Intercomparison of numerical models of flaring coronal loops

The proposed Benchmark Problem consists of an infinitesimal magnetic flux tube containing a low-beta plasma. The field strength is assumed to be so large that the plasma can move only along the flux tube, whose shape remains invariant with time (i.e., the fluid motion is essentially one-dimensional). The flux tube cross section is taken to be constant over its entire length. In planar view the flux tube has a semi-circular shape, symmetric about its midpoint s = s sub max and intersecting the chromosphere-corona interface (CCI) perpendicularly at each foot point. The arc length from the loop apex to the CCI is 10,000 km. The flux tube extends an additional 2000 km below the CCI to include the chromosphere, which initially has a uniform temperature of 8000 K. The temperature at the top of the loop was fixed initially at 2 X 1 million K. The plasma is assumed to be a perfect gas (gamma = 5/3), consisting of pure hydrogen which is considered to be fully ionized at all temperatures. For simplicity, moreover, the electron and ion temperatures are taken to be everywhere equal at all times (corresponding to an artificially enhanced electron-ion collisional coupling). While there was more-or-less unanimous agreement as to certain global properties of the system behavior (peak temperature reached, thermal-wave time scales, etc.), no two groups could claim satisfactory accord when a more detailed comparison of solutions was attempted

A New Method of Measuring the Lifetimes of Excited States of Atoms

Abstract Not Provided

Melanocytic naevi and melanoma in survivors of childhood cancer.

There is evidence from previous studies of small numbers of children who received cytotoxic therapy for cancer, that they may develop increased numbers of melanocytic naevi (moles), the strongest known risk factors for melanoma. Our aim was to investigate a large number of survivors of childhood cancer in order to test the hypothesis that they have more melanocytic naevi than matched controls. Total-body naevus counts were obtained from 263 oncology patients ascertained in paediatric oncology departments in Queensland, Australia, and from 263 hospital controls matched for age and sex. Additional information was gathered from children's parents about concurrent factors influencing naevus development such as type of complexion and history of sun exposure. Matched analyses, both crude and adjusted for possible confounding factors, revealed no significant difference in overall density of naevi among oncology patients and control subjects, according to diagnosis or to duration or type of chemotherapy. However significantly more oncology patients had atypical naevi (P < 0.05) and acral naevi (P < 0.0001) than controls. One patient developed a malignant melanoma 13 years after chemotherapy and radiotherapy for rhabdomyosarcoma. These findings support an association between treatment for childhood cancer and acral naevi and suggest that atypical naevi may also be associated with chemotherapy in childhood

A Dynamic, Modular Intelligent-Agent framework for Astronomical Light Curve Analysis and Classification

Modern time-domain astronomy is capable of collecting a staggeringly large amount of data on millions of objects in real time. This makes it almost impossible for objects to be identified manually. Therefore the production of methods and systems for the automated classification of time-domain astro-nomical objects is of great importance. The Liverpool Telescope has a number of wide-field image gathering instruments mounted upon its structure. These in-struments have been in operation since March 2009 gathering data of multi-degree sized areas of sky around the current field of view of the main telescope. Utilizing a Structured Query Language database established by a pre-processing operation upon the resultant images, which has identified millions of candidate variable stars with multiple time-varying magnitude observations, we applied a method designed to extract time-translation invariant features from the time-series light curves of each object for future input into a classification system. These efforts were met with limited success due to noise and uneven sampling within the time-series data. Additionally, finely surveying these light curves is a processing intensive task. Fortunately, these algorithms are capable of multi-threaded implementations based on available resources. Therefore we propose a new system designed to utilize multiple intelligent agents that distribute the data analysis across multiple machines whilst simultaneously a powerful intelligence service operates to constrain the light curves and eliminate false signals due to noise and local alias periods. This system will be highly scalable, capable of operating on a wide range of hardware whilst maintaining the production of ac-curate features based on the fitting of harmonic models to the light curves within the initial Structural Query Language database

Differential Therapeutic Outcomes of Community-Based Group Interventions for Women and Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Two community-based group therapies, emotion focused versus goal oriented, are compared among women exposed to intimate partner violence (n = 46) and their children ( n = 48) aged between 6 and 12 years. A series of repeated measures analyses are employed to evaluate the effects of time from baseline to postintervention following random assignment. Main and treatment effects for women provide support for the relative effectiveness in increasing quality of social support in the emotion-focused intervention and in the reduction of both family conflict and alcohol use for the goal-oriented intervention.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The Therapeutic Efficacy of Domestic Violence Victim Interventions

Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Ionization state, excited populations and emission of impurities in dynamic finite density plasmas: I. The generalized collisional-radiative model for light elements

The paper presents an integrated view of the population structure and its role in establishing the ionization state of light elements in dynamic, finite density, laboratory and astrophysical plasmas. There are four main issues, the generalized collisional-radiative picture for metastables in dynamic plasmas with Maxwellian free electrons and its particularizing to light elements, the methods of bundling and projection for manipulating the population equations, the systematic production/use of state selective fundamental collision data in the metastable resolved picture to all levels for collisonal-radiative modelling and the delivery of appropriate derived coefficients for experiment analysis. The ions of carbon, oxygen and neon are used in illustration. The practical implementation of the methods described here is part of the ADAS Project

Spatial temporal patterns in childhood leukaemia: further evidence for an infectious origin. EUROCLUS project.

The EUROCLUS project included information on residence at diagnosis for 13351 cases of childhood leukaemia diagnosed in the period 1980-89 in defined geographical regions in 17 countries. A formal algorithm permits identification of small census areas as containing case excesses. The present analysis examines spatial-temporal patterns of the cases (n = 970) within these clustered areas. The objectives were, first, to compare these results with those from an analysis conducted for UK data for the period 1966-83, and, second, to extend them to consider infant leukaemias. A modification of the Knox test investigates, within the small areas, temporal overlap between cases in a subgroup of interest at a putative critical time and all other cases at any time between birth and diagnosis. Critical times were specified in advance as follows: for cases of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia aged 2-4 years, the 18-month period preceding diagnosis; for cases of total leukaemia aged 5-14 years, 1 year before to 1 year after birth; and for infant cases (diagnosed < 1 year), 1 year before to 6 months after birth. Each of the analyses found evidence of excess space-time overlap compared with that expected; these were 10% (P = 0.005), 15% (P= 0.0002) and 26% (P= 0.03) respectively. The results are interpreted in terms of an infectious origin of childhood leukaemia

The Murchison Widefield Array Transients Survey (MWATS). A search for low frequency variability in a bright Southern hemisphere sample

We report on a search for low-frequency radio variability in 944 bright (> 4Jy at 154 MHz) unresolved, extragalactic radio sources monitored monthly for several years with the Murchison Widefield Array. In the majority of sources we find very low levels of variability with typical modulation indices < 5%. We detect 15 candidate low frequency variables that show significant long term variability (>2.8 years) with time-averaged modulation indices M = 3.1 - 7.1%. With 7/15 of these variable sources having peaked spectral energy distributions, and only 5.7% of the overall sample having peaked spectra, we find an increase in the prevalence of variability in this spectral class. We conclude that the variability seen in this survey is most probably a consequence of refractive interstellar scintillation and that these objects must have the majority of their flux density contained within angular diameters less than 50 milli-arcsec (which we support with multi-wavelength data). At 154 MHz we demonstrate that interstellar scintillation time-scales become long (~decades) and have low modulation indices, whilst synchrotron driven variability can only produce dynamic changes on time-scales of hundreds of years, with flux density changes less than one milli-jansky (without relativistic boosting). From this work we infer that the low frequency extra-galactic southern sky, as seen by SKA-Low, will be non-variable on time-scales shorter than one year.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure