Mask breathing system for the Apollo command module

Breathing mask for Apollo command module spacecre

The impact of poor asthma control among asthma patients treated with inhaled corticosteroids plus long-acting β2-agonists in the United Kingdom : a cross-sectional analysis

This study was sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim Ltd UK, which was involved in all stages of the study conduct and analysis and also funded all costs associated with the development of the manuscript. The authors acknowledge Kantar Health and Errol J Philip for providing medical writing support. Editorial assistance and medical writing support was also provided by Michelle Rebello, PhD, and Suchita Nath-Sain, PhD, of Cactus Communications. This study was sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim Ltd., UK, which also funded all costs associated with the development of the manuscript. Author Correction, npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine 27, Article number: 65 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41533-017-0063-5, 05 December 2017 Correction to:npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine (2017); doi:10.1038/s41533-017-0014-1; Published 09 March 2017Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Giant Fluctuations of Coulomb Drag in a Bilayer System

We have observed reproducible fluctuations of the Coulomb drag, both as a function of magnetic field and electron concentration, which are a manifestation of quantum interference of electrons in the layers. At low temperatures the fluctuations exceed the average drag, giving rise to random changes of the sign of the drag. The fluctuations are found to be much larger than previously expected, and we propose a model which explains their enhancement by considering fluctuations of local electron properties.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Cavitation Inception in Immersed Jet Shear Flows

Cavitation inception occurring in immersed jets was investigated in a purpose-built mechanical flow rig. The rig utilized custom-built cylindrical and conical nozzles to direct high-velocity jets of variable concentration n-octane-hexadecane mixtures into a fused silica optically accessible receiver. The fluid pressure upstream and down-stream of the nozzles were manually controlled. The study employed a variety of acrylic and metal nozzles. The results show that the critical upstream pressure to downstream pressure ratio for incipient cavitation decreases with increasing n-octane concentration for the cylindrical nozzles, and increases with increasing n-octane concentration for the conical nozzle

Making sense of digitally remediated touch in virtual reality experiences

Touch, often called the ‘first sense’, is fundamental to how we experience and know ourselves, others and the world. Increasingly, touch is being brought into the digital landscape. This paper explores this shifting landscape to understand the ways in which touch is re-mediated in the context of virtual reality. With attention to the sensoriality and sociality of touch, it asks what ‘counts’ as touch in VR, how is touch experienced and how is it incorporated into meaning making. We present and discuss findings from a multimodal and multisensory study of 16 participants interacting in two VR experiences to describe: the participants’ material encounters with the virtual through a focus on touch practices, expectations and norms; the ways in which participants made meaning of (and with) virtual touch through their dynamic selection and orchestration of the range of semiotic and experiential resources available; and how these virtual touch experiences translated into discourses of touch in VR to emphasize continuities and change between the past, present and futures. The paper comments on the methodological challenges of researching touch in the emergent landscape of VR and asks how multimodality might engage newly with touch, perhaps the most under-rated and neglected of modes and senses, and its digital remediation

Taking an Extended Embodied Perspective of Touch: Connection-Disconnection in iVR

Bringing touch into VR experiences through haptics is considered increasingly important for user engagement and fostering feelings of presence and immersion, yet few qualitative studies have explored users' iVR touch experiences. This paper takes an embodied approach–bringing attention to the tactile-kinaesthetic body–to explore users' wholistic experiences of touch in iVR, moving beyond the cutaneous and tactile elements of “feeling” to elaborate upon themes of movement and kinetics. Our findings show how both touch connections and disconnections emerged though material forms of tactility (the controller, body positioning, tactile expectations) and through “felt proximities” and the tactile-kinaesthetic experience thus shaping the sense of presence. The analysis shows three key factors that influence connection and disconnection, and how connection is re-navigated or sought at moments of experienced disconnection: a sense of control or agency; identity; and bridging between the material and virtual. This extended notion of touch deepens our understanding of its role in feelings of presence by providing insight into a range of factors related to notions of touch – both physical and virtual–that come into play in creating a sense of connection or presence (e.g., histories, expectations), and highlights the potential for iVR interaction to attend to the body beyond the hands in terms of touch

Estimating China’s Urban Energy Demand and CO2 Emissions: A Bottom-up Modeling Perspective

China is experiencing unprecedented urbanization with the urban share of population expected to grow to nearly 80% by 2050. Chinese urban residents consume nearly 1.6 times as much commercial energy as rural residents, and account for an even larger share of energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions embodied in urban infrastructure and goods. As a result, cities can play an increasingly important role in helping China meet its future energy and CO2 intensity reduction targets. While some individual cities have conducted energy and greenhouse gas emission inventories, China lacks estimates of aggregate urban energy consumption and CO2 emissions that take into consideration detailed sectoral drivers, fuel mixes, and end-uses specific to urban areas. This paper describes the results of a bottom-up, energy end-use modeling methodology for estimating China’s urban energy demand and CO2 emissions for four key demand sectors. We present a detailed modeling framework that characterizes residential and commercial building end-uses in Chinese cities, differentiates between intra-city and inter-city transport attributable to urban residents, and evaluates the urban share of industrial production activity. Scenario analysis is also used to quantify the urban energy and CO2 emissions reduction potential within each sector. We find that the Chinese industrial sector alone accounts for 56% of urban primary energy demand and 62% of urban CO2 emissions in 2010 and holds the greatest mitigation potential – a characteristic unique to Chinese cities. Maximum deployment of commercially-available, cost-effective technologies across all four sectors can also help Chinese urban CO2 emissions peak earlier

A Two-Dimensional MagnetoHydrodynamics Scheme for General Unstructured Grids

We report a new finite-difference scheme for two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations, with and without rotation, in unstructured grids with quadrilateral cells. The new scheme is implemented within the code VULCAN/2D, which already includes radiation-hydrodynamics in various approximations and can be used with arbitrarily moving meshes (ALE). The MHD scheme, which consists of cell-centered magnetic field variables, preserves the nodal finite difference representation of div(\bB) by construction, and therefore any initially divergence-free field remains divergence-free through the simulation. In this paper, we describe the new scheme in detail and present comparisons of VULCAN/2D results with those of the code ZEUS/2D for several one-dimensional and two-dimensional test problems. The code now enables two-dimensional simulations of the collapse and explosion of the rotating, magnetic cores of massive stars. Moreover, it can be used to simulate the very wide variety of astrophysical problems for which multi-D radiation-magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD) is relevant.Comment: 22 pages, including 11 figures; Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal. Higher resolution figures available at http://zenith.as.arizona.edu/~burrows/mhd-code

Electrical switching of magnetic polarity in a multiferroic BiFeO3 device at room temperature

We have directly imaged reversible electrical switching of the cycloidal rotation direction (magnetic polarity) in a (111)-BiFeO3 epitaxial-film device at room temperature by non-resonant x-ray magnetic scattering. Consistent with previous reports, fully relaxed (111)-BiFeO3 epitaxial films consisting of a single ferroelectric domain were found to comprise a sub-micron-scale mosaic of magneto-elastic domains, all sharing a common direction of the magnetic polarity, which was found to switch reversibly upon reversal of the ferroelectric polarization without any measurable change of the magneto-elastic domain population. A real-space polarimetry map of our device clearly distinguished between regions of the sample electrically addressed into the two magnetic states with a resolution of a few tens of micron. Contrary to the general belief that the magneto-electric coupling in BiFeO3 is weak, we find that electrical switching has a dramatic effect on the magnetic structure, with the magnetic moments rotating on average by 90 degrees at every cycle.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures; corrected figure