Smart health braceletes

Smart health bracelets: a fashion accessory or an invention of the future? In this article you will learn useful information about the history of the appearance of smart health bracelets, the principle of their operation and additional functions. The article also includes a study of the popularity of these gadgets and a list of criteria for choosing a smart health bracelet

An atom fiber for guiding cold neutral atoms

We present an omnidirectional matter wave guide on an atom chip. The rotational symmetry of the guide is maintained by a combination of two current carrying wires and a bias field pointing perpendicular to the chip surface. We demonstrate guiding of thermal atoms around more than two complete turns along a spiral shaped 25mm long curved path (curve radii down to 200$\mu$m) at various atom--surface distances (35-450$\mu$m). An extension of the scheme for the guiding of Bose-Einstein condensates is outlined

Tandem Solar Cell Concept Using Black Silicon for Enhanced Infrared Absorption

AbstractIn this work we present a novel tandem solar cell concept that is based on enhanced below band gap infrared absorption. The solar cell structure is based on silicon and infrared activated Black Silicon. Infrared active Black Silicon is produced by exposing silicon to fs-laser pulses. It features an enhanced IR absorption, when processed under a sulfur-containing atmosphere. Then sulfur is incorporated into the silicon lattice during laser processing providing energy states in the band gap. This silicon based tandem cell thus absorbs light with wavelengths beyond 1.1μm. This can potentially increase the overall efficiency. In this paper we present the first experimental realization of this concept. We use a standard aluminium-back-surface-field (Al-BSF) silicon solar cell and implement a Black Silicon solar cell on its rear side for enhanced IR absorption. Current and voltage measurements show the feasibility of our concept

Movement patterns during a small knee bend test in academy footballers with femoroacetabular impingement (FAI)

Background: Femoracetabular impingement (FAI) is common in footballers and causes hip pain, which may arise from abnormal morphologic features involving the proximal femur and/or acetabulum. Early detection and treatment are important to prevent the development of osteoarthritis (OA). Despite extensive publications on FAI, little is known about hip movement patterns associated with FAI, which may indicate mechanisms of dysfunction to inform development of effective interventions.Design: Observational pilot studyMethods: Nine male academy footballers aged 12–18 years with hip/groin pain, diagnosed with FAI on magnetic resonance imaging, were studied. The hip and pelvis were observed whilst the participant performed a small knee bend test, to see if any abnormal movement patterns were present.Findings: In all nine cases, abnormal movement patterns were observed clinically. Participants were unable to control hip flexion in one or more aspects, mostly seen as the trunk leaning forwards and the hip moving into increased flexion. Participants also demonstrated poorly controlled hip medial rotation.Discussion: These preliminary findings suggest impaired movement control exists in academy footballers with symptomatic FAI. Identifying and classifying these movement faults may prove necessary for effective prevention and management of symptoms by controlling movement adaptations. Further studies are warranted to validate these findings against motion analysis technology and muscle activity using electromyography, and to further understand the mechanisms of movement dysfunction. Since FAI is a strong predictor in the development of hip OA, it is vital that strategies are developed to prevent FAI and its progression to OA

Tailoring the Absorption Properties of Black Silicon

AbstractSamples of crystalline silicon for use as solar cell material are structured and hyperdoped with sulfur by irradiation with femtosecond laser pulses under a sulfur hexafluoride atmosphere. The sulfur creates energy levels in the silicon band gap, allowing light absorption in the infrared wavelength regime, which offers the potential of a significant efficiency increase. This Black Silicon is a potential candidate for impurity or intermediate band photovoltaics. In this paper we determine the laser processed sulfur energy levels by deep-level transient spectroscopy (DLTS). We present how the number of laser pulses per sample spot influence the sulfur energy levels and hence the DLTS spectra. Further we show that changing the laser pulse by splitting it with a Michelson interferometer setup results in altered absorption which is most likely due to altered sulfur energy levels. This contribution focuses on the possibility of controlling the sulfur in Black Silicon through manipulating the laser pulse shape. As a first step samples of microstructured silicon are fabricated with doubled laser pulses at two different laser pulse distances and the absorption spectra by integrating sphere measurements are compared

Natural isoforms of the Photosystem II D1 subunit differ in photoassembly efficiency of the water-oxidizing complex

© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Oxygenic photosynthesis efficiency at increasing solar flux is limited by light-induced damage (photoinhibition) of Photosystem II (PSII), primarily targeting the D1 reaction center subunit. Some cyanobacteria contain two natural isoforms of D1 that function better under low light (D1:1) or high light (D1:2). Herein, rates and yields of photoassembly of the Mn4CaO5 water-oxidizing complex (WOC) from the free inorganic cofactors (Mn2+, Ca2+, water, electron acceptor) and apo-WOC-PSII are shown to differ significantly: D1:1 apo-WOC-PSII exhibits a 2.3-fold faster rate-limiting step of photoassembly and up to seven-fold faster rate to the first light-stable Mn3+ intermediate, IM1, but with a much higher rate of photoinhibition than D1:2. Conversely, D1:2 apo-WOC-PSII assembles slower but has up to seven-fold higher yield, achieved by a higher quantum yield of charge separation and slower photoinhibition rate. These results confirm and extend previous observations of the two holoenzymes: D1:2-PSII has a greater quantum yield of primary charge separation, faster [P680+ Q A- ] charge recombination and less photoinhibition that results in a slower rate and higher yield of photoassembly of its apo-WOC-PSII complex. In contrast, D1:1-PSII has a lower quantum yield of primary charge separation, a slower [P680+ Q A- ] charge recombination rate, and faster photoinhibition that together result in higher rate but lower yield of photoassembly at higher light intensities. Cyanobacterial PSII reaction centers that contain the high- and low-light D1 isoforms can tailor performance to optimize photosynthesis at varying light conditions, with similar consequences on their photoassembly kinetics and yield. These different efficiencies of photoassembly versus photoinhibition impose differential costs for biosynthesis as a function of light intensity

Logistic Normal Priors for Unsupervised Probabilistic Grammar Induction

We explore a new Bayesian model for probabilistic grammars, a family of distributions over discrete structures that includes hidden Markov models and probabilistic context-free grammars. Our model extends the correlated topic model framework to probabilistic grammars, exploiting the logistic normal distribution as a prior over the grammar parameters. We derive a variational EM algorithm for that model, and then experiment with the task of unsupervised grammar induction for natural language dependency parsing. We show that our model achieves superior results over previous models that use different priors.