Geochemical and mineralogical impacts of sulfuric acid on clays between pH 5.0 and -3.0

Natural and constructed clay liners are routinely used to contain waste and wastewater. The impact of acidic solutions on the geochemistry and mineralogy of clays has been widely investigated in relation to acid mine drainage systems at pH > 1.0. The impact of sulfuric acid leachate characterized by pH < 1.0, including potentially negative pH values on the geochemistry and mineralogy of clays is, however, not clear. To address this deficiency a series of batch and diffusion cell studies, investigating the geochemical and mineralogical impacts of H2SO4 solutions (pH 5.0 to -3.0), were conducted on three mineralogically distinct clays (Kc, Km, and BK). Batch testing was conducted at seven pH treatments (5.0, 3.0, 1.0, 0.0, -1.0, -2.0 and -3.0) using standardized sulfuric acid solutions for four exposure periods (14, 90, 180, and 365 d). Aqueous geochemical, XRD, and Si and Al XANES analyses showed: increased dissolution of aluminosilicates with decreasing pH and increasing exposure period; preferential dissolution of aluminosilicate Al-octahedral layers relative to Si-tetrahedral layers; formation of an amorphous silica-like phase that was confined to the surface layer of the altered clay samples at pH ¡Ü 0.0 and t ¡Ý 90 d; and precipitation of anhydrite and a Al-SO4-rich phase (pH ¡Ü -1.0, t ¡Ý 90 d). The diffusive transport of H2SO4 (pH =1.0, -1.0, and -3.0) through the Kc and Km clays for 216 d was examined using single reservoir, constant concentration, diffusion cells. The diffusive transport of H+ within the cells was modeled using 1-D transport models that assumed no absorption, linear absorption, and non-linear absorption of H+. The absorption isotherms were calculated from the pH 5.0, 3.0, and 1.0 batch experiment results, which were assumed representative of H+ absorption at pH < 1.0. However, model results indicated that the batch test results can not account for the observed H+ consumption in all cells and greatly underestimate the amount of H+ consumption in the pH -1.0 and -3.0. In the Kc and Km diffusion cells, above-background Ca, Al, Fe, and Si aqueous concentrations were associated with depth intervals characterized by decreased pH values. Respective peak concentrations of 325, 403, 176, 11.7, and 1.38 x 103 ¦Ìmol g-1 (Kc) and 32.4, 426, 199, 7.2, and 1.22 x 103 ¦Ìmol g-1 (Km) were measured in the pH -3.0 cells. XRD results showed that the elevated concentrations corresponded to the loss of carbonates and montmorillonite peaks and decreased peak intensities for illite and kaolinite in depth intervals with pH ¡Ü 1.0, in the Kc and Km pH -1.0 and -3.0 cells. The combined results of these studies indicated that the long-term diffusion of H2SO4 through clays at pH < 1.0 will result in a large amount of primary phase dissolution; however, this will be accompanied by precipitation of soluble Ca and Al sulfate salts and amorphous silica, especially at pH ¡Ü 0.0. Additionally, the presence of even a small amount of carbonate will serve to greatly buffer the diffusive transport of H2SO4 through clays, even at a source pH of -3.0

Dance Exposure, Individual Characteristics, and Injury Risk over Five Seasons in a Professional Ballet Company

PURPOSE: To describe the relationships between dance exposure, dancer characteristics, and injury risk across five seasons in a professional ballet company. METHODS: Dance exposure time and clinician-reported time-loss and medical attention injury data were prospectively collected from 118 professional dancers of The Royal Ballet between 2015/16 and 2019/20. Cox proportional hazards and shared frailty models were fitted to overuse and traumatic injuries; individualized robust Z-scores for 7-day and 28-day accumulated exposure, and week-to-week change in exposure, age, sex, company rank, and injury history were included as time-varying covariates. RESULTS: Across 381,710 h of exposure, 1332 medical attention and 427 time-loss injuries were observed. Positive relationships were observed between week-to-week change in exposure and overuse time-loss (+1 Z-score hazard ratio (HR): 1.27, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.06-1.53) and medical attention injury risk (+1 Z-score HR: 1.17, 95% CI: 1.06-1.28). A negative relationship was observed between 7-day accumulated exposure and overuse medical-attention injury risk (+1 Z-score HR: 0.74, 95% CI: 0.66-0.84). Overuse time-loss injury risk was greater in soloists compared to the corps de ballet (HR: 1.47, 95% CI: 1.01-2.15), and in dancers with a higher previous injury rate (+1 injury.1000 h-1 HR: 1.06, 95% CI: 1.02-1.10). Only age was associated with traumatic time-loss (+1-year HR: 1.05, 95% CI: 1.01-1.09) or medical attention injury risk (+1-year HR: 1.04, 95% CI: 1.01-1.07). CONCLUSION: Professional ballet companies should implement training principles such as periodization and progression, particularly in the case of senior-ranking dancers, older dancers, and dancers with high rates of previous injury. These findings provide a basis for future prospective investigations into specific causal injury pathways

Injury epidemiology in professional ballet: a five-season prospective study of 1596 medical attention injuries and 543 time-loss injuries

OBJECTIVES: To describe the incidence rate, severity, burden and aetiology of medical attention and time-loss injuries across five consecutive seasons at a professional ballet company. METHODS: Medical attention injuries, time-loss injuries and dance exposure hours of 123 professional ballet dancers (women: n=66, age: 28.0+/-8.3 years; men: n=57, age: 27.9+/-8.5 years) were prospectively recorded between the 2015/2016 and 2019/2020 seasons. RESULTS: The incidence rate (per 1000 hours) of medical attention injury was 3.9 (95% CI 3.3 to 4.4) for women and 3.1 (95% CI 2.6 to 3.5) for men. The incidence rate (per 1000 hours) of time-loss injury was 1.2 (95% CI 1.0 to 1.5) for women and 1.1 (95% CI 0.9 to 1.3) for men. First Soloists and Principals experienced between 2.0-2.2 additional medical attention injuries per 1000 hours and 0.9-1.1 additional time-loss injuries per 1000 hours compared with Apprentices (p</=0.025). Further, intraseason differences were observed in medical attention, but not time-loss, injury incidence rates with the highest incidence rates in early (August and September) and late (June) season months. Thirty-five per cent of time-loss injuries resulted in over 28 days of modified dance training. A greater percentage of time-loss injuries were classified as overuse (women: 50%; men: 51%) compared with traumatic (women: 40%; men: 41%). CONCLUSION: This is the first study to report the incidence rate of medical attention and time-loss injuries in professional ballet dancers. Incidence rates differed across company ranks and months, which may inform targeted injury prevention strategies

A Trifecta of New Insights into Ovine Footrot for Infection Drivers, Immune Response and Host Pathogen Interactions.

Footrot is a polymicrobial infectious disease in sheep causing severe lameness, leading to one of the industry’s biggest welfare problems. The complex aetiology of footrot makes in-situ or in-vitro investigations difficult. Computational methods offer a solution to understanding the bacteria involved, how they may interact with the host and ultimately providing a way to identify targets for future hypotheses driven investigative work. Here we present the first combined global analysis of the bacterial community transcripts together with the host immune response in healthy and diseased ovine feet during a natural polymicrobial infection state using metatranscriptomics. The intra tissue and surface bacterial populations and the most abundant bacterial transcriptome were analysed, demonstrating footrot affected skin has a reduced diversity and increased abundances of, not only the causative bacteria Dichelobacter nodosus, but other species such as Mycoplasma fermentans and Porphyromonas asaccharolytica. Host transcriptomics reveals a suppression of biological processes relating to skin barrier function, vascular functions, and immunosurveillance in unhealthy interdigital skin, supported by histological findings that type I collagen (associated with scar tissue formation) is significantly increased in footrot affected interdigital skin comparted to outwardly healthy skin. Finally, we provide some interesting indications of host and pathogen interactions associated with virulence genes and the host spliceosome which could lead to the identification of future therapeutic targets

Spatially resolved flux measurements of NOx from London suggest significantly higher emissions than predicted by inventories

To date, direct validation of city-wide emissions inventories for air pollutants has been difficult or impossible. However, recent technological innovations now allow direct measurement of pollutant fluxes from cities, for comparison with emissions inventories, which are themselves commonly used for prediction of current and future air quality and to help guide abatement strategies. Fluxes of NOx were measured using the eddy-covariance technique from an aircraft flying at low altitude over London. The highest fluxes were observed over central London, with lower fluxes measured in suburban areas. A footprint model was used to estimate the spatial area from which the measured emissions occurred. This allowed comparison of the flux measurements to the UK's National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) for NOx, with scaling factors used to account for the actual time of day, day of week and month of year of the measurement. The comparison suggests significant underestimation of NOx emissions in London by the NAEI, mainly due to its under-representation of real world road traffic emissions. A comparison was also carried out with an enhanced version of the inventory using real world driving emission factors and road measurement data taken from the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (LAEI). The measurement to inventory agreement was substantially improved using the enhanced version, showing the importance of fully accounting for road traffic, which is the dominant NOx emission source in London. In central London there was still an underestimation by the inventory of 30-40% compared with flux measurements, suggesting significant improvements are still required in the NOx emissions inventory

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment: Exploring Fundamental Symmetries of the Universe

The preponderance of matter over antimatter in the early Universe, the dynamics of the supernova bursts that produced the heavy elements necessary for life and whether protons eventually decay --- these mysteries at the forefront of particle physics and astrophysics are key to understanding the early evolution of our Universe, its current state and its eventual fate. The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) represents an extensively developed plan for a world-class experiment dedicated to addressing these questions. LBNE is conceived around three central components: (1) a new, high-intensity neutrino source generated from a megawatt-class proton accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, (2) a near neutrino detector just downstream of the source, and (3) a massive liquid argon time-projection chamber deployed as a far detector deep underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. This facility, located at the site of the former Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota, is approximately 1,300 km from the neutrino source at Fermilab -- a distance (baseline) that delivers optimal sensitivity to neutrino charge-parity symmetry violation and mass ordering effects. This ambitious yet cost-effective design incorporates scalability and flexibility and can accommodate a variety of upgrades and contributions. With its exceptional combination of experimental configuration, technical capabilities, and potential for transformative discoveries, LBNE promises to be a vital facility for the field of particle physics worldwide, providing physicists from around the globe with opportunities to collaborate in a twenty to thirty year program of exciting science. In this document we provide a comprehensive overview of LBNE's scientific objectives, its place in the landscape of neutrino physics worldwide, the technologies it will incorporate and the capabilities it will possess.Comment: Major update of previous version. This is the reference document for LBNE science program and current status. Chapters 1, 3, and 9 provide a comprehensive overview of LBNE's scientific objectives, its place in the landscape of neutrino physics worldwide, the technologies it will incorporate and the capabilities it will possess. 288 pages, 116 figure

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

Antimicrobial resistance among migrants in Europe: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are rising globally and there is concern that increased migration is contributing to the burden of antibiotic resistance in Europe. However, the effect of migration on the burden of AMR in Europe has not yet been comprehensively examined. Therefore, we did a systematic review and meta-analysis to identify and synthesise data for AMR carriage or infection in migrants to Europe to examine differences in patterns of AMR across migrant groups and in different settings. METHODS: For this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched MEDLINE, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus with no language restrictions from Jan 1, 2000, to Jan 18, 2017, for primary data from observational studies reporting antibacterial resistance in common bacterial pathogens among migrants to 21 European Union-15 and European Economic Area countries. To be eligible for inclusion, studies had to report data on carriage or infection with laboratory-confirmed antibiotic-resistant organisms in migrant populations. We extracted data from eligible studies and assessed quality using piloted, standardised forms. We did not examine drug resistance in tuberculosis and excluded articles solely reporting on this parameter. We also excluded articles in which migrant status was determined by ethnicity, country of birth of participants' parents, or was not defined, and articles in which data were not disaggregated by migrant status. Outcomes were carriage of or infection with antibiotic-resistant organisms. We used random-effects models to calculate the pooled prevalence of each outcome. The study protocol is registered with PROSPERO, number CRD42016043681. FINDINGS: We identified 2274 articles, of which 23 observational studies reporting on antibiotic resistance in 2319 migrants were included. The pooled prevalence of any AMR carriage or AMR infection in migrants was 25·4% (95% CI 19·1-31·8; I2 =98%), including meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (7·8%, 4·8-10·7; I2 =92%) and antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacteria (27·2%, 17·6-36·8; I2 =94%). The pooled prevalence of any AMR carriage or infection was higher in refugees and asylum seekers (33·0%, 18·3-47·6; I2 =98%) than in other migrant groups (6·6%, 1·8-11·3; I2 =92%). The pooled prevalence of antibiotic-resistant organisms was slightly higher in high-migrant community settings (33·1%, 11·1-55·1; I2 =96%) than in migrants in hospitals (24·3%, 16·1-32·6; I2 =98%). We did not find evidence of high rates of transmission of AMR from migrant to host populations. INTERPRETATION: Migrants are exposed to conditions favouring the emergence of drug resistance during transit and in host countries in Europe. Increased antibiotic resistance among refugees and asylum seekers and in high-migrant community settings (such as refugee camps and detention facilities) highlights the need for improved living conditions, access to health care, and initiatives to facilitate detection of and appropriate high-quality treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections during transit and in host countries. Protocols for the prevention and control of infection and for antibiotic surveillance need to be integrated in all aspects of health care, which should be accessible for all migrant groups, and should target determinants of AMR before, during, and after migration. FUNDING: UK National Institute for Health Research Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, Imperial College Healthcare Charity, the Wellcome Trust, and UK National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare-associated Infections and Antimictobial Resistance at Imperial College London

Autoantibodies neutralizing type I IFNs are present in ~4% of uninfected individuals over 70 years old and account for ~20% of COVID-19 deaths

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved.Circulating autoantibodies (auto-Abs) neutralizing high concentrations (10 ng/ml; in plasma diluted 1:10) of IFN-alpha and/or IFN-omega are found in about 10% of patients with critical COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pneumonia but not in individuals with asymptomatic infections. We detect auto-Abs neutralizing 100-fold lower, more physiological, concentrations of IFN-alpha and/or IFN-omega (100 pg/ml; in 1:10 dilutions of plasma) in 13.6% of 3595 patients with critical COVID-19, including 21% of 374 patients >80 years, and 6.5% of 522 patients with severe COVID-19. These antibodies are also detected in 18% of the 1124 deceased patients (aged 20 days to 99 years; mean: 70 years). Moreover, another 1.3% of patients with critical COVID-19 and 0.9% of the deceased patients have auto-Abs neutralizing high concentrations of IFN-beta. We also show, in a sample of 34,159 uninfected individuals from the general population, that auto-Abs neutralizing high concentrations of IFN-alpha and/or IFN-omega are present in 0.18% of individuals between 18 and 69 years, 1.1% between 70 and 79 years, and 3.4% >80 years. Moreover, the proportion of individuals carrying auto-Abs neutralizing lower concentrations is greater in a subsample of 10,778 uninfected individuals: 1% of individuals 80 years. By contrast, auto-Abs neutralizing IFN-beta do not become more frequent with age. Auto-Abs neutralizing type I IFNs predate SARS-CoV-2 infection and sharply increase in prevalence after the age of 70 years. They account for about 20% of both critical COVID-19 cases in the over 80s and total fatal COVID-19 cases.Peer reviewe