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Communication: Analytic Continuation Of The Virial Series Through The Critical Point Using Parametric Approximants, Nathaniel S. Barlow, Andrew J. Schultz, Steven J. Weinstein, David A. Kofke

Articles

The mathematical structure imposed by the thermodynamic critical point motivates an approximant that synthesizes two theoretically sound equations of state: the parametric and the virial. The former is constructed to describe the critical region, incorporating all scaling laws; the latter is an expansion about zero density, developed from molecular considerations. The approximant is shown to yield an equation of state capable of accurately describing properties over a large portion of the thermodynamic parameter space, far greater than that covered by each treatment alone.

Adversarial Science, Sanne H. Knudsen

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Adversarial science—sometimes referred to as "litigation science" or "junk science"—has a bad name. It is often associated with the tobacco industry's relentless use of science to manufacture uncertainty and avoid liability. This Article challenges the traditional conception that adversarial science should be castigated simply because it was developed for litigation. Rather, this Article urges that adversarial science is an important informational asset that should, and indeed must, be embraced.

In the ecological context, adversarial science is vital to understanding the ecological effects of long-term toxic exposure. Government trustees and corporate defendants fund intensive scientific research following major ecological disasters like …

Robotics And The Lessons Of Cyberlaw, Ryan Calo

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Two decades of analysis have produced a rich set of insights as to how the law should apply to the Internet’s peculiar characteristics. But, in the meantime, technology has not stood still. The same public and private institutions that developed the Internet, from the armed forces to search engines, have initiated a significant shift toward developing robotics and artificial intelligence.

This Article is the first to examine what the introduction of a new, equally transformative technology means for cyberlaw and policy. Robotics has a different set of essential qualities than the Internet and accordingly will raise distinct legal issues. Robotics …

In Vitro Fertilization And The Law: How Legal And Regulatory Neglect Compromised A Medical Breakthrough, Steve P. Calandrillo, Chryssa V. Deliganis

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The rise of assisted reproductive technology like in vitro fertilization (“IVF”) as a method of human reproduction represents a remarkable medical achievement. Live births and success rates have increased dramatically in the past decade, so much so that many fertility clinics now “guarantee” a baby to clients who sign up.

But with successes come inevitable downsides. Everyone knows that the price tag is steep, but given the demand, relatively few individuals are deterred. More insidious are the increased birth-defect risks associated with reproductive technologies. For some time it was assumed that these risks were due to the fact that individuals …

Breast-Feeding And Postpartum Maternal Weight Trajectories, Laura Mullaney, Amy O'Higgins, Shona Cawley, Rachel Kennedy, Daniel Mccartney, Michael J. Turner

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We examined whether breast-feeding, and in particular exclusive breast-feeding, was associated with maternal weight and body composition changes at 4 months postpartum independently of other maternal variables.

What Dna Can And Cannot Say: Perspectives Of Immigrant Families About The Use Of Genetic Testing In Immigration, Llilida P. Barata, Helene Starks, Patricia Kuszler, Wylie Burke

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Genetic technologies are being implemented in areas that extend beyond the field of medicine to address social and legal problems. An emerging example is the implementation of genetic testing in the family petitioning process in immigration policy. This use of genetic testing offers the potential benefits of reducing immigration fraud and making the process more efficient and accessible for immigrants, especially those without documentation. However, little is known about the positive or negative impacts of such testing on immigrant families and their communities.

This study collected empirical data through family interviews to understand the experiences and attitudes of individuals who …

"Lead In The Far North" By Acceding To The Law Of The Sea Convention, Craig H. Allen

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The theme for the 2015 Arctic Encounter Symposium was “Charting a Path to U.S. Leadership in the Far North.” I would like to begin my comments regarding U.S. leadership by reminding the audience that the Arctic is primarily a maritime domain and the fundamental rule set for international relations in the Arctic’s maritime domain is the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention), a convention to which the United States remains the most conspicuous non-party.

Characteristics Of Attorneys Representing Children In Child Welfare Cases, Britany Orlebeke, Andrew Zinn, Xiaomeng Zhou, Donald N. Duquette

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Every day in state and local courts throughout the United States, judges are called upon to decide who should have the responsibility for the immediate and long-term care of neglected and abused children. Federal recognition of the right to independent advocacy for children subject to these proceedings originates with the 1974 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). As a condition of receiving federal funds for child abuse prevention services through CAPTA, states must provide for the appointment of an appropriately trained guardian ad litem (GAL) for every child whose case results in a judicial proceeding. A guardian ad …

Reflections On Freedom And Criminal Responsibility In Late Twentieth Century American Legal Thought, Thomas A. Green, Merrill Catharine Hodnefield

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It is now a commonplace among historians that American criminal jurisprudence underwent a dramatic change something like two-thirds to three-quarters into the last century. Roughly, this development is understood as a shift (or drift) from a more-or-less pure consequentialism to a "mixed theory" wherein retributivism played a major-at times, dominant-role. As the new paradigm remains intact, now approaching a half-century, the development qualifies as a significant historical fact. The fact applies not only to the history of justification for punishment but also to conceptions of the underlying principle of (basis for) responsibility. The two are rightly distinguished: for many scholars …

The Child Quasi-Witness, Richard D. Friedman, Stephen J. Ceci

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This Essay provides a solution to the conundrum of statements made by very young children and offered against an accused in a criminal prosecution. Currently prevailing doctrine allows one of three basic outcomes. First, in some cases the child testifies at trial. But this is not always feasible, and when it is, cross-examination is a poor method for determining the truth. Second, evidence of the child's statement may be excluded, which denies the adjudicative process of potentially valuable information. Third, the evidence may be admitted without the child testifying at trial, which leaves the accused with no practical ability to …

The Contribution Of Non-Thermal And Advanced Oxidation Technologies Towards Dissipation Of Pesticide Residues, N. Misra

Articles

Background

The use of pesticides has stabilised the food production to a great extent and their usage cannot be avoided anymore. Nevertheless, common food processing operations always allowed dissipating pesticide residues in foods to some extent. Within the food science community and the food processing sector, non-thermal food technologies are being researched and commercialised at a great pace over the past three decades.

Scope and Approach

In this review we provide a critical analysis of the literature pertinent to the fate of pesticide residues during non-thermal processing of solid and liquid foods. We also identify the opportunities for further development …

Computational Development Of Selective Nnos Inhibitors: Binding Modes And Pharmacokinetic Considerations, Adam Curtin, Gemma K. Kinsella, John Stephens

Articles

Abstract: Neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) produces the key signalling mediator nitric oxide, (NO). This gaseous, free radical molecule modulates a vast array of biological processes, from vascular pressure to immune responses and neurological signalling cascades. Overproduction of NO has been implicated in conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia. Inhibition of nNOS therefore offers a potential therapeutic approach for treatment of these conditions. This endeavour is made more complex by the fact that there are two other isoforms of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), endothelial NOS (eNOS) and inducible NOS (iNOS). The selectivity of nNOS inhibitors is therefore a …

A Class Of High-Order Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev Stability Polynomials, Stephen O'Sullivan

Articles

The analytic form of a new class of factorized Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev (FRKC) stability polynomials of arbitrary order N is presented. Roots of FRKC stability polynomials of degree L = MN are used to construct explicit schemes comprising L forward Euler stages with internal stability ensured through a sequencing algorithm which limits the internal amplification factors to ~ L². The associated stability domain scales as M² along the real axis. Marginally stable real-valued points on the interior of the stability domain are removed via a prescribed damping procedure. By construction, FRKC schemes meet all linear order conditions; for nonlinear …

A Mathematical Model Of Meat Cooking Based On Polymer-Solvent Analogy, M. Chapwanya, Nissreen Misra

Articles

Mathematical modelling of transport phenomena in food processes is vital to understand the process dynamics. In this work, we study the process of double sided cooking of meat by developing a mathematical model for the simultaneous heat and mass transfer. The constitutive equations for the heat and mass transport are based on Fourier conduction, and the Flory–Huggins theory respectively, formulated for a two-phase transport inside a porous medium. We investigate a reduced one-dimensional case to verify the model, by applying appropriate boundary conditions. The results of the simulation agree well with experimental findings reported in literature. Finally, we comment upon …

Functional Conservation Of An Ancestral Pellino Protein In Helminth Species, Christopher Cluxton, Brian Caffrey, Gemma Kinsella, Paul Moynagh, Mario Fares, Padraic Fallon

Articles

The immune system of H. sapiens has innate signaling pathways that arose in ancestral species. This is exemplified by the discovery of the Toll-like receptor (TLR) pathway using free-living model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster. The TLR pathway is ubiquitous and controls sensitivity to pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) in eukaryotes. There is, however, a marked absence of this pathway from the plathyhelminthes, with the exception of the Pellino protein family, which is present in a number of species from this phylum. Helminth Pellino proteins are conserved having high similarity, both at the sequence and predicted structural protein level, with that …

Student Attitudes To An Online, Peer-Instruction, Revision Aid In Science Education, Barry Ryan, Aaron Mac Raighne, Morag Casey, Robert Howard

Articles

Peer instruction has been shown to have a positive effect on students’ engagement and learning. However, many of the techniques designed to incorporate peer instruction into the student experience are very heavy on resources. PeerWise is a free, low-maintenance, web-tool designed to allow peer instruction between students within a large class group. Students can write, answer and discuss Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) based on their work in-class.

In this study, we introduce PeerWise to a wide and varied cohort of science students (N=509) across different disciplines, undergraduate years, levels (certificate to honours degree) and institutes. The attitudes of the students …

Postgraduate Researchers Who Teach: How Can National Policy And The Structured Phd Centralise This Forgotten Tribe And Celebrate Their Skills In Tackling Some Of The Current Challenges In Irish Higher Education?, Barry Ryan

Articles

Some of the current challenges faced by Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) include financial constraints imposed by the economic downturn, the requirement to ‘teach more with less’, and the use of the knowledge based economy to drive economic stabilisation and recovery. HEIs have adopted a number of approaches to address these drivers of change including centralising the postgraduate research student who teaches. The role of these postgraduate research students is one that is not often highlighted within the fabric of the HEI; however, these transient researchers play two key roles: full-time researchers and novice educators. Centralising and celebrating the research skills …

Mechanism Of Inactivation By High Voltage Atmospheric Cold Plasma Differs Between Escherichia Coli And Staphylococcus Aureus, Lu Han, Sonal Patil, Daniela Boehm, Vladimir Milosavljević, Patrick J. Cullen, Paula Bourke

Articles

Atmospheric cold plasma (ACP) is a promising non-thermal technology effective against a wide range of pathogenic microorganisms. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) play a crucial inactivation role when air or other oxygen containing gases are used. With strong oxidative stress, cells can be damaged by lipid peroxidation, enzyme inactivation and DNA cleavage. Identifying ROS and understanding their role is important to advance ACP applications to a range of complex microbiological issues. In this study, the inactivation efficacy of in-package, high voltage (80 kV_RMS) ACP (HVACP) and the role of intracellular ROS were investigated. Two mechanisms of inactivation were observed …

Photonic Hydrogel Sensors, Ali K. Yetisen, Haider Butt, Lisa R Volpatti, Ida Pavlichenko, Matjaž Humar, Sheldon J.J.Kwok Sheldon J.J.Kwok, Heebeom Koo, Ki Su Kim, Izabela Naydenova, Ali Khademhosseini, Sei Kwang Hahnk, Seok Hyun Yunaf

Articles

Analyte-sensitive hydrogels that incorporate optical structures have emerged as sensing platforms for point-of-care diagnostics. The optical properties of the hydrogel sensors can be rationally designed and fabricated through self-assembly, microfabrication or laser writing. The advantages of photonic hydrogel sensors over conventional assay formats include label-free, quantitative, reusable, and continuous measurement capability that can be integrated with equipment-free text or image display. This Review explains the operation principles of photonic hydrogel sensors, presents syntheses of stimuli-responsive polymers, and provides an overview of qualitative and quantitative readout technologies. Applications in clinical samples are discussed, and potential future directions are identified.

A Quantum Theory Of Consciousness May Require A Paradigm Shift In Biology, Maurice Goodman

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It is often assumed that the known physical laws form a closed system and are complete. It is also assumed that biological theories require no additional principles that are fundamental other than those we already know. Assumptions such as these are acting as a barrier to progress in biological theories and an understanding of consciousness. This paper examines the unexplained inconsistencies among fundamental particles and forces and the fundamental gaps in our knowledge of biology and the cell in particular that may impact on such progress. Also, the laws of quantum mechanics are examined and found to be grossly incomplete. …

Antimicrobial Properties Of Nano-Silver: A Cautionary Approach To Ionic Interference, Kate Sheehy, Alan Casey, Anna Murphy, Gordon Chambers

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Hypothesis: Metallic nanoparticles such as nano-silver have found many applications as alternative antimicrobials in recent years. However methods for determining their proposed antimicrobial activity have received little attention to date. The disk diffusion assay is commonly used as a demonstration of antimicrobial properties and is a regular feature in synthetic nanoparticle papers. The aim of this study was to assess its effectiveness in demonstrating the ‘‘nanoparticle specific’’ antimicrobial properties in the absence of ionic contributions from unreacted reducing agents and or impurities. Experiments: The disk diffusion assay was carried out on a range of silver nanoparticles, both in-house synthesised and …

Competitive Evaluation Of Data Mining Algorithms For Use In Cassification Of Leukocyte Subtypes With Raman Microspectroscopy, Adrian Maguire, I. Vega-Carrascal, Jane Bryant, Lisa White, Orla Howe, Fiona Lyng, Aidan Meade

Articles

Raman microspectroscopy has been investigated for some time for use in label-free cell sorting devices. These approaches require coupling of the Raman spectrometer to complex data mining algorithms for identification of cellular subtypes such as the leukocyte subpopulations of lymphocytes and monocytes. In this study, three distinct multivariate classification approaches, (PCA-LDA, SVMs and Random Forests) are developed and tested on their ability to classify the cellular subtype in extracted peripheral blood mononuclear cells (T-cell lymphocytes from myeloid cells), and are evaluated in terms of their respective classification performance. A strategy for optimisation of each of the classification algorithm is presented …

Raman Microspectroscopy For The Early Detection Of Pre-Malignant Changes In Cervical Tissue, Nosheen Rashid, Haq Nawaz, Kelvin W. Poon, Franck Bonnier, Salih Bakhiet, Cara Martin, John O'Leary, Hugh Byrne, Fiona Lyng

Articles

Cervical cancer is the third most common cancer affecting women worldwide. The mortality associated with cervical cancer can, however, be significantly reduced if the disease is detected at the pre-malignant stage. The aim of this study was to evaluate the potential of Raman microspectroscopy for elucidation of the biochemical changes associated with the pre-malignant stages of cervical cancer. Formalin fixed paraffin preserved tissue sections from cervical biopsies classified as negative for intraepithelial lesion and malignancy (NILM), low grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (LSIL) or high grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (HSIL) were analysed by Raman spectral mapping. Raman mapping, with K-Means Cluster …

Numerical Simulations Of In Vitro Nanoparticle Toxicity – The Case Of Poly(Amido Amine) Dendrimers., Marcus Maher, Pratap Naha, Sourav Prasanna Mukherjee, Hugh Byrne

Articles

A phenomenological rate equation model is constructed to numerically simulate nanoparticle uptake and subsequent cellular response. Polyamidoamine dendrimers (generations 4-6) are modelled and the temporal evolution of the intracellular cascade of; increased levels of reactive oxygen species, intracellular antioxidant species, caspase activation, mitochondrial membrane potential decay, tumour necrosis factor and interleukin generation is simulated, based on experimental observations.

The dose and generation dependence of several of these response factors are seen to well represent experimental observations at a range of time points. The model indicates that variations between responses of different cell-lines, including murine macrophages, human keratinocytes and colon cells, …

Family Frontiers: The Spage Age Fiction Of Marge Piercy And Ursula K. Leguin, Sue Norton

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This article considers the ways in which feminist writers of speculative fiction reinvent family forms in ways that disrupt conventional narratives of family in literature.

The Regulating Daughter In John Updike's Rabbit Novels, Sue Norton

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This article considers the ways in which John Updike creates female characters who suffer in some way so that their family units can remain intact. His Rabbit novels privilege the so-called nuclear family as an abiding family form, one which rests upon the sacrificial choices made by girls and women. It uses Family Systems Theory as a tool of interpretation in reading the texts and establishing their underlying ethos.

Breast Cancer Detection Using Interferometric Music: Experimental And Numerical Assessment, Giuseppe Ruvio, Raffaele Solimene, Antonio Cuccaro, Domenico Gaetano, Jacinta Browne, Max Ammann

Articles

Purpose: In microwave breast cancer detection, it is often beneficial to arrange sensors in close proximity to the breast. The resultant coupling generally changes the antenna response. As an a priori characterization of the radio frequency system becomes difficult, this can lead to severe degradation of the detection efficacy. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the advantages of adopting an interferometric multiple signal classification (I-MUSIC) approach due to its limited dependence from a priori information on the antenna. The performance of I-MUSIC detection was measured in terms of signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR), signal-to-mean ratio (SMR), and spatial displacement (SD) …

Legal And Ethical Concerns About Sexualorientation Change Efforts, Tia Powell, Edward D. Stein

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The United States has recently made significant and positive civil rights gains for LGB people, including expanded recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. Among the central tropes that have emerged in the struggle for the rights of LGB people are that they are “born that way,” that sexual orientations cannot change, and that one's sexual orientation is not affected by choice. Writer Andrew Sullivan put it this way:

“[H]omosexuality is an essentially involuntary condition that can neither be denied nor permanently repressed.… [S]o long as homosexual adults as citizens insist on the involuntary nature of their condition, …

Snp-E: A New Method For Multiple Sequence Alignments Analysis And Accurate Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Evaluation, David A. Lightfoot, Naghmeh Hemmati, Larry A. Sholeh

Articles

Identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and insertion-deletion mutations are important for discovering the connection between the genetic mutations and complex diseases. The objective of this study was to develop a sensitive and accurate computational method for SNP detection among Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSAs) to be run on Microsoft Office SuiteTM and WindowsTM. The SNP-Evaluator, was designed to simulate the process of human eye visual change-identification. Analysis of three 82-Kbp genomic loci derived from Sanger sequencing and the corresponding SNPs from 31 genomes from IlluminaTM sequencing of soybean (Glycine max L. Merr.) demonstrated that the SNP-E was an effective …

Quantitative Assessment Of Blood Coagulation By Cold Atmospheric Plasma, Caitlin Heslin, Daniela Boehm, Vladimir Milosavljevic, Michelle Laycock, Patrick J. Cullen, Paula Bourke

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Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) is produced by ionizing a chosen gas, thereby creating charged and reactive species. The reactive species generated are capable of inducing a range of biomedically relevant interactions including blood coagulation. However, the underlying biochemical processes of plasma-assisted blood coagulation are largely unknown, and data quantifying blood clot formation or the impact of system parameters on the intensity of the blood clot are scarce. In this study, blood coagulation was quantified by measuring hemoglobin absorbance. System parameters of the kINPen plasma jet were investigated and compared, including treatment time, distance from the plasma source and gas flow …