Do State Fairs with Firework Displays Impact PM2.5 Levels in Nearby Communities?

This study identified state fairs with known firework displays to evaluate whether they impact local air quality. Previous research has shown firework displays are linked with the short-term degradation of local air quality due to increased concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) as a result of the display. These studies observed increased PM2.5 concentrations associated with widespread firework displays such as the Lantern Festival in China, Diwali Festival in India, and Independence Day in the United States. However, it has not been investigated whether a signal of increased PM2.5 concentrations from firework displays during a state fair could be observed to degrade air quality in nearby neighborhoods. Air quality and meteorological data were collected for five state fairs, with the fairs ranging 10 –14 days in duration, over 2 – 7 years. Statistical analysis performed on multi-year aggregated data for each state fair found that festival day concentrations were not larger than non-festival day concentrations. However, results from individual years identified several hours for the Delaware, Iowa, and Minnesota State Fairs where hourly festival day concentrations were larger than non-festival day. These hours occurred in the afternoon (Minnesota State Fair) and in the overnight early morning hours (Delaware and Iowa State Fairs). Statistical analysis was then performed on multi-year aggregated data during hours in which wind was blowing from the direction of the state fair to air monitoring site (within plus or minus 30˚) and wind speeds were non-zero. The results continued to identify several hours where hourly festival day concentrations were larger during the Iowa State Fair. Once again, these hours occurred overnight, and festival day mean concentrations were generally 3 – 8 μg/m3 larger than control. Possible explanations of the results include (a) the distance of the air quality monitoring site from the fairgrounds being too far to detect firework emissions, (b) other emission sources provided too much noise to discern a clear signal, or (c) emissions from firework displays were smaller than expected

Food security and Brexit: how the CAP began

In a new briefing paper, ‘Food, the UK and the EU: Brexit or Bremain?‘, Tim Lang and Victoria Schoen argue that post-Brexit the food world “will be characterised by volatility, disruption and uncertainty”, as the cost of imports will rise if sterling falls. They also discuss the urgent need for continued reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. In this extract from the paper, they explain how food and agriculture were central to the founding mission of the EU

Towards a Harm-Minimising Approach to Sex Work: A Call for Decriminalisation in England and Wales

This thesis has developed a harm-minimising framework to analyse the regulation of sex work in England and Wales and propose a system of reform. In so doing, it defines the ‘harm’ in sex work as that of stigma, violence and exploitation, using this categorisation to judge the effectiveness of any (new) system of legal regulation. This thesis demonstrates how sex workers are frequently cast as a deviant population and separated from the rest of society, facing extreme forms of violence and exploitation. Using my harm-framework of analysis, this thesis examines the regulation of sex work in England and Wales, starting with the Contagious Disease Acts of the 1860’s through to modern day. In doing this, it will demonstrate the ability of the law to maintain, shape and create the conditions for the violence, exploitation and stigma faced by women selling sex. The thesis then explores alternative means of regulating sex work. It will look towards the alternatives of criminalising the clients, regimes of legalisation and of decriminalisation. It concludes that in order to provide the sex worker with sufficient protections against violence, stigma and exploitation, England and Wales should adopt a regime of decriminalisation. It is only under such a regime that sex workers could be provided with effective and realistic safeguards against the harm currently endemic in their work, and within which, crucial steps can be made towards altering their stigmatised and marginalised status

The potential for liquid biopsies in the precision medical treatment of breast cancer.

Currently the clinical management of breast cancer relies on relatively few prognostic/predictive clinical markers (estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, HER2), based on primary tumor biology. Circulating biomarkers, such as circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) or circulating tumor cells (CTCs) may enhance our treatment options by focusing on the very cells that are the direct precursors of distant metastatic disease, and probably inherently different than the primary tumor's biology. To shift the current clinical paradigm, assessing tumor biology in real time by molecularly profiling CTCs or ctDNA may serve to discover therapeutic targets, detect minimal residual disease and predict response to treatment. This review serves to elucidate the detection, characterization, and clinical application of CTCs and ctDNA with the goal of precision treatment of breast cancer

Zytomorphometrische und fluoreszenzmikroskopische Untersuchungen humaner männlicher Osteoblasten auf Implantatoberflächen in vitro unter Stimulation mit gepulsten elektrischen Feldern

Ließe sich das Wachstum des Knochengewebes in der Umgebung dentaler Implantate durch Einwirkung externer elektrischer Stimuli beschleunigen, könnte dadurch die Einheilzeit nach der Implantation entscheidend verkürzt und folglich der darauf verankerte Zahnersatz zeiti-ger eingegliedert werden. Ziel dieser experimentellen Studie ist es, den Einfluss elektrischer Stimulation auf humane Knochenzellen zu untersuchen, die zuvor im Bereich der Unterkiefermolaren von Probanden entnommen und auf den zu vergleichenden, klinisch verwendeten Implantatoberflächen Titan, Ticer® und TiWhite® kultiviert worden sind. Dazu wurde in Zusammenarbeit mit der Hochschule Mittweida eine Apparatur konzipiert, mit deren Hilfe die Probekörper unter standardisierten Bedingungen jeweils mit einer Fre-quenz von 3,8 Hz, einer Amplitude von 3 V sowie einem Tastverhältnis von 50 % befeldet wurden. Nach einer Gesamtversuchsdauer von 120 h erfolgte die fluoreszenzoptische Auswertung anhand der Zellzählung sowie der Bestimmung der mit Antikörpern gefärbten Zellkerne und Bone Sialoprotein-Moleküle, wobei letztere besonders in Phasen der Knochenneubildung vermehrt nachweisbar sind und folglich als Marker des Knochenstoffwechsels gelten. Die auf Titan erhobenen Daten können aufgrund der drastisch erhöhten Anzahl von Zellen und der hoch-signifikant gesteigerten Proteinanheftung eine positive Wirkung der Elektro-stimulation nachweisen. Gegenteiliges ist auf der Ticer®-Oberfläche feststellbar; hier sind sowohl die gezählten Zellen als auch die relativen Grauwerte der Zellkern- und Proteinanfärbung bei den befeldeten verglichen mit den unbefeldeten Zellen deutlich erniedrigt. Weniger eindeutig sind die Ergebnisse auf der TiWhite®-Oberfläche. Während in der befel-deten Kultur mehr Zellen gezählt wurden als in der unbefeldeten, differiert der Betrag der Proteinbestimmung zu unterschiedlichen Zeitpunkten und lässt folglich keine präzise Aussage hinsichtlich der durch die Elektrostimulation verursachten Effekte zu

Multiscale Representations for Manifold-Valued Data

We describe multiscale representations for data observed on equispaced grids and taking values in manifolds such as the sphere $S^2$, the special orthogonal group $SO(3)$, the positive definite matrices $SPD(n)$, and the Grassmann manifolds $G(n,k)$. The representations are based on the deployment of Deslauriers--Dubuc and average-interpolating pyramids "in the tangent plane" of such manifolds, using the $Exp$ and $Log$ maps of those manifolds. The representations provide "wavelet coefficients" which can be thresholded, quantized, and scaled in much the same way as traditional wavelet coefficients. Tasks such as compression, noise removal, contrast enhancement, and stochastic simulation are facilitated by this representation. The approach applies to general manifolds but is particularly suited to the manifolds we consider, i.e., Riemannian symmetric spaces, such as $S^{n-1}$, $SO(n)$, $G(n,k)$, where the $Exp$ and $Log$ maps are effectively computable. Applications to manifold-valued data sources of a geometric nature (motion, orientation, diffusion) seem particularly immediate. A software toolbox, SymmLab, can reproduce the results discussed in this paper