Quenching of spin operators in the calculation of radiative corrections for nuclear beta decay

Calculations of the axial-vector component to the radiative correction for superallowed Fermi $0^+ \rightarrow 0^+$ nuclear beta decay are here modified with quenched rather than free-nucleon coupling constants for the axial-vector and electromagnetic interactions with nucleons. The result increases the deduced value of $V_{ud}$ but does not restore unitarity in the CKM matrix.Comment: LaTeX, 7 pages, no figures, TASCC-P-94-1

Bicycle Urbanism, Blog 8

Student blog posts from the Great VCU Bike Race Book

Healthcare professionals should be mindful that victims and victim-bullies may have additional health needs associated with risk-taking behaviour

Commentary on: Kritsotakis G, Papanikolaou M, Androulakis E, et al. Associations of bullying and cyberbullying with substance use and sexual risk taking in young adults. J Nurs Scholarsh 2017;49:360–70. • The effects of bullying and cyberbullying can be linked to a number of health risk behaviours, education and healthcare professionals need to include prevention and intervention strategies within educational curricula, building on replacing maladaptive coping strategies with adaptive responses. • Future research should explore the adaptive and maladaptive coping mechanisms employed by victims and victim-bullies during the transition to adulthood and how this impacts on their relationships

Particulate airborne impurities

The cumulative effects of air pollutants are of principal concern in research on environmental protection in Sweden. Post-industrial society has imposed many limits on emitted air pollutants, yet the number of reports on the negative effects from them is increasing, largely due to human activity in the form of industrial emissions and increased traffic flows. Rising concerns over the health effects from airborne particulate matter (PM) stem from in vitro, in vivo, and cohort studies revealing effects of mostly negative nature. Full insight into the health effects from PM can only be achieved through practical investigation of the mode of toxicity from distinct types of particles and requires techniques for their identification, monitoring, and the production of model fractions for health studies. To this effect, comprehensive collection and chemical analysis of particulates at the origin of emission was performed in order to provide clearer insight into the nature of the particulates at exposure and add detail to aid risk assessment. Methods of capturing particles and analyzing their chemical nature were devised using scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS). Furthermore, taking the approach of in vitro cytotoxicity testing, nanoparticles of types typical to automotive emissions, were synthesized and extensively characterized using SEM-EDS, X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM),dynamic light scattering (DLS), and nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA). The produced model magnetite and palladium nanoparticles were found to induce toxicity in human pulmonary epithelial cells (A549 and PBEC) as well as impact severely on immunological and renal cells (221 B- and 293T-cells) in a dose-dependent manner

An exact effective Hamiltonian for a perturbed Landau level

Considers the effect of a scalar potential V (x, y) on a Landau level in two dimensions. An exact effective Hamiltonian is derived which describes the effect of the potential on a single Landau level, expressed as a power series in V/Ec, where Ec is the cyclotron energy. The effective Hamiltonian can be represented as a function H (x, p) in a one-dimensional phase space. The function H (x, p) resembles the potential V (x, y): when the area of a flux quantum is much smaller than the square of the characteristic length scale of V, then H approximately=V. Also H (x, p) retains the translational and rotational symmetries of V(x, y) exactly, but reflection symmetries are not retained beyond the lowest order of the perturbation expansion

Convective Ripening and Initiation of Rainfall

This paper discusses the evolution of the droplet size distribution for a liquid-in-gas aerosol contained in a Rayleigh-B\'enard cell. It introduces a non-collisional model for broadening the droplet size distribution, termed 'convective ripening'. The paper also considers the initiation of rainfall from ice-free cumulus clouds. It is argued that while collisional mechanisms cannot explain the production of rain from clouds with water droplet diameters of $20\ \mu {\rm m}$, the non-collisional convective ripening mechanism gives a much faster route to increasing the size of the small fraction of droplets that grow into raindrops.Comment: 6 pages, no figure