Improving basic life support training for medical students

Mariam Lami, Pooja Nair, Karishma GadhviFaculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London, London, UKAbstract: Questions have been raised about basic life support (BLS) training in medical education. This article addresses the research evidence behind why BLS training is inadequate and suggests recommendations for improving BLS training for medical students.Keywords: medical education, basic life suppor

Biogas Production from Co-Digestion of Poultry Manure and Orange Peel through Thermo-Chemical Pre-Treatments in Batch Fermentation

The increasing demand for the treatment of organic wastes from municipalities, faming and industrial activities is a great opportunity to convert organic wastes into energy in a form of biogas. With the aim of producing biogas from co- digestion of Poultry Manure (PM) and Orange Peel (OP) a series of experiments were carried out for 21 consecutive days. Five different proportions of PM and OP (100%PM, 75%MP+25%OP, 50%PM+50%OP, 25%PM+75%OP, 100%OP) were used to obtain the suitable mix ratio (which gives maximum biogas production). Having determined the optimum mix ratio, chemical pre-treatment with CaO (0.5 g, 1.5 g and 2.5 g) and temperature pre-treatment at 60 and 80 oC were applied to compare the results with those obtained with non-pre-treated waste. Cumulative biogas production obtained from 75%PM+25%OP was 768ml, whereas 218.33ml was measured from 100%OP. Increasing the proportion of OP above 25% decreased the amount of gas production, volatile solids (VS) and total solids (TS) reduction. This indicated that addition of PM to mix ratios improves biogas production.Thus 75%PM+25%OPmix was found to be the optimum mix ratio which resulted in high biogas yield. In thermal pre-treatments, maximum cumulative gas production was measured at 80 ºC pre-treated substrate. It exceeded by 11.7% and 6.6% over the control and the 60 ºC pre-treated sample respectively. In case of chemical pre-treatments, the highest cumulative biogas yield was obtained from a substrate treated by 2.5g CaO which exceed by 139, 250 and 356 over 1.5g CaO, 0.5g CaO and control, respectively. Overall the results indicated that the biogas yield and VS and TS reduction of the 75%PM+25%OPmix ratio can be enhanced with the use of thermal and chemical pre-treatments prior to anaerobic digestion

Approximate Reversal of Quantum Gaussian Dynamics

Recently, there has been focus on determining the conditions under which the data processing inequality for quantum relative entropy is satisfied with approximate equality. The solution of the exact equality case is due to Petz, who showed that the quantum relative entropy between two quantum states stays the same after the action of a quantum channel if and only if there is a reversal channel that recovers the original states after the channel acts. Furthermore, this reversal channel can be constructed explicitly and is now called the Petz recovery map. Recent developments have shown that a variation of the Petz recovery map works well for recovery in the case of approximate equality of the data processing inequality. Our main contribution here is a proof that bosonic Gaussian states and channels possess a particular closure property, namely, that the Petz recovery map associated to a bosonic Gaussian state sigma and a bosonic Gaussian channel N is itself a bosonic Gaussian channel. We furthermore give an explicit construction of the Petz recovery map in this case, in terms of the mean vector and covariance matrix of the state sigma and the Gaussian specification of the channel N

Nitrogenase activity associated with codium species from New Zealand marine habitats

Nitrogenase activity, measured as acetylene reduction, was recorded at rates up to 1028 nmol.h \g * dry weight for Codium adhaerens (Cabr.) Ag. var. convolutum Dellow and Codium fragile (Sur.) Hariot subsp. tomentosoides (Van Goor) Silva collected from New Zealand habitats. In both species the ability to reduce acetylene is invariably associated with the presence of a heterocystous blue-green alga, Calothrix sp., epiphytic or embedded in the Codium thallus. A highly significant (P < 0.001) correlation between heterocyst frequency and nitrogenase activity was found. Nitrogenase and net photosynthesis of the Codium-Calothrix system have different steady-state responses to light intensity, and the kinetics of the two processes also differ in that nitrogenase is slow to respond to illumination or darkening. Glucose additions to Codium did not significantly increase nitrogenase activity. Nitrogenase is relatively insensitive to oxygen tension over the range 0-1.0 atm (0-1.033 kgf.cnT2) and still occurs at 1.5 atm (1.55 kgf.cm"2); this condition is unique in all nitrogenase systems thus far reported. Collectively these facts suggest that Calothrix is the agent primarily responsible for nitrogenase activity in these Codium species

Proceedings of the workshop "Standard Model at the LHC" University College London 30 March - 1 April 2009

Proceedings from a 3-day discussion on Standard Model discoveries with the first LHC dataComment: 9 contributions to the proceedings of the LHC Standard Model worksho

The CDF MiniPlug Calorimeters at the Tevatron

Two MiniPlug calorimeters, designed to measure the energy and lateral position of particles in the pseudorapidity region of 3.6<|eta|<5.1 of the CDF detector, have been installed as part of the Run II CDF upgrade at the Tevatron collider. Detector performance and first results from $\bar pp$ collision data are presented.Comment: Presented at `Frontier Detectors for Frontier Physics; 9th Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors', Biodola, Italy, 25-31 May 2003. 2 page

Entanglement-Saving Channels

The set of Entanglement Saving (ES) quantum channels is introduced and characterized. These are completely positive, trace preserving transformations which when acting locally on a bipartite quantum system initially prepared into a maximally entangled configuration, preserve its entanglement even when applied an arbitrary number of times. In other words, a quantum channel $\psi$ is said to be ES if its powers $\psi^n$ are not entanglement-breaking for all integers $n$. We also characterize the properties of the Asymptotic Entanglement Saving (AES) maps. These form a proper subset of the ES channels that is constituted by those maps which, not only preserve entanglement for all finite $n$, but which also sustain an explicitly not null level of entanglement in the asymptotic limit~$n\rightarrow \infty$. Structure theorems are provided for ES and for AES maps which yield an almost complete characterization of the former and a full characterization of the latter.Comment: 26 page

Forward Physics at the LHC (Elba 2010)

The papers review the main theoretical and experimental aspects of the Forward Physics at the Large Hadron Collider