BACKGROUND Guidance on the cleaning of dental instruments in primary care has recently been published. The aims of this study are to determine if the publication of the guidance document was enough to influence decontamination best practice and to design an implementation intervention strategy, should it be required. METHODS A postal questionnaire assessing current decontamination practice an...

Spectroscopy is one of the most important tools that an astronomer has for studying the universe. This chapter begins by discussing the basics, including the different types of optical spectrographs, with extension to the ultraviolet and the near-infrared. Emphasis is given to the fundamentals of how spectrographs are used, and the trade-offs involved in designing an observational experiment. I...

We report performance verification observations of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 in the Virgo Cluster with the MOS, pn, and optical monitor instruments on board of XMM-Newton. With the energy sensitive imaging instruments MOS and pn we obtain the first spatially constrained X-ray spectra of the nucleus and the jet of the galaxy. The good photon statistics of the pn and MOS allow a detailed an...

surgical instruments, on bandaging and on many other aspects of surgery in general and surgery of the head and neck area in particular. It is hoped however that the present paper will stimulate interest and further examination of the empiric maturity of Hindu surgery more than fifteen centuries ago.

The study of two biological indicators in monitoring "flash" sterilization demonstrated that indicator construction often leads to a false interpretation of spore survival.

BACKGROUND Transferring non-trivial human manipulation skills to robot systems is a challenging task. There have been a number of attempts to design research systems for skill transfer, but the level of the complexity of the actual skills transferable to the robot was rather limited, and delicate operations requiring a high dexterity and long action sequences with many sub-operations were impos...

Introduction: In 2006, NASA’s Stardust mission returned a capsule to Earth with particles collected from the coma of comet 81P/Wild 2. Cometary particles were collected by impact into low-density silica aerogel at a relative velocity of 6.1 km/s [1]. Upon impacting the aerogel, particles left behind tracks of melted and compressed aerogel and void space, shedding material along the way. In orde...

This paper presents a miniature wrist that can be integrated into needle-sized surgical instruments. The wrist consists of a nitinol tube with asymmetric cutouts that is actuated by a single tendon to provide high distal curvature. We derive and experimentally validate kinematic and static models for the wrist and describe several prototype wrists, illustrating the straightforward fabrication a...