The Euthanasia of Radically Defective Neonates: Some Statutory Considerations

Advances in medical technology, discoveries in pharmacology, an developments in bio-engineering have made it possible for the modem physician to save and/or sustain the lives of individuals who but a few decades ago would have died. These developments have proved a mixed blessing. While on the one hand they have allowed the physician to exercise his profession more successfully, on the other they have opened up before him a domain of decision problems that few of his predecessors have had to face. The thrust of these problems may be focussed into a single question: Ought he to employ the techniques, drugs and devices thus at his disposal in all cases, or ought he to proceed selectively

The Right to Life of Potential Persons

The law accords an individual the right to sue for damages sustained in utero when these damages are the result of what would otherwise be described as criminally negligent treatment. Recent court actions involving children subjected to the influence of thalidomide during certain critical stages of their fetal development 1 make this only too clear. 2 At the same time, however, the law also permits abortion: the deliberate and intentional killing of fetuses at precisely those stages of their development at which thalidomide damage would be sustained were the drug to be administered. 3 In adopting these two stances, the law appears to find itself in a position of conflict. For the right to sue for damages is reserved solely for those individuals which in one sense or another are persons; 4 and in taking a favourable stance in the thalidomide cases, 5 the law seems to be operating on the principle that those individuals who suffer morphological damage as a result of exposure to the drug in fact enjoyed the status of persons at that particular time. On the other hand, in permitting abortions to occur at that particular stage of fetal development, the law seems to be operating on the principle that these individuals are not yet persons; 6 for otherwise, the act of abortion would be one of murder

Diffusion and jump-length distribution in liquid and amorphous Cu33_{33}Zr67_{67}

Using molecular dynamics simulation, we calculate the distribution of atomic jum ps in Cu$_{33}$Zr$_{67}$ in the liquid and glassy states. In both states the distribution of jump lengths can be described by a temperature independent exponential of the length and an effective activation energy plus a contribution of elastic displacements at short distances. Upon cooling the contribution of shorter jumps dominates. No indication of an enhanced probability to jump over a nearest neighbor distance was found. We find a smooth transition from flow in the liquid to jumps in the g lass. The correlation factor of the diffusion constant decreases with decreasing temperature, causing a drop of diffusion below the Arrhenius value, despite an apparent Arrhenius law for the jump probability

A cylindrical Penning trap for capture, mass selective cooling, and bunching of radioactive ion beams

A Penning trap ion accumulator, cooler, and buncher for low energy ion beams has been developed for the ISOLTRAP mass spectrometer at ISOLDE/CERN. A cylindrical electrode configuration is used for the creation of a nested trapping potential. This is required for efficient accumulation of externally produced ions and for high mass selectivity by buffer gas cooling. The design goal of a mass resolving power of about $1\cdot 10^{5}$ has been achieved. Isobar separation has been demonstrated for radioactive rare earth ion beams delivered by the ISOLDE on-line mass separator

Status and overview of development of the Silicon Pixel Detector for the PHENIX experiment at the BNL RHIC

We have developed a silicon pixel detector to enhance the physics capabilities of the PHENIX experiment. This detector, consisting of two layers of sensors, will be installed around the beam pipe at the collision point and covers a pseudo-rapidity of | \eta | < 1.2 and an azimuth angle of | \phi | ~ 2{\pi}. The detector uses 200 um thick silicon sensors and readout chips developed for the ALICE experiment. In order to meet the PHENIX DAQ readout requirements, it is necessary to read out 4 readout chips in parallel. The physics goals of PHENIX require that radiation thickness of the detector be minimized. To meet these criteria, the detector has been designed and developed. In this paper, we report the current status of the development, especially the development of the low-mass readout bus and the front-end readout electronics.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures and 1 table in DOCX (Word 2007); PIXEL 2008 workshop proceedings, will be published in the Proceedings Section of JINST(Journal of Instrumentation

Evidence for a breakdown of the Isobaric Multiplet Mass Equation: A study of the A=35, T=3/2 isospin quartet

Mass measurements on radionuclides along the potassium isotope chain have been performed with the ISOLTRAP Penning trap mass spectrometer. For 35K T1/2=178ms) to 46K (T1/2=105s) relative mass uncertainties of 2x10-8 and better have been achieved. The accurate mass determination of 35K (dm=0.54keV) has been exploited to test the Isobaric Multiplet Mass Equation (IMME) for the A=35, T=3/2 isospinquartet. The experimental results indicate a deviation from the generally adopted quadratic form.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Good practice in mental health care for socially marginalised groups in Europe: a qualitative study of expert views in 14 countries

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Pade approximants for the ground-state energy of closed-shell quantum dots

Analytic approximations to the ground-state energy of closed-shell quantum dots (number of electrons from 2 to 210) are presented in the form of two-point Pade approximants. These Pade approximants are constructed from the small- and large-density limits of the energy. We estimated that the maximum error, reached for intermediate densities, is less than 3%. Within the present approximation the ground-state is found to be unpolarized.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX, 3 ps figure