More than Seals and Sea Otters: OPA Causation and Moratorium Damages

Following the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Federal Government issued a drilling and permitting moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that resulted in significant economic losses for many businesses that serve the oil and gas industry. The Oil Pollution Act should have covered these economic damages; however, the Eastern District of Louisiana held otherwise. This article details how the Oil Pollution Act should have been applied to those who suffered economic loss as a result of the oil spill following the six month moratorium in the Gulf

Gravitational-Wave Geodesy: A New Tool for Validating Detection of the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background

A valuable target for advanced gravitational-wave detectors is the stochastic gravitational-wave background. The stochastic background imparts a weak correlated signal into networks of gravitational-wave detectors, and so standard searches for the gravitational-wave background rely on measuring cross-correlations between pairs of widely-separated detectors. Stochastic searches, however, can be affected by any other correlated effects which may also be present, including correlated frequency combs and magnetic Schumann resonances. As stochastic searches become sensitive to ever-weaker signals, it is increasingly important to develop methods to separate a true astrophysical signal from other spurious and/or terrestrial signals. Here, we describe a novel method to achieve this goal -- gravitational-wave geodesy. Just as radio geodesy allows for the localization of radio telescopes, so too can observations of the gravitational-wave background be used to infer the positions and orientations of gravitational-wave detectors. By demanding that a true observation of the gravitational-wave background yield constraints consistent with the baseline's known geometry, we demonstrate that we can successfully validate true observations of the gravitational-wave background while rejecting spurious signals due to correlated terrestrial effects.Comment: Minor typos correcte

Gravitational-Wave Constraints on the Progenitors of Fast Radio Bursts

The nature of fast radio bursts (FRBs) remains enigmatic. Highly energetic radio pulses of millisecond duration, FRBs are observed with dispersion measures consistent with an extragalactic source. A variety of models have been proposed to explain their origin. One popular class of theorized FRB progenitor is the coalescence of compact binaries composed of neutron stars and/or black holes. Such coalescence events are strong gravitational-wave emitters. We demonstrate that measurements made by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave observatories can be leveraged to severely constrain the validity of FRB binary coalescence models. Existing measurements constrain the binary black hole rate to approximately $5\%$ of the FRB rate, and results from Advanced LIGO's O1 and O2 observing runs may place similarly strong constraints on the fraction of FRBs due to binary neutron star and neutron star--black hole progenitors.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, published in ApJL. Additional minor updates to match published version, updating metadat

The LIGO Open Science Center

The LIGO Open Science Center (LOSC) fulfills LIGO's commitment to release, archive, and serve LIGO data in a broadly accessible way to the scientific community and to the public, and to provide the information and tools necessary to understand and use the data. In August 2014, the LOSC published the full dataset from Initial LIGO's "S5" run at design sensitivity, the first such large-scale release and a valuable testbed to explore the use of LIGO data by non-LIGO researchers and by the public, and to help teach gravitational-wave data analysis to students across the world. In addition to serving the S5 data, the LOSC web portal (losc.ligo.org) now offers documentation, data-location and data-quality queries, tutorials and example code, and more. We review the mission and plans of the LOSC, focusing on the S5 data release.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, proceedings of the 10th LISA Symposium, University of Florida, Gainesville, May 18-23, 2014; final published version; see losc.ligo.org for the S5 data release and more information about the LIGO Open Science Cente

Targeted Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound to Detect Inflammation

Health Professions - Laboratory/Cellular (The Ohio State University Denman Undergraduate Research Forum)This study investigates the use of targeted contrast enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) to detect neural inflammation in a mouse model. Ultrasound contrast has been used previously to demonstrate perfusion at the tissue level, and several studies have utilized targeted CEUS to investigate angiogenesis in tumors. The current gold standard for the diagnosis of peripheral neuropathies is electrodiagnostic testing, which has been shown to be costly, painful for the patient, and lacking in sensitivity. The use of targeted CEUS with an affinity for P-selectin, a protein expressed on the surface of endothelial cells during inflammation, allows for the detection of inflammatory processes at a cellular level, potentially offering an earlier and less painful diagnosis of peripheral neuropathies. In this study, mice were imaged seven days after receiving a traumatic spinal cord injury at the T9 level. While imaging continuously, contrast microbubbles bound with anti-P-selectin were injected and allowed to circulate for 10 minutes, at which point a bursting mechanism was activated on the ultrasound unit, rupturing microbubbles within the beam profile. Images from before and after the bursting pulse were processed using analysis software to highlight the distribution of contrast, and generate trend graphs to represent contrast signal amplitude in the T9 region. Evaluation of the trend graphs from mice injected with contrast bound to anti-P-selectin showed a significant decrease in signal amplitude following the bursting pulse. Trend graphs from mice injected with contrast bound to a non-binding control antibody showed more static signal intensity, consistent with the background signal of circulating, unbound contrast. These results suggest that targeted CEUS can successfully detect inflammatory markers in neural tissue. To further investigate the potential of this technique, study should continue with a larger sample size and the use of a wider variety of antibodies.Academic Major: Biomedical Engineerin

Review of N. Diamantouros, Th. Dragonas and F. Birtek (eds), Ελλάδα και Τουρκία: Εκσυγχρονιστικές γεωγραφίες και χωρικές αντιλήψεις του έθνους [Spatial conceptions of the nation: modernising geographies in Greece and Turkey]

Review of Nikiforos Diamantouros, Thalia Dragonas, Faruk Birtek (eds), Ελλάδα και Τουρκία: Εκσυγχρονιστικές γεωγραφίες και χωρικές αντιλήψεις του έθνους [Spatial conceptions of the nation: modernising geographies in Greece and Turkey], Athens: Alexandria, 2012, 446 pp