Thermally operated valve Patent

Gas valve operated by thermally expanding and contracting devic

Reduced empathic concern leads to utilitarian moral judgments in trait alexithymia

Recent research with moral dilemmas supports dual-process model of moral decision making. This model posits two different paths via which people can endorse utilitarian solution that requires personally harming someone in order to achieve the greater good (e.g., killing one to save five people): (i) weakened emotional aversion to the prospect of harming someone due to reduced empathic concern for the victim; (ii) enhanced cognition which supports cost-benefit analysis and countervails the prepotent emotional aversion to harm. Direct prediction of this model would be that personality traits associated with reduced empathy would show higher propensity to endorse utilitarian solutions. As per this prediction, we found that trait alexithymia, which is well-known to have deficits in empathy, was indeed associated with increased utilitarian tendencies on emotionally aversive personal moral dilemmas and this was due to reduced empathic concern for the victim. Results underscore the importance of empathy for moral judgments in harm/care domain of morality

Orbiting quarantine facility. The Antaeus report

A mission plan for the Orbiting Quarantine Facility (OQF) is presented. Coverage includes system overview, quarantine and protocol, the laboratory, support systems, cost analysis and possible additional uses of the OQF

Planetary protection issues and future Mars missions

A primary scientific theme for the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) is the search for life, extant or extinct, on Mars. Because of this, concerns have arisen about Planetary Protection (PP), the prevention of biological cross-contamination between Earth and other planets during solar system exploration missions. A recent workshop assessed the necessity for, and impact of, PP requirements on the unmanned and human missions to Mars comprising the SEI. The following ground-rules were adopted: (1) Information needed for assessing PP issues must be obtained during the unmanned precursor mission phase prior to human landings. (2) Returned Mars samples will be considered biologically hazardous until proven otherwise. (3) Deposition of microbes on Mars and exposure of the crew to martian materials are inevitable when humans land. And (4) Human landings are unlikely until it is demonstrated that there is no harmful effect of martian materials on terrestrial life forms. These ground-rules dictated the development of a conservative PP strategy for precursor missions. Key features of the proposed strategy include: to prevent forward-contamination, all orbiters will follow Mars Observer PP procedures for assembly, trajectory, and lifetime. All landers will follow Viking PP procedures for assembly, microbial load reduction, and bio-shield. And, to prevent back-contamination, all sample return missions will have PP requirements which include fail-safe sample sealing, breaking contact chain with the martian surface, and containment and quarantine analysis in Earth-based laboratory. In addition to deliberating on scientific and technical issues, the workshop made several recommendations for dealing with forward and back-contamination concerns from non-scicntific perspectives

Global rank-invariant set normalization (GRSN) to reduce systematic distortions in microarray data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Microarray technology has become very popular for globally evaluating gene expression in biological samples. However, non-linear variation associated with the technology can make data interpretation unreliable. Therefore, methods to correct this kind of technical variation are critical. Here we consider a method to reduce this type of variation applied after three common procedures for processing microarray data: MAS 5.0, RMA, and dChip^®.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We commonly observe intensity-dependent technical variation between samples in a single microarray experiment. This is most common when MAS 5.0 is used to process probe level data, but we also see this type of technical variation with RMA and dChip^®processed data. Datasets with unbalanced numbers of up and down regulated genes seem to be particularly susceptible to this type of intensity-dependent technical variation. Unbalanced gene regulation is common when studying cancer samples or genetically manipulated animal models and preservation of this biologically relevant information, while removing technical variation has not been well addressed in the literature. We propose a method based on using rank-invariant, endogenous transcripts as reference points for normalization (GRSN). While the use of rank-invariant transcripts has been described previously, we have added to this concept by the creation of a global rank-invariant set of transcripts used to generate a robust average reference that is used to normalize all samples within a dataset. The global rank-invariant set is selected in an iterative manner so as to preserve unbalanced gene expression. Moreover, our method works well as an overlay that can be applied to data already processed with other probe set summary methods. We demonstrate that this additional normalization step at the "probe set level" effectively corrects a specific type of technical variation that often distorts samples in datasets.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We have developed a simple post-processing tool to help detect and correct non-linear technical variation in microarray data and demonstrate how it can reduce technical variation and improve the results of downstream statistical gene selection and pathway identification methods.</p