Finding an Expert Witness in the Sciences

To the uninitiated a classification of diversified sciences upsets the notion that science is one field of knowledge. There are times when even a scientist in one area has difficulty in locating an expert in another area. How then does one find a scientific expert

Finding an Expert Witness in the Sciences

To the uninitiated a classification of diversified sciences upsets the notion that science is one field of knowledge. There are times when even a scientist in one area has difficulty in locating an expert in another area. How then does one find a scientific expert

Nature and Effects of Narcotics for Pain

The dictionary defines a medicine as a drug that is used to treat diseases, or to relieve pain. This term includes materials that act upon various tissues, organs and systems of the anatomy. Upon further inquiry one finds that the term narcotic refers to those preparations which produce profound sleep, lethargy, and relief of pain. This article will deal primarily with the sensation called pain, and the use of narcotics to relieve that sensation

Laboratory Accident Liability: Academic and Industrial

Educational institutions are not expected to be insurers of a student\u27s safety; however, schools must exercise that degree of care required to avoid a negligent disregard of the potential dangers inherent in academic chemical experimentation. Industry must likewise exert due care to avoid unnecessary exposure of the industrial chemist to unreasonable dangers. Injuries sustained in the industrial research laboratory may be recoverable under workmen\u27s compensation statutes or under tort law. The industrial chemist assumes a limited risk, but he does not assume the perils of his employer\u27s negligence

RIVPACS database documentation. Final report

With the advent of the EU Water Framework Directive the concept of the 'reference condition' has become explicit within the legislative framework of the European Union. Reference condition has been established as a quality standard against which assessments of biological degradation must be compared. It is therefore essential that Member States can demonstrate that the biological datasets used to define their reference conditions meet the criteria of the WFD. The RIVPACS reference site dataset is therefore central to the definition of reference conditions for macroinvertebrates in streams and rivers in the United Kingdom. Objectives of research: • To establish the ownership of the RIVPACS reference site dataset • To liaise with all stakeholders of the dataset to establish unhindered access to the RIVPACS reference site dataset for the UK agencies (in perpetuity) • To deliver the RIVPACS reference site dataset to the UK agencies and to the public domain in a readily accessible database together will its accompanying physicochemical variables (both existing and newly collated as part of this project), historical and current anthropogenic stress data, and a range of calculated biotic indices. Key findings and recommendations: Ownership of the RIVPACS dataset resides with no single organization and several different organizations consider that they own different portions of the dataset. Formal permissions to release the dataset into the public domain have been obtained from all twelve extant organizations that have been identified as having funded various phases of RIVPACS research. In addition, CEH/NERC has also agreed to release the RIVPACS dataset to the public domain. Terms and conditions relating to the end use of the RIVPACS dataset have now been established. The RIVPACS database has been assembled in Microsoft® Access and can now be downloaded from the CEH web site. This report details the terms and conditions that apply to all end users of the database and it documents the tables given in the database, their structure and the origin of their data. A separate Pressure Data Analysis report describes the screening of the RIVPACS sites in terms of the current and emerging definitions of reference condition

Scientific Objectives, Measurement Needs, and Challenges Motivating the PARAGON Aerosol Initiative

Aerosols are involved in a complex set of processes that operate across many spatial and temporal scales. Understanding these processes, and ensuring their accurate representation in models of transport, radiation transfer, and climate, requires knowledge of aerosol physical, chemical, and optical properties and the distributions of these properties in space and time. To derive aerosol climate forcing, aerosol optical and microphysical properties and their spatial and temporal distributions, and aerosol interactions with clouds, need to be understood. Such data are also required in conjunction with size-resolved chemical composition in order to evaluate chemical transport models and to distinguish natural and anthropogenic forcing. Other basic parameters needed for modeling the radiative influences of aerosols are surface reflectivity and three-dimensional cloud fields. This large suite of parameters mandates an integrated observing and modeling system of commensurate scope. The Progressive Aerosol Retrieval and Assimilation Global Observing Network (PARAGON) concept, designed to meet this requirement, is motivated by the need to understand climate system sensitivity to changes in atmospheric constituents, to reduce climate model uncertainties, and to analyze diverse collections of data pertaining to aerosols. This paper highlights several challenges resulting from the complexity of the problem. Approaches for dealing with them are offered in the set of companion papers

Probing the physics of narrow-line regions of Seyfert galaxies I: The case of NGC 5427

We have used the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) on the ANU 2.3m telescope at Siding Spring to observe the nearby, nearly face-on, Seyfert 2 galaxy, NGC 5427. We have obtained integral field spectroscopy of both the nuclear regions and the HII regions in the spiral arms. We have constrained the chemical abundance in the interstellar medium of the extended narrow line region (ENLR) by measuring the abundance gradient in the circum-nuclear \ion{H}{ii} regions to determine the nuclear chemical abundances, and to use these to in turn determine the EUV spectral energy distribution for comparison with theoretical models. We find a very high nuclear abundance, $\sim 3.0$ times solar, with clear evidence of a nuclear enhancement of N and He, possibly caused by massive star formation in the extended ($\sim 100$pc) central disk structure. The circum-nuclear narrow-line region spectrum is fit by a radiation pressure dominated photoionisation model model with an input EUV spectrum from a Black Hole with mass $5\times10^7 M_{\odot}$ radiating at $\sim 0.1$ of its Eddington luminosity. The bolometric luminosity is closely constrained to be $\log L_{\mathrm bol.} = 44.3\pm 0.1$ erg s$^{-1}$. The EUV spectrum characterised by a soft accretion disk and a harder component extending to above 15keV. The ENLR region is extended in the NW-SE direction. The line ratio variation in circum-nuclear spaxels can be understood as the result of mixing \ion{H}{ii} regions with an ENLR having a radius-invariant spectrum.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 14 pages, 13 figure

How do 16-17 year old school students engage with scientific research?

Our article explores how 16-17 year old school students discuss contemporary scientific research and how they use their current school science knowledge in thinking through open research problems in biomedical science. Contemporary research problems (somewhat simplified) were presented to school groups of six participants who were tasked with discussing possible solutions. More specifically, they were asked to devise testable hypotheses and experiments to account for cell movements that form the embryonic spinal cord. An experienced researcher presented the problem and was available to answer student questions and to prompt them when they became stuck. Our analysis shows that fruitful discussions have the following three features: authoritative scaffolding encouraging elaboration, explanation, and use of pupil knowledge; willingness of participants to problematise and revise suggestions; and collective elaboration of ideas sufficient to stimulate new questions. Students drew on knowledge through dialogue which problematised their school knowledge and opened-up its difficulties in application to a research task. We suggest that an openness to new ways of thinking and uncertainty in learning science rather than the STEM ‘pipeline’ might attract more young people from minority groups into studying science at university and open up new pedagogic possibilities in addressing science research in schools

Probing the Physics of Narrow Line Regions in Active Galaxies II: The Siding Spring Southern Seyfert Spectroscopic Snapshot Survey (S7)

Here we describe the \emph{Siding Spring Southern Seyfert Spectroscopic Snapshot Survey} (S7) and present results on 64 galaxies drawn from the first data release. The S7 uses the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) mounted on the ANU 2.3m telescope located at the Siding Spring Observatory to deliver an integral field of $38\times25$~ arcsec at a spectral resolution of $R=7000$ in the red ($530-710$nm), and $R=3000$ in the blue ($340-560$nm). {From these data cubes we have extracted the Narrow Line Region (NLR) spectra from a 4 arc sec aperture centred on the nucleus. We also determine the H$\beta$ and [OIII]~$\lambda$5007 fluxes in the narrow lines, the nuclear reddening, the reddening-corrected relative intensities of the observed emission lines, and the H$\beta$ and \lOIII\ luminosities {determined from spectra for which the stellar continuum has been removed.} We present a set of images of the galaxies in [OIII]~$\lambda$5007, [NII]~$\lambda$6584 and H$\alpha$ which serve to delineate the spatial extent of the extended narrow line region (ENLR) and {\bf also to} reveal the structure and morphology of the surrounding \HII\ regions. Finally, we provide a preliminary discussion of those Seyfert~1 and Seyfert~2 galaxies which display coronal emission lines in order to explore the origin of these lines.Comment: Accepted for publication 9 Jan 2015, Astrophysical Journal Supplements. 49pages, 8 figure