Design of a strain-gage probe

Strain-gage spacer probe uses the deflection of a leaf spring to measure strain in a long, slender beam nondestructively. The selected gage is of the smallest practical size, as thin as possible and yet of a standard type

Pre-processing of Wallops Station AN/FPQ-6 GEOS 2 data

Preprocessing, operation, and calibration procedures for Wallops radar syste

The Patient-Centered Medical Home and the Value of Heightened Care Coordination: A Systematic Literature Review

Health care spending in the United States continues to increase at a pace that far exceeds inflation. Representing a greater proportion of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) than any other country, costs associated with health care services in the U.S. lend support to growing concern regarding the sustainability of current systems. Furthermore, the fragmented nature of the current landscape often presents challenges to the provision of high-quality and efficient care. Satisfaction among both patients and health care providers, alike, suffers under the weight of increasing regulatory burden, the lack of integrated medical records systems, and growing complexity among health insurance payer programs. The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model proposes a variety of strategies to improve coordination among health care services, reduce utilization of higher acuity services, and promote increased satisfaction for patients within the continuum of care. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) seeks to highlight the strategies proposed within the PCMH model and provide an analysis of available data surrounding these claims of improved outcomes and reduced costs

Exploring the Relationship of Relative Telomere Length and the Epigenetic Clock in the LipidCardio Cohort

Telomere length has been accepted widely as a biomarker of aging. Recently, a novel candidate biomarker has been suggested to predict an individual’s chronological age with high accuracy: The epigenetic clock is based on the weighted DNA methylation (DNAm) fraction of a number of cytosine-phosphate-guanine sites (CpGs) selected by penalized regression analysis. Here, an established methylation-sensitive single nucleotide primer extension method was adapted, to estimate the epigenetic age of the 1005 participants of the LipidCardio Study, a patient cohort characterised by high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, based on a seven CpGs epigenetic clock. Furthermore, we measured relative leukocyte telomere length (rLTL) to assess the relationship between the established and the promising new measure of biological age. Both rLTL (0.79 ± 0.14) and DNAm age (69.67 ± 7.27 years) were available for 773 subjects (31.6% female; mean chronological age= 69.68 ± 11.01 years; mean DNAm age acceleration = −0.01 ± 7.83 years). While we detected a significant correlation between chronological age and DNAm age (n = 779, R = 0.69), we found neither evidence of an association between rLTL and the DNAm age (β = 3.00, p = 0.18) nor rLTL and the DNAm age acceleration (β = 2.76, p = 0.22) in the studied cohort, suggesting that DNAm age and rLTL measure different aspects of biological age

Recycling Animal Wastes

During a time period when shortages, ecology, and conservation are routinely a concern to government, business, and individuals, there are renewed efforts to make food production more efficient. Recycling of animal wastes involves the refeeding of animal excreta to other or the same species of food producing animals usually a a fraction of the total diet. For centuries animal wastes have been recycled by allowing hogs to follow cattle and chickens to roam the barnyard. Animals will consume portions of their own feces when fed a diet deficient in certain nutrients

BIRDSFOOT TREFOIL - Brings New Life to Pastures

Thereare over 3 million acres of low yielding open land pastures in Iowa. Birdsfoot trefoil, a high quality, bloat-free forage with persistent stand and ability to withstand continuous grazing might be the answer to developing these low yield pastures

EBF factors drive expression of multiple classes of target genes governing neuronal development

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Early B cell factor (EBF) family members are transcription factors known to have important roles in several aspects of vertebrate neurogenesis, including commitment, migration and differentiation. Knowledge of how EBF family members contribute to neurogenesis is limited by a lack of detailed understanding of genes that are transcriptionally regulated by these factors.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We performed a microarray screen in <it>Xenopus </it>animal caps to search for targets of EBF transcriptional activity, and identified candidate targets with multiple roles, including transcription factors of several classes. We determined that, among the most upregulated candidate genes with expected neuronal functions, most require EBF activity for some or all of their expression, and most have overlapping expression with <it>ebf </it>genes. We also found that the candidate target genes that had the most strongly overlapping expression patterns with <it>ebf </it>genes were predicted to be direct transcriptional targets of EBF transcriptional activity.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The identification of candidate targets that are transcription factor genes, including <it>nscl-1</it>, <it>emx1 </it>and <it>aml1</it>, improves our understanding of how EBF proteins participate in the hierarchy of transcription control during neuronal development, and suggests novel mechanisms by which EBF activity promotes migration and differentiation. Other candidate targets, including <it>pcdh8 </it>and <it>kcnk5</it>, expand our knowledge of the types of terminal differentiated neuronal functions that EBF proteins regulate.</p

Energy-efficiency improvements for optical access

This article discusses novel approaches to improve energy efficiency of different optical access technologies, including time division multiplexing passive optical network (TDM-PON), time and wavelength division multiplexing PON (TWDM-PON), point-to-point (PTP) access network, wavelength division multiplexing PON (WDM-PON), and orthogonal frequency division multiple access PON (OFDMA-PON). These approaches include cyclic sleep mode, energy-efficient bit interleaving protocol, power reduction at component level, or frequency band selection. Depending on the target optical access technology, one or a combination of different approaches can be applied

Designing robust crystallization processes in the presence of parameter uncertainty using attainable regions

We consider the influence of uncertainty in crystallization kinetics (i.e., in the nucleation and growth rates) in the context of process design. Specifically, we model continuous and batch crystallization processes using population balance equation models and investigate how the inherent uncertainty in kinetic parameters propagates through the crystallization processes and how it ultimately affects the distribution of process outcomes (yield and mean particle size). We incorporate the effect of uncertainty into the concept of attainable regions, i.e., we exhaustively investigate which combinations of particle size and total residence time (or batch time) can be attained with a certain probability. Avoiding regions of low probability allows the design of robust crystallization processes that can deliver a product with desired specifications, even when the original process was designed using inadequately characterized crystallization kinetics. The concepts presented in this article are illustrated by a case study on the cooling crystallization of paracetamol grown from ethanol as a solvent