126,565 research outputs found
Workplace Wellness Programs: Are They Part of the Answer to the U.S.’s Growing Healthcare Crisis?
[Excerpt] Of the $2.8 trillion that the United States has spent on healthcare in recent years, the majority of it (75%) is spent treating chronic disease. Chronic disease is “a long-standing condition that can be controlled but not cured… It is the leading cause of death and disability in the U.S., which is 1.7 million lives each year.” To make matters worse, chronic disease indicators in the U.S. have been on the increase recently. And, even though chronic disease is commonly thought to be more prevalent among the elderly, in the past 10 years, it has increased by 25% among working-age adults. The cost of chronic disease to the U.S. economy far exceeds the money and resources spent to treat it. In fact, a study by the Milken Institute found that the indirect costs of chronic diseases (such as missed days from work) are higher than the direct costs to treat them. Furthermore, a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that these indirect costs are four times higher for individuals with chronic disease than for those without them. Therefore, chronic disease is strongly affecting employers’ increasing healthcare expenditure. A joint study by Tower Watson and the National Business Group on Health found that 67% of employers identified employee’s poor health habits as one of their top three challenges to maintain affordable health coverage
Developing Tools for Multimessenger Gravitational Wave Astronomy
We present work in progress to craft open-sourced numerical tools that will
enable the calculation of electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational
waveforms: the {\tt GiRaFFE} (General Relativistic Force-Free Electrodynamics)
code. {\tt GiRaFFE} numerically solves the general relativistic
magnetohydrodynamics system of equations in the force-free limit, to model the
magnetospheres surrounding compact binaries, in order (1) to characterize the
nonlinear interaction between the source and its surrounding magnetosphere, and
(2) to evaluate the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational waves,
including the production of collimated jets. We apply this code to various
configurations of spinning black holes immersed in external magnetic field, in
order to both test our implementation, and to explore the effect of strong
gravitational field, high spins and of misalignment between the magnetic field
lines an black hole spin, on the electromagnetic output and the collimation of
Poynting jets.
We will extend our work to collisions of black holes immersed in external
magnetic field, which are prime candidates for coincident detection in both
gravitational and electromagnetic spectra.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, MG15 proceeding
The Local Compressibility of Liquids near Non-Adsorbing Substrates: A Useful Measure of Solvophobicity and Hydrophobicity?
We investigate the suitability of the local compressibility chi(z) as a
measure of the solvophobicity or hydrophobicity of a substrate. Defining the
local compressibility as the derivative of the local one-body density w.r.t.
the chemical potential at fixed temperature, we use density functional theory
(DFT) to calculate chi(z) for a model fluid, close to bulk liquid-gas
coexistence, at various planar substrates. These range from a `neutral'
substrate with a contact angle of approximately 90 degrees, which favours
neither the liquid nor the gas phase, to a very solvophobic, purely repulsive
substrate which exhibits complete drying (i.e. contact angle 180 degrees). We
find that the maximum in the local compressibility, which occurs within one-two
molecular diameters of the substrate, and the integrated quantity chi_ex (the
surface excess compressibility, defined below) both increase rapidly as the
contact angle increases and the substrate becomes more solvophobic. The local
compressibility provides a more pronounced indicator of solvophobicity than the
density depletion in the vicinity of the surface which increases only weakly
with increasing contact angle. When the fluid is confined in a parallel slit
with two identical solvophobic walls, or with competing solvophobic and
solvophilic walls, chi(z) close to the solvophobic wall is altered little from
that at the single substrate. We connect our results with simulation studies of
water near to hydrophobic surfaces exploring the relationship between chi(z)
and fluctuations in the local density and between chi_ex and the mean-square
fluctuation in the number of adsorbed molecules.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Journal of Physics: Condensed
Matter as a Special Issue Articl
Promises and Prospects of Microbiome Studies
Since Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, first microscopic observations of the unseen microbiota and the more recent realization that little of the microbes in the biosphere are known, humans have developed a deep curiosity to fully understand the inner workings of the microbial realm. Our ability to characterize the complexity of microbial communities in their natural habitats has dramatically improved over the past decade thanks to advances in high-throughput methodologies. By eliminating the need to isolate and culture individual species, metagenomics approaches have removed many of the obstacles that hindered research in the ecology of mixed microbial consortia, providing valuable information about the diversity, composition, function, and metabolic capability of the community. Microbes are the unseen majority with the capability to colonize every environment, including our bodies. The establishment and composition of a stable human microbiome is determined by the host genetics, immunocompetence, and life-style choices. Our life-style choices determine our exposure to many external and internal environmental factors that permanently or temporarily can influence our microbiome composition. Figure 1 illustrates some of the life-style-related factors that might influence the microbiota of the skin, mouth, and gut. It is not limited to what we carry, touch, breath, and eat. Other dispersal vectors include secretion, excretions, aerosols, air flow, animals, moving surfaces, water, beverages, food, contact, wind, tools, toiletry, and others. These influence the microbiome membership, who are present, and they have the ability to participate in the microbiome dynamic within an environment. The establishment of a microbial community is dependent on many environmental factors, including pH, temperature, altitude, weather, soil type, nutrient availability, relative humidity, air quality, pollutants, microbial competitors, and others. In other words, we are superorganisms interconnected with other living forms on this Earth
Effects of a large irrigation reservoir on aquatic and riparian plants: a history of survival and loss
Dammed rivers have unnatural stream flows, disrupted sediment dynamics, and rearranged
geomorphologic settings. Consequently, fluvial biota experiences disturbed functioning in the novel
ecosystems. The case study is the large irrigation reservoir Alqueva in Guadiana River, Southern Iberia.
The study area was divided into three zones: upstream and downstream of the dam and reservoir.
For each zone, species composition and land use and land cover (LULC) were compared before
and after the Alqueva Dam implementation. Data consist of aquatic and riparian flora composition
obtained from 46 surveys and the area (%) of 12 classes of LULC obtained in 90 riverine sampling
units through the analysis of historical and contemporary imagery. There was an overall decrease
of several endemic species and on the riparian shrublands and aquatic stands, although di erences
in the proportion of functional groups were not significant. Nevertheless, compositional diversity
shows a significant decline in the upstream zone while landscape diversity shows an accentuated
reduction in the reservoir area and downstream of the dam, which is likely related to the loss of
the rocky habitats of the ‘old’ Guadiana River and the homogenization of the riverscape due to the
irrigation intensification. The mitigation of these critical changes should be site-specific and should
rely on the knowledge of the interactions between surrounding lands, ecological, biogeomorphologic,
and hydrological components of the fluvial ecosystemsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
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