Follow-up services for improving long-term outcomes in intensive care unit (ICU) survivors

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: Our main objective is to assess the effectiveness of follow-up services for ICU survivors that aim to identify and address unmet health needs related to the ICU period. We aim to assess the effectiveness in relation to health-related quality of life, mortality, depression and anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical function, cognitive function, ability to return to work or education and adverse events. Our secondary objectives are, in general, to examine both the various ways that follow-up services are provided and any major influencing factors. Specifically, we aim to explore: the effectiveness of service organisation (physician versus nurse led, face to face versus remote, timing of follow-up service); possible differences in services related to country (developed versus developing country); and whether participants had delirium within the ICU setting

The Alberta Oil Sands

The Alberta oil sands near Ft. McMurray, Alberta, have been estimated by many to contain at least 300,000,000,000 bbls of oil, and would therefore be classed as the largest potential oil field in the world. The oil sand deposit is considered to be non-marine in origin and consists mainly of very fine-grained, angular, quartz grains with the viscous oil acting as a binding agent. Lenticular beds of clay and extensive cross-bedding indicates deltaic conditions with intermittent flooding periods during deposition. Extensive research has shown that the problems of extraction, transportation, plant design and location are surmountable, and oil production from the sands is forseeable in the near future

Chemistry and valency spectra of Chromite in SNC meteorites

Shergottite chromite core mantle sources were Al-poor, Fe-rich, low Fe^{3+}/Fe^{2+}, fO_{2} 1 to 4 unit

Superconductor Test Station

A basic test station, using a modified four point probe was designed and built for measuring resistivity over a temperature range. This test station can now be used to characterize the effects of any subsequent semiconductor processing on transition temperatures and performance of superconductive films

Hall effect in heavy-fermion metals

The heavy fermion systems present a unique platform in which strong electronic correlations give rise to a host of novel, and often competing, electronic and magnetic ground states. Amongst a number of potential experimental tools at our disposal, measurements of the Hall effect have emerged as a particularly important one in discerning the nature and evolution of the Fermi surfaces of these enigmatic metals. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of Hall effect measurements in the heavy-fermion materials, and examine the success it has had in contributing to our current understanding of strongly correlated matter. Particular emphasis is placed on its utility in the investigation of quantum critical phenomena which are thought to drive many of the exotic electronic ground states in these systems. This is achieved by the description of measurements of the Hall effect across the putative zero-temperature instability in the archetypal heavy-fermion metal YbRh$_2$Si$_2$. Using the Ce$M$In$_5$ (with $M =$ Co, Ir) family of systems as a paradigm, the influence of (antiferro-)magnetic fluctuations on the Hall effect is also illustrated. This is compared to prior Hall effect measurements in the cuprates and other strongly correlated systems to emphasize on the generality of the unusual magnetotransport in materials with non-Fermi liquid behavior.Comment: manuscript accepted in Adv. Phy

Spectral and spatial information from a novel dual-wavelength full-waveform terrestrial laser scanner for forest ecology

The Salford Advanced Laser Canopy Analyser (SALCA) is an experimental terrestrial laser scanner designed and built specifically to measure the structural and biophysical properties of forest canopies. SALCA is a pulsed dual-wavelength instrument with co-aligned laser beams recording backscattered energy at 1063 and 1545 nm; it records full-waveform data by sampling the backscattered energy at 1 GHz giving a range resolution of 150 mm. The finest angular sampling resolution is 1 mrad and around 9 million waveforms are recorded over a hemisphere above the tripod-mounted scanner in around 110 minutes. Starting in 2010, data pre-processing and calibration approaches, data analysis, and information extraction methods, were developed and a wide range of field experiments conducted. The overall objective is to exploit the spatial, spectral and temporal characteristics of the data to produce ecologically useful information on forest and woodland canopies including leaf area index, plant area volume density and leaf biomass, and to explore the potential for tree species identification and classification. This paper outlines the key challenges in instrument development, highlights the potential applications for providing new data for forest ecology, and describes new avenues for exploring information-rich data from the next generation of TLS instruments like SALCA