Vanadium alloys are attractive candidate structural materials for breeding blanket of fusion reactors because of their low activation properties and high temperature strength. Studies on various blanket designs are being carried out using vanadium alloys as structural materials and liquid lithium or molten salt Flibe as breeding and coolant materials. Recently significant progress in fabricatio...

As the commercial success of electronic cigarettes offers the opportunity to study harm reduction by replacement therapy, the UK government steers in the opposite direction and plans to expand the 'war on drugs' with a blanket ban on all psychoactive substances. Michael Gross reports.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY Static magnetic blankets are often claimed to induce increases in blood flow, reduce muscle tension and tenderness, and be beneficial in both prevention and treatment of musculoskeletal injuries in horses. However, there are no studies that confirm alleged beneficial effects of magnets on muscles of the back in healthy horses. OBJECTIVES To investigate whether sta...

BACKGROUND Keeping abdominal surgery patients warm is common and warming methods are needed in power outages during natural disasters. We aimed to evaluate the efficacy of low-cost, low-power warming methods for maintaining normothermia in abdominal surgery patients. METHODS Patients (n = 160) scheduled for elective abdominal surgery were included in this prospective clinical study. Five warm...

Feature based steganalysis, an emerging branch in information forensics, aims at identifying the presence of a covert communication by employing the statistical features of the cover and stego image as clues/evidences. Due to the large volumes of security audit data as well as complex and dynamic properties of steganogram behaviours, optimizing the performance of steganalysers becomes an import...

Hypothermia is a common complication in patients undergoing surgery under general anesthesia. It has been noted that, during the first hour of surgery, the patient's internal temperature (Tcore) decreases by 0.5-1.5°C due to the vasodilatory effect of anesthetic gases, which affect the body's thermoregulatory system by inhibiting vasoconstriction. Thus a continuous check on patient temperature ...

Freshwater peatlands are carbon accumulating ecosystems where primary production exceeds organic matter decomposition rates in the soil, and therefore perform an important sink function in global carbon cycling. Typical peatland plant and microbial communities are adapted to the waterlogged, often acidic and low nutrient conditions that characterise them. Peatlands in coastal locations receive ...

[1] Blanket peat catchments exhibit flashy regimes, but little is known about the exact nature of runoff production processes within these catchments. Catchment, hillslope, and plot-scale monitoring results are presented from the blanket peats of the northern Pennines, United Kingdom. Catchment efficiency for three study catchments with areas of 11.4 km, 0.83 km, and 0.44 km were 72%, 77%, and ...

We consider functions of the form f : are only partially speciied. In general, f assigns to any output y i a nonempty set d 2 D of elements of E. If d = feg for some e 2 E, then y i has the value e. If d = E, then y i is a \complete don't care", i.e., is allowed to take on any value in E. In other cases, y i is a \limited don't care", allowed to take on any value in d. Moreover, the functions a...