Ventilation Loss in the NASA Space Shuttle Crew Protective Garments: Potential for Heat Stress

The potential of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) S1035 Launch/Entry suit (LES) for producing heat stress in a simulated Space Shuttle cabin environment has been studied. The testing was designed to determine if the NASA S1035 poses a greater threat of inducing heat stress than the NASA S1032. Conditions were designed to simulate an extreme prelaunch situation, with chamber temperatures maintained at dry bulb temperature 27.2 +/- 0.1 C, globe temperature - 27.3 +/- 0.1 C, and wet bulb temperature 21.1 +/- 0.3 C. Four males, aged 28-48, were employed in this study, with three subjects having exposures in all four conditions and the fourth subject exposed to 3 conditions. Test durations in the ventilated (V) and unventilated (UV) conditions were designed for 480 minutes, which all subjects achieved. No significant differences related to experimental conditions were noted in rectal temperatures, heart rates or sweat rates. The results indicate that the S1032 and S1035 garments, in either the V or UV state, poses no danger of inducing unacceptable heat stress under the conditions expected within the Shuttle cabin during launch or re-entry

STARLINK: IMPACTS ON THE U.S. CORN MARKET AND WORLD TRADE

StarLink disrupted the U.S. corn market during the marketing year of 2000/01 as a result of inadvertent commingling. The potential volume of marketed StarLink-commingled corn from the 2000 crop located in areas near wet and dry millers prior to October 1, 2000, is estimated at 124 million bushels. Price differentials between StarLink-free and StarLink-commingled corn existed during the early stage of the incident, but eroded quickly. While StarLink has had a negative impact on U.S. corn exports, most of the reduction in exports to Japan and South Korea during November 2000 and March 2002 is due to Japan's increased purchases from South Africa, China's decision to continue to subsidize exports, increased competition from the large back-to-back crops in Argentina, and a record Brazilian crop.Crop Production/Industries, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Assessing the use of social media in physician assistant education.

Objectives: This study aims to assess physician assistant (PA) students\u27 experiences with social media (SM) as a part of their medical education. Methods: The study is split into two phases: Phase 1- A cross-sectional survey emailed to all PA students at four PA school campuses to assess students\u27 prior SM experiences (226 responses, 71.1% response rate); and Phase 2- Inclusion of SM educational resources, via Twitter, within lectures performed at two PA schools. A phase-2 survey assessed students\u27 opinions of educational SM (50 responses, 59.5% response rate) and SM usage was tracked. Results: The phase-1 survey respondents indicated that 97.3% (n=220) use social media; often used as a part of their education, 65% (n=147) informally and 2.7% (n=6) formally incorporated. Students most commonly use Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, but rarely use Twitter. Currently using SM for medical education was significantly associated with predicting that future PA education will formally include SM [r Conclusions: Many PA students are currently using various forms of social media to augment their education. Most PA students support formal incorporation of social media into their education. PA educators should consider using our data and methods of social media inclusion when designing curricula and while clinically precepting PA students

Theory of momentum resolved tunneling into a short quantum wire

Motivated by recent tunneling experiments in the parallel wire geometry, we calculate results for momentum resolved tunneling into a short one-dimensional wire, containing a small number of electrons. We derive some general theorems about the momentum dependence, and we carry out exact calculations for up to N=4 electrons in the final state, for a system with screened Coulomb interactions that models the situation of the experiments. We also investigate the limit of large $N$ using a Luttinger-liquid type analysis. We consider the low-density regime, where the system is close to the Wigner crystal limit, and where the energy scale for spin excitations can be much lower than for charge excitations, and we consider temperatures intermediate between the relevant spin energies and charge excitations, as well as temperatures below both energy scales.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, clarified text in a few points, added 1 figure, updated reference

Electron stimulated desorption of atomic oxygen from silver

The electron stimulated desorption (ESD) of neutral oxygen atoms from polycrystalline silver and of oxygen ions from Ag(110) has been studied. Polycrystalline Ag charged with (16)O2 and (18)O2 and bombarded by low-energy electrons (approx 100 eV) under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions emitted O atom flux levels of 1 x 10 to the 12th power/sq cm/s at a Ag temperature of 300 C. The flux was detected with a quadrupole mass spectrometer operating in the appearance potential mode. The neutral cross section at about 100 C was determined to be 7 x 10 to the -19 sq cm. Ancillary experiments conducted in a UHV chamber equipped with a cylindrical mirror analyzer and rigged for ion energy distribution and ion angular distribution were used to study O ions desorbed from Ag(110). Two primary O(+) energies of 2.4 and 5.4 eV were detected from the Ag(110) after having been dosed with 2500 L of (16)O2. It also appears that in both experiments there was strong evidence for directionality of the emitted flux. The results of this study serve as a proof of concept for the development of a laboratory atomic oxygen beam generator that simulates the gas flux environment experienced by orbiting vehicles