Gluteus Maximus Activity during Bilateral Countermovement Jump in D1 Female Athletes

The objective of this study was to compare left and right gluteus maximus muscle activation in division one (D1) female basketball players, while performing a countermovement (CMJ). The study asked, What impact does the bilateral CMJ have on gluteal activation in D1 female athletes? The null hypothesis stated no significant differences would be found in gluteal activation between the right and left gluteus maximus muscles. Nine female participants volunteered for the study. Pre-screening of participants involved assessment of the Functional Movement ScreenTM squat pattern and muscular voluntary isometric contractions (MVIC) of the right and left gluteus maximus. Surface electrodes were placed on the belly of each gluteus maximus to record muscle activation while performing three trials of the CMJ. Data was analyzed using the Delsys EMGWorks® software. Root mean square (RMS) values were normalized to the MVIC for each gluteus maximus. Means for the right and left gluteus maximus activation during the countermovement portion of the jump and landing portion were calculated separately. A match paired t-test compared the right and left gluteus maximus activation for the CMJ and landing. Results indicated no statistically significant differences in gluteus maximus during CMJ task. The null hypothesis is accepted. No significant differences were noted at CMJ p=0.79 and at landing p=0.11. Further research should be performed using multiple MVICs and greater resistance during MVIC testing

About the development of advanced membrane process control systems

This paper focuses on the design and development of advanced control systems to use on either batch or continuous, new or existing membrane process plants. In the last decade, membrane technologies resulted to be very appealing and shows positive market trends. One main drawback is membrane fouling, which affects productivity, selectivity and longevity of the process, which leads to both technical and economical failures: proper membrane process design and control is a difficult task to accomplish. This leads to overdesign the plant capacities by process engineers, making this technology less reliable and convenient. Nowadays membrane processes are controlled by a constant permeate flow rate or constant applied operating pressure. These simple control strategy approaches are sufficient to operate the processes, but do not distinguish different fouling operating regions, and therefore do not avoid process failures due to fouling. Fouling may be described by the boundary flux theory in a convenient way, separating low-fouling operations from high-fouling ones. The paper reports about the development of an advanced membrane process control system based on the boundary flux concept. The developed advanced control strategy by the use of a simulation software, capable to predict boundary flux values by measurement of some key parameters, provides suitable set-point values to the feedback controllers in order to work at or below the boundary flux. As a consequence, the membrane process is always operated far from irreversible fouling issues. The developed approach was then successfully validated by experiments on lab scale

Simulated hailstone fabrication and use in testing weatherability of structures

Equipment fabricates and uses simulated hailstones to test the weatherability of exposed structures. The equipment projects the hailstones at velocities experienced in hailstorms

Effect of Habitat on Blow Fly (Diptera: Calliphoridae) Oviposition in Michigan

Forensic entomology applies data gained from insects to aid the criminal justice system. Blow flies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) are usually the first insects to arrive and oviposit (lay eggs) on carrion. Their quick appearance is the foundation for post mortem interval estimations, making any factors that influence their oviposition crucial. This study examined the effects of habitat (forest vs. prairie) on blow fly oviposition timing. Research was conducted in 2015 at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute in Barry County, Michigan. No significant differences were found in oviposition timing or frequency between prairie and forest habitats. Temperature and humidity were not correlated with oviposition timing, which contradicted previous studies. Lucilia coeruleiviridis (Macquart) was the dominant species found, comprising about 90% of collected specimens. The data confirm previous reports that Lucilia species are the first to arrive on carrion

Chitin and lignin. Natural ingredients from waste materials to make innovative and healthy products for humans and plant

In a globalized world, plants are continually cut to obtain free land for intensive farming without remembering their important function in the planet ecosystem. They produce oxygen eliminating the carbon dioxide excess, contributing to reduce the pollution thus giving a great support to our health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution -both outdoor and indoor- is nowadays "the biggest environmental risk to health carrying responsibility for about one in every nine deaths" (WHO, 2016). Outdoor pollution alone, in fact, kills around 3 million people each year. At this purpose however, it is necessary to remember that indoor emission of nanoparticles (NP) represent 50-80% of human exposure, calculated from 10.000 to 249.000 NP/mL air-while in polluted air NP are from ~10.000 to 50.000 NP/mL (Nohynek, 2011). Thus, there is a strict necessity "to consider air pollution as a global health priority in the sustainable development agenda" (WHO, 2016). Moreover, plants, multicellular organisms, as well as humans have evolved several mechanisms of defense and sensor systems to detect danger and prevent entry of most foreign material (Janeway et al, 2001). The sensors can direct and assist the host defenses by the use of specialized cells that ingest and digest foreign material. This protective non-specific method is called innate immune system, also connected with certain specific molecular patterns recognition associated with invading microbes or tissue damage (Nurnberger et al., 2004). In addition to innate immunity, vertebrates have evolved an adaptive immune system that relies on many antigen receptors, expressed by specialized immune cells. Unlike vertebrates, plants lack mobile defender cells and respond to infection by a two-branched immune system (Jones et al., 2006). The first branch recognizes and responds to all the common microbial molecules, while the second responds to pathogen virulence factors only. However, both plants and mammals have as first-line defense a barrier that, separating and shielding the interior of the body from the surrounding environment, represents the initial obstacle to be overcame from any pathogenic microorganisms. This barrier not only provides a physical separation, but releases also substances with antimicrobial properties. Moreover, when the first-line barrier has been breached, sensor systems are activated to give information to other components of the host defenses. Thus, while mammals activate, for example, the toll-like receptors capable to recognize families of compounds unique to microbes, plants release specialized compounds known as elicitors, signaling molecules able to induce their defense systems (Trouvelot et al., 2014). Examples of common ingredients, used from both plant and mammal as elicitors and defense-related compounds, are chitin and lignin. In this work, these materials will be briefly reviewed and results of chitin nanofibrils production and usage is reported. Finally, possible usage of combined chitin-lignin nanofibrils in commercial products will be pointed out

Low speed, long term tracking electric drive system has zero backlash

Electric drive system provides low speed, long term tracking of targets that move at a sidereal rate. It utilizes eddy-current energized actuators that are free from radio frequency interference generation and a solid state feedback amplifier with provisions for antibacklash biasing

Adversarial Semi-Supervised Audio Source Separation applied to Singing Voice Extraction

The state of the art in music source separation employs neural networks trained in a supervised fashion on multi-track databases to estimate the sources from a given mixture. With only few datasets available, often extensive data augmentation is used to combat overfitting. Mixing random tracks, however, can even reduce separation performance as instruments in real music are strongly correlated. The key concept in our approach is that source estimates of an optimal separator should be indistinguishable from real source signals. Based on this idea, we drive the separator towards outputs deemed as realistic by discriminator networks that are trained to tell apart real from separator samples. This way, we can also use unpaired source and mixture recordings without the drawbacks of creating unrealistic music mixtures. Our framework is widely applicable as it does not assume a specific network architecture or number of sources. To our knowledge, this is the first adoption of adversarial training for music source separation. In a prototype experiment for singing voice separation, separation performance increases with our approach compared to purely supervised training.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Final version of manuscript accepted for 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Implementation available at https://github.com/f90/AdversarialAudioSeparatio