Effects of stitching on delamination of satin weave carbon-epoxy laminates under mode I, mode II and mixed-mode I/II loadings

The objective of the present study is to characterize the effect of modified chain stitching on the delamination growth under mixed-mode I/II loading conditions. Delamination toughness under mode I is experimentally determined, for unstitched and stitched laminates, by using untabbed and tabbed double cantilever beam (TDCB) tests. The effect of the reinforcing tabs on mode I toughness is investigated. Stitching improves the energy release rate (ERR) up to 4 times in mode I. Mode II delamination toughness is evaluated in end-notched flexure (ENF) tests. Different geometries of stitched specimens are tested. Crack propagation occurs without any failure of stitching yarns. The final crack length attains the mid-span or it stops before and the specimen breaks in bending. The ERR is initially low and gradually increases with crack length to very high values. The mixedmode delamination behaviour is investigated using a mixed-mode bending (MMB) test. For unstitched specimens, a simple mixed-mode criterion is identified. For stitched specimens, stitching yarns do not break during 25% of mode I ratio tests and the ERR increase is relatively small compared to unstitched values. For 70% and 50% of mode I ratios, failures of yarns are observed during crack propagation and tests are able to capture correctly the effect of the stitching: it clearly improves the ERR for these two mixed modes, as much as threefold

New microbial ecosystem created by artificak floating island

To scrutinize the microbial ecosystem and processing of water quality improvement under the artificial floating island, water quality parameteres, bacterial numbers and extracellular enzyme activities were measured biweekly flom 3, November 2001 to 20,April 2002 in Lake Paldang, Korea. Most of the mean encironmental parameters were not different from artificially floating island (AFI) site and control site. But,zooplankton numbers were about 100 times higher at AFI site than those of control site, even though the chlorophyll α concentrations were not so different. During winter, the rations of respiratory active bacteria to total bacterial number were two fold higher and enzyme activities of β-glucosidase and phosphatase were extremely higher at AFI site than those of contrl site. With these high densities of zooplankton, active bacteria and high rates of degradation under the AFI, the organic materials are eliminated at inside of lake with newly created ecosystem.Article信州大学山地水環境教育研究センター研究報告 2: 5-9(2004)departmental bulletin pape

Annotating patient clinical records with syntactic chunks and named entities: the Harvey corpus

The free text notes typed by physicians during patient consultations contain valuable information for the study of disease and treatment. These notes are difficult to process by existing natural language analysis tools since they are highly telegraphic (omitting many words), and contain many spelling mistakes, inconsistencies in punctuation, and non-standard word order. To support information extraction and classification tasks over such text, we describe a de-identified corpus of free text notes, a shallow syntactic and named entity annotation scheme for this kind of text, and an approach to training domain specialists with no linguistic background to annotate the text. Finally, we present a statistical chunking system for such clinical text with a stable learning rate and good accuracy, indicating that the manual annotation is consistent and that the annotation scheme is tractable for machine learning

Your space or mine? : Mapping self in time

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Observation of a ppb mass threshoud enhancement in \psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p}) decay

The decay channel $\psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p})$ is studied using a sample of $1.06\times 10^8$ $\psi^\prime$ events collected by the BESIII experiment at BEPCII. A strong enhancement at threshold is observed in the $p\bar{p}$ invariant mass spectrum. The enhancement can be fit with an $S$-wave Breit-Wigner resonance function with a resulting peak mass of $M=1861^{+6}_{-13} {\rm (stat)}^{+7}_{-26} {\rm (syst)} {\rm MeV/}c^2$ and a narrow width that is $\Gamma<38 {\rm MeV/}c^2$ at the 90% confidence level. These results are consistent with published BESII results. These mass and width values do not match with those of any known meson resonance.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Chinese Physics

Microguards and micromessengers of the genome

The regulation of gene expression is of fundamental importance to maintain organismal function and integrity and requires a multifaceted and highly ordered sequence of events. The cyclic nature of gene expression is known as ‘transcription dynamics’. Disruption or perturbation of these dynamics can result in significant fitness costs arising from genome instability, accelerated ageing and disease. We review recent research that supports the idea that an important new role for small RNAs, particularly microRNAs (miRNAs), is in protecting the genome against short-term transcriptional fluctuations, in a process we term ‘microguarding’. An additional emerging role for miRNAs is as ‘micromessengers’—through alteration of gene expression in target cells to which they are trafficked within microvesicles. We describe the scant but emerging evidence that miRNAs can be moved between different cells, individuals and even species, to exert biologically significant responses. With these two new roles, miRNAs have the potential to protect against deleterious gene expression variation from perturbation and to themselves perturb the expression of genes in target cells. These interactions between cells will frequently be subject to conflicts of interest when they occur between unrelated cells that lack a coincidence of fitness interests. Hence, there is the potential for miRNAs to represent both a means to resolve conflicts of interest, as well as instigate them. We conclude by exploring this conflict hypothesis, by describing some of the initial evidence consistent with it and proposing new ideas for future research into this exciting topic

Esophageal cancer in a young woman with bulimia nervosa: a case report

Adenocarcinoma of the esophagus has increased dramatically within the United States and continues to have a poor prognosis despite aggressive treatment. Identifying potential risk factors is critical for the early detection and treatment of this disease. The present case report describes a very young woman who developed adenocarcinoma of the esophagus after only a brief history of bulimia. These findings suggest that even in very young patients, bulimia may represent a risk factor for adenocarcinoma of the esophagus

Structural and biochemical characterization of the exopolysaccharide deacetylase Agd3 required for Aspergillus fumigatus biofilm formation

The exopolysaccharide galactosaminogalactan (GAG) is an important virulence factor of the fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus. Deletion of a gene encoding a putative deacetylase, Agd3, leads to defects in GAG deacetylation, biofilm formation, and virulence. Here, we show that Agd3 deacetylates GAG in a metal-dependent manner, and is the founding member of carbohydrate esterase family CE18. The active site is formed by four catalytic motifs that are essential for activity. The structure of Agd3 includes an elongated substrate-binding cleft formed by a carbohydrate binding module (CBM) that is the founding member of CBM family 87. Agd3 homologues are encoded in previously unidentified putative bacterial exopolysaccharide biosynthetic operons and in other fungal genomes. The exopolysaccharide galactosaminogalactan (GAG) is an important virulence factor of the fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus. Here, the authors study an A. fumigatus enzyme that deacetylates GAG in a metal-dependent manner and constitutes a founding member of a new carbohydrate esterase family.Bio-organic Synthesi

Serum amyloid A primes microglia for ATP-dependent interleukin-1\u3b2 release

Acute-phase response is a systemic reaction to environmental/inflammatory insults and involves production of acute-phase proteins, including serum amyloid A (SAA). Interleukin-1\u3b2 (IL-1\u3b2), a master regulator of neuroinflammation produced by activated inflammatory cells of the myeloid lineage, in particular microglia, plays a key role in the pathogenesis of acute and chronic diseases of the peripheral nervous system and CNS. IL-1\u3b2 release is promoted by ATP acting at the purinergic P2X7 receptor (P2X7R) in cells primed with toll-like receptor (TLR) ligands

C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, and prostate cancer risk in men aged 65 years and older.

Inflammation is believed to play a role in prostate cancer (PCa) etiology, but it is unclear whether inflammatory markers C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) associate with PCa risk in older men. Using Cox regression, we assessed the relationship between baseline concentrations of CRP and IL-6 and the subsequent PCa risk in the Cardiovascular Health Study, a population-based cohort study of mostly European American men of ages >64 years (n = 2,234; mean follow-up = 8.7 years; 215 incident PCa cases). We also tested associations between CRP and IL-6 tagSNPs and PCa risk, focusing on SNPs that are known to associate with circulating CRP and/or IL-6. Neither CRP nor IL-6 blood concentrations was associated with PCa risk. The C allele of IL-6 SNP rs1800795 (-174), a known functional variant, was associated with increased risk in a dominant model (HR = 1.44; 95% CI = 1.03-2.01; p = 0.03), but was not statistically significant after accounting for multiple tests (permutation p = 0.21). Our results suggest that circulating CRP and IL-6 do not influence PCa risk. SNPs at the CRP locus are not associated with PCa risk in this cohort, while the association between rs1800795 and PCa risk warrants further investigation