Technique of elbow bending small jacketed transfer lines Patent

Elbow forming in jacketed pipes while maintaining separation between core shape and jacket pipe

Microbiota-based Models Enhance Detection of Colorectal Cancer.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of death among cancers in the United States. Although individuals diagnosed early have a greater than 90% chance of survival, more than one-third of individuals do not adhere to screening recommendations partly because the standard diagnostics, colonoscopy and sigmoidoscopy, are expensive and invasive. Thus, there is a great need to improve the sensitivity of non-invasive tests to detect early stage cancers and adenomas. Numerous studies have demonstrated a causal link between the formation of colonic lesions and the activity of the gut microbiota in tissue culture and animal models. These findings have been complemented by studies in human populations identifying shifts in the composition of the gut microbiota associated with the progression of colorectal cancer. These results suggest that the gut microbiota may represent a reservoir of biomarkers that would complement existing non-invasive methods such as the widely used fecal immunochemical test (FIT). Using stool samples from 490 patients we developed a cross-validated random forest classification model that detects colonic lesions using the relative abundance of gut microbiota and the concentration of hemoglobin in stool. The microbiota-based model had significantly higher sensitivity for lesions compared to FIT alone, detecting the majority of lesions that were missed by FIT. Furthermore, we demonstrated that microbial DNA isolated from the residual buffer of FIT cartridges could be used in place of stool samples for microbiota characterization. These findings demonstrate the potential for microbiota analysis to be combined with existing screening methods to improve detection of colonic lesions.PhDMicrobiology and ImmunologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133364/1/ntbaxter_1.pd

A true concurrent model of smart contracts executions

The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state of smart contracts is collaboratively maintained by a peer-to-peer network of mutually untrusted nodes, which collect from users a set of transactions (representing the required actions on contracts), and execute them in some order. Once this sequence of transactions is appended to the blockchain, the other nodes validate it, re-executing the transactions in the same order. The serial execution of transactions does not take advantage of the multi-core architecture of modern processors, so contributing to limit the throughput. In this paper we propose a true concurrent model of smart contract execution. Based on this, we show how static analysis of smart contracts can be exploited to parallelize the execution of transactions.Comment: Full version of the paper presented at COORDINATION 202

Detection of Asynchronous Message Passing Errors Using Static Analysis

Concurrent programming is hard and prone to subtle errors. In this paper we present a static analysis that is able to detect some commonly occurring kinds of message passing errors in languages with dynamic process creation and communication based on asynchronous message passing. Our analysis is completely automatic, fast, and strikes a proper balance between soundness and completeness: it is effective in detecting errors and avoids false alarms by computing a close approximation of the interprocess communication topology of programs. We have integrated our analysis in dialyzer, a widely used tool for detecting software defects in Erlang programs, and demonstrate its effectiveness on libraries and applications of considerable size. Despite the fact that these applications have been developed over a long period of time and are reasonably well-tested, our analysis has managed to detect a significant number of previously unknown message passing errors in their code

Colchicine-Doubling of Germinating Seedlings of Interspecific Wildrye Hybrids

Colchicine has usually been applied to sterile clones of interspecific grass hybrids to restore fertility. However, when hybrids are partially fertile, colchicine can be applied to germinating seedlings. Four populations of Basin wildrye (Leymus cinereus) X beardless wildrye (L. triticoides) were treated with a 0.2% colchicine solution to double chromosome number from 4x=28 to 8x=56. Doubling percentage was 28, 33, 42, and 44% of all root-tips examined for the four populations. When plants without doubled sectors were discarded, doubling percentage increased to 56, 68, 78, and 78%. Plants with doubled sectors have been placed in crossing blocks to generate octoploid progeny. Octoploids identified through root-tip chromosome counts will be intercrossed to generate 8x populations

Godspeed: Counselor Education Doctoral Student Experiences From Diverse Religious and Spiritual Backgrounds

Amidst growing literature regarding the importance of spirituality within counseling and counselor education, little is known of the experiences of doctoral students regarding their religious and spiritual backgrounds while matriculating through their doctoral program. This research explored the experiences of four researcher-participant counselor education doctoral students from diverse religious and spiritual backgrounds. This exploration deepened their understanding of the role their religious and spiritual identities played in their thoughts, emotions, challenges, and strengths of their experiences. A phenomenological autoethnography method was used for this study. A unique data analysis procedure was developed called Integrative Group Process Phenomenology (IGPP), which was used to analyze journal and music data. The overarching experience was described as a journey with four primary categories of themes identified: painful experiences, learning and awareness, velocity (i.e., themes descriptive of movement and action), and connect versus disconnect. This research brought to light the challenges that counselor education doctoral students may encounter in their training, while highlighting the strength and resilience that religion and spirituality may offer. Recommendations, limitations, and implications for the counseling profession are offered to further the development of research regarding religious and spiritual experiences. © 2018: Alyse M. Anekstein, Lynn Bohecker, Tiffany Nielson, Hailey Martinez, and Nova Southeastern University

A New Look at the Axial Anomaly in Lattice QED with Wilson Fermions

By carrying out a systematic expansion of Feynman integrals in the lattice spacing, we show that the axial anomaly in the U(1) lattice gauge theory with Wilson fermions, as determined in one-loop order from an irrelevant lattice operator in the Ward identity, must necessarily be identical to that computed from the dimensionally regulated continuum Feynman integrals for the triangle diagrams.Comment: 1 figure, LaTeX, 18 page