Correlation between Pineal Activation and Religious Meditation Observed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The human brain possesses plenty of functions but little is known about its scientific relationship with mind and spirit. Conferences^1,2^ focused on the connection between science and religion were held very recently in which neuroscientists, Buddhist scholars and Dalai Lama discussed attention, mental imagery, emotion, mind, brain functions and meditation, suggesting religious meditation offers an effective means to investigate the mystery of mind and spirit. In the past decade, scientists struggled to obtain brain mappings for various meditation styles using different brain imaging techniques and stimulating results have been observed^3-17^. In this letter we report that, together with other brain regions, pineal body exhibit significant activation during meditation process, supporting the long lasting speculation that pineal plays an important role in the intrinsic awareness which might concern spirit or soul. Pineal is known as an endocrine organ which produces substrates including melatonin and has been ascribed numerous even mysterious functions but its activation during meditation has never been observed by brain imaging technique. In seventeenth century, based on anatomic observation, Descartes ventured to suggest that pineal serves as the principal seat of the soul^18-20^. Inspired by its geometric center in the brain, physiologists, psychologists, philosophers and religionists have been speculating for centuries about pineal's function relevant to spirit and soul. In this study, we chose Chinese Original Quiet Sitting, one style of meditation, to explore this long lasting speculation by functional magnetic resonance imaging technique. Our results demonstrate a correlation between pineal activation and religious meditation which might have profound implications in physiological understanding of the intrinsic awareness

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE PHYSICIANS’ BEHAVIORAL INTENTION WITH ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD SYSTEMS IN TAIWAN

Currently in healthcare organizations paper-based patient record management faces many challenges. Most countries are promoting the full implementation of electronic medical records in every hospital. Medical environments change frequently and dramatically, which makes full acceptance of electronic medical records (EMR) by physicians an important issue. This empirical study combines the theory on reasoned action (TRA) and information technology acceptance model (TAM) resulted in a modified TAM to find what critical factors influence the acceptance behavior of EMR by physicians. To test these hypotheses, this study administered a cross-sectional mailed questionnaire survey during the period of three months in 2012. The survey was deployed to1000 physicians randomly from the estimated total 2000 physicians of 50 regional acute hospitals (more than 300 beds) in Taiwan currently. From these, 252effective responses were received, resulting in a net response rate of 25%. These research findings indicate that four variables significantly positively impact the intention to adopt EMR. Among these, attitude has the most significant positive impact on adoption intentions. Moreover, it shows that the professional autonomy might play an important role to moderate the attitude with significant statistics. These results maintain enough explanatory power (R2 =78.4%) to help explain the attitudes and intentions of physicians in adopting electronic medical record information systems. Our analysis revealed the importance of the perception usefulness which moderated by professional autonomy and pragmatism by physicians for their adoption electronic medical record systems in clinical practice

Dual residence time for droplet to coalesce with liquid surface

When droplets approach a liquid surface, they have a tendency to merge in order to minimize surface energy. However, under certain conditions, they can exhibit a phenomenon called coalescence delay, where they remain separate for tens of milliseconds. This duration is known as the residence time or the non-coalescence time. Surprisingly, under identical parameters and initial conditions, the residence time for water droplets is not a constant value but exhibits dual peaks in its distribution. In this paper, we present the observation of the dual residence times through rigorous statistical analysis and investigate the quantitative variations in residence time by manipulating parameters such as droplet height, radius, and viscosity. Theoretical models and physical arguments are provided to explain their effects, particularly why a large viscosity or/and a small radius is detrimental to the appearance of the longer residence time peak.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

CFD Analysis of Oil Distribution in Oil-injected Screw Compressor

Oil-injected screw compressor has been used in various industries. After decades of continuous research efforts by research teams around the world, the computer tools for rotor profile design, thermodynamic analysis, CFD/CAE calculation, and moving grid generation have been well developed and widely employed in design works. With assistance from the computer tools in performance simulation, designers could clearly understand internal phenomena of a screw compressor, as a reference for performance optimization design, and systematically carry out research works. One important issue inside an oil-injected screw compressor is about oil distribution. Different oil-injected positions and quantities cause different oil distribution inside the compressor. Therefore, the effects of oil sealing and lubrication change. Designers must understand how oil distribution is to deal with oil issues. In this study, CFD analysis was done with dynamic grid technology. Basic performance of screw compressor was calculated and compared with experiment data. Besides, three CFD models with different oil-injected paths were designed and analyzed. The influence of varying oil-injected conditions on oil distribution near contact line, sealing lines, blow holes, and end sides of inlet and outlet are shown in this study. They are used to explain how volumetric efficiency is affected. Especially for oil distribution near contact line, it not only affects volumetric efficiency, but also acts on the lubrication as rotor meshing

Application of Computational Fluid Dynamics to the Lubrication Study of an Oil-injected Screw Compressor

Computational fluid dynamics and mesh generation tools have been well developed, and could be used to calculate the performance of an oil-injected screw compressor. Designers could now effectively obtain reliable results of efficiency, temperature, force and torque. Some physical phenomena inside a screw compressor are not easy to be observed through experiments, such as the oil distribution and the oil film thickness on the rotor surface. Under the ideal lubrication condition, the oil film of proper thickness should be maintained on the local surfaces which are going to contact with each other. This could be numerically explored by computational fluid dynamics. The first case in this study showed the effect of centrifugal force on a thin free surface flow on the rotor surface. Designers could graphically understand how the oil film flows on the rotor surface when rotors separately rotate without meshing with each other and doing the compression work. The second case in this study was the rotor lubrication. The clearance distribution between rotors in the actual contact area was designed by the minimum film thickness and was 1 μm. The pressure gradient on the rotor surface was used to see if the hydrodynamic pressure appeared. Designers could optimize the design of oil injection not only by considering efficiencies, but also by analyzing the pressure gradient and the oil film distribution on rotor surfaces

A Comparison of Thermal Deformation of Scroll Profiles inside Oil-free Scroll Vacuum Pump and Compressor via CAE/CFD Analysis

Scroll machine is simply constructed by fixed and orbit scrolls, rotary shaft, and some mechanical components. It can impressively operate at low noise level with high reliability and high efficiency. Scroll machine achieves oil-free application through reasonable clearance control, cooling solution, and the tip seal application, and has been designed and applied as vacuum pump or compressor. In order to compactly design structure and optimize the gaps or clearances of a scroll machine, the issue of heat deformation must be considered. Deformation inside a scroll machine is not easy to be discovered, but is the necessary information for scroll profile design. In this study, the internal flow fields of oil-free scroll vacuum pump and compressor are obtained by CFD analysis. Based on the results of flow fields, this study shows the basic performance of a scroll machine, including loading on structures, gas torque, volume flow rate, and the pulsation of outlet pressure. The fluid phenomena under sub-atmospheric and positive pressure are quite different. The difference would cause different heat transfer and heat deformation. Therefore, the fluid-thermal-solid coupling analysis is also carried out. The temperature distribution of scroll structures, the thermal deformation, and gap changes are also discussed in this study

Enhancing the Performance of a Rainfall Measurement System Using Artificial Neural Networks Based Object Tracking Algorithms

With the recent development of optical sensing and digital image processing techniques, high-speed cameras have been applied to measure the microphysical properties of raindrops. However, the performance of such systems are significantly affected by object tracking algorithms. In order to improve the measurement accuracy of rainfall rate and accumulated rainfall, a novel object tracking algorithm based on artificial neural networks (ANN) is proposed in this paper. The ANN model takes the features of each raindrop in the two successive images as inputs including the center coordinates, area, canting angle, the lengths of long axis and minor axis of the equivalent ellipse. The output of the ANN model is the matched probabilities of each pair of raindrops between before and after images. Experimental data were collected during a real rainfall event. Performance comparisons between the traditional and ANN based object tracking algorithms are conducted based on the experimental data. Experimental results suggest the successful matching rate is significantly increased from 87.20% to 95.60% due to the usage of the ANN based algorithm. Hence, the improved disdrometer system is capable of producing more accurate and robust measurements of rainfall status

Methane Migration and Its Influence on Sulfate Reduction in the Good Weather Ridge Region, South China Sea Continental Margin Sediments

Bacteria sulfate reduction is a major pathway for organic carbon oxidation in marine sediments. Upward diffusion of methane from gas hydrate deep in the sedimentary strata might be another important source of carbon for sulfate reducing bacteria and subsequently induce higher rates of sulfate reduction in sediments. Since abundant gas may migrate upward to the surface as a result of tectonic activity occurring in the accretionary wedge, this study investigates the effect of methane migration on the sulfate reduction process in continental margin sediments offshore southwestern Taiwan. Piston and gravity core samples were taken in order to evaluate vertical and spatial variations of sulfate and methane. Pore water sulfate, sulfide, methane, sediment pyrite, and organic carbon were extracted and analyzed

Automatic Precipitation Measurement Based on Raindrop Imaging and Artificial Intelligence

Rainfall measurement is subjected to various uncertainties due to the complexity of measurement techniques and atmosphere characteristics associated with weather type. Thus, this article presents a video-based disdrometer to analyze raindrop images by introducing artificial intelligence technology for the rainfall rate. First, a high-speed CMOS camera is integrated into a planar LED as a backlight source for appropriately acquiring falling raindrops in different positions. The falling raindrops can be illuminated and used for further image analysis. Algorithms developed for raindrop detection and trajectory identification are employed. In a field test, a rainfall event of 42 continuous hours has been measured by the proposed disdrometer that is validated against a commercial PARSIVEL² disdrometer and a tipping bucket rain gauge at the same area. In the evaluation for 5-min rainfall images, the results of the trajectory identification are within the precision of 87.8%, recall of 98.4%, and F1 score of 92.8%, respectively. Furthermore, the performance exhibits that the rainfall rate and raindrop size distribution (RSD) obtained by the proposed disdrometer are remarkably consistent with those of PARSIVEL² disdrometer. The results suggest that the proposed disdrometer based on the continuous movements of the falling raindrops can achieve accurate measurements and eliminate the potential errors effectively in the real-time monitoring of rainfall