Managing Debris Flow Risks

Debris flows represent a widespread threat to villages and small towns in the Swiss Alps. For many centuries people “managed” such risks by trying to avoid hazardous areas. However, major debris flow and flood events in the last 25 years have revealed that the degree of freedom to engage in this type of risk management has substantially decreased. This became especially evident during the 1999 disasters in a number of places in Switzerland. The winter of that year was unusually wet. In February heavy snowfall triggered destructive avalanches. In May high temperatures caused heavy snowmelt, with excessive rainfall contributing more water to the already saturated soils. Landslides, debris flows and floods were triggered in many locations, including Sörenberg. Hazard prevention and disaster management have a long tradition in Switzerland, although an integrated approach to risk management is rather new. Only in recent years have methods and tools been developed to assess hazards, define protection goals, and implement disaster reduction measures. The case of Sörenberg serves as an example of how today's approaches to disaster reduction are implemented at the local level

Forecasting the SST space-time variability of the Alboran Sea with genetic algorithms

We propose a nonlinear ocean forecasting technique based on a combination of genetic algorithms and empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis. The method is used to forecast the space-time variability of the sea surface temperature (SST) in the Alboran Sea. The genetic algorithm finds the equations that best describe the behaviour of the different temporal amplitude functions in the EOF decomposition and, therefore, enables global forecasting of the future time-variability.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures; latex compiled with agums.st

The concurrent programming of saccades

Sequences of saccades have been shown to be prepared concurrently however it remains unclear exactly what aspects of those saccades are programmed in parallel. To examine this participants were asked to make one or two target-driven saccades: a reflexive saccade; a voluntary saccade; a reflexive then a voluntary saccade; or vice versa. During the first response the position of a second target was manipulated. The new location of the second saccade target was found to impact on second saccade latencies and second saccade accuracy showing that some aspects of the second saccade program are prepared in parallel with the first. However, differences were found in the specific pattern of effects for each sequence type. These differences fit well within a general framework for saccade control in which a common priority map for saccade control is computed and the influence of saccade programs on one another depends not so much on the types of saccade being produced but rather on the rate at which their programs develop

IVC CLAMP: infrahepatic inferior vena cava clamping during hepatectomy - a randomised controlled trial in an interdisciplinary setting

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Intraoperative haemorrhage is a known predictor for perioperative outcome of patients undergoing hepatic resection. While anaesthesiological lowering of central venous pressure (CVP) by fluid restriction is known to reduce bleeding during transection of the hepatic parenchyma its potential side effects remain poorly investigated. In theory it may have negative effects on kidney function and tissue perfusion and bears the risk to result in severe haemodynamic instability in case of profound intraoperative blood loss. The present randomised controlled trial evaluates efficacy and safety of infrahepatic inferior vena cava (IVC) clamping as an alternative surgical technique to reduce CVP during hepatic resection.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>The proposed IVC CLAMP trial is a single-centre randomised controlled trial with a two-group parallel design. Patients and outcome-assessors are blinded for the treatment intervention. Patients undergoing elective hepatic resection due to any reason are enrolled in IVC CLAMP. All patients admitted to the Department of General-, Visceral-, and Transplant Surgery, University of Heidelberg for elective hepatic resection are consecutively screened for eligibility and written informed consent is obtained on the day before surgery. The primary objective of this trial is to assess and compare the amount of blood loss during hepatic resection in patients receiving surgical CVP reduction by clamping of the IVC as compared to anaesthesiological CVP without infrahepatic IVC clamping reduction. In addition to blood loss a set of general as well as surgical variables are analysed.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>This is a randomised controlled patient and observer blinded two-group parallel trial designed to assess efficacy and safety of infrahepatic IVC clamping during elective hepatectomy.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>ClinicalTrials NCT00732979</p

Parasites of domestic and wild animals in South Africa. XLIX. Ticks (Acari: Ixodidae) infesting white and black rhinoceroses in southern Africa

The objectives of the study were to determine the species composition of ticks infesting white and black rhinoceroses in southern Africa as well as the conservation status of those tick species that prefer rhinos as hosts. Ticks were collected opportunistically from rhinos that had been immobilised for management purposes, and 447 white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum) and 164 black rhinoceroses (Diceros bicornis) were sampled in South Africa, 61 black rhinos in Namibia, 18 white and 12 black rhinos in Zimbabwe, and 24 black rhinos in Zambia. Nineteen tick species were recovered, of which two species, Amblyomma rhinocerotis and Dermacentor rhinocerinus, prefer rhinos as hosts. A. rhinocerotis was collected only in the northeastern KwaZulu-Natal reserves of South Africa and is endangered, while D. rhinocerinus is present in these reserves as well as in the Kruger National Park and surrounding conservancies. Eight of the tick species collected from the rhinos are ornate, and seven species are regularly collected from cattle. The species present on rhinos in the eastern, moister reserves of South Africa were amongst others Amblyomma hebraeum, A. rhinocerotis, D. rhinocerinus, Rhipicephalus maculatus, Rhipicephalus simus and Rhipicephalus zumpti, while those on rhinos in the Karoo and the drier western regions, including Namibia, were the drought-tolerant species, Hyalomma glabrum, Hyalomma rufipes, Hyalomma truncatum and Rhipicephalus gertrudae. The species composition of ticks on rhinoceroses in Zambia differed markedly from those of the other southern African countries in that Amblyomma sparsum, Amblyomma tholloni and Amblyomma variegatum accounted for the majority of infestations

Measurement of the cosmic ray spectrum above 4×10184{\times}10^{18} eV using inclined events detected with the Pierre Auger Observatory

A measurement of the cosmic-ray spectrum for energies exceeding $4{\times}10^{18}$ eV is presented, which is based on the analysis of showers with zenith angles greater than $60^{\circ}$ detected with the Pierre Auger Observatory between 1 January 2004 and 31 December 2013. The measured spectrum confirms a flux suppression at the highest energies. Above $5.3{\times}10^{18}$ eV, the "ankle", the flux can be described by a power law $E^{-\gamma}$ with index $\gamma=2.70 \pm 0.02 \,\text{(stat)} \pm 0.1\,\text{(sys)}$ followed by a smooth suppression region. For the energy ($E_\text{s}$) at which the spectral flux has fallen to one-half of its extrapolated value in the absence of suppression, we find $E_\text{s}=(5.12\pm0.25\,\text{(stat)}^{+1.0}_{-1.2}\,\text{(sys)}){\times}10^{19}$ eV.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Energy Estimation of Cosmic Rays with the Engineering Radio Array of the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is part of the Pierre Auger Observatory and is used to detect the radio emission of cosmic-ray air showers. These observations are compared to the data of the surface detector stations of the Observatory, which provide well-calibrated information on the cosmic-ray energies and arrival directions. The response of the radio stations in the 30 to 80 MHz regime has been thoroughly calibrated to enable the reconstruction of the incoming electric field. For the latter, the energy deposit per area is determined from the radio pulses at each observer position and is interpolated using a two-dimensional function that takes into account signal asymmetries due to interference between the geomagnetic and charge-excess emission components. The spatial integral over the signal distribution gives a direct measurement of the energy transferred from the primary cosmic ray into radio emission in the AERA frequency range. We measure 15.8 MeV of radiation energy for a 1 EeV air shower arriving perpendicularly to the geomagnetic field. This radiation energy -- corrected for geometrical effects -- is used as a cosmic-ray energy estimator. Performing an absolute energy calibration against the surface-detector information, we observe that this radio-energy estimator scales quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy as expected for coherent emission. We find an energy resolution of the radio reconstruction of 22% for the data set and 17% for a high-quality subset containing only events with at least five radio stations with signal.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Expansion-enhanced super-resolution radial fluctuations enable nanoscale molecular profiling of pathology specimens

Expansion microscopy physically enlarges biological specimens to achieve nanoscale resolution using diffraction-limited microscopy systems1. However, optimal performance is usually reached using laser-based systems (for example, confocal microscopy), restricting its broad applicability in clinical pathology, as most centres have access only to light-emitting diode (LED)-based widefield systems. As a possible alternative, a computational method for image resolution enhancement, namely, super-resolution radial fluctuations (SRRF)2,3, has recently been developed. However, this method has not been explored in pathology specimens to date, because on its own, it does not achieve sufficient resolution for routine clinical use. Here, we report expansion-enhanced super-resolution radial fluctuations (ExSRRF), a simple, robust, scalable and accessible workflow that provides a resolution of up to 25 nm using LED-based widefield microscopy. ExSRRF enables molecular profiling of subcellular structures from archival formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues in complex clinical and experimental specimens, including ischaemic, degenerative, neoplastic, genetic and immune-mediated disorders. Furthermore, as examples of its potential application to experimental and clinical pathology, we show that ExSRRF can be used to identify and quantify classical features of endoplasmic reticulum stress in the murine ischaemic kidney and diagnostic ultrastructural features in human kidney biopsies.</p