Cleaning up the catalogue

The London School of Economics wanted to remove cataloguing inconsistencies but the scale of the task was huge, and outsourcing to a specialist bibliographic services company proved only a partial solution. Helen Williams explains why manual and automated processes were needed

NASA's Zero-g aircraft operations

NASA's Zero-g aircraft, operated by the Johnson Space Center, provides the unique weightless or zero-g environment of space flight for hardware development and test and astronaut training purposes. The program, which began in 1959, uses a slightly modified Boeing KC-135A aircraft, flying a parabolic trajectory, to produce weightless periods of 20 to 25 seconds. The program has supported the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and Shuttle programs as well as a number of unmanned space operations. Typical experiments for flight in the aircraft have included materials processing experiments, welding, fluid manipulation, cryogenics, propellant tankage, satellite deployment dynamics, planetary sciences research, crew training with weightless indoctrination, space suits, tethers, etc., and medical studies including vestibular research. The facility is available to microgravity research organizations on a cost-reimbursable basis, providing a large, hands-on test area for diagnostic and support equipment for the Principal Investigators and providing an iterative-type design approach to microgravity experiment development. The facility allows concepts to be proven and baseline experimentation to be accomplished relatively inexpensively prior to committing to the large expense of a space flight

Embryo futures and stem cell research: The management of informed uncertainty

This article is available open access and is distributed under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2011 The Authors.In the social worlds of assisted conception and stem cell science, uncertainties proliferate and particular framings of the future may be highly strategic. In this article we explore meanings and articulations of the future using data from our study of ethical and social issues implicated by the donation of embryos to human embryonic stem cell research in three linked assisted conception units and stem cell laboratories in the UK. Framings of the future in this field inform the professional management of uncertainty and we explore some of the tensions this involves in practice. The bifurcation of choices for donating embryos into accepting informed uncertainty or not donating at all was identified through the research process of interviews and ethics discussion groups. Professional staff accounts in this study contained moral orientations that valued ideas such as engendering patient trust by offering full information, the sense of collective ownership of the National Heath Service and publicly funded science and ideas for how donors might be able to give restricted consent as a third option.The Wellcome Trus

Donation of 'spare' fresh or frozen embryos to research: Who decides that an embryo is 'spare' and how can we enhance the quality and protect the validity of consent?

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited - Copyright @ The Author 2012.This paper analyses elements of the legal process of consent to the donation of ‘spare’ embryos to research, including stem-cell research, and makes a recommendation intended to enhance the quality of that process, including on occasion by guarding against the invalidity of such consent. This is important in its own right and also so as to maximise the reproductive treatment options of couples engaged in in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment and to avoid possible harms to them. In Part 1, with reference to qualitative data from three UK IVF clinics, we explore the often delicate and contingent nature of what comes to be, for legal purposes, a ‘spare’ embryo. The way in which an embryo becomes ‘spare’, with its implications for the process of consent to donation to research, is not addressed in the relevant reports relating to or codes of practice governing the donation of embryos to research, which assume an unproblematic notion of the ‘spare’ embryo. Significantly, our analysis demonstrates that there is an important and previously unrecognised first stage in the donation of a ‘spare’ embryo to research, namely: consent to an embryo being ‘spare’ and so, at the same time, to its disuse in treatment. This is not explicitly covered by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Act 1990, as amended by the HFE Act 2008. Having identified this important initial stage in the process of consent to the donation of a ‘spare’ embryo to research in conclusion to Part 1, in Part 2 we analyse the idea of consent to an embryo's disuse in treatment on the basis that it is ‘spare’ with reference to the legal elements of consent, namely information as to nature and purpose, capacity, and voluntariness. We argue that there are in fact three related consent processes in play, of which the principal one concerns consent to an embryo's disuse in treatment. If the quality of this first consent is compromised, in turn this will impact on the quality of the consent to the donation of that ‘spare’ embryo to research, followed by the quality of consent to future cycles of assisted reproduction treatment in the event that these are needed as a result of a donation decision. The analysis overall is of central relevance to the debate as to whether, and if so when, it should be permissible to request the donation of fresh embryos for research, as opposed to those that have been frozen and, for instance, have reached the end of their statutory storage term. This has a particular bearing on the donation of embryos to stem-cell research since there is a debate as to whether fresh embryos are most useful for this.This work is funded by the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Programme, Project Grant No 081414

Recall of physical activity advice was associated with higher levels of physical activity in colorectal cancer patients.

The present study tested the hypothesis that recall of receiving physical activity (PA) advice would be associated with higher levels of PA in patients with a diagnosis of colorectal cancer (CRC)

Three-body recombination in a three-state Fermi gas with widely tunable interactions

We investigate the stability of a three spin state mixture of ultracold fermionic $^6$Li atoms over a range of magnetic fields encompassing three Feshbach resonances. For most field values, we attribute decay of the atomic population to three-body processes involving one atom from each spin state and find that the three-body loss coefficient varies by over four orders of magnitude. We observe high stability when at least two of the three scattering lengths are small, rapid loss near the Feshbach resonances, and two unexpected resonant loss features. At our highest fields, where all pairwise scattering lengths are approaching $a_t = -2140 a_0$, we measure a three-body loss coefficient $L_3 \simeq 5\times 10^{-22} \mathrm{cm}^6/\mathrm{s}$ and a trend toward lower decay rates for higher fields indicating that future studies of color superfluidity and trion formation in a SU(3) symmetric Fermi gas may be feasible

Corrosion resistant coating

A method of coating a substrate with an amorphous metal is described. A solid piece of the metal is bombarded with ions of an inert gas in the presence of a magnetic field to provide a vapor of the metal which is deposited on the substrate at a sufficiently low gas pressure so that there is formed on the substrate a thin, uniformly thick, essentially pinhole-free film of the metal

Momentum distribution and ordering in mixtures of ultracold light and heavy fermionic atoms

The momentum distribution is one of the most important quantities which provides information about interactions in many-body systems. At the same time it is a quantity that can easily be accessed in experiments on ultracold atoms. In this paper, we consider mixtures of light and heavy fermionic atoms in an optical lattice described effectively by the Falicov-Kimball model. Using a Monte Carlo method, we study how different ordered density-wave phases can be detected by measurement of the momentum distribution of the light atoms. We also demonstrate that ordered phases can be seen in Bragg scattering experiments. Our results indicate that the main factor that determines the momentum distribution of the light atoms is the trap confinement. On the other hand, the pattern formed by the heavy atoms seen in the Bragg scattering experiments is very sensitive to the temperature and possibly can be used in low-temperature thermometry.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure