Biosafety and Biohazards: Understanding Biosafety Levels and Meeting Safety Requirements of a Biobank.

When it comes to biobanking and working with different types of laboratory specimens, it is important to understand potential biohazards to ensure safety of the operator and laboratory personnel. Biological safety levels (BSL) are a series of designations used to inform laboratory personnel about the level of biohazardous risks in a laboratory setting. There are a total of four levels ranked in order of increasing risk as stipulated by the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Biosafety in microbiological and biomedical laboratories, 5th edn. HHS publication no. (CDC) 21-1112. https://www.cdc.gov/biosafety/publications/bmbl5/bmbl.pdf . Accessed 2 Jan 2016, 2009). We will address the main distinctions between these levels including briefly introducing hazards characteristics that classify biohazardous agents, as well as define the essentials in meeting safety requirements

Peak shifts due to B(∗)−Bˉ(∗)B^{(*)}-\bar{B}^{(*)} rescattering in Υ(5S)\Upsilon(5S) dipion transitions

We study the energy distributions of dipion transitions $\Upsilon(5S)$ to $\Upsilon(1S,2S,3S)\pi^+\pi^-$ in the final state rescattering model. Since the $\Upsilon(5S)$ is well above the open bottom thresholds, the dipion transitions are expected to mainly proceed through the real processes $\Upsilon(5S)\to B^{(*)}\bar{B}^{(*)}$ and $B^{(*)}\bar{B}^{(*)}\to \Upsilon(1S,2S,3S)\pi^+\pi^-$. We find that the energy distributions of $\Upsilon(1S,2S,3S)\pi^+\pi^-$ markedly differ from that of $\Upsilon(5S)\to B^{(*)}\bar{B}^{(*)}$. In particular, the resonance peak will be pushed up by about 7-20 MeV for these dipion transitions relative to the main hadronic decay modes. These predictions can be used to test the final state rescattering mechanism in hadronic transitions for heavy quarkonia above the open flavor thresholds.Comment: Version published in PRD, energy dependence of the total width in Eq.(12) restored and corresponding figure changed, more discussion and clarification adde

Short lists with short programs in short time - a short proof

Bauwens, Mahklin, Vereshchagin and Zimand [ECCC TR13-007] and Teutsch [arxiv:1212.6104] have shown that given a string x it is possible to construct in polynomial time a list containing a short description of it. We simplify their technique and present a shorter proof of this result

Energy boost in laser wakefield accelerators using sharp density transitions

The energy gain in laser wakefield accelerators is limited by dephasing between the driving laser pulse and the highly relativistic electrons in its wake. Since this phase depends on both the driver and the cavity length, the effects of dephasing can be mitigated with appropriate tailoring of the plasma density along propagation. Preceding studies have discussed the prospects of continuous phase-locking in the linear wakefield regime. However, most experiments are performed in the highly non-linear regime and rely on self-guiding of the laser pulse. Due to the complexity of the driver evolution in this regime it is much more difficult to achieve phase locking. As an alternative we study the scenario of rapid rephasing in sharp density transitions, as was recently demonstrated experimentally. Starting from a phenomenological model we deduce expressions for the electron energy gain in such density profiles. The results are in accordance with particle-in-cell simulations and we present gain estimations for single and multiple stages of rephasing

An integrated framework to classify healthcare virtual communities

Healthcare (HC) strives to improve service quality through its cost-effective social computing strategy. However, sudden rise in the count of virtual community of practices (VCoPs) introduced many choices for physicians; As a result, it is not surprising to observe current literature reporting lack of study to investigate ideas integration within and between VCoPs. VCoPs need to be categorized for HC physicians so they will be able to pin-point effective a VC to attain assistance from. This paper is one of the first investigative studies, in HC sector, that proposed a framework to classify and pin-point appropriate VCoPs, for physicians, after it reviewed and analyzed traditional and up-to-date theoretical, empirical and case study literature in the area of social computing, knowledge management (KM) and VCoPs. The implementation of this framework pinpointed professional VCoPs as most appropriate for physicians based on strict requirements, i.e. closed physician communities holding many participants, which are older than 5 years with high boundary crossing. This framework is also a “one-size-fit-all” formula to build an organizational VCoP, utilizable by other business sectors

Apparent competition drives community-wide parasitism rates and changes in host abundance across ecosystem boundaries

Species have strong indirect effects on others, and predicting these effects is a central challenge in ecology. Prey species sharing an enemy (predator or parasitoid) can be linked by apparent competition, but it is unknown whether this process is strong enough to be a community-wide structuring mechanism that could be used to predict future states of diverse food webs. Whether species abundances are spatially coupled by enemy movement across different habitats is also untested. Here, using a field experiment, we show that predicted apparent competitive effects between species, mediated via shared parasitoids, can significantly explain future parasitism rates and herbivore abundances. These predictions are successful even across edges between natural and managed forests, following experimental reduction of herbivore densities by aerial spraying over 20ha. This result shows that trophic indirect effects propagate across networks and habitats in important, predictable ways, with implications for landscape planning, invasion biology and biological control

Relativistic corrections to J/ψJ/\psi exclusive and inclusive double charm production at B factories

In order to clarify the puzzling problems in double charm production, relativistic corrections at order $v^{2}$ to the processes $e^{+}e^{-}\to J/\psi+\eta_{c}$ and $e^{+}e^{-}\to J/\psi+c\bar{c}$ at B factories are studied in non-relativistic quantum chromodynamics. The short-distance parts of production cross sections are calculated perturbatively, while the long-distance matrix elements are estimated from $J/\psi$ and $\eta_c$ decays up to errors of order $v^4$. Our results show that the relativistic correction to the exclusive process $e^{+}e^{-}\to J/\psi+\eta_{c}$ is significant, which, when combined together with the next-to-leading order $\alpha_{s}$ corrections, could resolve the large discrepancy between theory and experiment; whereas for the inclusive process $e^{+}e^{-}\to J/\psi+c\bar{c}$ the relativistic correction is tiny and negligible. The physical reason for the above difference between exclusive and inclusive processes largely lies in the fact that in the exclusive process the relative momentum between quarks in charmonium substantially reduces the virtuality of the gluon that converts into a charm quark pair, but this is not the case for the inclusive process, in which the charm quark fragmentation $c\to J/\psi+c$ is significant, and QCD radiative corrections can be more essential.Comment: Version to appear in PRD. In the summary an explicit statement added: "for the J/\psi eta_c cross section the relativistic correction alone gives an enhancement factor of 1.7 while the combination of relativistic correction with QCD radiative correction results in a much larger enhancement factor of 9". One reference added. A few typos correcte

Structural panels

Vinyl pyridines including vinyl stilbazole materials and vinyl styrylpyridine oligomer materials are disclosed. These vinylpyridines form copolymers with bismaleimides which copolymers have good fire retardancy and decreased brittleness. The cure temperatures of the copolymers are substantially below the cure temperatures of the bismaleimides alone. Reinforced composites made from the cured copolymers are disclosed as well