Science and technology studies (STS) has long studied scientific controversies as a way to identify prospects for technical democracy. Contemporary STS tends prioritize ‘overflowing’ controversies, where lay actors challenge experts’ frameworks by explicating the broader implications so open up technological issues. Yet many are not like this; they operate on largely register within official pr...

Too often, ergonomics is relegated to being a "post-design" evaluation, leaving ergonomists little opportunity to make significant and important design changes. One way to start attacking this problem is to study the process of design and, in particular, ergonomics in design. This article describes the findings from a four-month long participant-observer study of the relationship between ergono...

Introduction The collapse of the Soviet Union could result in a variety of nuclear proliferation dangers. Some of the newly independent states (NIS) may retain former Soviet nuclear weapons or develop their own nuclear weapons capability. Others are capable of supplying nuclear weapons and missile equipment, technology, or materials to states outside the NIS. Ongoing conflicts in several region...

In Cold Fusion, confusion exists as a result of conflicting intuitive pictures, one based on local physics, the other on non-local physics. The local picture, based on particle-particle interaction, has played a dominant role. The non-local “less-intuitive” picture, based on the known behavior of solids, places greater emphasis on the behavior of matter distributions and their interaction with ...

Sensor data fusion and interpretation, sensor failure detection, isolation and identification are extremely important activities for the safety of a nuclear power plant. In particular, they become critical in case of conflicts among the data. If the monitored system’s description model is correct and its components work properly, then incompatibilities among data may only be attributed to tempo...

Replication protein A (RPA), a stable complex of three polypeptides, is the single-stranded DNA-binding protein essential for DNA replication in eukaryotic cells. Previous studies of the subcellular distribution and stability of the RPA heterotrimer during the mammalian cell cycle have produced conflicting results. Here, we present evidence that these inconsistencies can be accounted for by the...

background: the earlier atomic bomb explosion in hiroshima and nagasaki, and three worth mentioning nuclear accidents - detonation at fukushima daiichi nuclear plant, chernobyl nuclear fallout and an accident at three mile island nuclear power plant have made us more worried about the secure exploitation of nuclear energy. the central focus of this paper is to review radiation-mediated health e...

Biodiversity is severely declining in intensively managed agriculture worldwide. In response, land-management strategies for biodiversity conservation on farmland are in debate, namely ecological intensification and land sparing vs. land sharing. In parallel, there is a recent food vs. energy debate stimulated by an increasing competition for land resources. Despite clear overlaps between these...