Lawson criterion for ignition exceeded in an inertial fusion experiment

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition as a proof of principle of various fusion concepts. Following the Lawson criterion, an ignited plasma is one where the fusion heating power is high enough to overcome all the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop with rapidly increasing temperature. In inertially confined fusion, ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin "burn propagation" into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain. While "scientific breakeven" (i.e., unity target gain) has not yet been achieved (here target gain is 0.72, 1.37 MJ of fusion for 1.92 MJ of laser energy), this Letter reports the first controlled fusion experiment, using laser indirect drive, on the National Ignition Facility to produce capsule gain (here 5.8) and reach ignition by nine different formulations of the Lawson criterion

Intergenerational impacts of maternal mortality: Qualitative findings from rural Malawi

Background: Maternal mortality, although largely preventable, remains unacceptably high in developing countries such as Malawi and creates a number of intergenerational impacts. Few studies have investigated the far-reaching impacts of maternal death beyond infant survival. This study demonstrates the short- and long-term impacts of maternal death on children, families, and the community in order to raise awareness of the true costs of maternal mortality and poor maternal health care in Neno, a rural and remote district in Malawi. Methods: Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted to assess the impact of maternal mortality on child, family, and community well-being. We conducted 20 key informant interviews, 20 stakeholder interviews, and six sex-stratified focus group discussions in the seven health centers that cover the district. Transcripts were translated, coded, and analyzed in NVivo 10. Results: Participants noted a number of far-reaching impacts on orphaned children, their new caretakers, and extended families following a maternal death. Female relatives typically took on caregiving responsibilities for orphaned children, regardless of the accompanying financial hardship and frequent lack of familial or governmental support. Maternal death exacerbated children’s vulnerabilities to long-term health and social impacts related to nutrition, education, employment, early partnership, pregnancy, and caretaking. Impacts were particularly salient for female children who were often forced to take on the majority of the household responsibilities. Participants cited a number of barriers to accessing quality child health care or support services, and many were unaware of programming available to assist them in raising orphaned children or how to access these services. Conclusions: In order to both reduce preventable maternal mortality and diminish the impacts on children, extended families, and communities, our findings highlight the importance of financing and implementing universal access to emergency obstetric and neonatal care, and contraception, as well as social protection programs, including among remote populations

The role of voice and word order in incremental sentence processing. Studies on sentence production and comprehension in Tagalog and German

Contains fulltext : 176833.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Radboud University, 10 oktober 2017Promotores : Levinson, S.C., Van Valin, R.D. Co-promotor : Norcliffe, E.242 p

The timing of utterance planning in task-oriented dialogue: Evidence from a novel list-completion paradigm

Contains fulltext : 161643.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)In conversation, interlocutors rarely leave long gaps between turns, suggesting that next speak- ers begin to plan their turns while listening to the previous speaker. The present experiment used analyses of speech onset latencies and eye-movements in a task-oriented dialogue paradigm to investigate when speakers start planning their response. Adult German participants heard a confederate describe sets of objects in utterances that either ended in a noun (e.g. Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad ('I have a door and a bicycle')) or a verb form (Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad besorgt ('I have gotten a door and a bicycle')), while the presence or absence of the final verb either was or was not predictable from the preceding sentence structure. In response, participants had to name any unnamed objects they could see in their own display in utterances such as Ich habe ein Ei ('I have an egg'). The main question was when participants started to plan their response. The results are consistent with the view that speakers begin to plan their turn as soon as sufficient information is available to do so, irrespective of further incoming words.13 p

Speaking for seeing: Sentence structure guides visual event apprehension

Human experience and communication are centred on events, and event apprehension is a rapid process that draws on the visual perception and immediate categorization of event roles (“who does what to whom”). We demonstrate a role for syntactic structure in visual information uptake for event apprehension. An event structure foregrounding either the agent or patient was activated during speaking, transiently modulating the apprehension of subsequently viewed unrelated events. Speakers of Dutch described pictures with actives and passives (agent and patient foregrounding, respectively). First fixations on pictures of unrelated events that were briefly presented (for 300 ms) next were influenced by the active or passive structure of the previously produced sentence. Going beyond the study of how single words cue object perception, we show that sentence structure guides the viewpoint taken during rapid event apprehension