Report of Committee on Federal Legislation

Mr. President, members of the Association, here is the Spence Bill, forty-two pages of government control. Our report is on file, the report of a divided committee. It was printed. Maybe you have not read it. Perhaps for the reason suggested by the president this morning, the review may not have reached you in time. We might say, as another chairman did this morning, that we will rest our report and let it go at that, as a counsel might rest his case upon his brief. But as experienced counsel, we are all familiar with that sinking feeling that you get in the pit of your stomach when you fear that the court may not have read your brief, after all. Since the report may not be wholly familiar to all of you, I may therefore be permitted to paraphrase the more important parts of it, so that the matter will be fairly before you including those whose late arrival here may have prevented their reading the report

Experimental and numerical investigation of capillary flow in SU8 and PDMS microchannels with integrated pillars

Microfluidic channels with integrated pillars are fabricated on SU8 and PDMS substrates to understand the capillary flow. Microscope in conjunction with highspeed camera is used to capture the meniscus front movement through these channels for ethanol and isopropyl alcohol, respectively. In parallel, numerical simulations are conducted, using volume of fluid method, to predict the capillary flow through the microchannels with different pillar diameter to height ratio, ranging from 2.19 to 8.75 and pillar diameter to pitch ratio, ranging from 1.44 to 2.6. The pillar size (diameter, pitch and height) and the physical properties of the fluid (surface tension and viscosity) are found to have significant influence on the capillary phenomena in the microchannel. The meniscus displacement is non-uniform due to the presence of pillars and the non-uniformity in meniscus displacement is observed to increase with decrease in pitch to diameter ratio. The surface area to volume ratio is observed to play major roles in the velocity of the capillary meniscus of the devices. The filling speed is observed to change more dramatically under different pillar heights upto 120 mu m and the change is slow with further increase in the pillar height. The details pertaining to the fluid distribution (meniscus front shapes) are obtained from the numerical results as well as from experiments. Numerical predictions for meniscus front shapes agree well with the experimental observations for both SU8 and PDMS microchannels. It is observed that the filling time obtained experimentally matches very well with the simulated filling time. The presence of pillars creates uniform meniscus front in the microchannel for both ethanol and isopropyl alcohol. Generalized plots in terms of dimensionless variables are also presented to predict the performance parameters for the design of these microfluidic devices. The flow is observed to have a very low Capillary number, which signifies the relative importance of surface tension to viscous effects in the present study

Changes in composition and lead speciation due to water washing of air pollution control residue from municipal waste incineration

Changes in elemental and mineralogical composition, and lead speciation, of air pollution control residue (APCR) from municipal solid waste incineration, due to treatment by water washing, were investigated in this work and are reported in the context of a review of the literature. Water washing was shown to substantially modify the nature of APCR by: 1) removing 23% dry mass soluble salts to disagglomerate particles and significantly reduce concentrations of the associated major elements, and increase concentrations of insoluble matrix elements and potential pollutants; and 2) respeciating elements to form new phases. X-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES) showed that the 500 mg/kg of Pb in raw and washed APCR were comprised mainly of Pb-glass, with some PbSO4, and small amounts of PbO and PbCl2. Semi-quantitative linear combination fitting suggests that the glass in the APCR may be unstable and release Pb under the alkaline pH of water washing, to reprecipitate as PbO. Chemical analysis suggests that some Pb may be removed by washing. Scientific understanding of the composition of raw and washed APCR, and particularly the speciation of potentially toxic metals, such as Zn and Pb, can help in developing effective element recovery and residue treatment, utilization or disposal strategies

High-density information storage in an absolutely defined aperiodic sequence of monodisperse copolyester

Synthesis of a polymer composed of a large discrete number of chemically distinct monomers in an absolutely defined aperiodic sequence remains a challenge in polymer chemistry. The synthesis has largely been limited to oligomers having a limited number of repeating units due to the difficulties associated with the step-by-step addition of individual monomers to achieve high molecular weights. Here we report the copolymers of ??-hydroxy acids, poly(phenyllactic-co-lactic acid) (PcL) built via the cross-convergent method from four dyads of monomers as constituent units. Our proposed method allows scalable synthesis of sequence-defined PcL in a minimal number of coupling steps from reagents in stoichiometric amounts. Digital information can be stored in an aperiodic sequence of PcL, which can be fully retrieved as binary code by mass spectrometry sequencing. The information storage density (bit/Da) of PcL is 50% higher than DNA, and the storage capacity of PcL can also be increased by adjusting the molecular weight (~38???kDa)

Lifshitz-like space-time from intersecting branes in string/M theory

We construct 1/4 BPS, threshold F-D$p$ bound states (with $0\leq p \leq 5$) of type II string theories by applying S- and T-dualities to the D1-D5 system of type IIB string theory. These are different from the known 1/2 BPS, non-threshold F-D$p$ bound states. The near horizon limits of these solutions yield Lifshitz-like space-times with varying dynamical critical exponent $z=2(5-p)/(4-p)$, for $p\neq 4$, along with the hyperscaling violation exponent $\theta = p - (p-2)/(4-p)$, showing how Lifshitz-like space-time can be obtained from string theory. The dilatons are in general non-constant (except for $p=1$). We discuss the holographic RG flows and the phase structures of these solutions. For $p=4$, we do not get a Lifshitz-like space-time, but the near horizon limit in this case leads to an AdS$_2$ space.Comment: 20 pages, no figure, v2: proper identification of hyperscaling violation exponent has been made, abstract and the text has been changed accordingly, note added, v3: minor changes, refs added, version to appear in JHE

Spontaneous splenic rupture mimicking pneumonia: a case report

A 74-year-old gentleman presented with a history of left-sided pleuritic chest and upper abdominal pain. Examination and chest x-ray findings were suggestive of pneumonia. An abdominal ultrasound was suggestive of spontaneous splenic rupture. An abdominal computed tomography scan showed a splenic laceration and large peri-splenic haematoma. The advice from the on-call surgical team was to treat conservatively but the patient's condition deteriorated suddenly and he died. Spontaneous splenic rupture is uncommon but probably under-diagnosed and should be considered in all patients presenting with non-specific abdominal pain. The optimal management strategy for the older patient with spontaneous ruptured spleen is unknown