The Effect of Added Weight on Foot Anthropometry in Pregnant Women and Controls

Please refer to the pdf version of the abstract located adjacent to the title

Multi-Community Risk Assessment Framework for Drinking Water

PresentationDrinking water supply involves a complex network of natural and man-made infrastructure necessary to capture, store, convey, treat, and discharge this necessary resource. Each component in this “cloud to tap” supply chain faces a host of threats such as systemic decay, population change, natural disaster, cyber and physical attacks, and/or contamination incidents. Evaluating and quantifying the near- and long-term implications of these stressors on the risk and resilience of the current water infrastructure system has historically been implemented at the local utility level. The Drinking Water Resilience Project (DWRP), a collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Sandia National Laboratories, the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS), and the University of Tennessee (UT) is aimed at providing a more comprehensive view of water utility risk and resilience. Specifically, Sandia’s effort will develop an infrastructure risk assessment tool to support self-assessment by the asset owner/operator using an interactive, data-rich, web-based application that guides the user through the analysis. The associated analysis is intended to be simple, consistent and comparable. This facilitates the sharing of results, in a secure environment, across multiple levels of government as the need requires. This sharing helps place individual utility results in the broader context of risk borne by similar utilities across the U.S. Shared analysis also helps identify and address issues with assets and resources shared across multiple utilities. Most importantly, risks and mitigating measures can be prioritized across different geographic scales to aid funding decisions made at levels beyond the capacity of a single utility. A demonstration of the framework will be given along with demonstration results from several public utilities

Sit-to-Stand Symmetry in Individuals with Hip Pathology

Post-hip fracture patients continue to exhibit asymmetries during sit-to-stand task following rehabilitation. While strength is thoroughly addressed, perceptual deficits may be a missing component to rehabilitation post-hip fracture

Dynamic breaking of a single gold bond

AbstractWhile one might assume that the force to break a chemical bond gives a measure of the bond strength, this intuition is misleading. If the force is loaded slowly, thermal fluctuations may break the bond before it is maximally stretched, and the breaking force will be less than the bond can sustain. Conversely, if the force is loaded rapidly it is more likely that the maximum breaking force is measured. Paradoxically, no clear differences in breaking force were observed in experiments on gold nanowires, despite being conducted under very different conditions. Here we explore the breaking behaviour of a single Au–Au bond and show that the breaking force is dependent on the loading rate. We probe the temperature and structural dependencies of breaking and suggest that the paradox can be explained by fast breaking of atomic wires and slow breaking of point contacts giving very similar breaking forces.</jats:p

Taz protects hematopoietic stem cells from an aging-dependent decrease in PU.1 activity

Specific functions of the immune system are essential to protect us from infections caused by pathogens such as viruses and bacteria. However, as we age, the immune system shows a functional decline that can be attributed in large part to age-associated defects in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs)-the cells at the apex of the immune cell hierarchy. Here, we find that the Hippo pathway coactivator TAZ is potently induced in old HSCs and protects these cells from functional decline. We identify Clca3a1 as a TAZ-induced gene that allows us to trace TAZ activity in vivo. Using CLCA3A1 as a marker, we can isolate "young-like" HSCs from old mice. Mechanistically, Taz acts as coactivator of PU.1 and to some extent counteracts the gradual loss of PU.1 expression during HSC aging. Our work thus uncovers an essential role for Taz in a previously undescribed fail-safe mechanism in aging HSCs. Immune system function declines with age, a consequence of defects in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Here the authors show that TAZ buffers age-related loss of PU.1 activity to maintain HSC functionality and identify the surface protein Clca3a1 as a marker of "young-like" HSCs, even in old mice

From Symbolic Violence to Symbolic Reparation Strengthening Resilience and Reparation in Conflict-Affected Areas through Place-(re)making. Examples of the West Bank and Colombia

Based on examples of the West Bank and central Colombia, this paper investigates how in conflict settings, symbolic violence affects populations and on their perception of place, lifestyle and culture. It also looks at the potential of space and place-making to enhance conflict transformation and resilience by strengthening the sense of place and symbolic reparation. In extreme environments, symbolic violence has become a means of actively imposing social or symbolic domination which can be challenged by community-based peace-building and place-making initiatives

Stimulated Axion Decay in Superradiant Clouds around Primordial Black Holes

The superradiant instability can lead to the generation of extremely dense axion clouds around rotating black holes. We show that, despite the long lifetime of the QCD axion with respect to spontaneous decay into photon pairs, stimulated decay becomes significant above a minimum axion density and leads to extremely bright lasers. The lasing threshold can be attained for axion masses μ≳10^{-8}  eV, which implies superradiant instabilities around spinning primordial black holes with mass ≲0.01  M_{⊙}. Although the latter are expected to be nonrotating at formation, a population of spinning black holes may result from subsequent mergers. We further show that lasing can be quenched by Schwinger pair production, which produces a critical electron-positron plasma within the axion cloud. Lasing can nevertheless restart once annihilation lowers the plasma density sufficiently, resulting in multiple laser bursts that repeat until the black hole spins down sufficiently to quench the superradiant instability. In particular, axions with a mass ∼10^{-5}  eV and primordial black holes with mass ∼10^{24}  kg, which may account for all the dark matter in the Universe, lead to millisecond bursts in the GHz radio-frequency range, with peak luminosities ∼10^{42}  erg/s, suggesting a possible link to the observed fast radio bursts.publishe

Homogeneous analysis of globular clusters from the APOGEE survey with the BACCHUS code - III. omega Cen

We study the multiple populations of omega Cen by using the abundances of Fe, C, N, O, Mg, Al, Si, K, Ca, and Ce from the high-resolution, high signal-to-noise (S/N > 70) spectra of 982 red giant stars observed by the SDSS-IV/APOGEE-2 survey. We find that the shape of the Al-Mg and N-C anticorrelations changes as a function of metallicity, continuous for the metal-poor groups, but bimodal (or unimodal) at high metallicities. There are four Fe populations, similarly to previous literature findings, but we find seven populations based on Fe, Al, and Mg abundances. The evolution of Al in omega Cen is compared to its evolution in the Milky Way and in five representative globular clusters. We find that the distribution of Al in metal-rich stars of omega Cen closely follows what is observed in the Galaxy. Other alpha-elements and C, N, O, and Ce are also compared to the Milky Way, and significantly elevated abundances are observed over what is found in the thick disc for almost all elements. However, we also find some stars with high metallicity and low [Al/Fe], suggesting that omega Cen could be the remnant core of a dwarf galaxy, but the existence of these peculiar stars needs an independent confirmation. We also confirm the increase in the sum of CNO as a function of metallicity previously reported in the literature and find that the [C/N] ratio appears to show opposite correlations between Al-poor and Al-rich stars as a function of metallicity

The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presents the first spectroscopic data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This ninth data release (DR9) of the SDSS project includes 535,995 new galaxy spectra (median z=0.52), 102,100 new quasar spectra (median z=2.32), and 90,897 new stellar spectra, along with the data presented in previous data releases. These spectra were obtained with the new BOSS spectrograph and were taken between 2009 December and 2011 July. In addition, the stellar parameters pipeline, which determines radial velocities, surface temperatures, surface gravities, and metallicities of stars, has been updated and refined with improvements in temperature estimates for stars with T_eff<5000 K and in metallicity estimates for stars with [Fe/H]>-0.5. DR9 includes new stellar parameters for all stars presented in DR8, including stars from SDSS-I and II, as well as those observed as part of the SDSS-III Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration-2 (SEGUE-2). The astrometry error introduced in the DR8 imaging catalogs has been corrected in the DR9 data products. The next data release for SDSS-III will be in Summer 2013, which will present the first data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) along with another year of data from BOSS, followed by the final SDSS-III data release in December 2014.Comment: 9 figures; 2 tables. Submitted to ApJS. DR9 is available at http://www.sdss3.org/dr

The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment

The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in operation since July 2014. This paper describes the second data release from this phase, and the fourteenth from SDSS overall (making this, Data Release Fourteen or DR14). This release makes public data taken by SDSS-IV in its first two years of operation (July 2014-2016). Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14 is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14 is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS); the first data from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data driven machine learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of the publicly available data from SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release, and provides links to data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be followed by SDSS-V.Comment: SDSS-IV collaboration alphabetical author data release paper. DR14 happened on 31st July 2017. 19 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJS on 28th Nov 2017 (this is the "post-print" and "post-proofs" version; minor corrections only from v1, and most of errors found in proofs corrected