Scavenging in Northwestern Europe: A Survey of UK Police Specialist Search Officers

Physical search methods used by police specialist searchers are based on counter-terrorism methods and not on the search and recovery of outdoor surface deposited human remains, nevertheless these methods are applied to scenes involving human remains. Additionally, there is limited published forensic literature within Northwestern Europe on the potential taphonomic agents within this region that are capable of modifying human remains through scavenging, scattering and removal. The counter-terrorism basis in physical search methods and the gap in published forensic literature regarding scavenging in this region can potentially impede searchers’ abilities to adapt physical search methods to their full efficiency in the search and recovery of scavenged human remains. This paper analysed through a questionnaire survey of 111 police specialist searchers, within the U.K., the impact of animal scavenging on the search and recovery of human remains.According to questionnaire respondents’ experiences and knowledge, the occurrence of scavenging at scenes in which respondents took part in a physical search for human remains was common (63.46%,n= 66) and happened most frequently with surface deposits (68.25%,n= 43). Scavenging resulted in the recovery of incomplete sets of remains (59.79%, n= 58) and influenced search perimeters (58.33%, n= 35). Scavenging also affected recovery rates at scene searches (80.43%,n= 74) that included the use of cadaver dogs with police handlers. The impact scavengers within this region have on different crime scene scenarios and search methods is not reflected in current published literature or search standards

Charring rate for fire exposed X-Lam

Design of timber structures has been outlined in Eurocode 5. Notional charring rate for softwood and hardwood timber is given. For the performance of X-LAM panels in fire, only little information on charring is available and whether the fire behaviour of X-LAM is similar to homogenous timber panels has not yet been systematically analysed. This paper presents an overview of fire performance of X-LAM and evaluation of its resistance to elevated temperature as an element of structure in comparison to homogeneous timber panels. Numerical study has been carried out based on available experimental results. Charring rates for X-LAM panels obtained from experimental results are compared with those obtained from Eurocode 5 and proposed simplified model

Boundaries and Prototypes in Categorizing Direction

Projective terms such as left, right, front, back are conceptually interesting due to their flexibility of contextual usage and their central relevance to human spatial cognition. Their default acceptability areas are well known, with prototypical axes representing their most central usage and decreasing acceptability away from the axes. Previous research has shown these axes to be boundaries in certain non-linguistic tasks, indicating an inverse relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic direction concepts under specific circumstances. Given this striking mismatch, our study asks how such inverse non-linguistic concepts are represented in language, as well as how people describe their categorization. Our findings highlight two distinct grouping strategies reminiscent of theories of human categorization: prototype based or boundary based. These lead to different linguistic as well as non-linguistic patterns

Environmental Dimensionality Controls the Interaction of Phagocytes with the Pathogenic Fungi Aspergillus fumigatus and Candida albicans

The fungal pathogens Aspergillus fumigatus and Candida albicans are major health threats for immune-compromised patients. Normally, macrophages and neutrophil granulocytes phagocytose inhaled Aspergillus conidia in the two-dimensional (2-D) environment of the alveolar lumen or Candida growing in tissue microabscesses, which are composed of a three-dimensional (3-D) extracellular matrix. However, neither the cellular dynamics, the per-cell efficiency, the outcome of this interaction, nor the environmental impact on this process are known. Live imaging shows that the interaction of phagocytes with Aspergillus or Candida in 2-D liquid cultures or 3-D collagen environments is a dynamic process that includes phagocytosis, dragging, or the mere touching of fungal elements. Neutrophils and alveolar macrophages efficiently phagocytosed or dragged Aspergillus conidia in 2-D, while in 3-D their function was severely impaired. The reverse was found for phagocytosis of Candida. The phagocytosis rate was very low in 2-D, while in 3-D most neutrophils internalized multiple yeasts. In competitive assays, neutrophils primarily incorporated Aspergillus conidia in 2-D and Candida yeasts in 3-D despite frequent touching of the other pathogen. Thus, phagocytes show activity best in the environment where a pathogen is naturally encountered. This could explain why “delocalized” Aspergillus infections such as hematogeneous spread are almost uncontrollable diseases, even in immunocompetent individuals

Visual Similarity Perception of Directed Acyclic Graphs: A Study on Influencing Factors

While visual comparison of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is commonly encountered in various disciplines (e.g., finance, biology), knowledge about humans' perception of graph similarity is currently quite limited. By graph similarity perception we mean how humans perceive commonalities and differences in graphs and herewith come to a similarity judgment. As a step toward filling this gap the study reported in this paper strives to identify factors which influence the similarity perception of DAGs. In particular, we conducted a card-sorting study employing a qualitative and quantitative analysis approach to identify 1) groups of DAGs that are perceived as similar by the participants and 2) the reasons behind their choice of groups. Our results suggest that similarity is mainly influenced by the number of levels, the number of nodes on a level, and the overall shape of the graph.Comment: Graph Drawing 2017 - arXiv Version; Keywords: Graphs, Perception, Similarity, Comparison, Visualizatio

Cognitive Invariants of Geographic Event Conceptualization: What Matters and What Refines?

Behavioral experiments addressing the conceptualization of geographic events are few and far between. Our research seeks to address this deficiency by developing an experimental framework on the conceptualization of movement patterns. In this paper, we report on a critical experiment that is designed to shed light on the question of cognitively salient invariants in such conceptualization. Invariants have been identified as being critical to human information processing, particularly for the processing of dynamic information. In our experiment, we systematically address cognitive invariants of one class of geographic events: single entity movement patterns. To this end, we designed 72 animated icons that depict the movement patterns of hurricanes around two invariants: size difference and topological equivalence class movement patterns endpoints. While the endpoint hypothesis, put forth by Regier (2007), claims a particular focus of human cognition to ending relations of events, other research suggests that simplicity principles guide categorization and, additionally, that static information is easier to process than dynamic information. Our experiments show a clear picture: Size matters. Nonetheless, we also find categorization behaviors consistent with experiments in both the spatial and temporal domain, namely that topology refines these behaviors and that topological equivalence classes are categorized consistently. These results are critical steppingstones in validating spatial formalism from a cognitive perspective and cognitively grounding work on ontologies

On the importance of low-frequency signals in functional and molecular photoacoustic computed tomography

In photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) with short-pulsed laser excitation, wideband acoustic signals are generated in biological tissues with frequencies related to the effective shapes and sizes of the optically absorbing targets. Low-frequency photoacoustic signal components correspond to slowly varying spatial features and are often omitted during imaging due to the limited detection bandwidth of the ultrasound transducer, or during image reconstruction as undesired background that degrades image contrast. Here we demonstrate that low-frequency photoacoustic signals, in fact, contain functional and molecular information, and can be used to enhance structural visibility, improve quantitative accuracy, and reduce spare-sampling artifacts. We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of low-frequency signals in PACT, and experimentally evaluate their impact on several representative PACT applications, such as mapping temperature in photothermal treatment, measuring blood oxygenation in a hypoxia challenge, and detecting photoswitchable molecular probes in deep organs. Our results strongly suggest that low-frequency signals are important for functional and molecular PACT

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A Neutralizing Human Monoclonal Antibody Protects against Lethal Disease in a New Ferret Model of Acute Nipah Virus Infection

Nipah virus is a broadly tropic and highly pathogenic zoonotic paramyxovirus in the genus Henipavirus whose natural reservoirs are several species of Pteropus fruit bats. Nipah virus has repeatedly caused outbreaks over the past decade associated with a severe and often fatal disease in humans and animals. Here, a new ferret model of Nipah virus pathogenesis is described where both respiratory and neurological disease are present in infected animals. Severe disease occurs with viral doses as low as 500 TCID50 within 6 to 10 days following infection. The underlying pathology seen in the ferret closely resembles that seen in Nipah virus infected humans, characterized as a widespread multisystemic vasculitis, with virus replicating in highly vascular tissues including lung, spleen and brain, with recoverable virus from a variety of tissues. Using this ferret model a cross-reactive neutralizing human monoclonal antibody, m102.4, targeting the henipavirus G glycoprotein was evaluated in vivo as a potential therapeutic agent. All ferrets that received m102.4 ten hours following a high dose oral-nasal Nipah virus challenge were protected from disease while all controls died. This study is the first successful post-exposure passive antibody therapy for Nipah virus using a human monoclonal antibody