Validation of an Exertional Recall Questionnaire for a Circuit Training Program

Physical activity recall questionnaires are important tools to quantify physical activity patterns and relating these patterns to disease risk. However, of the movement components that comprise physical activity, intensity is the most difficult to directly and objectively measure.PURPOSE: The present investigation examined the validity of a post-event recall questionnaire to measure the perception of physical exertion during a circuit exercise program.METHODS: Forty (21.1 ±2.7 yrs) recreationally active females (n=22) and males (n=18), with no prior knowledge of OMNI RPE, underwent a circuit program consisting of in counterbalanced order: (I) cycle ergometry at 50% and 75% VO2peak, and (II) bicep curls at 65% and 90% 1-RM. Seven days later, subjects rated their perceived exertion associated with each exercise bout using the Exertional Recall Questionnaire. The subjects reported OMNI RPEs for the overall body (O), legs (L), and chest/breathing (C) for the cycle exercises, and OMNI RPEs for the overall body (O) and arm (A) for the bicep curl exercises. Following completion of the Exertional Recall Questionnaire, subjects were given standardized instructions for the OMNI RPE Cycle and Resistance Scales and repeated the circuit program. OMNI RPEs were then measured during the exercise bouts (the Criterion).RESULTS: Three-factor analyses of variance indicated that Recall and Criterion RPE-O, and -L did not differ significantly at both cycle exercise intensities (p=0.064 and 0.169). Recall RPE-C was significantly lower than Criterion RPE-C at both cycle exercise intensities (p=0.010). Three-factor analyses of variance indicated that the RPE-O and -A for the Recall procedure were significantly less than the Criterion procedure (p<0.001) for both the lighter and heavier resistances. CONCLUSIONS: Recreationally active females and males with no prior knowledge of OMNI RPE were able to recall their perceived exertion (overall body and legs) experienced during non-weight bearing (cycle) aerobic exercise performed seven days previously. The Recall procedure is valid for non-weight bearing aerobic exercise. However, subjects under-estimated Recall RPE-O and -A for upper body resistance exercise. These responses question validity of the Recall RPE procedure for single joint arm resistance exercise

Development of a Perceptual Hyperthermia Index to Evaluate Heat Strain during Treadmill Exercise

Fire suppression and rescue is a physiologically demanding occupation due to extreme external heat as well as the additional physical and thermal burden of the protective garments. The hot environment challenges body temperature homeostasis inducing heat stress. Accurate field assessment of hyperthermia is complex and unreliable. Purpose: The present investigation developed a perceptually based hyperthermia metric to measure physiologic exertional heat strain during treadmill exercise. Methods: Sixty-five (28.88 ± 6.75 yrs) female (n=11) and male (n=54) firefighters and non-firefighting volunteers participated in four related thermal stress investigations performing treadmill exercise while wearing thermal protective clothing in a heated room. Physiological and perceptual responses (i.e. body core temperature, perceived exertion, and thermal sensation) were assessed at baseline, 20-mins exercise, and at termination. Results: Perceived exertion increased from baseline (0.24 ± 0.42) to termination (7.43 ± 1.86). Thermal sensation increased from baseline (1.78 ± 0.77) to termination (4.50 ± 0.68). Perceived exertion and thermal sensation were measured concurrently with body core temperature to develop a two-dimensional graphical representation of three "colored" exertional heat strain zones. Each exertional heat strain zone was representative of a range of mean body core temperature responses such that green incorporated 36.0 to 37.4°C, yellow incorporated 37.5 to 37.9°C, and red incorporated 38.0 to greater than 40.5°C. Conclusions: A perceptual hyperthermia index (PHI) was developed using ratings of perceived exertion and thermal sensation. The PHI can provide a quick and easy momentary assessment of the level of risk for exertional heat strain for firefighters engaged in fire suppression and rescue. This metric may be beneficial in high risk environments that threaten the lives of firefighters

Partial oxidation and autothermal reforming of heavy hydrocarbon fuels with non-equilibrium gliding arc plasma for fuel cell applications

Non-thermal plasma fuel reforming technology has several advantages over traditional catalytic or thermal processes including fast start time, high productivity, relatively low electrical energy costs to operate. Several novel gliding arc plasma reformers were developed and investigated for the partial oxidation of several fuels including n-Tetradecane, Diesel, and JP-8 in the partial oxidation and autothermal reforming regimes. High conversion was achieved with efficiencies greater than 80 percent. The results show that gliding arc systems are capable of reforming heavy hydrocarbon fuels with high conversion efficiency and are an important piece of technology for on-board vehicular reforming systems that should be further developed and optimized.Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering -- Drexel University, 201

Session, Segmented Session, and Acute RPE and Affective Responses to Self-selected Treadmill Exercise

Please view abstract in the attached PDF file

Open Science principles for accelerating trait-based science across the Tree of Life.

Synthesizing trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Species traits are widely used in ecological and evolutionary science, and new data and methods have proliferated rapidly. Yet accessing and integrating disparate data sources remains a considerable challenge, slowing progress toward a global synthesis to integrate trait data across organisms. Trait science needs a vision for achieving global integration across all organisms. Here, we outline how the adoption of key Open Science principles-open data, open source and open methods-is transforming trait science, increasing transparency, democratizing access and accelerating global synthesis. To enhance widespread adoption of these principles, we introduce the Open Traits Network (OTN), a global, decentralized community welcoming all researchers and institutions pursuing the collaborative goal of standardizing and integrating trait data across organisms. We demonstrate how adherence to Open Science principles is key to the OTN community and outline five activities that can accelerate the synthesis of trait data across the Tree of Life, thereby facilitating rapid advances to address scientific inquiries and environmental issues. Lessons learned along the path to a global synthesis of trait data will provide a framework for addressing similarly complex data science and informatics challenges

Rapid inactivation of airborne bacteria using atmospheric pressure dielectric barrier grating discharge

IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 35(5): pp. 1501-1510.Dielectric barrier discharge plasma has been known to inactivate many different microorganisms on surfaces when treatment times are on the order of seconds or minutes in duration. In this paper, a unique plasma air cleaning facility was created which combines a dielectric barrier grating discharge (DBGD) with a filterless laboratory-scale ventilation system and is used to treat concentrated bacterial bioaerosol in a moving air stream at air flow rates of 25 L/s. Results indicate that plasma treatment times on the order of milliseconds corresponding to one pass through the DBGD device can achieve 1.5-log reduction in culturable E. coli immediately after contact with plasma and 5-log reduction totally following in the minutes after the plasma treatment. A numerical characterization study was performed to help predict and understand the mechanism of bacteria inactivation in the DBD plasma from a variety of plasma factors

Online dietary intake estimation : The food4me food frequency questionnaire

Copyright ©Hannah Forster, Rosalind Fallaize, Caroline Gallagher, Clare B O’Donovan, Clara Woolhead, Marianne C Walsh, Anna L Macready, Julie A Lovegrove, John C Mathers, Michael J Gibney, Lorraine Brennan, Eileen R Gibney. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 09.06.2014. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.Dietary assessment methods are important tools for nutrition research. Online dietary assessment tools have the potential to become invaluable methods of assessing dietary intake because, compared with traditional methods, they have many advantages including the automatic storage of input data and the immediate generation of nutritional outputs. Objective: The aim of this study was to develop an online food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) for dietary data collection in the Food4Me study and to compare this with the validated European Prospective Investigation of Cancer (EPIC) Norfolk printed FFQ. Methods: The Food4Me FFQ used in this analysis was developed to consist of 157 food items. Standardized color photographs were incorporated in the development of the Food4Me FFQ to facilitate accurate quantification of the portion size of each food item. Participants were recruited in two centers (Dublin, Ireland and Reading, United Kingdom) and each received the online Food4Me FFQ and the printed EPIC-Norfolk FFQ in random order. Participants completed the Food4Me FFQ online and, for most food items, participants were requested to choose their usual serving size among seven possibilities from a range of portion size pictures. The level of agreement between the two methods was evaluated for both nutrient and food group intakes using the Bland and Altman method and classification into quartiles of daily intake. Correlations were calculated for nutrient and food group intakes. Results: A total of 113 participants were recruited with a mean age of 30 (SD 10) years (40.7% male, 46/113; 59.3%, 67/113 female). Cross-classification into exact plus adjacent quartiles ranged from 77% to 97% at the nutrient level and 77% to 99% at the food group level. Agreement at the nutrient level was highest for alcohol (97%) and lowest for percent energy from polyunsaturated fatty acids (77%). Crude unadjusted correlations for nutrients ranged between .43 and .86. Agreement at the food group level was highest for other fruits (eg, apples, pears, oranges) and lowest for cakes, pastries, and buns. For food groups, correlations ranged between .41 and .90. Conclusions: The results demonstrate that the online Food4Me FFQ has good agreement with the validated printed EPIC-Norfolk FFQ for assessing both nutrient and food group intakes, rendering it a useful tool for ranking individuals based on nutrient and food group intakes.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Search for sterile neutrino mixing in the MINOS long-baseline experiment

A search for depletion of the combined flux of active neutrino species over a 735 km baseline is reported using neutral-current interaction data recorded by the MINOS detectors in the NuMI neutrino beam. Such a depletion is not expected according to conventional interpretations of neutrino oscillation data involving the three known neutrino flavors. A depletion would be a signature of oscillations or decay to postulated noninteracting sterile neutrinos, scenarios not ruled out by existing data. From an exposure of 3.18×1020 protons on target in which neutrinos of energies between ~500¿¿MeV and 120 GeV are produced predominantly as ¿µ, the visible energy spectrum of candidate neutral-current reactions in the MINOS far detector is reconstructed. Comparison of this spectrum to that inferred from a similarly selected near-detector sample shows that of the portion of the ¿µ flux observed to disappear in charged-current interaction data, the fraction that could be converting to a sterile state is less than 52% at 90% confidence level (C.L.). The hypothesis that active neutrinos mix with a single sterile neutrino via oscillations is tested by fitting the data to various models. In the particular four-neutrino models considered, the mixing angles ¿24 and ¿34 are constrained to be less than 11° and 56° at 90% C.L., respectively. The possibility that active neutrinos may decay to sterile neutrinos is also investigated. Pure neutrino decay without oscillations is ruled out at 5.4 standard deviations. For the scenario in which active neutrinos decay into sterile states concurrently with neutrino oscillations, a lower limit is established for the neutrino decay lifetime t3/m3&gt;2.1×10-12¿¿s/eV at 90% C.L

Single-shot 3D coherent diffractive imaging of core-shell nanoparticles with elemental specificity

We report 3D coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) of Au/Pd core-shell nanoparticles with 6.1 nm spatial resolution with elemental specificity. We measured single-shot diffraction patterns of the nanoparticles using intense x-ray free electron laser pulses. By exploiting the curvature of the Ewald sphere and the symmetry of the nanoparticle, we reconstructed the 3D electron density of 34 core-shell structures from these diffraction patterns. To extract 3D structural information beyond the diffraction signal, we implemented a super-resolution technique by taking advantage of CDI’s quantitative reconstruction capabilities. We used high-resolution model fitting to determine the Au core size and the Pd shell thickness to be 65.0 ± 1.0 nm and 4.0 ± 0.5 nm, respectively. We also identified the 3D elemental distribution inside the nanoparticles with an accuracy of 3%. To further examine the model fitting procedure, we simulated noisy diffraction patterns from a Au/Pd core-shell model and a solid Au model and confirmed the validity of the method. We anticipate this super-resolution CDI method can be generally used for quantitative 3D imaging of symmetrical nanostructures with elemental specificity

First observations of separated atmospheric nu_mu and bar{nu-mu} events in the MINOS detector

The complete 5.4 kton MINOS far detector has been taking data since the beginning of August 2003 at a depth of 2070 meters water-equivalent in the Soudan mine, Minnesota. This paper presents the first MINOS observations of nuµ and [overline nu ]µ charged-current atmospheric neutrino interactions based on an exposure of 418 days. The ratio of upward- to downward-going events in the data is compared to the Monte Carlo expectation in the absence of neutrino oscillations, giving Rup/downdata/Rup/downMC=0.62-0.14+0.19(stat.)±0.02(sys.). An extended maximum likelihood analysis of the observed L/E distributions excludes the null hypothesis of no neutrino oscillations at the 98% confidence level. Using the curvature of the observed muons in the 1.3 T MINOS magnetic field nuµ and [overline nu ]µ interactions are separated. The ratio of [overline nu ]µ to nuµ events in the data is compared to the Monte Carlo expectation assuming neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate in the same manner, giving R[overline nu ][sub mu]/nu[sub mu]data/R[overline nu ][sub mu]/nu[sub mu]MC=0.96-0.27+0.38(stat.)±0.15(sys.), where the errors are the statistical and systematic uncertainties. Although the statistics are limited, this is the first direct observation of atmospheric neutrino interactions separately for nuµ and [overline nu ]µ