Evaluation and Calibration of SAPS 3 in Patients with COVID-19 Admitted to Intensive Care Units

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Studies of Potential Inhibitors of Sodium Aluminosilicate Scales in High-Level Waste Evaporation

The Savannah River Site (SRS) has 49 underground storage tanks used to store High Level Waste (HLW). The tank space in these tanks must be managed to support the continued operation of key facilities. The reduction of the tank volumes in these tanks are accomplished through the use of three atmospheric pressure HLW evaporators. For a decade, evaporation of highly alkaline HLW containing aluminum and silicates has produced sodium aluminosilicate scales causing both operation and criticality hazards in the 2H Evaporator System. Segregation of aluminum-rich wastes from silicate-rich wastes minimizes the amount of scale produced and reduces cleaning expenses, but does not eliminate the scaling nor increases operation flexibility in waste process. Similar issues have affected the aluminum refining industry for many decades. Over the past several years, successful commercial products have been identified to eliminate aluminosilicate fouling in the aluminum industry, but have not been utilized in a nuclear environment. Laboratory quantities of three proprietary aluminosilicate scale inhibitors have been produced and been shown to prevent formation of scales. SRNL has been actively testing these potential inhibitors to examine their radiation stability, radiolytic degradation behaviors, and downstream impacts to determine their viability within the HLW system. One of the tested polymers successfully meets the established criteria for application in the nuclear environment. This paper will describe a summary of the methodology used to prioritize laboratory testing protocols based on potential impacts/risks identified for inhibitor deployment at SRS

Visual search performance is predicted by both prestimulus and poststimulus electrical brain activity

© The Author(s) 2016. An individual's performance on cognitive and perceptual tasks varies considerably across time and circumstances. We investigated neural mechanisms underlying such performance variability using regression-based analyses to examine trial-by-trial relationships between response times (RTs) and different facets of electrical brain activity. Thirteen participants trained five days on a color-popout visual-search task, with EEG recorded on days one and five. The task was to find a color-popout target ellipse in a briefly presented array of ellipses and discriminate its orientation. Later within a session, better preparatory attention (reflected by less prestimulus Alpha-band oscillatory activity) and better poststimulus early visual responses (reflected by larger sensory N1 waves) correlated with faster RTs. However, N1 amplitudes decreased by half throughout each session, suggesting adoption of a more efficient search strategy within a session. Additionally, fast RTs were preceded by earlier and larger lateralized N2pc waves, reflecting faster and stronger attentional orienting to the targets. Finally, SPCN waves associated with target-orientation discrimination were smaller for fast RTs in the first but not the fifth session, suggesting optimization with practice. Collectively, these results delineate variations in visual search processes that change over an experimental session, while also pointing to cortical mechanisms underlying performance in visual search

Experimental and theoretical confirmation of an orthorhombic phase transition in niobium at high pressure and temperature

Compared to other body-centered cubic (bcc) transition metals, Nb has been the subject of fewer compression studies and there are still aspects of its phase diagram which are unclear. Here, we report a combined theoretical and experimental study of Nb under high pressure and temperature. We present the results of static laser-heated diamond anvil cell experiments up to 120 GPa using synchrotron-based fast x-ray diffraction combined with ab initio quantum molecular dynamics simulations. The melting curve of Nb is determined and evidence for a solid-solid phase transformation in Nb with increasing temperature is found. The high-temperature phase of Nb is orthorhombic Pnma. The bcc-Pnma transition is clearly seen in the experimental data on the Nb principal Hugoniot. The bcc-Pnma coexistence observed in our experiments is explained. Agreement between the measured and calculated melting curves is very good except at 40–60 GPa where three experimental points lie below the theoretical melting curve by 250 K (or 7%); a possible explanation is given

First divertor physics studies in Wendelstein 7-X

The Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) optimized stellarator fusion experiment, which went into operation in 2015, has been operating since 2017 with an un-cooled modular graphite divertor. This allowed first divertor physics studies to be performed at pulse energies up to 80 MJ, as opposed to 4 MJ in the first operation phase, where five inboard limiters were installed instead of a divertor. This, and a number of other upgrades to the device capabilities, allowed extension into regimes of higher plasma density, heating power, and performance overall, e.g. setting a new stellarator world record triple product. The paper focuses on the first physics studies of how the island divertor works. The plasma heat loads arrive to a very high degree on the divertor plates, with only minor heat loads seen on other components, in particular baffle structures built in to aid neutral compression. The strike line shapes and locations change significantly from one magnetic configuration to another, in very much the same way that codes had predicted they would. Strike-line widths are as large as 10 cm, and the wetted areas also large, up to about 1.5 m(2), which bodes well for future operation phases. Peak local heat loads onto the divertor were in general benign and project below the 10 MW m(-2) limit of the future water-cooled divertor when operated with 10 MW of heating power, with the exception of low-density attached operation in the high-iota configuration. The most notable result was the complete (in all 10 divertor units) heat-flux detachment obtained at high-density operation in hydrogen

The C-Terminal Domain of the Novel Essential Protein Gcp Is Critical for Interaction with Another Essential Protein YeaZ of Staphylococcus aureus

Previous studies have demonstrated that the novel protein Gcp is essential for the viability of various bacterial species including Staphylococcus aureus; however, the reason why it is required for bacterial growth remains unclear. In order to explore the potential mechanisms of this essentiality, we performed RT-PCR analysis and revealed that the gcp gene (sa1854) was co-transcribed with sa1855, yeaZ (sa1856) and sa1857 genes, indicating these genes are located in the same operon. Furthermore, we demonstrated that Gcp interacts with YeaZ using a yeast two-hybrid (Y2H) system and in vitro pull down assays. To characterize the Gcp-YeaZ interaction, we performed alanine scanning mutagenesis on the residues of C-terminal segment of Gcp. We found that the mutations of the C-terminal Y317-F322 region abolished the interaction of Gcp and YeaZ, and the mutations of the D324-N329 and S332-Y336 regions alleviated Gcp binding to YeaZ. More importantly, we demonstrated that these key regions of Gcp are also necessary for the bacterial survival since these mutated Gcp could not complement the depletion of endogenous Gcp. Taken together, our data suggest that the interaction of Gcp and YeaZ may contribute to the essentiality of Gcp for S. aureus survival. Our findings provide new insights into the potential mechanisms and biological functions of this novel essential protein