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High performance hand-held gas chromatograph
The Microtechnology Center of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed a high performance hand-held, real time detection gas chromatograph (HHGC) by Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) technology. The total weight of this hand-held gas chromatograph is about five lbs., with a physical size of 8{close_quotes} x 5{close_quotes} x 3{close_quotes} including carrier gas and battery. It consumes about 12 watts of electrical power with a response time on the order of one to two minutes. This HHGC has an average effective theoretical plate of about 40k. Presently, its sensitivity is limited by its thermal sensitive detector at PPM. Like a conventional G.C., this HHGC consists mainly of three major components: (1) the sample injector, (2) the column, and (3) the detector with related electronics. The present HHGC injector is a modified version of the conventional injector. Its separation column is fabricated completely on silicon wafers by means of MEMS technology. This separation column has a circular cross section with a diameter of 100 pm. The detector developed for this hand-held GC is a thermal conductivity detector fabricated on a silicon nitride window by MEMS technology. A normal Wheatstone bridge is used. The signal is fed into a PC and displayed through LabView software
Central adiposity and the propensity for rehearsal in children.
Background: There is increasing evidence that continuous activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis and the central sympathetic nervous system contributes to the pathogenesis of central adiposity via increased psychological stress. The purpose of this study was to examine the link between central adiposity and the propensity for Chinese children to rehearse emotionally upsetting events, a dimension of psychological stress. Additionally, gender differences in this relationship were explored.
Methods: Waist circumference, which is a marker of central adiposity and associated risks of developing cardiovascular disease, was measured and the propensity for rehearsal was assessed twice over two consecutive years in Hong Kong Chinese children (n = 194, aged 7–9 years), using a psychometric tool.
Results: Children with waist circumference indicative of a risk of cardiovascular disease displayed higher rehearsal scores than children categorized as “not at risk”, as did boys compared with girls. Our results suggest that central adiposity and the propensity for rehearsal of emotionally upsetting events may be linked in Chinese children.
Conclusion: Future prospective studies examining the direction of causality between central adiposity and rehearsal can potentially have valuable clinical implications
Optimal VM placement in data centres with architectural and resource constraints
Recent advance in virtualisation technology enables service provisioning in a flexible way by consolidating several virtual machines (VMs) into a single physical machine (PM). The inter-VM communications are inevitable when a group of VMs in a data centre provide services in a collaborative manner. With the increasing demands of such intra-data-centre traffics, it becomes essential to study the VM-to-PM placement such that the aggregated communication cost within a data centre is minimised. Such optimisation problem is proved NP-hard and formulated as an integer programming with quadratic constraints in this paper. Different from existing work, our formulation takes into consideration of data-centre architecture, inter-VM traffic pattern, and resource capacity of PMs. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and its high efficiency is extensively validated
Forbidden Landscape from Holography
We present a class of field configurations that are forbidden in the quantum
gravity because of inconsistency in the dual field theory from holography.
Scale invariant but non-conformal field theories are impossible in (1+1)
dimension, and so should be the corresponding gravity dual. In particular, the
"spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking" models and the "ghost condensation"
models, which are well-studied in phenomenology literatures, are forbidden in
any consistent quantum theories of gravity in (1+2) dimension since they
predict such inconsistent field configurations.Comment: 4pages, v2: some improvements, reference adde
A superior drug carrier – aponeocarzinostatin in partially unfolded state fully protects the labile antitumor enediyne
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Neocarzinostatin is a potent antitumor drug consisting of an enediyne chromophore and a protein carrier.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We characterized an intermediate in the equilibrium unfolding pathway of aponeocarzinostatin, using a variety of biophysical techniques including 1-anilino-8-napthalene sulfonate binding studies, size-exclusion fast protein liquid chromatography, intrinsic tryptophan fluorescence, circular dichroism, and <sup>1</sup>H-<sup>15</sup>N heteronuclear single quantum coherence spectroscopy.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The partially unfolded protein is in molten globule-like state, in which ~60% and ~20% tertiary and secondary structure is disrupted respectively. Despite lacking a fully coordinated tertiary structure for assembling a functional binding cleft, the protein in molten globule-like state is still able to fully protect the labile chromophore. Titration of chromophore leads the partially denatured apoprotein to fold into its native state.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These findings bring insight into conserving mechanism of neocarzinostatin under harsh environment, where even the partially denatured apoprotein exhibits protective effect, confirming the superiority of the drug carrier.</p
Nonlinear atom optics and bright gap soliton generation in finite optical lattices
We theoretically investigate the transmission dynamics of coherent matter
wave pulses across finite optical lattices in both the linear and the nonlinear
regimes. The shape and the intensity of the transmitted pulse are found to
strongly depend on the parameters of the incident pulse, in particular its
velocity and density: a clear physical picture for the main features observed
in the numerical simulations is given in terms of the atomic band dispersion in
the periodic potential of the optical lattice. Signatures of nonlinear effects
due the atom-atom interaction are discussed in detail, such as atom optical
limiting and atom optical bistability. For positive scattering lengths, matter
waves propagating close to the top of the valence band are shown to be subject
to modulational instability. A new scheme for the experimental generation of
narrow bright gap solitons from a wide Bose-Einstein condensate is proposed:
the modulational instability is seeded in a controlled way starting from the
strongly modulated density profile of a standing matter wave and the solitonic
nature of the generated pulses is checked from their shape and their
collisional properties
Observer dependence of the quasi-local energy and momentum in Schwarzschild space-time
The observer dependence of the quasi-local energy (QLE) and momentum in the
Schwarzschild geometry is illustrated. Using the Brown-York prescription, the
QLE for families of non-geodesic and geodesic observers penetrating the event
horizon is obtained. An explicit shell-building process is presented and the
binding energy is computed in terms of the QLE measured by a static observer
field at a radius outside the horizon radius. The QLE for a radially geodesic
observer field freely-falling from infinity is shown to vanish. Finally, a
simple relation for the dynamics of the quasi-local momentum density for a
geodesic observer field is noted.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures; accepted for publication in Gen. Rel. Gra
Familization risks, defamilization risks and older women
© 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis. This article is about the familization and defamilization risks faced by older women. Such risks are generated by the lack of one or both of two conditions: the freedom to choose whether or not to perform certain family roles; and the capacity to maintain a reasonable standard of living. Examples are drawn from findings of a qualitative study in Hong Kong, in which 40 older women aged 65 or above were interviewed to discuss their experiences of issues relating to the risks and their diverse preferences of how these issues should be handled
Quasi-local Energy for Spherically Symmetric Spacetimes
We present two complementary approaches for determining the reference for the
covariant Hamiltonian boundary term quasi-local energy and test them on
spherically symmetric spacetimes. On the one hand, we isometrically match the
2-surface and extremize the energy. This can be done in two ways, which we call
programs I (without constraint) and II (with additional constraints). On the
other hand, we match the orthonormal 4-frames of the dynamic and the reference
spacetimes. Then, if we further specify the observer by requiring the reference
displacement to be the timelike Killing vector of the reference, the result is
the same as program I, and the energy can be positive, zero, or even negative.
If, instead, we require that the Lie derivatives of the two-area along the
displacement vector in both the dynamic and reference spacetimes to be the
same, the result is the same as program II, and it satisfies the usual
criteria: the energies are non-negative and vanish only for Minkowski (or
anti-de Sitter) spacetime.Comment: 16 pages, no figure
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