Declining risk of sudden death in heart failure

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Shock wave induced vaporization of porous solids

Strong shock waves generated by hypervelocity impact can induce vaporization in solid materials. To pursue knowledge of the chemical species in the shock-induced vapors, one needs to design experiments that will drive the system to such thermodynamic states that sufficient vapor can be generated for investigation. It is common to use porous media to reach high entropy, vaporized states in impact experiments. We extended calculations by Ahrens [J. Appl. Phys. 43, 2443 (1972)] and Ahrens and O'Keefe [The Moon 4, 214 (1972)] to higher distentions (up to five) and improved their method with a different impedance match calculation scheme and augmented their model with recent thermodynamic and Hugoniot data of metals, minerals, and polymers. Although we reconfirmed the competing effects reported in the previous studies: (1) increase of entropy production and (2) decrease of impedance match, when impacting materials with increasing distentions, our calculations did not exhibit optimal entropy-generating distention. For different materials, very different impact velocities are needed to initiate vaporization. For aluminum at distention (m)<2.2, a minimum impact velocity of 2.7 km/s is required using tungsten projectile. For ionic solids such as NaCl at distention <2.2, 2.5 km/s is needed. For carbonate and sulfate minerals, the minimum impact velocities are much lower, ranging from less than 1 to 1.5 km/s

First-Principles Calculations of Electronic and Transport Properties of Nanowires

The goal of this research is to find out the electronic structure and transport property of nanowires that we are interested in. As Moore’s law is faltering, scientists are trying to use different methods to continue to increase computer’s computing power like using carbon nanotubes or quantum transistors. In the spirit of this, semiconducting nanowires constituted of atomic units and choices of ligands are proposed to mimic the functions of transistors to achieve the goal of increasing computing power. Electronic structure and electron transport calculations have been conducted based on the density function theory and the non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) method to show the effect of ligands on the nanowire

Network-based stratification of tumor mutations.

Many forms of cancer have multiple subtypes with different causes and clinical outcomes. Somatic tumor genome sequences provide a rich new source of data for uncovering these subtypes but have proven difficult to compare, as two tumors rarely share the same mutations. Here we introduce network-based stratification (NBS), a method to integrate somatic tumor genomes with gene networks. This approach allows for stratification of cancer into informative subtypes by clustering together patients with mutations in similar network regions. We demonstrate NBS in ovarian, uterine and lung cancer cohorts from The Cancer Genome Atlas. For each tissue, NBS identifies subtypes that are predictive of clinical outcomes such as patient survival, response to therapy or tumor histology. We identify network regions characteristic of each subtype and show how mutation-derived subtypes can be used to train an mRNA expression signature, which provides similar information in the absence of DNA sequence