803 research outputs found
Awareness of Breast Cancer and Its Early Detection Measures Among Female Students, Northern Ethiopia
Globally breast cancer is the most common of all cancers. Since risk reduction strategies cannot eliminate the majority of breast cancers, early detection remains the cornerstone of breast cancer control. This paper, therefore, attempts to assess the awareness of breast cancer and its early detection measures among female students in Mekelle University, Ethiopia. An institution based cross-sectional study was conducted on randomly selected female students. Multistage sampling technique was employed to select the participants. A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used. Data analysis was carried out using SPSS version 16. In this study, 760 students participated making a response rate of 96 percent. Respondents with good knowledge score for risk factors, early detections measures and warning signs of breast cancer were 1.4 percent, 3.6 percent and 22.1 percent respectively. The majority 477 (62.8 percent) of participants practiced self-breast examination. In conclusion the participants had poor knowledge of risk factors, early detection measures and early warning signs of breast cancer.Therefore, the Ministry of health of Ethiopia together with its stalk holders should strengthen providing IEC targeting women to increase their awareness about breast cancer and its early detection measure
Regulating khat - Dilemmas and opportunities for the international drug control system
Background: The regulation of khat, one of the most recent psychoactive drugs to become a globally traded commodity, remains hotly contested within different producer and consumer countries. As regimes vary, it has been possible to compare khat policies in Africa, Europe and North America from different disciplinary perspectives.
Methods: Field research was conducted in East Africa and Europe, using a combination of semistructured interviews, participant observation and the analysis of trade statistics.
Results: The research established the significance of khat for rural producers, regional economies, as a tax base and source of foreign exchange. At the same time, khat as a psychoactive substance is associated with health and public safety problems that in turn are met with often ill-informed legislative responses. Bans have in turn lead to the criminalisation of users and sellers and illegal drug markets.
Conclusion: The empirical work from Africa provides a strong argument for promoting evidence-based approaches to khat regulation, harnessing the positive aspects of the khat economy to develop a control model that incorporates the voices and respects the needs of rural producers. Ultimately, the framework for khat may provide both a model and an opportunity for revising the international treaties governing the control of other plant psychoactive-based substances
Participatory identification of indicators for assessing options for climate compatible development of smallholder farmers in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia.
Rotational Doppler effect in left-handed materials
We explain the rotational Doppler effect associated with light beams carrying
with orbital angular momentum in left-handed materials (LHMs). We demonstrate
that the rotational Doppler effect in LHMs is unreversed, which is
significantly different from the linear Doppler effect. The physics underlying
this intriguing effect is the combined contributions of negative phase velocity
and inverse screw of wave-front. In the normal dispersion region, the
rotational Doppler effect induces a upstream energy flow but a downstream
momentum flow. In the anomalous dispersion region, however, the rotational
Doppler effect produces a downstream energy flow but a upstream momentum flow.
We theoretically predict that the rotational Doppler effect can induce a
transfer of angular momentum of the LHM to orbital angular momentum of the
beam.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
Spin Hall effect of light in photon tunneling
We resolve the breakdown of angular momentum conservation on two-dimensional
photon tunneling by considering spin Hall effect (SHE) of light. This
interesting effect manifests itself as polarization-dependent transverse shifts
for a classic wave packet tunneling through a prism-air-prism barrier. For a
certain circularly polarized component, the transverse shifts can be modulated
by altering the refractive index gradient associated with the two prisms. We
find that the SHE in conventional beam refraction can be evidently enhanced via
photon tunneling mechanism. The polarization-dependent transverse shift is
governed by the total angular momentum conservation law, while the
polarization-dependent angular shift is governed by the total linear momentum
law. These findings open the possibility for developing new nano-photonic
devices and can be extrapolated to other physical systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
Low-Temperature Orientation Dependence of Step Stiffness on {111} Surfaces
For hexagonal nets, descriptive of {111} fcc surfaces, we derive from
combinatoric arguments a simple, low-temperature formula for the orientation
dependence of the surface step line tension and stiffness, as well as the
leading correction, based on the Ising model with nearest-neighbor (NN)
interactions. Our formula agrees well with experimental data for both Ag and
Cu{111} surfaces, indicating that NN-interactions alone can account for the
data in these cases (in contrast to results for Cu{001}). Experimentally
significant corollaries of the low-temperature derivation show that the step
line tension cannot be extracted from the stiffness and that with plausible
assumptions the low-temperature stiffness should have 6-fold symmetry, in
contrast to the 3-fold symmetry of the crystal shape. We examine Zia's exact
implicit solution in detail, using numerical methods for general orientations
and deriving many analytic results including explicit solutions in the two
high-symmetry directions. From these exact results we rederive our simple
result and explore subtle behavior near close-packed directions. To account for
the 3-fold symmetry in a lattice gas model, we invoke a novel
orientation-dependent trio interaction and examine its consequences.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
Reversed propagation dynamics of Laguerre-Gaussian beams in left-handed materials
On the basis of angular spectrum representation, the reversed propagation
dynamics of Laguerre-Gaussian beam in left-handed materials (LHMs) is
presented. We show that negative phase velocity gives rise to a reversed screw
of wave-front, and ultimately leads to a reversed rotation of optical vortex.
Furthermore, negative Gouy-phase shift causes an inverse spiral of Poynting
vector. It is found that the Laguerre-Gaussian beam in LHMs will present the
same propagation characteristics as the counterpart with opposite topological
charges in regular right-handed materials (RHMs). The momentum conservation
theorem insures that the tangential component of the wave momentum at the
RHM-LHM boundary is conserved. It is shown that although the linear momentum
reverses its direction, the angular momentum remains unchanged.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
Multilocus sequence and microsatellite identification of intra-specific hybrids and ancestor-like donors among natural Ethiopian isolates of Leishmania donovani.
Protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania (Kinetoplastida: Trypanosomatidae) cause widespread and devastating human diseases. Visceral leishmaniasis is endemic in Ethiopia where it has also been responsible for fatal epidemics. It is postulated that genetic exchange in Leishmania has implications for heterosis (hybrid vigour), spread of virulent strains, resistance to chemotherapeutics, and exploitation of different hosts and vectors. Here we analyse 11 natural Ethiopian Leishmania donovani isolates consisting of four putative hybrids, seven parent-like isolates and over 90 derived biological clones. We apply a novel combination of high resolution multilocus microsatellite typing (five loci) and multilocus sequence typing (four loci) that together distinguish parent-like and hybrid L. donovani strains. Results indicate that the four isolates (and their associated biological clones) are genetic hybrids, not the results of mixed infections, each possessing heterozygous markers consistent with inheritance of divergent alleles from genetically distinct Ethiopian L. donovani lineages. The allelic profiles of the putative hybrids may have arisen from a single hybridisation event followed by inbreeding or gene conversion, or alternatively from two or more hybridisation events. Mitochondrial sequencing showed uniparental maxicircle inheritance for all of the hybrids, each possessing a single mitochondrial genotype. Fluorescence activated cell sorting analysis of DNA content demonstrated that all hybrids and their associated clones were diploid. Together the data imply that intra-specific genetic exchange is a recurrent feature of natural L. donovani populations, with substantial implications for the phyloepidemiology of Leishmania
Nonlinear photonics properties of porphyrins nanocomposites and self-assembled porphyrins
Two major reasons limit porphyrins photonic applications: (i) the difficulty of handling them in liquid solutions and (ii) their degradation with long exposure to light. This necessitates the use of appropriate solid matrices to host the porphyrin compounds such as Nafion (117), a stable and inert ion exchange polymer. The first part of this publication confirms such a possibility. In addition to their effective NLO properties, an enhancement of the Soret and Q-bands absorbance width have been observed by blending three different porphyrin molecules in the Nafion column matrix membrane. This is an important development towards achieving efficient photon-harvesting medium for possible application in photonic devices. The second part of this contribution reports on the self-assembly/molecular recognition of a specific class of porphyrins giving rise to tubular nano-systems with potential THG nonlinear properties
Experimental observation of the spin Hall effect of light on a nano-metal film via weak measurements
We theorize the spin Hall effect of light (SHEL) on a nano-metal film and
demonstrate it experimentally via weak measurements. A general propagation
model to describe the relationship between the spin-orbit coupling and the
thickness of the metal film is established. It is revealed that the spin-orbit
coupling in the SHEL can be effectively modulated by adjusting the thickness of
the metal film, and the transverse displacement is sensitive to the thickness
of metal film in certain range for horizontal polarization light. Importantly,
a large negative transverse shift can be observed as a consequence of the
combined contribution of the ratio and the phase difference of Fresnel
coefficients.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
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