Factors contributing to the degradation of poly(p-phenylene benzobisoxazole) (PBO) fibers under elevated temperature and humidity conditions

The moisture absorption behavior of Zylon fibers was characterized in various high temperature and high humidity conditions in a controlled environment. The results of these thermal cycling tests show that PBO fibers not only absorb, but also retain moisture (approximately 0.5-3%) when exposed to elevated temperature and humidity cycles. Also, the impurities of Zylon fibers were characterized through the use of Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and solid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). These tests demonstrated that, in addition to other impurities, PBO fibers may contain up to 0.55 weight percent phosphorus, and that this phosphorus is present in the form of phosphoric acid. It was also shown through accelerated hydrolytic degradation tests that production procedures used to neutralize the acid present in the fibers have a beneficial effect on the hydrolytic performance of the fiber. The data collected in this study was then compared and contrasted to known Kevlar studies, identifying similarities, differences, and potential trends. The results of these tests seem to indicate that there is accelerated acid catalyzed hydrolysis occurring in the fiber which is causing these fibers to degrade at an increased rate. This condition is further accelerated by heat and humidity induced permanent fiber swelling

The influence of the miracle plays of the early Christian church on the secular drama

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universityhttps://archive.org/details/theinfluenceofmi00one

Short stature and the effect of human growth hormone: Guidelines for the care of people with spina bifida

It is estimated that a significant percentage of individuals with spina bifida (SB) are shorter than their age-matched typical peers. Parents of children with spina bifida may ask if human growth hormone is appropriate for their child. This article discusses short stature and the use of human growth hormone among children with SB. This guideline was developed for SB Healthcare Guidelines from the 2018 Spina Bifida Association's Fourth Edition of the Guidelines for the Care of People with Spina Bifida

Automated clinical coding using off-the-shelf large language models

The task of assigning diagnostic ICD codes to patient hospital admissions is typically performed by expert human coders. Efforts towards automated ICD coding are dominated by supervised deep learning models. However, difficulties in learning to predict the large number of rare codes remain a barrier to adoption in clinical practice. In this work, we leverage off-the-shelf pre-trained generative large language models (LLMs) to develop a practical solution that is suitable for zero-shot and few-shot code assignment, with no need for further task-specific training. Unsupervised pre-training alone does not guarantee precise knowledge of the ICD ontology and specialist clinical coding task, therefore we frame the task as information extraction, providing a description of each coded concept and asking the model to retrieve related mentions. For efficiency, rather than iterating over all codes, we leverage the hierarchical nature of the ICD ontology to sparsely search for relevant codes.Comment: Accepted to the NeurIPS 2023 workshop Deep Generative Models For Health (DGM4H). 9 pages, 3 figure

Searching in HI for Massive Low Surface Brightness Galaxies: Samples from HyperLeda and the UGC

A search has been made for 21 cm HI line emission in a total of 350 unique galaxies from two samples whose optical properties indicate they may be massive The first consists of 241 low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies of morphological type Sb and later selected from the HyperLeda database and the the second consists of 119 LSB galaxies from the UGC with morphological types Sd-m and later. Of the 350 unique galaxies, 239 were observed at the Nancay Radio Telescope, 161 at the Green Bank Telescope, and 66 at the Arecibo telescope. A total of 295 (84.3%) were detected, of which 253 (72.3%) appear to be uncontaminated by any other galaxies within the telescope beam. Finally, of the total detected, uncontaminated galaxies, at least 31 appear to be massive LSB galaxies, with a total HI mass $\ge$ 10$^{10}$ M$_{sol}$, for H$_0$ = 70 km/s/Mpc. If we expand the definition to also include galaxies with significant total (rather than just gas) mass, i.e., those with inclination-corrected HI line width W$_{50}$,cor > 500 km/s, this bring the total number of massive LSB galaxies to 41. There are no obvious trends between the various measured global galaxy properties, particularly between mean surface brightness and galaxy mass.Comment: 71 pages, including all tables and figures; Accepted by A

Molecular Criteria for Defining the Naive Human Pluripotent State.

Recent studies have aimed to convert cultured human pluripotent cells to a naive state, but it remains unclear to what extent the resulting cells recapitulate in vivo naive pluripotency. Here we propose a set of molecular criteria for evaluating the naive human pluripotent state by comparing it to the human embryo. We show that transcription of transposable elements provides a sensitive measure of the concordance between pluripotent stem cells and early human development. We also show that induction of the naive state is accompanied by genome-wide DNA hypomethylation, which is reversible except at imprinted genes, and that the X chromosome status resembles that of the human preimplantation embryo. However, we did not see efficient incorporation of naive human cells into mouse embryos. Overall, the different naive conditions we tested showed varied relationships to human embryonic states based on molecular criteria, providing a backdrop for future analysis of naive human pluripotency.This study was supported by grants from the Simons Foundation (SFLIFE #286977 to R.J) and in part by the NIH (RO1-CA084198) to R.J., from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Research Council (KRABnKAP, No. 268721) to D.T. The work in J.R.E’s laboratory was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF3034) and the Mary K. Chapman Foundation. J.R.E is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. T.W.T. is supported by a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship (098889/Z/12/Z), J.P. by a Foundation Bettencourt Award and by the Association pour la Recherche sur le Cancer (ARC), M.I. by a postdoctoral training grant from the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec. R.J. is co-founder of Fate Therapeutics and an adviser to Stemgent.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Cell Press via http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/abstract/S1934-5909(16)30161-

Study of low-lying resonant states in 16F using an 15O radioactiveion beam

A 120 MeV {sup 15}O radioactive ion beam with an intensity on target of 4.5 x 10{sup 4} pps has been developed at the 88-inch cyclotron at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This beam has been used to study the level structure of {sup 16}F at low energies via the p({sup 15}O,p) reaction using the thick target inverse kinematics method on a polyethylene target. The experimental excitation function was analyzed using R-matrix calculations. Significantly improved values for the level widths of the four low-lying states in 16F are reported. Good agreement with the theoretical spectroscopic factors is also obtained