at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), less than one year after project start. Designed, developed, manufactured and operated in-house by engineers at JSC, the Morpheus Project represents an unprecedented departure from recent NASA programs and projects that traditionally require longer development lifecycles and testing at remote, dedicated testing facilities. This paper documents the integrated testing campaign, including descriptions of test types (hot-fire, tether, and free-flight), test objectives, and the infrastructure of JSC testing facilities. A major focus of the paper will be the fast pace of the project, rapid prototyping, frequent testing, and lessons learned from this departure from the traditional engineering development process at NASA s Johnson Space Center

Tip of the Red Giant Branch Bounds on the Neutrino Magnetic Dipole Moment Revisited

We use a novel method to constrain the neutrino magnetic dipole moment ($\mu_{\nu}$) using the empirically-calibrated tip of the red giant branch I-band magnitude that fully accounts for uncertainties in stellar physics. Our method uses machine learning to emulate the results of stellar evolution codes. This reduces the I-Band magnitude computation time to milliseconds, which enables a Bayesian statistical analysis where $\mu_{\nu}$ is varied simultaneously with the stellar physics, allowing for a complete exploration of parameter space. We find the region $\mu_{\nu} \leq 6\times10^{-12}\mu_{\textrm{B}}$ (with $\mu_{\textrm{B}}$ the Bohr magneton), previously believed to be excluded, is unconstrained after accounting for degeneracies with stellar physics. It is likely that larger values are similarly unconstrained. We discuss the implications of our results for future neutrino magnetic dipole moment searches and for other astrophysical probes.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures. Dataset and code available at https://zenodo.org/record/817332

An Infinite Family of Connected 1-Factorisations of Complete 3-Uniform Hypergraphs

A connected 1-factorisation is a 1-factorisation of a hypergraph for which the union of each pair of distinct 1-factors is a connected hypergraph. A uniform 1-factorisation is a 1-factorisation of a hypergraph for which the union of each pair of distinct 1-factors is isomorphic to the same subhypergraph, and a uniform-connected 1-factorisation is a uniform 1-factorisation in which that subhypergraph is connected. Chen and Lu [Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, 46(2) 475--497, 2017] describe a family of 1-factorisations of the complete 3-uniform hypergraph on $q+1$ vertices, where $q\equiv 2\pmod 3$ is a prime power. In this paper, we show that their construction yields a connected 1-factorisation only when $q=2,5,11$ or $q=2^p$ for some odd prime $p$, and a uniform 1-factorisation only for $q=2,5,8$ (each of these is a uniform-connected 1-factorisation).Comment: 11 page

The Effect of Bubble Bottle Humidifiers on Absolute Humidity When Using Low Flowrates in Neonates in Critical Care Settings: A Bench Study

Background: Humidification to the neonate is a critical part of quality care. However, there is a lack of research on the effectiveness of non-heated nasal cannula humidifiers at flowrates less than 2 LPM. This bench study evaluated the amount of absolute humidity potentially delivered to the neonate at five commonly-used low flowrates in the neonatal patient population. Methods: A Salter Labs 1601-7 infant cannula was connected to a Hudson RCI AquaPak 340 ml humidifier; an inline CEM DT-321 hygrometer assessed the humidity at the distal end of the cannula. The following flowrates were selected: 1, ½, ¼, ⅛, and 1/16 LPM. Each flowrate ran continuously for 24 hours with a humidifier inline. Before each test was run, the temperature and relative humidity were measured with the hygrometer and recorded, at the following locations: 1) ambient, 2) at the end of the cannula prior to humidifier being connected, and 3) at the end of the cannula after the humidifier was connected. After each test was completed, the ambient relative humidity and temperature were recorded at each location; the absolute humidity was calculated from the results. The humidifiers were each weighed before and after each test with an AND EJ-610 scale and results recorded in order to determine the total amount of water displaced from the bottle over 24-hours. Each trial was repeated twice, at each flow rate. Results: As the flowrate decreased the weight loss from the humidifier decreased. The absolute humidity prior to the connection of the humidifier and after the connection to the humidifier changed very little, regardless of the flow rate, averaging between -1 mg/L and 1 mg/L. Conclusion: Insensible water loss can vary widely in infants and neonates, but is estimated to average between 15 ml/kg/day and 170 ml/kg/day. Based on the results of this study, there is minimal increase in absolute humidity delivered to the neonate at the low flowrates relative to expected insensible water loss. The cost and infection risk associated with running a humidifier is likely unnecessary, due to the lack of absolute humidity delivered to the neonate