X-ray images of defect formation in porcelain ceramics during drying

The drying phase during the manufacture of ceramic pieces is often the point of failure owing to the formation of cracks. In this study, non-destructive microfocus X-ray imaging has been employed to study the onset of cracking in porcelain and correlate it with the moisture content. Samples of moist porcelain paste were extruded through dies of 30 and 50 mm diameter. Sections of the extrudate were placed into an X-ray transparent oven and imaged while drying at constant temperature and low humidity. The time to the onset of cracking was found to be a function of temperature. The mode of failure was consistent across the temperature range 40–120 °C.The higher the drying temperature, the shorter the time to failure and the higher the moisture loss at failure. For a particular paste consistency and sample geometry there was found to be a critical moisture content below which cracking began to occur. This moisture threshold was observed to be weakly temperature dependent; it appears to be more sensitive to sample geometry and paste consistency. A safe drying curve has been constructed which provides a boundary for the process parameters which prevent cracking. The implication is that during the drying of a ceramic piece, different sections may have different safe parameter boundaries and the process must be designed to keep all sections within the safe region

The criminal profiling illusion:what's behind the smoke and mirrors?

There is a belief that criminal profilers can predict a criminal's characteristics from crime scene evidence. In this article, the authors argue that this belief may be an illusion and explain how people may have been misled into believing that criminal profiling (CP) works despite no sound theoretical grounding and no strong empirical support for this possibility. Potentially responsible for this illusory belief is the information that people acquire about CP, which is heavily influenced by anecdotes, repetition of the message that profiling works, the expert profiler label, and a disproportionate emphasis on correct predictions. Also potentially responsible are aspects of information processing such as reasoning errors, creating meaning out of ambiguous information, imitating good ideas, and inferring fact from fiction. The authors conclude that CP should not be used as an investigative tool because it lacks scientific support

Oesophageal tuberculosis mimicking a tumour during treatment for nodal tuberculosis.

A patient with cervical lymph node tuberculosis developed a tubercular ulcer in the oesophagus eight weeks after starting treatment. This was probably due to a drug related hypersensitivity reaction in an adjacent mediastinal lymph node and subsided with continued treatment