Small Wind Power Machine for Rural and Farm Use in the State of Missouri

This paper describes work in progress to develop a prototype wind power generator for use by small farms, rural and isolated homes. It is anticipated that the wind power generator may supply power (1 to 10 kw) as base electric power (including energy storage), supplemental power, or in other forms (e.g. water pumping, nitrogen or hydrogen manufacture, and direct mechanical drive). The objective of this study is to produce a system(s) of high efficiency, low construction cost, and minimum maintenance requirement. Preliminary wind tunnel tests have been completed on several blade designs. A tower system is under construction on campus that will provide size prototype wind power generators

Strong electron-phonon coupling in delta-phase stabilized Pu

Heat capacity measurements of the delta-phase stabilized alloy Pu-Al suggest that strong electron-phonon coupling is required to explain the moderate renormalization of the electronic density of states near the Fermi energy. We calculate the heat capacity contributions from the lattice and electronic degrees of freedom as well as from the electron-lattice coupling term and find good overall agreement between experiment and theory assuming a dimensionless electron-phonon coupling parameter of order unity, lambda ~ 0.8. This large electron-phonon coupling parameter is comparable to reported values in other superconducting metals with face-centered cubic crystal structure, for example, Pd (lambda ~ 0.7) and Pb (lambda ~ 1.5). Further, our analysis shows evidence of a sizable residual low-temperature entropy contribution, S_{res} ~ 0.4 k_B (per atom). We can fit the residual specific heat to a two-level system. Therefore, we speculate that the observed residual entropy originates from crystal-electric field effects of the Pu atoms or from self-irradiation induced defects frozen in at low temperatures.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Preferences among American Indian People of the Northern Midwest

This study examines factors that influence preferences between traditional cultural and western mental health and substance use associated care among American Indians from the northern Midwest. Personal interviews were conducted with 865 parents/caretakers of tribally enrolled youth concerning their preferences for traditional/cultural and formal healthcare for mental health or substance abuse problems. Adults strongly preferred traditional informal services to formal medical services. In addition, formal services on reservation were preferred to off reservation services. To better serve the mental health and substance abuse treatment needs of American Indians, traditional informal services should be incorporated into the current medical model

Nature of the 5f states in actinide metals

Actinide elements produce a plethora of interesting physical behaviors due to the 5f states. This review compiles and analyzes progress in understanding of the electronic and magnetic structure of the 5f states in actinide metals. Particular interest is given to electron energy-loss spectroscopy and many-electron atomic spectral calculations, since there is now an appreciable library of core d -> valence f transitions for Th, U, Np, Pu, Am, and Cm. These results are interwoven and discussed against published experimental data, such as x-ray photoemission and absorption spectroscopy, transport measurements, and electron, x-ray, and neutron diffraction, as well as theoretical results, such as density-functional theory and dynamical mean-field theory.Comment: 136 pages in Word format, 29 Figures; Accepted to Reviews of Modern Physic

Integrated genetic map and genetic analysis of a region associated with root traits on the short arm of rye chromosome 1 in bread wheat

A rye–wheat centric chromosome translocation 1RS.1BL has been widely used in wheat breeding programs around the world. Increased yield of translocation lines was probably a consequence of increased root biomass. In an effort to map loci-controlling root characteristics, homoeologous recombinants of 1RS with 1BS were used to generate a consensus genetic map comprised of 20 phenotypic and molecular markers, with an average spacing of 2.5 cM. Physically, all recombination events were located in the distal 40% of the arms. A total of 68 recombinants was used and recombination breakpoints were aligned and ordered over map intervals with all the markers, integrated together in a genetic map. This approach enabled dissection of genetic components of quantitative traits, such as root traits, present on 1S. To validate our hypothesis, phenotyping of 45-day-old wheat roots was performed in five lines including three recombinants representative of the entire short arm along with bread wheat parents ‘Pavon 76’ and Pavon 1RS.1BL. Individual root characteristics were ranked and the genotypic rank sums were subjected to Quade analysis to compare the overall rooting ability of the genotypes. It appears that the terminal 15% of the rye 1RS arm carries gene(s) for greater rooting ability in wheat

Synergies, Strengths and Challenges: Findings on Community Capability from a Systematic Health Systems Research Literature Review

Background: Community capability is the combined influence of a community’s social systems and collective resources that can address community problems and broaden community opportunities. We frame it as consisting of three domains that together support community empowerment: what communities have; how communities act; and for whom communities act. We sought to further understand these domains through a secondary analysis of a previous systematic review on community participation in health systems interventions in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Methods: We searched for journal articles published between 2000 and 2012 related to the concepts of “community”, “capability/participation”, “health systems research” and “LMIC.” We identified 64 with rich accounts of community participation involving service delivery and governance in health systems research for thematic analysis following the three domains framing community capability. Results: When considering what communities have, articles reported external linkages as the most frequently gained resource, especially when partnerships resulted in more community power over the intervention. In contrast, financial assets were the least mentioned, despite their importance for sustainability. With how communities act, articles discussed challenges of ensuring inclusive participation and detailed strategies to improve inclusiveness. Very little was reported about strengthening community cohesiveness and collective efficacy despite their importance in community initiatives. When reviewing for whom communities act, the importance of strong local leadership was mentioned frequently, while conflict resolution strategies and skills were rarely discussed. Synergies were found across these elements of community capability, with tangible success in one area leading to positive changes in another. Access to information and opportunities to develop skills were crucial to community participation, critical thinking, problem solving and ownership. Although there are many quantitative scales measuring community capability, health systems research engaged with community participation has rarely made use of these tools or the concepts informing them. Overall, the amount of information related to elements of community capability reported by these articles was low and often of poor quality. Conclusions: Strengthening community capability is critical to ensuring that community participation leads to genuine empowerment. Our simpler framework to define community capability may help researchers better recognize, support and assess it

Mining and validating grape (Vitis L.) ESTs to develop EST-SSR markers for genotyping and mapping

Grape expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are a new resource for developing simple sequence repeat (SSR) functional markers for genotyping and genetic mapping. An integrated pipeline including several computational tools for SSR identification and functional annotation was developed to identify 6,447 EST-SSR sequences from a total collection of 215,609 grape ESTs retrieved from NCBI. The 6,447 EST-SSRs were further reduced to 1,701 non-redundant sequences via clustering analysis, and 1,037 of them were successfully designed with primer pairs flanking the SSR motifs. From them, 150 pairs of primers were randomly selected for PCR amplification, polymorphism and heterozygosity analysis in V. vinifera cvs. Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon, and V. rotundifolia (muscadine grape) cvs. Summit and Noble, and 145 pairs of these primers yielded PCR products. Pairwise comparisons of loci between the parents Riesling and Cabernet Sauvignon showed that 72 were homozygous in both cultivars, while 70 loci were heterozygous in at least one cultivar of the two. Muscadine parents Noble and Summit had 90 homozygous SSR loci in both parents and contained 50 heterozygous loci in at least one of the two. These EST-SSR functional markers are a useful addition for grape genotyping and genome mapping

High-Order SNP Combinations Associated with Complex Diseases: Efficient Discovery, Statistical Power and Functional Interactions

There has been increased interest in discovering combinations of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are strongly associated with a phenotype even if each SNP has little individual effect. Efficient approaches have been proposed for searching two-locus combinations from genome-wide datasets. However, for high-order combinations, existing methods either adopt a brute-force search which only handles a small number of SNPs (up to few hundreds), or use heuristic search that may miss informative combinations. In addition, existing approaches lack statistical power because of the use of statistics with high degrees-of-freedom and the huge number of hypotheses tested during combinatorial search. Due to these challenges, functional interactions in high-order combinations have not been systematically explored. We leverage discriminative-pattern-mining algorithms from the data-mining community to search for high-order combinations in case-control datasets. The substantially improved efficiency and scalability demonstrated on synthetic and real datasets with several thousands of SNPs allows the study of several important mathematical and statistical properties of SNP combinations with order as high as eleven. We further explore functional interactions in high-order combinations and reveal a general connection between the increase in discriminative power of a combination over its subsets and the functional coherence among the genes comprising the combination, supported by multiple datasets. Finally, we study several significant high-order combinations discovered from a lung-cancer dataset and a kidney-transplant-rejection dataset in detail to provide novel insights on the complex diseases. Interestingly, many of these associations involve combinations of common variations that occur in small fractions of population. Thus, our approach is an alternative methodology for exploring the genetics of rare diseases for which the current focus is on individually rare variations