Observational Dutch Young Symptomatic StrokE studY (ODYSSEY): Study rationale and protocol of a multicentre prospective cohort study

Background: The proportion of strokes occurring in younger adults has been rising over the past decade. Due to the far longer life expectancy in the young, stroke in this group has an even larger socio-economic impact. However, information on etiology and prognosis remains scarce.Methods/design: ODYSSEY is a multicentre prospective cohort study on the prognosis and risk factors of patients with a first-ever TIA, ischemic stroke or intracerebral hemorrhage aged 18 to 49 years. Our aim is to include 1500 patients. Primary outcome will be all cause mortality and risk of recurrent vascular events. Secondary outcome will be the risk of post-stroke epilepsy and cognitive impairment. Patients will complete structured questionnaires on outcome measures and risk factors. Both well-documented and less well-documented risk factors and potentially acute trigger factors will be investigated. Patients will be followed every 6 months for at least 3 years. In addition, an extensive neuropsychological assessment will be administered both at baseline and 1 year after the stroke/TIA. Furthermore we will include 250 stroke-free controls, who will complete baseline assessment and one neuropsychological assessment.Discussion: ODYSSEY is designed to prospectively determine prognosis after a young stroke and get more insight into etiology of patients with a TIA, ischemic stroke and intracerebral hemorrhage in patients aged 18 to 49 years old in a large sample size

Lunar occultation of the diffuse radio sky: LOFAR measurements between 35 and 80 MHz

We present radio observations of the Moon between 35 and 80 MHz to demonstrate a novel technique of interferometrically measuring large-scale diffuse emission extending far beyond the primary beam (global signal) for the first time. In particular, we show that (i) the Moon appears as a negative-flux source at frequencies 35 z >12) and the Epoch of Reionization (12 > z>5)

Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917-27

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.The return of facially disfigured men from the trenches of World War One occasioned a muted public reaction in the US. However, this article will show that burgeoning discourses concerning plastic surgery in the US also generated a significant reaction in the popular press, and that these were reflected, too, in several feature films dealing with facial surgery on disfigured veterans. Though several of these films depicted miraculous transformations occasioned by the surgeons, Robert Florey’s 1927 film, Face Value, focused on an American veteran with facial scarring that could not be repaired. The article will argue that this film drew strongly upon the increasingly prominent public presence of the gueules cassées in the US during 1926 and 1927. Depicting gueules cassées and their facial injuries prominently in several scenes, the film brought to attention difficult questions concerning the futures of such men, which the US media had hitherto rarely addressed

The brightness and spatial distributions of terrestrial radio sources

Faint undetected sources of radio-frequency interference (RFI) might become visible in long radio observations when they are consistently present over time. Thereby, they might obstruct the detection of the weak astronomical signals of interest. This iss

Probing atmospheric electric fields in thunderstorms through radio emission from cosmic-ray-induced air showers

We present measurements of radio emission from cosmic ray air showers that took place during thunderstorms. The intensity and polarization patterns of these air showers are radically different from those measured during fair-weather conditions. With the use of a simple two-layer model for the atmospheric electric field, these patterns can be well reproduced by state-of-the-art simulation codes. This in turn provides a novel way to study atmospheric electric fields