Tech

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have shown that between 87 and 98 percent of ships comply with the tougher regulations for sulphur emissions that were introduced in northern Europe in 2015. The lowest levels of compliance were observed in the western part of the English Channel and in the middle of the Baltic Sea.

The highest permitted sulphur content in shipping fuel was drastically reduced at the end of 2014 for vessels sailing in the northern European Sulphur Emission Control Area (SECA) - from 1.00 to 0.10 per cent. Before the stricter regulations were implemented, sulphur emissions from the shipping industry were estimated to cause the premature death of 50,000 Europeans each year, because the sulphur forms particles that are swept inland by the wind.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a ground-breaking method for remotely monitoring emissions from marine vessels, which they've used to investigate the effects of the new regulations. The work has been carried out through the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the EU projects Compmon and Envisum.

Some of the measurements were taken using an aeroplane flying over Denmark, the English Channel and the middle of the Baltic Sea, while others used fixed measuring stations in the approach to Gothenburg, Sweden, on the Oresund Bridge (between Copenhagen and Malmo) and on the Great Belt Bridge in central Denmark (see videos and photos below).

Johan Mellqvist, professor of optical remote sensing, heads the work at Chalmers.

"We can see differences in how the regulations are followed depending on who owns the vessels," he says. While the vast majority of the ships comply with the regulations, a few shipping companies seem repeatedly to use non-compliant fuel.

"Other patterns we can see are that vessels that only rarely come into these waters break the rules more frequently. In addition, it's more common that vessels emit excessive sulphur as they are leaving the SECA rather than on the way in, when they risk an on-board inspection. Some ships that have installed abatement technique for sulphur, so called scrubbers, have been observed with high levels on multiple occasions."

One use of remote sensing is to advise port authorities as to which ships they should select for on-board fuel inspections. Such inspections are a prerequisite for taking legal action against rule breakers. Recently the Norwegian Maritime Authority fined a ship NOK 600.000 (about EUR 63.000) for non-compliance. This was detected by the Great Belt measuring station and reported to the Norwegian Authorities.

"In general, the vessels carry both low-sulphur fuel oil and the less expensive high-sulphur oil on board," Mellqvist says. "If they switch fuel well in advance of their passing of the measuring stations, they won't be caught out. That's why aerial monitoring is superior. It shows how much the vessels actually emit when they are out at sea and don't know that they will be monitored."

The aerial surveys show that 13 per cent of vessels in the western part of the English Channel, near the SECA border, were in violation of the sulphur regulations in September 2016. For vessels around Denmark, the corresponding figure is 6-8 per cent, depending on time period. The fixed measuring stations on the approach to Gothenburg, on the Oresund Bridge and the Great Belt Bridge show that between 2 and 5 per cent of the bypassing ships use non-compliant fuel. This can be compared to on-board inspections showing non-compliance rates of around 5 per cent of the vessels at port. This may indicate that some ships change to compliant fuels too late (when entering the SECA) or change to non-compliant fuels too early (when leaving the SECA), while aiming at compliance at the fixed stations where they expect to be observed.

"There is a strong financial incentive for shipping companies to continue using the prohibited high-sulphur fuel," Mellqvist says. "For example, they can save around 100,000 euros by using the cheaper, high-sulphur fuel on a single round trip between the UK and St Petersburg. The entirety of this journey lies within the SECA."

On Friday, March 23, Johan Mellqvist will present the ship surveillance work at the 19th International Environmental Forum "Baltic Sea Day" 2018 in St Petersburg, describing results from surveillance flights last summer in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The preliminary results show that the compliance rate was 88 percent, which is lower than in the western part of the Baltic Sea.

More about: The Chalmers researchers' method for remote sensing of emissions:

The method that the Chalmers researchers have developed is based on a combination of established technologies that have been refined and adapted. They include optical remote sensing, physical/chemical analysis using a "sniffer" and monitoring vessels using an Automatic Identification System (AIS).

In addition to sulphur, the system can analyse marine emissions of nitrogen oxides and particles, for which the regulations have also been tightened for the shipping industry in recent years.

The method was completely unique when it came, and it is gaining ground in the industry. For example, the Chalmers team has built an aerial surveillance system for monitoring air pollution in Belgium. They've also conducted a pilot project in Los Angeles and maintain regular contacts with China, where the detection technique is about to be implemented.

More About: Sulphur emissions from the shipping industry:

Sulphur emissions are above all a health issue, but in the Nordic region, where the bedrock has low lime content, they also contribute to acidification in lakes and waterways.

Since 2015, the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat, the Skagerrak, the North Sea and the English Channel have made up a Sulphur Emission Control Area in which shipping fuel may contain no more than 0.1 per cent sulphur. The rest of the EU follows the regulations set out by the UN's International Maritime Organisation, IMO, which will reduce the maximum permitted sulphur content in shipping fuel from the current 3.5 per cent to 0.5 per cent worldwide by 2020.

Reducing sulphur emissions is very costly for shipping companies, no matter how they choose to meet the requirements. There are several alternatives:

- Powering ships with the significantly more expensive low-sulphur heavy fuel oil (HFO).
- Installing scrubbers on board to reduce sulphur emissions to the necessary degree.
- Switching fuels entirely, for example to liquefied natural gas (LNG) or methanol, which the ferry company Stena Line is now testing on a few of its vessels.

More about: The research

The results come from measurements that the Chalmers researchers carried out on the behalf of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the recently completed EU compliance monitoring project Compmon. The report from Compmon was published end of December 2017 (http://dx.doi.org/10.17196/CompMon.001 and http://dx.doi.org/10.17196/CompMon.002 )

The EU project Envisum is currently investigating the health benefits created by the new regulations in the countries around the Baltic. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg University and City of Gothenburg are some of the participants. The project focuses particularly on health effects in Gothenburg, St Petersburg and Gdynia-Gdansk - some of the biggest ports in the area, which are centrally located in their respective cities.

These days, Americans shop for nearly everything online--including marijuana. That's the conclusion of a new study published today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine led by San Diego State University Graduate School of Public Health associate research professor John W. Ayers. Millions are searching for and finding online marijuana retailers across the country, the researchers find.

The team monitored Google searches in the United States between January 2005 and June 2017, including all searches with the terms marijuana, weed, pot, or cannabis combined with the terms buy, shop, or order (for example., "buy marijuana"). They omitted similar but irrelevant searches like "buy weed killer." The team then replicated the relevant searches and checked to see whether the resulting websites advertised mail-order marijuana.

"By studying anonymized, aggregate Internet searches and search results, we were able to directly observe the online marijuana marketplace," said study coauthor Mark Dredze, the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.

The team found marijuana shopping searches nearly tripled in the United States from 2005 to 2017, peaking between 1.4 and 2.4 million searches each month.

Marijuana shopping searches were highest in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Nevada. However, the annual growth rate in searching for these terms increased in all but two states, Alabama and Mississippi, suggesting demand is accelerating across the nation. (The six least populated states were excluded from the study.)

Forty-one percent of all search results linked to retailers advertising mail-order marijuana, promising delivery using a variety of methods including the United State Postal Service, commercial parcel companies such as UPS, or private courier. Moreover, mail-order marijuana retailers occupied half of the first-page results, and three out of every four searches resulted in a mail-order marijuana retailer as the very first suggested link.

"Anyone, including teenagers, can search for and buy marijuana from their smartphone regardless of what state they live in," Ayers said.

Such online sales of marijuana are prohibited in the United States, even in states that have legalized or partially legalized the drug, "but clearly these regulations are failing," said coauthor Eric Leas, a research fellow at Stanford University.

Public health leaders must immediately take action to curtail online marijuana sales, urged Theodore Caputi, the study's lead author and George J. Mitchell Scholar at University College Cork.

"Children could obtain marijuana online without safeguards to protect them," he said. "States that have legalized marijuana might not be able to collect taxes to offset the public health costs of legal marijuana from online retailers, and the instant online availability of marijuana could increase marijuana dependence among all age groups."

One solution could be for public safety officials to work with internet service providers to purge marijuana retailers from major search engine results, said Ayers. Such a move would "effectively close off illicit retailers from consumers," he said.

Nearly a third of all antibiotics prescribed for hospitalized children globally were intended to prevent potential infections rather than to treat disease, according to the results of a worldwide survey published in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. A large proportion of these preventive, or prophylactic, prescriptions also were for broad-spectrum antibiotics or combinations of antibiotics, or were for prolonged periods, which can hasten the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and drug-resistant infections.

"This pattern and high rate of prophylactic prescribing indicates a clear overuse of antibiotics," said study author Markus Hufnagel, DTM&H, of the University of Freiburg in Germany. "Hopefully, our study results will help to raise awareness among health professionals about appropriate prescribing of antibiotics in children," Dr. Hufnagel said.

The study provides a snapshot of antibiotic prescriptions for 6,818 children who were inpatients at 226 pediatric hospitals in 41 countries, including four hospitals in the United States, during one day in 2012. There were 11,899 total prescriptions for antibiotics, and 28.6 percent of these were for prophylactic use, researchers found. Among hospitalized children who received at least one antibiotic prescription, 32.9 percent (2,242 children) were prescribed an antibiotic to prevent a potential infection rather than to treat a current one.

Of the antibiotics prescribed for prophylactic use, 26.6 percent were to prevent potential infections associated with an upcoming surgery, and the vast majority of these antibiotics were given for more than one day. The remaining 73.4 percent of the prophylactic prescriptions were intended to potentially prevent other types of infections. Approximately half (51.8 percent) of all preventive antibiotic prescriptions were for broad-spectrum antibiotics. In 36.7 percent of cases, two or more systemic antibiotics were prescribed at the same time.

These patterns contradict current recommendations for appropriate prophylactic antibiotic use. Guidelines often call for using narrow-spectrum antibiotics for shorter periods, in an effort to limit the development of antibiotic resistance. The study findings suggest clear targets for improving antibiotic prescribing in pediatric patients, according to the authors. These include reducing prolonged, preventive antibiotic use before surgery, limiting the use of broad-spectrum and combinations of antibiotics, and reducing antibiotic use, overall, for prophylactic rather than therapeutic use.

Additional education for clinicians and improved implementation of current guidelines for antibiotic use to prevent surgical infections are needed, Dr. Hufnagel said. More in-depth guidelines that address the use of prophylactic antibiotics for a broader range of medical conditions than current guidelines do are also needed, as well as efforts to communicate these guidelines to health care providers and to analyze how the recommendations are used.

Fast Facts

A survey of hospitals in 41 countries suggests antibiotics are often inappropriately and excessively prescribed for hospitalized children worldwide.

Nearly a third of all antibiotics prescribed for these children were for preventive, or prophylactic, use, rather than to treat disease, the survey found.

The use of broad-spectrum antibiotics and combinations of antibiotics was also high, raising concerns about increased risk for the development of antibiotic resistance and drug-resistant infections.

Alexandria, VA, USA - The 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), featured a symposium sponsored by the American Dental Association (ADA) titled "Transforming Oral Health Through Science and Evidence-based Practice." The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

How can we transform oral health research and do research that better meets the needs of dental patients and clinicians? This symposium features clinical and scientific perspectives on topics such as building a stronger oral health research infrastructure through improved advocacy, institutional support and funding from federal agencies. There will also be a focus on investigating ways to "change the narrative" for oral health research advocacy which will provide faculty and clinicians with the tools to build research capacity and obtain long-term financial support for conducting research that addresses the most impactful oral diseases faced by the U.S. population (e.g., dental caries, periodontal disease, oral cancer).

"The ADA Council on Scientific Affairs is pleased to present on such important topics," said Marcelo Araujo, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D., ADA Science Institute vice president and session moderator. "We are dedicated to advancing oral health through research and look to support the next wave of research to improve patient outcomes."

The speakers and topics of the symposium were "Building the Oral Health Research Pipeline to Measure and Improve Treatment Outcomes" by Steven Offenbacher, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, "Precision, Risk-based Caries Management" by Margherita Fontana, University of Michigan Department of Cariology, Restorative Sciences and Endodontics, Ann Arbor, "Improving Evaluation of Potentially Malignant Disorders in the Oral Cavity" by Lauren Patton, University of North Carolina School of Dentistry, Chapel Hill and "Closing the Gap Between Oral Health Research and Evidence-based Practice" by Robert Weyant, University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine, Pa. The session moderator is Marcelo Araujo, American Dental Association Science Institute, Chicago, Ill.

Understanding the factors that affect a bird species' nesting success can be crucial for planning effective conservation efforts. However, many studies of nesting birds last only a few years--and that means they can miss the effects of long-term variation and rare events. A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances demonstrates this with nearly four decades of data from Song Sparrows in British Columbia.

The University of British Columbia's Merle Crombie and Peter Arcese used 39 years of data from an island population of Song Sparrows to examine how the factors influencing their nesting success changed over long periods of time. Over almost 3,000 nesting attempts, 64% of which were successful, a number of patterns emerged. Some, such as the fact that older female birds were less successful, remained consistent over time. However, others, such as the effects of rainfall, population density, and nest parasitism, interacted with each other in complex ways that caused their importance to wax and wane over the decades, and inbreeding only became a significant negative factor when it increased sharply during the middle portion of the study. Unpredictable, rare fluctuations such as this can have large effects that shorter-term studies rarely capture.

"Researchers have been learning about the Song Sparrow population on Mandarte Island since 1960, and monitoring the population continuously since 1975," says Arcese. "Because the population is semi-isolated, small, and resident year-round, we band all birds in the nest and have genotyped all nestlings since 1991." A close focus on individuals, fitness, and relatedness in the Mandarte Song Sparrow population has allowed researchers to report the most precise demographic and population genetic parameters yet estimated in wild populations.

"Most studies of plant and animal populations in nature last three to five years, but ecological processes are often dramatically affected by climate and community change, which plays out over decades," he continues. "Long-term studies like ours provide an invaluable record of change in population processes, which can help interpret the results of short-term studies of species not as easily studied as Song Sparrows."

The race for quantum computing is on: Industry giants, such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft, and leading international research centers and universities are involved in the global effort to build a quantum computer. It is not known yet when this new technology can become a reality, but the world is getting ready. The greatest expectation about the quantum computer is that it could break the security of all classical data transfer networks. Today, sensitive data such as personal communication or financial information are protected using encryption algorithms that would take a classical supercomputer years to crack. A quantum computer could conceivably do this in a few seconds.

Luckily, quantum technologies come with a way of neutralizing this threat. Modern classical cryptographic algorithms are complexity-based and can remain secure only for a certain period of time. Unlike its classical counterpart, quantum cryptography relies on the fundamental laws of physics, which can guarantee security of data transmission forever. The operation principle is based on the fact that one cannot copy an unknown quantum state without altering the original message. This means that a quantum communication line cannot be compromised without the sender and the receiver knowing. Even a quantum computer would be of no use to eavesdroppers.

Photons -- the quanta of light -- are the best carriers for quantum bits. It is important to emphasize that only single photons can be used, otherwise an eavesdropper might intercept one of the transmitted photons and thus get a copy of the message. The principle of single-photon generation is quite simple: An excited quantum system can relax into the ground state by emitting exactly one photon. From an engineering standpoint, one needs a real-world physical system that reliably generates single photons under ambient conditions. However, such a system is not easy to find. For example, quantum dots could be a good option, but they only work well when cooled below ?200 degrees Celsius, while the newly emerged two-dimensional materials, such as graphene, are simply unable to generate single-photons at a high repetition rate under electrical excitation.

The MIPT researchers see the solution in silicon carbide, a semiconductor material long forgotten in optoelectronics. "In 2014, we were studying diamond and turned our attention to silicon carbide almost by accident. We figured it had vast potential," says Dmitry Fedyanin. However, as he explains, electrically driven emission of single photons in this semiconductor was only achieved one year later, in 2015, by an Australian research team.

Surprisingly, silicon carbide is a material that started the whole of optoelectronics: The phenomenon of electroluminescence, in which an electric current ?auses a material to emit light, was observed for the first time in silicon carbide. In the 1920s, the material was used in the world's first light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In the '70s, silicon carbide LEDs were mass-produced in the Soviet Union. However, after that, silicon carbide lost the battle against direct-bandgap semiconductors and was abandoned by optoelectronics. Nowadays, this material is mostly known for being extremely hard and heat-resistant -- it is used in high-power electronics, bulletproof vests, and the brakes of sports cars produced by Porsche, Lamborghini, and Ferrari.

Together with his colleagues, Fedyanin studied the physics of electroluminescence of color centers in silicon carbide and came up with a theory of single-photon emission upon electrical injection that explains and accurately reproduces the experimental findings. A color center is a point defect in the lattice structure of silicon carbide that can emit or absorb a photon at a wavelength to which the material is transparent in the absence of defects. This process is at the heart of the electrically driven single-photon source. Using their theory, the researchers have shown how a single-photon emitting diode based on silicon carbide can be improved to emit up to several billion photons per second. That is exactly what one needs to implement quantum cryptography protocols at data transfer rates on the order of 1 Gbps. Study co-authors Igor Khramtsov and Andrey Vyshnevyy point out that new materials are likely to be found, rivaling silicon carbide in terms of brightness of single-photon emission. However, unlike silicon carbide, they will require new technological processes to be used in mass production of devices. By contrast, silicon carbide-based single-photon sources are compatible with the CMOS technology, which is a standard for manufacturing electronic integrated circuits. This makes silicon carbide by far the most promising material for building practical ultrawide-bandwidth unconditionally secure data communication lines.

A new Journal of Internal Medicine article proposes that artificial intelligence tools, such as machine learning algorithms, have the potential for building predictive models for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases linked to imbalances in gut microbial communities, or microbiota.

The article focuses mainly on patients with cancer, who often undergo treatments that can cause profound alterations in the gut microbiota and potentially contribute to the development of complications.

Because research on the human microbiome is an emerging science and the application of artificial intelligence in medicine is in its infancy, it is important to consider ethical, legal, and social issues simultaneously with technical refinements required for applying these technologies to the clinic.

"Artificial intelligence algorithms have the potential to change the everyday medical practices and offer the prospect of identifying new associations not yet detected by humans, which will be very useful for better understanding the complexity of the human microbiota," said author Dr. J. Luis Espinoza, of the Kindai University Faculty of Medicine, in Japan.

In a new Acta Paediatrica study, children up to 2 years of age could be entertained and kept busy by their parents showing them YouTube clips on smartphones, but they did not learn anything from the videos.

For the study, 55 Indian children were visited at four ages: 6, 12, 18 and 24 months. Children were attracted to music at 6 months of age and were interested in watching the videos at 12 months. They could identify their parents in videos at 12 months and themselves by 24 months. They started touching the screen at 18 months and could press the buttons that appeared on the screen, but they did not understand their use.

"Young children are attracted to smartphones more than other forms of media and there is a need for more techno-behavioral studies on child-smartphone interaction," said lead author Savita Yadav, of the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, in New Delhi.

Prolonged sitting time and low physical activity levels were linked with the development of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) in a BJU International study of 69,795 middle-aged Korean men.

A team led by researchers at the Kangbuk Samsung Hospital, in South Korea, found that the incidence rate of LUTS--which relate to urine storage and/or voiding disturbances--was 39 per 1000 person-years. (A person-year is the number of years of follow-up multiplied by the number of people in the study.)

"The results support the importance of both reducing sitting time and promoting physical activity for preventing LUTS," said lead author Dr. Heung Jae Park. "Further studies are still needed to examine the influence of sedentary behaviors on LUTS and its determinants," added senior author Dr. Seungho Ryu.

A new study found that surgical patients with coexisting Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) are more likely to die within 30 days of admission and to die following a complication compared with patients without ADRD. Having more nurses with at least a Bachelor of Science in Nursing at the bedside improved the likelihood of good outcomes for all patients, but it had a much greater effect for patients with ADRD.

The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society study is the first to examine the effects of clinician education on surgical outcomes for patients with ADRD. It included 353,333 Medicare beneficiaries who underwent general, orthopedic, or vascular surgery in one of 531 hospitals in California, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

"Patients with dementia are clinically complex and vulnerable, and nurses play a key role in monitoring and protecting these individuals from unwanted complications such as delirium and pneumonia after surgery," said lead author Elizabeth White, of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. "To do this, nurses must be able to think critically, problem solve, and work well within interdisciplinary teams. These are all competencies emphasized in bachelor degree nursing programs."

Technology developed at the University of Waterloo reliably and affordably increases the efficiency of internal combustion engines by more than 10 per cent.

The product of a decade of research, this patented system for opening and closing valves could significantly reduce fuel consumption in everything from ocean-going ships to compact cars.

"This method has the potential to bring the well-established benefits of a fully variable valve system out of the lab and into production engines because cost and complexity aren't issues," said Amir Khajepour, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at Waterloo.

Intake and exhaust valves in internal combustion engines are typically controlled by cam mechanisms that do not allow the timing of their opening and closing to be varied.

The technology developed by Waterloo researchers replaces cams with hydraulic cylinders and rotary hydraulic valves that enable fully variable timing as the speed and torque of an engine change.

This ability to specifically time the opening and closing of valves according to engine operation is a key to increasing fuel efficiency, reducing both costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

"If you think about an ideal solution, it is to make the motion of the valve completely controllable," said Khajepour, who is also a Canada Research Chair and director of Waterloo's Mechatronic Vehicle Systems Lab. "That gives you infinite options to work with."

Although other systems to vary valve timing already exist, they are limited to use in experimental engines in laboratories due to their high cost and complexity.

The technology developed and tested at Waterloo is much simpler and far less expensive, paving the way for its use in engines for power generation, mining vehicles, the trucking industry and a host of other applications, including the consumer automotive market.

Khajepour said an affordable, reliable method to vary valve timing in internal combustion engines could substantially reduce our carbon footprint during the transition to cleaner electric powertrains over the next few decades.

"We should be able to easily improve efficiency by over 10 per cent, which is significant," he said.

The study on optimizing the hydraulic variable valve system, which builds on research that began in 2008, appears in the journal Mechatronics.

LOS ANGELES (March 20, 2018)--A relatively inexpensive 3-D-printed model of a patient's blood vessels is as effective as current commercially available models for training medical students in interventional radiology vascular access, according to a study presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 2018 Annual Scientific Meeting.

"We've come up with a viable method for creating something that's inexpensive and also customizable to individual patients," said Alexander Sheu, M.D., an interventional and diagnostic radiology resident at Stanford University School of Medicine, and lead author of the study. "The current model used to train medical students lacks the ability to replicate a patient's anatomy. Our 3-D-printed model will provide students a more realistic experience, allowing for better preparation before they perform procedures on real patients."

Interventional radiologists commonly treat patients using less-invasive options to surgery that involve inserting a catheter through a major artery under ultrasound guidance in order to reach internal organs or blood vessels. The researchers tested medical students' comfort in using a 3-D-printed model, compared to commercially available models, to simulate ultrasound-guided access through the femoral artery in the groin.

Thirty-two students were randomized to practice with the 3-D-printed model or the commercial model in a simulation experience developed by the authors of the study. Prior to the simulation exercise, 73 percent of the 3-D group and 76 percent of the commercial-model group indicated that they did not feel confident in performing the procedure. After the training, most of the 3D model and commercial model trainees agreed that their respective models were easy to use (93.3 percent and 94.1 percent) and helpful for practice (93.3 percent and 94.1 percent). Additionally, confidence in performing the procedure, known as femoral artery access, increased a similar amount in both groups.

"Now that we know that a 3-D-printed model is just as effective at training medical students in this type of procedure, this simulation experience can be made available to even more trainees and potentially improve procedural skills for residents, fellows, and attendees," said Sheu. "We foresee this really making an impact in the world of interventional radiology training."

Medical simulation exercises are playing an increasingly larger role in medical training; especially in the field of interventional radiology. Many commercially available devices cost between $2,000 and $3,000 each, while 3-D printing has the ability to produce practice models inexpensively and more realistically, the authors said.

The 3-D-printing technology can reproduce a patient's exact vessels based on a CT scan and produce an ultrasound-compatible vascular access model that is unique to that patient's anatomy. To adapt the 3-D printing technology to their needs, the researchers used a tissue-mimicking material that was durable to withstand punctures, but still felt realistic. This tailoring allows trainees to practice with variations in anatomy before they encounter them during a procedure, which may help to lower complication rates, researchers said.

As a result of these findings, the research team aims to extend this training to resident and fellow trainees and to study additional possible benefits of these devices. In addition, the team may develop 3-D-printed models for other parts of the body with arteries accessed in interventional radiology.

PITTSBURGH--A pair of autonomous robots developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute will soon be driving through miles of pipes at the U.S. Department of Energy's former uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, to identify uranium deposits on pipe walls.

The CMU robot has demonstrated it can measure radiation levels more accurately from inside the pipe than is possible with external techniques. In addition to savings in labor costs, its use significantly reduces hazards to workers who otherwise must perform external measurements by hand, garbed in protective gear and using lifts or scaffolding to reach elevated pipes.

DOE officials estimate the robots could save tens of millions of dollars in completing the characterization of uranium deposits at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, and save perhaps $50 million at a similar uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky.

"This will transform the way measurements of uranium deposits are made from now on," predicted William "Red" Whittaker, robotics professor and director of the Field Robotics Center.

Heather Jones, senior project scientist will present two technical papers about the robot on Wednesday at the Waste Management Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. CMU also will be demonstrating a prototype of the robot during the conference.

CMU is building two of the robots, called RadPiper, and will deliver the production prototype units to DOE's sprawling 3,778-acre Portsmouth site in May. RadPiper employs a new "disc-collimated" radiation sensor invented at CMU. The CMU team, led by Whittaker, began the project last year. The team worked closely with DOE and Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, the decommissioning contractor, to build a prototype on a tight schedule and test it at Portsmouth last fall.

Shuttered since 2000, the plant began operations in 1954 and produced enriched uranium, including weapons-grade uranium. With 10.6 million square feet of floor space, it is DOE's largest facility under roof, with three large buildings containing enrichment process equipment that span the size of 158 football fields. The process buildings contain more than 75 miles of process pipe.

Finding the uranium deposits, necessary before DOE decontaminates, decommissions and demolishes the facility, is a herculean task. In the first process building, human crews over the past three years have performed more than 1.4 million measurements of process piping and components manually and are close to declaring the building "cold and dark."

"With more than 15 miles of piping to be characterized in the next process building, there is a need to seek a smarter method," said Rodrigo V. Rimando, Jr., director of technology development for DOE's Office of Environmental Management. "We anticipate a labor savings on the order of an eight-to-one ratio for the piping accomplished by RadPiper." Even with RadPiper, nuclear deposits must be identified manually in some components.

RadPiper will operate initially in pipes measuring 30 inches and 42 inches in diameter and will characterize radiation levels in each foot-long segment of pipe. Those segments with potentially hazardous amounts of uranium-235, the fissile isotope of uranium used in nuclear reactors and weapons, will be removed and decontaminated. The vast majority of the plant's piping will remain in place and will be demolished safely along with the rest of the facility.

The tetherless robot moves through the pipe at a steady pace atop a pair of flexible tracks. Though the pipe is in straight sections, the autonomous robot is equipped with a lidar and a fisheye camera to detect obstructions ahead, such as closed valves, Jones said. After completing a run of pipe, the robot automatically returns to its launch point. Integrated data analysis and report generation frees nuclear analysts from time-consuming calculations and makes reports available the same day.

The robot's disc-collimated sensing instrument uses a standard sodium iodide sensor to count gamma rays. The sensor is positioned between two large lead discs. The lead discs block gamma rays from uranium deposits that lie beyond the one-foot section of pipe that is being characterized at any given time. Whittaker said CMU is seeking a patent on the instrument.

The Robotics Institute and Whittaker have extensive experience with robots in nuclear facilities, including the design and construction of robots to aid with the cleanup of the damaged Three Mile Island reactor building in Pennsylvania and the crippled Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine.

DOE has paid CMU $1.4 million to develop the robots as part of what CMU calls the Pipe Crawling Activity Measurement System.

In addition to the Portsmouth and Paducah plants, robots could be useful elsewhere in DOE's defense nuclear cleanup program, which is not even half complete, Rimando said. Other sites where robots might be used are the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina, and the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington.

"With at least 50 more years of nuclear cleanup to be performed, the Robotics Institute could serve as a major pipeline of roboticists for DOE's next several workforce generations," he added.

The convection-allowing ensemble forecasting has significant research and application value, and the initial perturbation generation method plays an important role in the improvement of its accuracy. Recently, a research group led by Chaohui Chen from National University of Defense Technology proposed a new method to generate initial perturbation with full consideration of the strong locality of a convective weather system. The experimental results confirm that it can improve the effect of convection-allowing ensemble forecasting. This innovative research has been published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences.

At present, initial condition ensemble predictions are relatively mature at medium-to-long-term and climate scales and it has formed corresponding perturbation generation methods. However, many problems exist in the direct application of these methods in convection-allowing ensemble forecasting, such as the small divergence of the ensemble forecast system and the tendency of the ensemble to converge. In general, the dominant approach both in China and overseas is to use orthogonality to tackle the dispersion or independence in short-term or convective-scale ensemble forecasting like the ensemble transformation Kalman filter (ETKF). But all these methods have some disadvantages.

Based on the conventional breeding of growing modes (BGM) method, this paper proposed a local BGM (LBGM) method considering the strong locality of a convective weather system, which is different from existing methods. The BGM method breeds the initial perturbation via the short-term prediction cycle of the model itself. In conventional BGM method, the ensemble perturbation needs to be rescaled after each breeding cycle, in which the scaling factor is simply a function of the vertical level. That is to say the scaling factors for all points on the same vertical level are identical (Fig1 (a)). However, the horizontal inhomogeneity in the distribution of physical variables also needs to be considered for convection-allowing ensemble prediction systems with strong locality and independence. Therefore, the impact radius is introduced to determine the local space of each point and the scaling factor is computed according to the perturbation root mean square error(RMSE) of points within the local space of each point(Fig1(b)). It can be seen that the LBGM method uses the perturbation RMSE at points within a certain range around a point to determine the scaling factor at that point, which incorporates local information into the rescaled perturbation. Simultaneously, the scope of the local area can be adjusted by assigning different impact radius.

To test the effect of the LBGM method, this paper presents a preliminary assessment in terms of its perturbation structure, ensemble spread, and the forecast RMSE. The experimental results confirm that more local characteristics of perturbation are incorporated after rescaling through the LBGM method and the method also reflects the interaction between grid points. For perturbation physical variables and some near-surface meteorological elements, the ensemble spread generated by the LBGM method is greater than that generated by conventional BGM and the forecast RMSE of LBGM is lower than that of traditional BGM. Meanwhile, the ensemble forecast system shows better performance with the new algorithm.

The LBGM method based on conventional BGM is conceptually novel. As it requires no additional computational resources, this method has great application potential in convection-allowing ensemble forecasting.

Periods of extreme cold winter weather and perilous snowfall, similar to those that gripped the UK in a deep freeze with the arrival of the 'Beast from the East', could be linked to the solar cycle, pioneering new research has shown.

A new study, led by Dr Indrani Roy from the University of Exeter, has revealed when the solar cycle is in its 'weaker' phase, there are warm spells across the Arctic in winter, as well as heavy snowfall across the Eurasian sector.

The research is published in leading journal Scientific Reports, a Nature Publication, on Tuesday, 20 March 2018.

Dr Roy, form Exeter's Mathematics department said: "In spite of all other influences and complexities, it is still possible to segregate a strong influence from the sun. There are reductions of sea-ice in the Arctic and a growth in the Eurasian sector is observed in recent winters. This study shows those trends are related and current weaker solar cycle is contributing to that."

The new study observed that during periods when the winter solar Sunspot Number (SSN) falls below average, the Arctic warming extends from the lower troposphere to high up in the upper stratosphere. On the other hand there is a cooling when SSN is above average.

It explored how the 11-year solar cycle - a periodic change in the sun's activity including changes in the levels of solar UV radiation and changes in the SSNs - can be linked with the Polar vortex and Arctic Oscillation phenomenon, which affects winter Arctic and Eurasian climate.

It subsequently can influence weather conditions in Europe, including the UK, Scandinavia and Asia.

Solar cyclic variability can modulate winter Arctic climate is published in Scientific Reports.