5,473 research outputs found
Arcuate nucleus homeostatic systems reflect blood leptin concentration but not feeding behaviour during scheduled feeding on a high-fat diet in mice
Acknowledgements T.B. was funded by a CASE studentship from the BBSRC and AstraZeneca. J.B. was a summer student from Bordeaux Sciences Agro and funded by student laboratory experience grant from the British Society of Neuroendocrinology. The authors are also grateful for funding from the Scottish Government, and from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements 266408 (Full4Health) and 245009 (NeuroFAST).Peer reviewedPublisher PD
The development of direct payments in the UK: implications for social justice
Direct payments have been heralded by the disability movement as an important means to
achieving independent living and hence greater social justice for disabled people through
enhanced recognition as well as financial redistribution. Drawing on data from the ESRC
funded project Disabled People and Direct Payments: A UK Comparative Perspective,
this paper presents an analysis of policy and official statistics on use of direct payments
across the UK. It is argued that the potential of direct payments has only partly been
realised as a result of very low and uneven uptake within and between different parts
of the UK. This is accounted for in part by resistance from some Labour-controlled local
authorities, which regard direct payments as a threat to public sector jobs. In addition,
access to direct payments has been uneven across impairment groups. However, from a
very low base there has been a rapid expansion in the use of direct payments over the
past three years. The extent to which direct payments are able to facilitate the ultimate
goal of independent living for disabled people requires careful monitoring
A Cluster of Class I/f/II YSOs Discovered Near the Cepheid SU Cas
Preliminary constraints are placed on a cluster of YSOs (J2000 02:54:31.4
+69:20:32.5) discovered in the field of the classical Cepheid SU Cas. WISE 3.4,
4.6, 12, and 22 um images reveal that the cluster deviates from spherical
symmetry and exhibits an apparent diameter of 3x6'. SEDs constructed using
2MASS Ks (2.2 um) and WISE photometry indicate that 19 (36%) class I, 21 (40%)
class f, and 13 (25%) class II objects lie r<3' from the cluster center.
Conversely, 11 (18%) class I, 13 (21%) class f, and 37 (61%) class II objects
were detected for r>3'. Approximately 50% of the class I sources within r<3'
were classified solely using WISE photometry owing to the absence of detections
by 2MASS.Comment: Accepted for Publication (MNRAS
Vaccine-preventable haemophilus influenza type B disease burden and cost-effectiveness of infant vaccination in Indonesia.
BACKGROUND: Most of Asia, including Indonesia, does not use Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) conjugate vaccines. We estimated total vaccine-preventable disease burden and the cost-effectiveness of Hib conjugate vaccine in Indonesia. METHODS: Hib pneumonia and meningitis incidences for children with access to health care were derived from a randomized vaccine probe study on Lombok Island, Indonesia during 1998-2002. Incidences were adjusted for limited access to care. Health system and patient out-of-pocket treatment cost data were collected concurrent with the probe study. For Hib vaccine in monovalent and combined (with DTP-HepB) presentations, we used 2007 UNICEF vaccine prices of US3.75 per dose. RESULTS: For the 2007 Indonesian birth cohort, Hib vaccine would prevent meningitis in 1 of every 179 children, pneumonia in 1 of every 18 children, and 4.9% of mortality among those younger than 5 years. The total incremental societal costs of introducing Hib vaccine in monovalent and pentavalent presentations were, respectively, US8.93 per child vaccinated. Annual discounted treatment costs averted amounted to 20% of pentavalent vaccine costs. For the pentavalent vaccine, the incremental costs per discounted death and disability adjusted life-year averted amounted to US74, respectively, versus 102 for monovalent vaccine. CONCLUSIONS: Routine infant Hib vaccination would prevent a large burden of pediatric illness and death in Indonesia. Even without external funding support, Hib vaccine will be a highly cost-effective intervention in either a monovalent or pentavalent presentation based on commonly used benchmarks
The thermal ignition problem in a cube
Steady state solutions for spontaneous thermal ignition in a unit cube are considered. For the unit sphere there are numerous solutions possible: these appear as ``wiggles'' in the bifurcation diagram. For the unit sphere this has been shown analytically. In contrast, for the unit cube analytic solutions are not possible and hence we must resort to numerical methods to determine the corresponding bifurcation diagram. Comparisons between the cube and the sphere are made
Three-Dimensional Multifunctional Ablative Thermal Protection System
A system for fabricating an ablative, 3D fiber-woven thermal protection material, with porosity 0.5-15 percent, reduced thermal conductivity, very low thermal recession, high glass transition temperature, high frontface-backface temperature difference, relatively high mass density, and significant compression strength and tensile strength
About the nature of Mercer14
We used UKIRT near infrared (NIR) broad band JHK photometry, narrow band
imaging of the 1-0S(1) molecular hydrogen emission line and mid infrared
Spitzer IRAC data to investigate the nature of the young cluster Mercer14.
Foreground star counts in decontaminated NIR photometry and a comparison with
the Besancon Galaxy Model are performed to estimate the cluster distance. This
method yields a distance of 2.5kpc with an uncertainty of about 10% and can be
applied to other young and embedded clusters. Mercer14 shows clear signs of
ongoing star formation with several detected molecular hydrogen outflows, a
high fraction of infrared excess sources and an association to a small gas and
dust cloud. Hence, the cluster is less than 4Myrs old and has a line of sight
extinction of A_K=0.8mag. Based on the most massive cluster members we find
that Mercer14 is an intermediate mass cluster with about 500Mo.Comment: 10pages, 2tables, 5figures, accepted for publication by MNRAS, a
version with higher resolution figures can be found at
http://astro.kent.ac.uk/~df
A “Learning Revolution”? Investigating Pedagogic Practices around Interactive Whiteboards in British Primary Classrooms
Interactive whiteboards have been rapidly introduced into all primary schools under UK Government initiatives. These large, touch-sensitive screens, which control a computer connected to a digital projector, seem to be the first type of educational technology particularly suited for whole-class teaching and learning. Strong claims are made for their value by manufacturers and policy makers, but there has been little research on how, if at all, they influence established pedagogic practices, communicative processes and educational goals. This study has been designed to examine this issue, using observations in primary (elementary) school classrooms. It is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and builds on the authors’ previous research on ICT in educational dialogues and collaborative activities
Event-based relaxation of continuous disordered systems
A computational approach is presented to obtain energy-minimized structures
in glassy materials. This approach, the activation-relaxation technique (ART),
achieves its efficiency by focusing on significant changes in the microscopic
structure (events). The application of ART is illustrated with two examples:
the structure of amorphous silicon, and the structure of Ni80P20, a metallic
glass.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, epsf.sty, 3 figure
Morphologies of Ultracompact HII Regions in W49A and Sgr B2: Prevalence of Shells and a Modified Classification Scheme
We have used Very Large Array (VLA) observations of the massive star forming
regions W49A and Sgr B2, obtained with resolutions from 2\farcs0 to 0\farcs04,
to classify the morphologies of nearly 100 ultracompact HII regions. These high
resolution, multi-frequency, multi-configuration VLA observations motivate
several modifications of the existing morphological classification scheme for
UC HII regions. In this work, we describe the modified morphology scheme and
the criteria used in source classification. In particular, we drop the
``core-halo'' classification, add a ``bipolar'' classification, and change the
shell classification to ``shell-like''. We tally the percentage of each
morphology found in the Sgr B2 and W49A regions and find broad agreement with
the Galactic plane surveys in the distribution of morphologies for most types.
However, we find that nearly a third of the sources in these regions are
shell-like, which is a higher percentage by nearly a factor of ten than found
in the surveys of Galactic plane star forming regions by Wood & Churchwell
(1989a) and Kurtz et al. (1994). This difference may be due to physical
differences in the environments of these two extreme star forming regions.
Alternatively, differences in observational technique may be responsible.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, to appear in The Astrophysical Journal
Letter
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