Human rights violations in organ procurement practice in China

Over 90% of the organs transplanted in China before 2010 were procured from prisoners. Although Chinese officials announced in December 2014 that the country would completely cease using organs harvested from prisoners, no regulatory adjustments or changes in China’s organ donation laws followed. As a result, the use of prisoner organs remains legal in China if consent is obtained

Theory of periodic swarming of bacteria: application to Proteus mirabilis

The periodic swarming of bacteria is one of the simplest examples for pattern formation produced by the self-organized collective behavior of a large number of organisms. In the spectacular colonies of Proteus mirabilis (the most common species exhibiting this type of growth) a series of concentric rings are developed as the bacteria multiply and swarm following a scenario periodically repeating itself. We have developed a theoretical description for this process in order to get a deeper insight into some of the typical processes governing the phenomena in systems of many interacting living units. All of our theoretical results are in excellent quantitative agreement with the complete set of available observations.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Lyalpha heating and its impact on early structure formation

In this paper we have calculated the effect of Lyalpha photons emitted by the first stars on the evolution of the IGM temperature. We have considered both a standard Salpeter IMF and a delta-function IMF for very massive stars with mass 300 M_sun. We find that the Lyalpha photons produced by the stellar populations considered here are able to heat the IGM at z<25, although never above ~100 K. Stars with a Salpeter IMF are more effective as, due to the contribution from small-mass long-living stars, they produce a higher Lyalpha background. Lyalpha heating can affect the subsequent formation of small mass objects by producing an entropy floor that may limit the amount of gas able to collapse and reduce the gas clumping.We find that the gas fraction in halos of mass below ~ 5 x 10^6 M_sun is less than 50% (for the smallest masses this fraction drops to 1% or less) compared to a case without Lyalpha heating. Finally, Lyalpha photons heat the IGM temperature above the CMB temperature and render the 21cm line from neutral hydrogen visible in emission at z<15.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, to be printed in MNRA

Non-obviousness and Screening

The paper offers a novel justification for the non-obviousness patentability requirement. An innovation involves two stages: research results in a technology blueprint, which development transforms into a profitable activity. An innovator, who is either efficient or inefficient, must rely on outside finance for the development. Only patented technologies are developed. Strengthening the non-obviousness requirement alleviates adverse selection by discouraging inefficient innovators from doing research, but creates inefficiencies by excluding marginal innovations. We show that it is socially optimal to raise the non-obviousness requirement so as to exclude bad innovators; we also provide several robustness checks and discuss the policy implications

CICE Magazine, No. 5

Immersive Experiences Behind the Archives Door SDC Club Spotlight: JSU Local Logger Do Loggers Vote? Race & Pedagogy National Conference Youth Summit Wrapping your Head Around Cultural Appropriationhttps://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/cicemagazine/1004/thumbnail.jp

Maternal dietary intake during pregnancy and offspring body composition: The Healthy Start Study

Consistent evidence of an influence of maternal dietary intake during pregnancy on infant body size and composition in human populations is lacking, despite robust evidence in animal models

The Spin-Resolved Atomic Velocity Distribution and 21-cm Line Profile of Dark-Age Gas

The 21-cm hyperfine line of atomic hydrogen (HI) is a promising probe of the cosmic dark ages. In past treatments of 21-cm radiation it was assumed the hyperfine level populations of HI could be characterized by a velocity-independent ``spin temperature'' T_s determined by a competition between 21-cm radiative transitions, spin-changing collisions, and (at lower redshifts) Lyman-alpha scattering. However we show here that, if the collisional time is comparable to the radiative time, the spin temperature will depend on atomic velocity, T_s=T_s(v), and one must replace the usual hyperfine level rate equations with a Boltzmann equation describing the spin and velocity dependence of the HI distribution function. We construct here the Boltzmann equation relevant to the cosmic dark ages and solve it using a basis-function method. Accounting for the actual spin-resolved atomic velocity distribution results in up to a 2 per cent suppression of the 21-cm emissivity, and a redshift and angular-projection dependent suppression or enhancement of the linear power spectrum of 21-cm fluctuations of up to 5 per cent. The effect on the 21-cm line profile is more dramatic -- its full-width at half maximum (FWHM) can be enhanced by up to 60 per cent relative to the velocity-independent calculation. We discuss the implications for 21-cm tomography of the dark ages.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. So

Simulating Cosmic Reionization at Large Scales II: the 21-cm Emission Features and Statistical Signals

We present detailed predictions for the redshifted 21cm signal from the epoch of reionization. These predictions are obtained from radiative transfer calculations on the results of large scale (100/h Mpc), high dynamic range, cosmological simulations. We consider several scenarios for the reionization history, of both early and extended reionization. From the simulations we construct and analyze a range of observational characteristics, from the global signal, via detailed images and spectra, to statistical representations of rms fluctuations, angular power spectra, and probability distribution functions to characterize the non-gaussianity of the 21cm signal. (abbreviated abstract)Comment: Revised version: brought in sync with MNRAS accepted version. 16 pages, 14 figure

Modelling Primordial Gas in Numerical Cosmology

We have reviewed the chemistry and cooling behaviour of low-density (n<10^4 cm^-3) primordial gas and devised a cooling model wich involves 19 collisional and 9 radiative processes and is applicable for temperatures in the range (1 K < T < 10^8 K). We derived new fits of rate coefficients for the photo-attachment of neutral hydrogen, the formation of molecular hydrogen via H-, charge exchange between H2 and H+, electron detachment of H- by neutral hydrogen, dissociative recombination of H2 with slow electrons, photodissociation of H2+, and photodissociation of H2. Further it was found that the molecular hydrogen produced through the gas-phase processes, H2+ + H -> H2 + H+, and H- + H -> H2 + e-, is likely to be converted into its para configuration on a faster time scale than the formation time scale. We have tested the model extensively and shown it to agree well with former studies. We further studied the chemical kinetics in great detail and devised a minimal model which is substantially simpler than the full reaction network but predicts correct abundances. This minimal model shows convincingly that 12 collisional processes are sufficient to model the H, He, H+, H-, He+, He++, and H2 abundances in low density primordial gas for applications with no radiation fields.Comment: 26 pages of text, 4 tables, and 6 eps figures. The paper is also available at http://zeus.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8080/~abel/PGas/bib.html Submitted to New Astronomy. Note that some of the hyperlinks given in the paper are still under constructio