Measurement of the Atmospheric Muon Spectrum from 20 to 3000 GeV

The absolute muon flux between 20 GeV and 3000 GeV is measured with the L3 magnetic muon spectrometer for zenith angles ranging from 0 degree to 58 degree. Due to the large exposure of about 150 m2 sr d, and the excellent momentum resolution of the L3 muon chambers, a precision of 2.3 % at 150 GeV in the vertical direction is achieved. The ratio of positive to negative muons is studied between 20 GeV and 500 GeV, and the average vertical muon charge ratio is found to be 1.285 +- 0.003 (stat.) +- 0.019 (syst.).Comment: Total 32 pages, 9Figure

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = −0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.publishedVersio

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Design of electron band pass filters for electrically biased finite superlattices

We design optimal band pass filters for electrons in semiconductor heterostructures, under a uniform applied electric field. The inner cells are chosen to provide a desired transmission window. The outer cells are then designed to transform purely incoming or outgoing waves into Bloch states of the inner cells. The transfer matrix is interpreted as a conformal mapping in the complex plane, which allows us to write constraints on the outer cell parameters, from which physically useful values can be obtained

The lived experiences of stigmatization in the process of HIV status disclosure among people living with HIV in Taiwan

[[abstract]]People living with HIV (PLWH) face social stigma which makes disclosure of HIV status difficult. The purpose of this descriptive qualitative study was to understand the lived experiences of stigmatization in the process of disease disclosure among PLWH in Taiwan. Analysis of the semi-structured interviews from 19 PLWH in Taiwan revealed two phases and six themes. Phase one "experiences before disclosure" involved three themes: "Struggles under the pressure of concealing the HIV Status", "Torn between fear of unemployment/isolation and desire to protect closed ones", and "Being forced to disclose the HIV status." Phase two "experiences after disclosure" included three themes: "Receiving special considerations and requirements from school or work", "Receiving differential treatments in life and when seeking medical care", and "Stress relief and restart." Healthcare professionals need to assess stigmatization in PLWH and develop individualized approaches to assist with the disease disclosure process

Full-frame simulation of micro-structural failure using a multi-grid finite difference method

International audienceSince the development of X-ray tomography, it has been possible to obtain 3D images of the micro-structure of materials. These data are extremely useful for analysing of the morphology of heterogeneous materials. More recently, using diffraction contrast tomography in polycrystalline materials, not only the morphology of grains but also their orientation can be measured. Using these data for building numerical models of materials at the microstructure scale is extremely promising. For finite element based simulations, mesh generation reveals very tedious and time consuming, sometimes more than the simulation by itself. As an alternative approach, we propose a multi-grid finite-difference method. This approach has the following advantages: 1. no mesh is required, the voxel grid of the tomography images is directly used as the finite difference grid 2. thanks to the multi-grid algorithm, stiffness ratio between different material constituents as high as 10 billions can be simulated. 3. the memory cost compared to finite element is really low and the method can be run massively in parallel with a good scalability. To illustrate the capability of the proposed approach we analyse low cycle fatigue experimental data on glass/epoxy laminate. In this material, depending on the stacking sequence, free edge effect may induce early initiation of delamination at the interfaces between plies of different orientation. We were able to show how the actual repartition of the glass fibres influence the stress distribution compared to an ideal microstructure. To analyse failure, we have developed a phase field damage model that can be implemented within a multi-grid finite-difference context. This makes possible the analysis of quasi-brittle failure at the microstructure scale in heterogeneous materials based on X-ray tomography images. In a near future, we plan to incorporate in the damage model anisotropy and directionality effect for the analysis of crystalline materials

Device Characterization of ZnInSe2 Thin Films

p-Si/n-ZnInSe2 hetero-junction diode was deposited by thermal evaporation of elemental evaporation sources on the 600 mu m thick p-type (1 1 1) mono-crystalline Si wafers having the resistivity value of 1 - 3 (Omega.cm). Detailed electrical characterization of the hetero-junction was performed by the help of temperature dependent current-voltage measurements. The forward current-voltage behaviour of the hetero-junction diode was investigated under the evaluation of possible current transport mechanisms. In the studied temperature range, thermionic emission and space charge limited current were found to be predominant transport models for this hetero-junction. In addition, the parasitic resistance, ideality factor and barrier height were determined. The contribution of the p- and n-layer in the junction was studied under the spectral photo-response measurement. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd

E4BP4 is a cardiac survival factor and essential for embryonic heart development

The bZIP transcription factor E4BP4, has been demonstrated to be a survival factor in pro-B lymphocytes. GATA factors play important roles in transducing the IL-3 survival signal and transactivating the downstream survival gene, E4BP4. In heart, GATA sites are essential for proper transcription of several cardiac genes, and GATA-4 is a mediator of cardiomyocyte survival. However, the role E4BP4 plays in heart is still poorly understood. In this study, Dot-blot hybridization assays using Dig-labeled RNA probes revealed that the E4BP4 gene was expressed in cardiac tissue from several species including, monkey, dog, rabbit, and human. Western blot analysis showed that the E4BP4 protein was consistently present in all of these four species. Furthermore, immunohistochemistry revealed that the E4BP4 protein was overexpressed in diseased heart tissue in comparison with normal heart tissue. In addition, the overexpression of E4BP4 in vitro activated cell survival signaling pathway of cardiomyocytes. At last, siRNA-mediated knock down of E4BP4 in zebrafish resulted in malformed looping of the embryonic heart tube and decreased heart beating. Based on these results, we conclude that E4BP4 plays as a survival factor in heart and E4BP4 is essential for proper embryonic heart development

Corrosion of magnesium and aluminum in palm biodiesel: A comparative evaluation

10.1016/j.energy.2013.04.067Energy57478-483ENEY