A1_5 Atomising Death Ray

This report examines the weapons commonly found in science fiction movies which are able to completely atomise a human being, leaving nothing visible behind. To atomise a human body, this report uses the approximation that every bond connecting their atoms must be broken simultaneously. The energy required from such a device is found to be ~3.75 GJ and it is found that it would require 11.06 mg of Deuterium-Tritium to undergo fusion to provide this energy. It is also found that targets will glow deep violet in the visible spectrum shot

A1_3 I believe in MIRACLs, where're you from?

The Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL) antimissile system is currently being developed by the US Army. Its aim is to destroy incoming missiles with lasers. This paper determines that there is a maximum of 10 minutes preparation time (assuming the missile is fired from at least 10 minutes flight time away), and it would take a 1 MW laser about 0.82 seconds to destroy a typical missile made of aluminium. It does not however cover the practical difficulties involved with implementing such a system

A1_6 Do you want to hang out?

This paper addresses the simple question: how much time will it take for wet clothes to dry, if they are hung up on a washing line, based on the current weather conditions? The metric form of the Penman equation is used to calculate the evaporation rate of water from a plane surface, which is dependent on the meteorological conditions of ambient temperature, wind speed, relative humidity, and the various properties of air and water at said ambient temperature. Empirically measuring the surface area of, and the mass of water contained in, a wet piece of clothing enables the time taken t for total evaporation to be determined. This paper concludes with an equation for t, provided the above factors are known, and gives example results for different items of clothing

A1_1 Tick, tick, tick... GRBoom!

This paper considers the possibility that a gamma ray burst (GRB) will cause a mass extinction on our planet. The distance over which a low energy GRB would expose a human to a lethal amount of radiation is calculated and found to be approximately 73 kiloparsecs. This indicates that we only need to consider GRBs occurring within the Milky Way galaxy. GRBs are also highly directional; the probability of a GRB striking the Earth is calculated to be 0.06%. From these calculations it is found that a lethal GRB is likely to impact on the Earth once every 328 million years

A1_7 The Neutrino Problem

This report examines the premise from the movie "2012" (2009) that solar neutrinos start interacting with the core of the Earth, causing it to melt. A lower energy limit required for this interaction is found to be 9.55*10^4 GeV  and it is shown that the source of such energetic neutrinos is unlikely to be from within the solar system

A1_2 Duck, duck... Spruce!

The H-4 Hercules was a prototype aircraft built in 1947 which was never properly flight tested. This report explores a theory that this aircraft would never have been able to fly more than a few hundred feet off of the ground due to the ground effect and that the plane was not viable for the purpose of transporting heavy military equipment. By exploring the pressure difference over the wing surfaces, the aircraft is shown to be able to reach a maximum altitude of 9,660 m and to require a minimum takeoff speed of 113.6 km/h. It is therefore shown that the aircraft would have been able to takeoff fully loaded and could have reached a high altitude successfully.Â

A1_9 The solar contract?

This report examines the claim by the 'Institute for Creation Research' that the Sun is contracting by about 5 ft per hour. It is determined that the gravitational potential energy released from the Sun contracting from its currently established radius to a radius 2.5 ft smaller would be larger than the Sun's current luminosity. It has also been shown that this would result in Earth being hotter than the current surface temperature of Venus and the Sun's peak of radiation would be in the ultra violet range rather than the visible

Development of a multivariable risk model integrating urinary cell DNA methylation and cell-free RNA data for the detection of significant prostate cancer

Background: Prostate cancer exhibits severe clinical heterogeneity and there is a critical need for clinically implementable tools able to precisely and noninvasively identify patients that can either be safely removed from treatment pathways or those requiring further follow up. Our objectives were to develop a multivariable risk prediction model through the integration of clinical, urine-derived cell-free messenger RNA (cf-RNA) and urine cell DNA methylation data capable of noninvasively detecting significant prostate cancer in biopsy naïve patients. Methods: Post-digital rectal examination urine samples previously analyzed separately for both cellular methylation and cf-RNA expression within the Movember GAP1 urine biomarker cohort were selected for a fully integrated analysis (n = 207). A robust feature selection framework, based on bootstrap resampling and permutation, was utilized to find the optimal combination of clinical and urinary markers in a random forest model, deemed ExoMeth. Out-of-bag predictions from ExoMeth were used for diagnostic evaluation in men with a clinical suspicion of prostate cancer (PSA ≥ 4 ng/mL, adverse digital rectal examination, age, or lower urinary tract symptoms). Results: As ExoMeth risk score (range, 0-1) increased, the likelihood of high-grade disease being detected on biopsy was significantly greater (odds ratio = 2.04 per 0.1 ExoMeth increase, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.78-2.35). On an initial TRUS biopsy, ExoMeth accurately predicted the presence of Gleason score ≥3 + 4, area under the receiver-operator characteristic curve (AUC) = 0.89 (95% CI: 0.84-0.93) and was additionally capable of detecting any cancer on biopsy, AUC = 0.91 (95% CI: 0.87-0.95). Application of ExoMeth provided a net benefit over current standards of care and has the potential to reduce unnecessary biopsies by 66% when a risk threshold of 0.25 is accepted. Conclusion: Integration of urinary biomarkers across multiple assay methods has greater diagnostic ability than either method in isolation, providing superior predictive ability of biopsy outcomes. ExoMeth represents a more holistic view of urinary biomarkers and has the potential to result in substantial changes to how patients suspected of harboring prostate cancer are diagnosed