3D Printing Homes Impact on the Residential Construction Industry

Construction companies are always looking for ways to reduce costs and shorten schedules and with new technologies there are more and more ways of achieving these goals. One new technology aimed to achieve those goals within the residential construction management industry is the three dimensional (3D) printer. Recently 3D printers have been put to use within the residential construction industry by printing the structures of homes, instead of framing them, at fractions of the cost and time, with greater efficiency, and less labor. 3D printed homes have a tremendous potential to impact impoverished citizens that need the peace and comfort of a roof over their head and a secure place to sleep but will struggle to make a big impact on the majority of homes in the United States. The inability of the 3D homes to reach sizes larger than an apartment (900 square feet) and the lack of an aesthetic appeal that allows for customization damages the homes potential until the technology is improved. With time and technical advancements 3D homes can become the norm of the industry but that won’t be for some time as the current kinks and limitations are sorted out

Daytime effects of raised pavement markers on horizontal curves

A large number of vehicle crashes occur every year on the horizontal curves found on many of America\u27s rural two-lane highways. Of these, a significant number can be attributed to the encroachment of a vehicle into the opposing lane of traffic. While multiple factors may contribute in forming these hazardous road segments, most are not corrected due to economic considerations. The purpose of this study is to note the driver response to the application of raised pavement markers by measuring the changes in speed and encroachment distance after varying the spacing intervals of these markers. All data was collected in dry, daylight conditions and thereby testing the rumble effect of the markers rather than their reflective delineation qualities. It is found here that daytime encroachment levels can be significantly reduced by an optimal marker spacing (40 feet) though operating speeds are generally not affected

Eye-CU: Sleep Pose Classification for Healthcare using Multimodal Multiview Data

Manual analysis of body poses of bed-ridden patients requires staff to continuously track and record patient poses. Two limitations in the dissemination of pose-related therapies are scarce human resources and unreliable automated systems. This work addresses these issues by introducing a new method and a new system for robust automated classification of sleep poses in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) environment. The new method, coupled-constrained Least-Squares (cc-LS), uses multimodal and multiview (MM) data and finds the set of modality trust values that minimizes the difference between expected and estimated labels. The new system, Eye-CU, is an affordable multi-sensor modular system for unobtrusive data collection and analysis in healthcare. Experimental results indicate that the performance of cc-LS matches the performance of existing methods in ideal scenarios. This method outperforms the latest techniques in challenging scenarios by 13% for those with poor illumination and by 70% for those with both poor illumination and occlusions. Results also show that a reduced Eye-CU configuration can classify poses without pressure information with only a slight drop in its performance.Comment: Ten-page manuscript including references and ten figure

Alaskan Natural Gas to Liquids (GTL) Using Microchannel Reactors

The proposed Alaskan natural gas to liquids (GTL) plant utilizes microchannel technology for both steam-methane reforming and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. A natural gas feed of 21.8 million standard cubic feet per hour is sent to a microchannel steam reformer, where it reacts with steam to produce a mixture comprised mainly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, or syngas. The syngas proceeds to another microchannel reactor, in which the Fischer-Tropsch reaction converts it to hydrocarbons. Approximately 117,600 bbl/day of C5+ liquid hydrocarbons (25.86% gasoline, 24.78% diesel, 21.40% naphtha, 21.72% C20+, 6.25% other) are recovered and fed to the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System for delivery to the North American market. The product contains little wax and few impurities and has an above average quality. Using a 13% discount rate, the project yields a positive 25-year Net Present Value of $708 million in 2009 and a 14.96% Internal Rate of Return, suggesting that the project has the potential to be an attractive investment. The most promising alternative to the GTL project is the construction of a natural gas pipeline, which would commence operation no sooner than 2019. The project’s economic feasibility depends most strongly on the product’s selling price, which is tied to the price of oil. The project is also capital-intensive and therefore sensitive to the final capital investment. Sensitivity analysis has been done on both of these factors

Genomic sequencing and analysis of a Chinese hamster ovary cell line using Illumina sequencing technology

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are among the most widely used hosts for therapeutic protein production. Yet few genomic resources are available to aid in engineering high-producing cell lines.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>High-throughput Illumina sequencing was used to generate a 1x genomic coverage of an engineered CHO cell line expressing secreted alkaline phosphatase (SEAP). Reference-guided alignment and assembly produced 3.57 million contigs and CHO-specific sequence information for ~ 18,000 mouse and ~ 19,000 rat orthologous genes. The majority of these genes are involved in metabolic processes, cellular signaling, and transport and represent attractive targets for cell line engineering.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This demonstrates the applicability of next-generation sequencing technology and comparative genomic analysis in the development of CHO genomic resources.</p

Genes required for survival in microgravity revealed by genome-wide yeast deletion collections cultured during spaceflight

Spaceflight is a unique environment with profound effects on biological systems including tissue redistribution and musculoskeletal stresses. However, the more subtle biological effects of spaceflight on cells and organisms are difficult to measure in a systematic, unbiased manner. Here we test the utility of the molecularly barcoded yeast deletion collection to provide a quantitative assessment of the effects of microgravity on a model organism. We developed robust hardware to screen, in parallel, the complete collection of ~4800 homozygous and ~5900 heterozygous (including ~1100 single-copy deletions of essential genes) yeast deletion strains, each carrying unique DNA that acts as strain identifiers. We compared strain fitness for the homozygous and heterozygous yeast deletion collections grown in spaceflight and ground, as well as plus and minus hyperosmolar sodium chloride, providing a second additive stressor. The genome-wide sensitivity profiles obtained from these treatments were then queried for their similarity to a compendium of drugs whose effects on the yeast collection have been previously reported. We found that the effects of spaceflight have high concordance with the effects of DNA-damaging agents and changes in redox state, suggesting mechanisms by which spaceflight may negatively affect cell fitness

Interaction between Bacteriophage DMS3 and Host CRISPR Region Inhibits Group Behaviors of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Bacteriophage infection has profound effects on bacterial biology. Clustered regular interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) and cas (CRISPR-associated) genes are found in most archaea and many bacteria and have been reported to play a role in resistance to bacteriophage infection. We observed that lysogenic infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA14 with bacteriophage DMS3 inhibits biofilm formation and swarming motility, both important bacterial group behaviors. This inhibition requires the CRISPR region in the host. Mutation or deletion of five of the six cas genes and one of the two CRISPRs in this region restored biofilm formation and swarming to DMS3 lysogenized strains. Our observations suggest a role for CRISPR regions in modifying the effects of lysogeny on P. aeruginosa