Continuing the education of autistic pupils while focusing on family wellbeing during the Coronavirus Pandemic

This advice is given in the form of numbered points in no particular order. Some will be very relevant and useful to some autistic children and young people and their families and others will not. It is for the reader to select those that make most sense and seem worth trying. As this document was developed at the start of the pandemic lockdown, transition back in to school /college was not then at the top of the priority list. Supporting learners going back into schools and colleges which may look very different from their pre pandemic presentation is clearly an important consideration now. The first bullet point raises this concern which is unpacked further later in the document

Embedded disposable functionalized electrochemical biosensor with a 3D-printed flow cell for detection of hepatic oval cells (HOCs)

Hepatic oval cells (HOCs) are considered the progeny of the intrahepatic stem cells that are found in a small population in the liver after hepatocyte proliferation is inhibited. Due to their small number, isolation and capture of these cells constitute a challenging task for immunosensor technology. This work describes the development of a 3D-printed continuous flow system and exploits disposable screen-printed electrodes for the rapid detection of HOCs that over-express the OV6 marker on their membrane. Multiwall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) electrodes have a chitosan film that serves as a scaffold for the immobilization of oval cell marker antibodies (anti-OV6-Ab), which enhance the sensitivity of the biomarker and makes the designed sensor specific for oval cells. The developed sensor can be easily embedded into the 3D-printed flow cell to allow cells to be exposed continuously to the functionalized surface. The continuous flow is intended to increase capture of most of the target cells in the specimen. Contact angle measurements were performed to characterize the nature and quality of the modified sensor surface, and electrochemical measurements (cyclic voltammetry (CV) and square wave voltammetry (SWV)) were performed to confirm the efficiency and selectivity of the fabricated sensor to detect HOCs. The proposed method is valuable for capturing rare cells and could provide an effective tool for cancer diagnosis and detection

Breaking Halo Occupation Degeneracies with Marked Statistics

We show that a suitably defined marked correlation function can be used to break degeneracies in halo-occupation distribution modeling. The statistic can be computed on both 3D and 2D data sets, and should be applicable to all upcoming galaxy surveys. A proof of principle, using mock catalogs created from N-body simulations, is given.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, minor revisions to match version accepted by MNRA

Weed Control in Lawns and Other Turf

Guide to weed control in lawns and other turf discusses methods of weed control, time of application, calibration of sprayers, dry spreaders, control of common weeds, and cleaning the sprayer

Population structure of multidrug resistant Klebsiella oxytoca within hospitals across the UK and Ireland identifies sharing of virulence and resistance genes with K. pneumoniae.

Klebsiella oxytoca, a member of the Enterobacteriaceae, is a gram-negative pathogenic bacterium of environmental origin, which can cause infection in healthcare settings. Outbreaks of multidrug-resistant K. oxytoca infection have been increasingly reported in hospitalized patients. Despite the growing importance of this pathogen, there is limited knowledge about the population structure and epidemiology of antimicrobial resistant K. oxytoca. We investigated the population structure and genomic basis of antimicrobial resistance of 41 multidrug resistant K. oxytoca isolates recovered from bloodstream infections across the UK and Ireland. Our results show that K. oxytoca has a highly diverse population, which is composed of several distinct clades, and we identified one recent expansion of a clone within our dataset. Although the K. oxytoca genomes are clearly distinct from the genomes of a global collection of Klebsiella pneumoniae complex, pre-dominantly composed of K. pneumoniae, we found evidence for sharing of core genes through recombination, as well as the exchange of accessory antimicrobial resistance and virulence factor genes between the species. Our findings also suggest that the different K. oxytoca clades have acquired antimicrobial resistance and virulence factor genes independently. This highlights the clinical and therapeutic importance of genetic flexibility in K. oxytoca and the relevance of this in its role as an opportunistic pathogen

A New Algorithm for Computing Statistics of Weak Lensing by Large-Scale Structure

We describe an efficient algorithm for calculating the statistics of weak lensing by large-scale structure based on a tiled set of independent particle-mesh N-body simulations which telescope in resolution along the line of sight. This efficiency allows us to predict not only the mean properties of lensing observables such as the power spectrum, skewness and kurtosis of the convergence, but also their sampling errors for finite fields of view, which are themselves crucial for assessing the cosmological significance of observations. We find that the nongaussianity of the distribution substantially increases the sampling errors for the skewness and kurtosis in the several to tens of arcminutes regime, whereas those for the power spectrum are only fractionally increased even out to wavenumbers where shot noise from the intrinsic ellipticities of the galaxies will likely dominate the errors.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures; minor changes reflect accepted versio

The Coyote Universe I: Precision Determination of the Nonlinear Matter Power Spectrum

Near-future cosmological observations targeted at investigations of dark energy pose stringent requirements on the accuracy of theoretical predictions for the clustering of matter. Currently, N-body simulations comprise the only viable approach to this problem. In this paper we demonstrate that N-body simulations can indeed be sufficiently controlled to fulfill these requirements for the needs of ongoing and near-future weak lensing surveys. By performing a large suite of cosmological simulation comparison and convergence tests we show that results for the nonlinear matter power spectrum can be obtained at 1% accuracy out to k~1 h/Mpc. The key components of these high accuracy simulations are: precise initial conditions, very large simulation volumes, sufficient mass resolution, and accurate time stepping. This paper is the first in a series of three, with the final aim to provide a high-accuracy prediction scheme for the nonlinear matter power spectrum.Comment: 18 pages, 22 figures, minor changes to address referee repor