Management of late presentation congenital heart disease

In many parts of the world, mostly low- and middle-income countries, timely diagnosis and repair of congenital heart diseases (CHDs) is not feasible for a variety of reasons. In these regions, economic growth has enabled the development of cardiac units that manage patients with CHD presenting later than would be ideal, often after the window for early stabilisation - transposition of the great arteries, coarctation of the aorta - or for lower-risk surgery in infancy - left-to-right shunts or cyanotic conditions. As a result, patients may have suffered organ dysfunction, manifest signs of pulmonary vascular disease, or the sequelae of profound cyanosis and polycythaemia. Late presentation poses unique clinical and ethical challenges in decision making regarding operability or surgical candidacy, surgical strategy, and perioperative intensive care management

Quasi-normal modes of Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes

The low-laying frequencies of characteristic quasi-normal modes (QNM) of Schwarzschild-de Sitter (SdS) black holes have been calculated for fields of different spin using the 6th-order WKB approximation and the approximation by the P\"{o}shl-Teller potential. The well-known asymptotic formula for large $l$ is generalized here on a case of the Schwarzchild-de Sitter black hole. In the limit of the near extreme $\Lambda$ term the results given by both methods are in a very good agreement, and in this limit fields of different spin decay with the same rate.Comment: 9 pages, 1 ancillary Mathematica(R) noteboo

Enhanced electrical resistivity before N\'eel order in the metals, RCuAs2_2 (R= Sm, Gd, Tb and Dy

We report an unusual temperature (T) dependent electrical resistivity($\rho$) behavior in a class of ternary intermetallic compounds of the type RCuAs$_2$ (R= Rare-earths). For some rare-earths (Sm, Gd, Tb and Dy) with negligible 4f-hybridization, there is a pronounced minimum in $\rho$(T) far above respective N\'eel temperatures (T$_N$). However, for the rare-earths which are more prone to exhibit such a $\rho$(T) minimum due to 4f-covalent mixing and the Kondo effect, this minimum is depressed. These findings, difficult to explain within the hither-to-known concepts, present an interesting scenario in magnetism.Comment: Physical Review Letters (accepted for publication

Boundary Conditions and Unitarity: the Maxwell-Chern-Simons System in AdS_3/CFT_2

We consider the holography of the Abelian Maxwell-Chern-Simons (MCS) system in Lorentzian three-dimensional asymptotically-AdS spacetimes, and discuss a broad class of boundary conditions consistent with conservation of the symplectic structure. As is well-known, the MCS theory contains a massive sector dual to a vector operator in the boundary theory, and a topological sector consisting of flat connections dual to U(1) chiral currents; the boundary conditions we examine include double-trace deformations in these two sectors, as well as a class of boundary conditions that mix the vector operators with the chiral currents. We carefully study the symplectic product of bulk modes and show that almost all such boundary conditions induce instabilities and/or ghost excitations, consistent with violations of unitarity bounds in the dual theory.Comment: 50+1 pages, 6 figures, PDFLaTeX; v2: added references, corrected typo

Serial optical coherence microscopy for label-free volumetric histopathology

The observation of histopathology using optical microscope is an essential procedure for examination of tissue biopsies or surgically excised specimens in biological and clinical laboratories. However, slide-based microscopic pathology is not suitable for visualizing the large-scale tissue and native 3D organ structure due to its sampling limitation and shallow imaging depth. Here, we demonstrate serial optical coherence microscopy (SOCM) technique that offers label-free, high-throughput, and large-volume imaging of ex vivo mouse organs. A 3D histopathology of whole mouse brain and kidney including blood vessel structure is reconstructed by deep tissue optical imaging in serial sectioning techniques. Our results demonstrate that SOCM has unique advantages as it can visualize both native 3D structures and quantitative regional volume without introduction of any contrast agents

Higher dimensional dust collapse with a cosmological constant

The general solution of the Einstein equation for higher dimensional (HD) spherically symmetric collapse of inhomogeneous dust in presence of a cosmological term, i.e., exact interior solutions of the Einstein field equations is presented for the HD Tolman-Bondi metrics imbedded in a de Sitter background. The solution is then matched to exterior HD Scwarschild-de Sitter. A brief discussion on the causal structure singularities and horizons is provided. It turns out that the collapse proceed in the same way as in the Minkowski background, i.e., the strong curvature naked singularities form and that the higher dimensions seem to favor black holes rather than naked singularities.Comment: 7 Pages, no figure

Impact of fly ash content and fly ash transportation distance on embodied greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption in concrete

Background, aim and scope Fly ash, a by-product of coal-fired power stations, is substituted for Portland cement to improve the properties of concrete and reduce the embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Much of the world's fly ash is currently disposed of as a waste product. While replacing some Portland cement with fly ash can reduce production costs and the embodied emissions of concrete, the relationship between fly ash content and embodied GHG emissions in concrete has not been quantified. The impact of fly ash content on embodied water is also unknown. Furthermore, it is not known whether a global trade in fly ash for use in concrete is feasible from a carbon balance perspective, or if transport over long distances would eliminate any CO(2) savings. This paper aims to quantify GHG emissions and water embodied in concrete (f'(c)= 32 MPa) as a function of fly ash content and to determine the critical fly ash transportation distance, beyond which use of fly ash in concrete increases embodied GHG emissions

A Real-Space Full Multigrid study of the fragmentation of Li11+ clusters

We have studied the fragmentation of Li11+ clusters into the two experimentally observed products (Li9+,Li2) and (Li10+,Li) The ground state structures for the two fragmentation channels are found by Molecular Dynamics Simulated Annealing in the framework of Local Density Functional theory. Energetics considerations suggest that the fragmentation process is dominated by non-equilibrium processes. We use a real-space approach to solve the Kohn-Sham problem, where the Laplacian operator is discretized according to the Mehrstellen scheme, and take advantage of a Full MultiGrid (FMG) strategy to accelerate convergence. When applied to isolated clusters we find our FMG method to be more efficient than state-of-the-art plane wave calculations.Comment: 9 pages + 6 Figures (in gzipped tar file

Improved Procedures for Purification of the Bandeiraea simplicifolia I Isolectins and Bandeiraea simplicifolia II Lectin by Affinity Chromatography

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66350/1/j.1432-1033.1980.tb07197.x.pd

Trust and distrust in contradictory information transmission

We analyse the problem of contradictory information distribution in networks of agents with positive and negative trust. The networks of interest are built by ranked agents with different epistemic attitudes. In this context, positive trust is a property of the communication between agents required when message passing is executed bottom-up in the hierarchy, or as a result of a sceptic agent checking information. These two situations are associated with a confirmation procedure that has an epistemic cost. Negative trust results from refusing verification, either of contradictory information or because of a lazy attitude. We offer first a natural deduction system called SecureNDsim to model these interactions and consider some meta-theoretical properties of its derivations. We then implement it in a NetLogo simulation to test experimentally its formal properties. Our analysis concerns in particular: conditions for consensus-reaching transmissions; epistemic costs induced by confirmation and rejection operations; the influence of ranking of the initially labelled nodes on consensus and costs; complexity results