The tectonic influence on the last 1500-year infill history of a deep lake located on the North Anatolian Fault: Lake Sapanca (N-W Turkey)

Lake Sapanca on the North Anatolian Fault zone (NW Turkey) is a pull-apart basin at the junction between the İzmit-Sapanca fault segment, the Sakarya segment and the westernmost end of the Mudurnu Valley fault. Multiproxy analyses of a 586-cm-long sediment core taken in the lake centre have revealed a complex history of earthquake events. The radiocarbon chronology, affected by reworking of plant remains, suggests that the sediment sequence retrieved from the centre of the lake covers approximately the last 1500 years. The bottom metre of the sequence is a gley soil indicating that at least the eastern half of the lake was a wetland, a prolongation of the floodplain between the lake and River Sakarya, that has collapsed to form the modern deep lake. A series of sedimentological and palynological indicators have been used to highlight four major episodes of mass movements linked to earthquakes. The short existence of the eastern part of the lake highlights the complexity of the morphology of the Sakarya Straight, a possible past connection between the Gulf of İzmit and the Black Sea

A Gene Expression Signature for RSV: Clinical Implications and Limitations

Peter Openshaw discusses the challenges in advancing respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) treatments and the implications of a study by Mejias and colleagues using a newly identified gene signature for diagnosis and prediction of RSV severity. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

'It's something I do as a parent, it's common sense to me' - Non-teaching staff members' perceptions of SEAL and their role in the development of children's social, emotional and behavioural skills

The ‘Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning’ (SEAL) initiative is a curriculum-based resource aimed at developing all children’s social, emotional and behavioural skills across England and Wales. Devised as a tool to improve such skills by enhancing levels of emotional intelligence, SEAL is a scheme that utilises whole-school work such as classroom based lessons, assemblies, small group sessions and intervention with individual children. Although subsequent studies of the initiative have identified favourable outcomes, few have captured how the scheme is being interpreted or used by schools and their staff members. Drawing on empirical data gathered during a three-year study that investigated the interpretation and use of SEAL in primary schools, I present the accounts of a range of non-teaching primary school staff members, including teaching assistants, welfare assistants, and pastoral staff, who utilise the scheme in their individual roles, within their respective schools. The views offered by these staff members illustrate how their interpretation and use of SEAL is influenced by the behaviours and skills they have gained as parents, and how these ‘funds of knowledge’ (Gonzalez, Moll and Amanti 2005) have positioned them as competent social, emotional and behavioural facilitators. With reference to Hochschild’s (1983) concept of ‘emotional labour’, Osgood’s (2005) work on ‘educare’, and their links to Gee’s (2008) notion of ‘everyday knowledge’, this paper will consider the role of non-teaching, primary school staff in the development of children’s social, emotional and behavioural skills and ask if such work is, indeed, ‘common sense’

Recent high-energy marine events in the sediments of the Lagoa de Óbidos and Martinhal (Portugal): Recognition, age and likely causes

© 2012 Author(s) - This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.A key issue in coastal hazards research is the need to distinguish sediments deposited by past extreme storms from those of past tsunamis. This study contributes to this aim by investigating patterns of sedimentation associated with extreme coastal flood events, in particular, within the Lagoa de Óbidos (Portugal). The recent stratigraphy of this coastal lagoon was studied using a wide range of techniques including visual description, grain-size analysis, digital and x-ray photography, magnetic susceptibility and geochemical analysis. The sequence was dated by 14C, 210Pb and Optically Stimulated Luminescence. Results disclose a distinctive coarser sedimentary unit, within the top of the sequence studied, and shown in quartz sand by the enrichment of elements with marine affinity (e.g., Ca and Na) and carbonates. The unit fines upwards and inland, thins inland and presents a sharp erosive basal contact. A noticeable post-event change in the sedimentary pattern was observed. The likely agent of sedimentation is discussed here and the conceivable association with the Great Lisbon tsunami of AD 1755 is debated, while a comparison is attempted with a possibly synchronous deposit from a tsunami in Martinhal (Algarve, Portugal). The possibility of a storm origin is also discussed in the context of the storminess of the western Portuguese coast and the North Atlantic Oscillation. This study highlights certain characteristics of the sedimentology of the deposits that may have a value in the recognition of extreme marine inundation signatures elsewhere in the world.This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

Effects of thermal cycling on epoxy bonded materials

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-22).Thermal cycling is a concern to those who use epoxy as an adhesion in space applications due to the mechanical and thermal properties of both the epoxy and adhered materials. These properties include the thermal expansion coefficient, a, and the stress at which the epoxy will yield fracture. An experiment was carried out to find out if failure would occur by thermal cycling of epoxy bonded components in the propulsion components of a small satellite. Failure did not occur due to shear stress attributed to the thermal expansion coefficient but unexpectedly to the liquefaction of epoxy in 3 of the 6 samples. The samples with thicker epoxy layers failed in contrast to the thinner epoxy layer samples. Overall, thermal cycling is still a concern for failure of the epoxy bond.by Michelle Burroughs.S.B

Boron content of Lake Ulubat sediment: A key to interpret the morphological history of NW Anatolia, Turkey

Freshwater Lake Ulubat (c. 1.5 m deep and c. 138 km2) receives sediment from a 10.414 km2 area in the seismically active Susurluk Drainage Basin (SDB) of NW Turkey. The B and trace element contents of the lake infill seem to be a link between the fresh landforms of the SDB and the lacustrine sediment. Deposition in Lake Ulubat has been 1.60 cm.a-1 for the last 50 a according to radionucleides; however the sedimentation rate over the last millennium was 0.37 cm.a-1 based on 14C dating. The B content of the lacustrine infill displays a slight increase at 0.50 m and a drastic increase at 4 m depth occurring c. 31 a and c. 1070 a ago respectively. Probably the topmost change corresponds to the start of open mining in the SDB and the second one to the natural trenching of borate ore-deposits. These dates also show indirectly a 1.4 cm.a-1 erosion rate during the last millennium as the borate beds were trenched up to 15 m. By extrapolation, it is possible to establish that the formation of some of the present morphological features of the southern Marmara region, especially river incision, began in the late Pleistocene, and developed especially over the last 75 ka