Ochroconis gallopava bronchitis mimicking haemoptysis in a patient with bronchiectasis.

Ochroconis gallopava is an anamorphic mould characterized by slow growth rate and production of a maroon pigment, which has been isolated worldwide from soil, thermal springs, decaying vegetation, and chicken litter. It has been reported to cause localized, mostly pulmonary, and systemic infection in severely immunocompromised patients. We describe the case of a 76-year-old woman known for ulcerative colitis-related bronchiectasis treated with low dose oral steroids, who developed a fungal bronchitis with dark, bloody-like, sputum which was initially misinterpreted as haemoptysis. A filamentary mould grew on sputum culture, and was identified by DNA analysis as Ochroconis gallopava. We observed a significant clinical improvement after 6 weeks of itraconazole therapy

Validation of Slosh Model Parameters and Anti-Slosh Baffle Designs of Propellant Tanks by Using Lateral Slosh Testing

The slosh dynamics of propellant tanks can be represented by an equivalent mass-pendulum-dashpot mechanical model. The parameters of this equivalent model, identified as slosh mechanical model parameters, are slosh frequency, slosh mass, and pendulum hinge point location. They can be obtained by both analysis and testing for discrete fill levels. Anti-slosh baffles are usually needed in propellant tanks to control the movement of the fluid inside the tank. Lateral slosh testing, involving both random excitation testing and free-decay testing, are performed to validate the slosh mechanical model parameters and the damping added to the fluid by the anti-slosh baffles. Traditional modal analysis procedures were used to extract the parameters from the experimental data. Test setup of sub-scale tanks will be described. A comparison between experimental results and analysis will be presented

Endovascular treatment of pulmonary arteriovenous malformations in hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia.

PRINCIPLES: To assess the efficiency and complication rates of vaso-occlusion of pulmonary arteriovenous malformations (PAVMs) in Rendu-Osler-Weber disease (hereditary haemorrhagic telangectasia; HHT). METHODS: Seventy-two patients were investigated in our institution for HHT between March 2000 and November 2011. Sixteen presented PAVMs (22.2%), and 11 (68.8%) were treated with vaso-occlusion for a total of 18 procedures. Procedures included coils, plugs and combined approaches. Immediate success and recurrence rate, complication were recorded, as well as persistent and new PAVMs during clinical and computed tomography (CT) follow-up. RESULTS: Eighteen procedures were performed and a total of 37 PAVMs were treated, 19 with coils, 16 with plugs and 2 with combined treatment. Mean CT follow-up time was 41 months (1‒164). No major complication was observed. One distal translocation was treated during the same intervention. Two PAVMs persisted after treatment (5.7%), both treated by means of plug embolisation. One new PAVM was observed during follow-up CT. PAVMs with an afferent artery of less than 3mm or asymptomatic PAVMs were not treated. CONCLUSION: Recent studies have demonstrated that vaso-occlusion has become the gold standard treatment for PAVM. This study is in accordance with previous results and shows a minimal complication rate and little recurrence, whether by coils, plugs, or combined treatments

Six-Bullets Faith

At a religious school of unspecified denomination—but definitely NOT Catholic—two women fall in love. One of them has a chainsaw, the other a gun. There’s also a horny parrot, a horny pastor and a senile mother, not to mention Lucifer, who is a bit of a teenage girl and a HUGE Billie Eilish fan. And the end of the Universe is coming, FYI, via the Big Rip, so there’s that too. And this play is also about addiction and withdrawal and recovery and the capacity or incapacity for love to overcome forces that can overwhelm the self

First Person Plural: Short Stories

I decided to title this collection First Person Plural after observing that one of the most prominent motifs common among these stories concerns the instability and multiplicity of identity. Horror is one of the traditions that most influences my writing, particularly the claustrophobic psychological horror of writers like Edgar Allen Poe. I mainly deploy the tropes of horror in an effort to destabilize my characters’ inner and outer realities. Another important influence on my writing has been that brand of fiction which exists within the liminal space between horror and realism, such as Dan Chaon’s collection Stay Awake, Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where is Here?” That’s the realm where some of my stories exist, where the metaphors of horror collapse on themselves and reveal what they’re designed to represent and conceal. As a writer, one of my goals/challenges is to make cliches less cliche, to find new ways of telling familiar stories and invent conventions for telling unfamiliar ones. For each story in this collection, I attempted to identify and employ whichever conventions promised to best help me tell it in an unconventional and hopefully more effective way

Ares I-X Launch Vehicle Modal Test Measurements and Data Quality Assessments

The Ares I-X modal test program consisted of three modal tests conducted at the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA s Kennedy Space Center. The first test was performed on the 71-foot 53,000-pound top segment of the Ares I-X launch vehicle known as Super Stack 5 and the second test was performed on the 66-foot 146,000- pound middle segment known as Super Stack 1. For these tests, two 250 lb-peak electro-dynamic shakers were used to excite bending and shell modes with the test articles resting on the floor. The third modal test was performed on the 327-foot 1,800,000-pound Ares I-X launch vehicle mounted to the Mobile Launcher Platform. The excitation for this test consisted of four 1000+ lb-peak hydraulic shakers arranged to excite the vehicle s cantilevered bending modes. Because the frequencies of interest for these modal tests ranged from 0.02 to 30 Hz, high sensitivity capacitive accelerometers were used. Excitation techniques included impact, burst random, pure random, and force controlled sine sweep. This paper provides the test details for the companion papers covering the Ares I-X finite element model calibration process. Topics to be discussed include test setups, procedures, measurements, data quality assessments, and consistency of modal parameter estimates

Ares I-X Launch Vehicle Modal Test Overview

The first test flight of NASA's Ares I crew launch vehicle, called Ares I-X, is scheduled for launch in 2009. Ares IX will use a 4-segment reusable solid rocket booster from the Space Shuttle heritage with mass simulators for the 5th segment, upper stage, crew module and launch abort system. Flight test data will provide important information on ascent loads, vehicle control, separation, and first stage reentry dynamics. As part of hardware verification, a series of modal tests were designed to verify the dynamic finite element model (FEM) used in loads assessments and flight control evaluations. Based on flight control system studies, the critical modes were the first three free-free bending mode pairs. Since a test of the free-free vehicle is not practical within project constraints, modal tests for several configurations in the nominal integration flow were defined to calibrate the FEM. A traceability study by Aerospace Corporation was used to identify the critical modes for the tested configurations. Test configurations included two partial stacks and the full Ares I-X launch vehicle on the Mobile Launcher Platform. This paper provides an overview for companion papers in the Ares I-X Modal Test Session. The requirements flow down, pre-test analysis, constraints and overall test planning are described

Ares I-X Flight Test Vehicle Modal Test

The first test flight of NASA's Ares I crew launch vehicle, called Ares I-X, was launched on October 28, 2009. Ares I-X used a 4-segment reusable solid rocket booster from the Space Shuttle heritage with mass simulators for the 5th segment, upper stage, crew module and launch abort system. Flight test data will provide important information on ascent loads, vehicle control, separation, and first stage reentry dynamics. As part of hardware verification, a series of modal tests were designed to verify the dynamic finite element model (FEM) used in loads assessments and flight control evaluations. Based on flight control system studies, the critical modes were the first three free-free bending mode pairs. Since a test of the free-free vehicle was not practical within project constraints, modal tests for several configurations during vehicle stacking were defined to calibrate the FEM. Test configurations included two partial stacks and the full Ares I-X flight test vehicle on the Mobile Launcher Platform. This report describes the test requirements, constraints, pre-test analysis, test execution and results for the Ares I-X flight test vehicle modal test on the Mobile Launcher Platform. Initial comparisons between pre-test predictions and test data are also presented

Use of variability in national and regional data to estimate the prevalence of lymphangioleiomyomatosis

Background: Understanding the true prevalence of lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) is important in estimating disease burden and targeting specific interventions. As with all rare diseases, obtaining reliable epidemiological data is difficult and requires innovative approaches. Aim: To determine the prevalence and incidence of LAM using data from patient organizations in seven countries, and to use the extent to which the prevalence of LAM varies regionally and nationally to determine whether prevalence estimates are related to health-care provision. Methods: Numbers of women with LAM were obtained from patient groups and national databases from seven countries (n = 1001). Prevalence was calculated for regions within countries using female population figures from census data. Incidence estimates were calculated for the USA, UK and Switzerland. Regional variation in prevalence and changes in incidence over time were analysed using Poisson regression and linear regression. Results: Prevalence of LAM in the seven countries ranged from 3.4 to 7.8/million women with significant variation, both between countries and between states in the USA. This variation did not relate to the number of pulmonary specialists in the region nor the percentage of population with health insurance, but suggests a large number of patients remain undiagnosed. The incidence of LAM from 2004 to 2008 ranged from 0.23 to 0.31/million women/per year in the USA, UK and Switzerland. Conclusions: Using this method, we have found that the prevalence of LAM is higher than that previously recorded and that many patients with LAM are undiagnose