In this paper, we present preliminary results on the feasibility of employing a low energy (2 kJ, 31 kV) plasma focus device as a portable source of pulsed neutron beams (2.45 MeV) generated by nuclear fusion reactions D-D, for the "in situ" analysis of substances by nuclear activation. This source has the relevant advantage of being pulsed at requirement, transportable, not permanently radioac...

Recent progress towards demonstrating inertial confinement fusion (ICF) ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has sparked wide interest in Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) for carbon-free large-scale power generation. A LIFE-based fleet of power plants promises clean energy generation with no greenhouse gas emissions and a virtually limitless, widely available thermonuclear fuel s...

G raham Hutchings of Cardiff University made a discovery in 1982 that came to define his career. He predicted that golddespite its reputation for being inertshould be an excellent catalyst for an industrial reaction that makes vinyl chloride monomer (VCM, or chloroethene), used to produce one of the world’s most ubiquitous plastics, polyvinyl chloride (PVC). More than three decades later, Hut...

An in situ X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) experiment has been performed to observe the evolution of gold nanoparticles in the ionic liquid [BMIM][AuCl4], by hard X-ray irradiation. The ionic liquid acts as both a reducing agent and a protective ligand. A synchrotron-based X-ray plays the role of the irradiation source, which induces the reduction of the gold species, as well as being a ...

Integrating diverse sources of interaction information to create protein networks requires strategies sensitive to differences in accuracy and coverage of each source. Previous integration approaches calculate reliabilities of protein interaction information sources based on congruity to a designated 'gold standard.' In this paper, we provide a comparison of the two most popular existing approa...

Microblogging services like Twitter are an important source of real-time information during disasters and can be utilized to aid rescue, relief and rehabilitation efforts. The focus of this work is on the creation of gold standard data for automatic retrieval of helpful tweets. Using various experiments on the gold standard data prepared in the FIRE 2016 Microblog Track [3], we show that the go...

Nanothermometry is a challenging field that can open the door to intriguing questions ranging from biology and medicine to material sciences. Gold nanorods are excellent candidates to act as nanoprobes because they are reasonably bright emitters upon excitation with a monochromatic source. Gold nanoparticles are commonly used in photothermal therapy as efficient transducers of electromagnetic r...

A comparative analysis of typomorphic features gold placers and indigenous sources was carried out for the Glukharinsky ore-placer node (the Nadezhda deposit Glukharinskoye, Tyomnoye, Tyi-Jurye ore occurrences). correlation between fineness placer native composition relic minerals preserved inside particles obtained first time. This made it possible to establish mineral parageneses from potenti...

We present a new approach to summary evaluation which combines two novel aspects, namely (a) content comparison between gold standard summary and system summary via factoids, a pseudo-semantic representation based on atomic information units which can be robustly marked in text, and (b) use of a gold standard consensus summary, in our case based on 50 individual summaries of one text. Even thou...