Exploration of the High Entropy Alloy Space as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem

High Entropy Alloys (HEAs), Multi-principal Component Alloys (MCA), or Compositionally Complex Alloys (CCAs) are alloys that contain multiple principal alloying elements. While many HEAs have been shown to have unique properties, their discovery has been largely done through costly and time-consuming trial-and-error approaches, with only an infinitesimally small fraction of the entire possible composition space having been explored. In this work, the exploration of the HEA composition space is framed as a Continuous Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CCSP) and solved using a novel Constraint Satisfaction Algorithm (CSA) for the rapid and robust exploration of alloy thermodynamic spaces. The algorithm is used to discover regions in the HEA Composition-Temperature space that satisfy desired phase constitution requirements. The algorithm is demonstrated against a new (TCHEA1) CALPHAD HEA thermodynamic database. The database is first validated by comparing phase stability predictions against experiments and then the CSA is deployed and tested against design tasks consisting of identifying not only single phase solid solution regions in ternary, quaternary and quinary composition spaces but also the identification of regions that are likely to yield precipitation-strengthened HEAs.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

History of anaesthetics

Citation: Mason, Kirk P. History of anaesthetics. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1904.Morse Department of Special CollectionsIntroduction: The use of anaesthetics (anesthetic) has been known for hundreds of years. The art of catalepsis, a sort of mesmerism, was one of the first methods of allaying pain that was put into practice. Herodotus, a Greek historian B. 0. 484-420, Pliny, a Roman naturalist 23-79, and Dioskorides, a Greek medical writer who flourished in the second century, mention in some of their manuscripts drugs that were used for the purpose of deadening pain. Mandragora was used by Italian physicians for this purpose. There is a Chinese physician who is credited with having used Cannabis, hemp, for the purpose of obviating the pains of surgical operations, by inhalation. It has been claimed that physicians of the Middle Ages were very skillful in the producing of insensibility by artificial means, and that many of the astonishing exhibitions of unconsciousness to pain were the effect of drugs and vapors. Sir Humphrey Davy, 1778-1829, one of the leading English chemists, appears to have been the first to comprehend the practicability of using anaesthesia (anesthesia) for surgical purposes. He discovered that nitro-genic protoxide would, with a reasonable degree of safety, remove the sense of pain and set the mind free from its bodily duties. Michael Faraday, a pupil of Davy's, secured similar results from inhaling sulphuric ether, but it was not until the latter part of the century that this was put to any practical use. It was then that Crawford W. Long of Georgia, Horace Wells of Hartford, and William T. G. Morton of Boston ventured to make some practical demonstrations with it. The latter two, who were dentists, used it in their practice, Wells using nitrous oxide, and Morton, sulphuric ether. Morton's success was so complete that he induced a surgeon to use it in the hospital. After many trials and legal conflicts the credit for the discovery was conceded to Morton. At first his discovery was not accepted very generally in the United States, but received a very speedy appreciation abroad. In the preceding lines I have tried to give a brief history of the use of anaesthetics (anesthetics) leading up to the discovery of the use of ether by Morton

Direct observation of size scaling and elastic interaction between nano-scale defects in collision cascades

Using in-situ transmission electron microscopy, we have directly observed nano-scale defects formed in ultra-high purity tungsten by low-dose high energy self-ion irradiation at 30K. At cryogenic temperature lattice defects have reduced mobility, so these microscope observations offer a window on the initial, primary damage caused by individual collision cascade events. Electron microscope images provide direct evidence for a power-law size distribution of nano-scale defects formed in high-energy cascades, with an upper size limit independent of the incident ion energy, as predicted by Sand et al. [Eur. Phys. Lett., 103:46003, (2013)]. Furthermore, the analysis of pair distribution functions of defects observed in the micrographs shows significant intra-cascade spatial correlations consistent with strong elastic interaction between the defects

MR-Clust: clustering of genetic variants in Mendelian randomization with similar causal estimates.

MOTIVATION: Mendelian randomization is an epidemiological technique that uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to estimate the causal effect of a risk factor on an outcome. We consider a scenario in which causal estimates based on each variant in turn differ more strongly than expected by chance alone, but the variants can be divided into distinct clusters, such that all variants in the cluster have similar causal estimates. This scenario is likely to occur when there are several distinct causal mechanisms by which a risk factor influences an outcome with different magnitudes of causal effect. We have developed an algorithm MR-Clust that finds such clusters of variants, and so can identify variants that reflect distinct causal mechanisms. Two features of our clustering algorithm are that it accounts for differential uncertainty in the causal estimates, and it includes 'null' and 'junk' clusters, to provide protection against the detection of spurious clusters. RESULTS: Our algorithm correctly detected the number of clusters in a simulation analysis, outperforming methods that either do not account for uncertainty or do not include null and junk clusters. In an applied example considering the effect of blood pressure on coronary artery disease risk, the method detected four clusters of genetic variants. A post hoc hypothesis-generating search suggested that variants in the cluster with a negative effect of blood pressure on coronary artery disease risk were more strongly related to trunk fat percentage and other adiposity measures than variants not in this cluster. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MR-Clust can be downloaded from https://github.com/cnfoley/mrclust. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

MDI-GPU: accelerating integrative modelling for genomic-scale data using GP-GPU computing.

The integration of multi-dimensional datasets remains a key challenge in systems biology and genomic medicine. Modern high-throughput technologies generate a broad array of different data types, providing distinct--but often complementary--information. However, the large amount of data adds burden to any inference task. Flexible Bayesian methods may reduce the necessity for strong modelling assumptions, but can also increase the computational burden. We present an improved implementation of a Bayesian correlated clustering algorithm, that permits integrated clustering to be routinely performed across multiple datasets, each with tens of thousands of items. By exploiting GPU based computation, we are able to improve runtime performance of the algorithm by almost four orders of magnitude. This permits analysis across genomic-scale data sets, greatly expanding the range of applications over those originally possible. MDI is available here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/systemsbiology/research/software/

Ion Mobility Shift of Isotopologues in a High Kinetic Energy Ion Mobility Spectrometer (HiKE-IMS) at Elevated Effective Temperatures

Ion mobility spectrometers (IMS) separate ions mainly by ion–neutral collision cross section and to a lesser extent by ion mass and effective temperature. When investigating isotopologues, the difference in collision cross section can be assumed negligible. Since the mobility shift of isotopologues is thus mainly caused by their difference in mass and effective temperature, the investigation of isotopologues can provide important insights into the theory of ion mobility. However, in classical IMS operated at ambient pressure, cluster formation with neutral molecules occurs, which significantly influences the mobility shift of isotopologues and thus makes a sound investigation of the effect of ion mass and effective temperature on the ion mobility difficult. In this work, the relative ion mobility of several organic compounds and their 13C-labeled isotopologues is studied in a High Kinetic Energy Ion Mobility Spectrometer (HiKE-IMS) at high reduced electric fields up to 120 Td, which allows the investigation of nonclustered ion species and thus enables a sound investigation of the mobility shift of isotopologues. The results show that the measured relative ion mobilities of isotopologues having the same effective temperature and, thus, their ion mass dominating the relative ion mobility agree well with theoretical relative ion mobilities predicted by the theory of ion mobility

Universal design for learning in physical education: Overview and critical reflection

Universal design for learning (UDL) has been advocated for by adapted physical education scholars as a panacea to the challenges associated with teaching disabled and nondisabled students together in physical education. So much so that UDL currently occupies a privileged and largely unquestioned position in adapted physical education scholarship and practice, until now. To move scholarship forward, this article draws on published theoretical and empirical work relating to UDL generally and in physical education in particular to critically discuss the scientific research supporting, or not, the use of UDL as a so-called inclusive approach. We end this article with a call to action for scholars in this field, ourselves included, to conduct theoretically guided and empirically informed research relating to UDL in physical education, which adheres to established hallmarks of research quality that are tied to the ontological and epistemological assumptions of researchers because, at present, it is conspicuous by its absence

Circulating Health Information toward Health Action

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the most prevalent chronic disease in Canada, with 4 in 5 Canadians having at least one CV risk factor. The Canadian Cardiovascular Harmonized National Guideline Endeavour (C-CHANGE) guidelines harmonize recommendations from clinical practice guidelines to improve the prevention and treatment of CVD (Tobe et al., 2011). C-CHANGE clinicians engaged a team of healthcare design students to formulate design proposals for knowledge translation of lifestyle recommendations from the guidelines. The research question explored was how might we help people learn to self-manage their CV risk? Interviews were conducted with patients and clinicians in primary care and specialist clinics to generate insights. Clinicians participated in an initial participatory design workshop that aimed to map and understand complex health information journeys. A second co-design workshop developed proposals for intervention in the system, aided by the use of personas and storyboards. Reading the health action map Research findings were summarized in a system map. The circular service blueprint proposes brief bursts of healthy lifestyle information created by multidisciplinary teams and targeted to the public at multiple touchpoints. A public-facing website is proposed as an interactive and supportive online repository of evidence-based health information. The next steps would include service design and evaluation of population health impacts