Traffic induced moisture entry into road pavements

Most Australian roads have experienced potholes and other types of pavement failures. An excessive amount of moisture in road pavements is often a major contributing factor to these pavement failures. Queensland has a very large road network connecting rural with urban and dense populations with sparse populations. This project seeks to investigate the penetration of water into road pavements due to the compounding nature of traffic. This project will determine if moisture enters the pavement through the compounding nature of traffic and quantify the extent of the problem. In Australia sprayed seal surfacing are used on most rural, arterial and rural local roads. Tyre pressures, traffic volumes, speed, loads and the amount of heavy vehicles have increased dramatically over time. This has led to an increase in pavement failures particularly in the wheel paths. An obvious cause of these failures is excessive amounts of moisture in these failure zones. Data provided by Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads – Toowoomba and samples that were collected were analysed. As a result of this analysis it was found that there was more moisture in the wheel paths compared to between the wheel paths. Although the majority of locations had higher moisture content in the outer wheel path than the inner wheel path, infiltration through the shoulder was an unlikely cause due to the moisture content in the inner wheel path shoulder being less than that of the outer wheel path in some cases. It is also evident that the more re-seals there were, the less moisture content there was within the pavement. The results of the permeameter tests revealed that spray seals are classed as ‘permeable’ under atmospheric pressure. Under pressure at the same locations the classification increases to ‘moderately free draining’. This indicates that under more realistic traffic conditions, moisture does penetrate spray seals. The results of this study show that moisture does penetrate the pavement due to the compounding nature of traffi

A Consensus Map in Cultivated Hexaploid Oat Reveals Conserved Grass Synteny with Substantial Subgenome Rearrangement

Hexaploid oat ( L., 2 = 6 = 42) is a member of the Poaceae family and has a large genome (∼12.5 Gb) containing 21 chromosome pairs from three ancestral genomes. Physical rearrangements among parental genomes have hindered the development of linkage maps in this species. The objective of this work was to develop a single high-density consensus linkage map that is representative of the majority of commonly grown oat varieties. Data from a cDNA-derived single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array and genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) were collected from the progeny of 12 biparental recombinant inbred line populations derived from 19 parents representing oat germplasm cultivated primarily in North America. Linkage groups from all mapping populations were compared to identify 21 clusters of conserved collinearity. Linkage groups within each cluster were then merged into 21 consensus chromosomes, generating a framework consensus map of 7202 markers spanning 2843 cM. An additional 9678 markers were placed on this map with a lower degree of certainty. Assignment to physical chromosomes with high confidence was made for nine chromosomes. Comparison of homeologous regions among oat chromosomes and matches to orthologous regions of rice ( L.) reveal that the hexaploid oat genome has been highly rearranged relative to its ancestral diploid genomes as a result of frequent translocations among chromosomes. Heterogeneous chromosome rearrangements among populations were also evident, probably accounting for the failure of some linkage groups to match the consensus. This work contributes to a further understanding of the organization and evolution of hexaploid grass genomes

ICAR: endoscopic skull‐base surgery

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