Air Force

Hypothermia is defined as a significant drop in core body temperature below 35°C (95°F). It is traditionally staged as mild, moderate, severe, and profound at temperatures of 35°C to 32°C (95°F to 89.6°F), 32°C to 28°C (89.6°F to 82.4°F), <28°C (<82.4°F), and <24°C (75.2°F), respectively. It can also be classified into the same stages by clinical presentations. We present a patient that fits into two different stages based on core body temperature and clinical presentation...

Many artificial molecular machines have been synthesized, and various functions have been expressed by changing their molecular conformations. However, their structures are still simple compared with those of biomolecular machines, and more energy is required to control them. To design artificial molecular machines with more complex structures and higher functionality, it is necessary to combine molecular machines with simple movements such as components. This means that the motion of individual molecular machines must be precisely controlled and observed in various environments...

Optical and acoustic tweezers, despite operating on different physical principles, offer non-contact manipulation of microscopic and mesoscopic objects, making them essential in fields like cell biology, medicine, and nanotechnology. The advantages and limitations of optical and acoustic manipulation complement each other, particularly in terms of trapping size, force intensity, and flexibility. We use photoacoustic effects to generate localized Lamb wave fields capable of mapping arbitrary laser pattern shapes...

In 2022, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency found threat agnostic detection of novel bioaerosol threats to be "not feasible for daily operations" due to the cost of reagents used for metagenomics, cost of sequencing instruments, and cost of labor for subject matter experts to analyze bioinformatics. Similar operational difficulties might extend to many of the 280,000 buildings (totaling 2.3 billion square feet) at 5,000 secure US Department of Defense military sites, 250 Navy ships, as well as many civilian buildings...

Superhydrophobic surfaces are often seen as frictionless materials, on which water is highly mobile. Understanding the nature of friction for such water-repellent systems is central to further minimize resistance to motion and energy loss in applications. For slowly moving drops, contact-line friction has been generally considered dominant on slippery superhydrophobic surfaces. Here, we show that this general rule applies only at very low speed. Using a micropipette force sensor in an oscillating mode, we measure the friction of water drops approaching or even equaling zero contact-line friction...

During biomanufacturing, several unit operations expose solutions of biologics to multiple stresses, such as hydrodynamic shear forces due to fluid flow and interfacial dilatational stresses due to mechanical agitation or bubble collapse. When these stresses individually act on proteins adsorbed to interfaces, it results in an increase in protein particles in the bulk solution, a phenomenon referred to as interface-induced protein particle formation. However, an understanding of the dominant cause, when multiple stresses are acting simultaneously or sequentially, on interface-induced protein particle formation is limited...

BACKGROUND: Pneumothorax, pneumomediastinum and subcutaneous emphysema are respiratory complications of Coronavirus disease 2019 occurring with noteworthy frequency in patients especially with severe disease. They can be life-threatening and often complicate patient managment. METHODS: This was a retrospective, observational study of patients admitted in Nepal Armed Police Force hospital from 13/05/2020 to 28/12/2021 diagnosed with pneumothorax, pneumomediastinum or subcutaneous emphysema singly or in combination...

Living cells actively interact biochemically and mechanically with the surrounding extracellular matrices (ECMs) and undergo dramatic morphological and dimensional transitions, concomitantly remodeling ECMs. However, there is no suitable method to quantitatively discuss the contribution of mechanical interactions in such mutually adaptive processes. We herein developed a highly deformable "living" cellular scaffold to evaluate overall mechanical energy transfer between cell and ECMs. It is based on the water-perfluorocarbon interface decorated with phospholipids bearing a cell-adhesive ligand and fluorescent tag...

Ethyl cellulose-ethanol (ECE) is emerging as a promising formulation for ablative injections, with more controllable injection distributions than those from traditional liquid ethanol. This study evaluates the influence of salient injection parameters on forces needed for infusion, depot volume, retention, and shape in a large animal model relevant to human applications. Experiments were conducted to investigate how infusion volume (0.5 mL to 2.5 mL), ECE concentration (6% or 12%), needle gauge (22 G or 27 G), and infusion rate (10 mL/h) impacted the force of infusion into air using a load cell...

Background: Percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PNL) poses a risk of hypothermia. Additionally, general anesthesia lowers the thresholds for shivering and vasoconstriction, which leads to dysfunction of central thermoregulation. Perioperative hypothermia is associated with adverse outcomes after surgery. In this study, we aimed to demonstrate that prewarming for 10 min can effectively prevent early hypothermia during PNL. Methods: A total of 68 patients scheduled for elective PNL were recruited to this study from January to June 2022, but two patients were excluded because of a change in the surgical plan...

Fire emissions in Southeast Asia transported to southern China every spring (March-May), influencing not only the air quality but also the weather and climate. However, the multi-year variations and magnitude of this impact on aerosol radiation forcing in southern China remain unclear. Here, we quantified the multi-year contributions of fire emissions in Indo-China Peninsula (ICP) region to aerosol radiation forcing in the various southern Chinese provinces during the fire season (March-May) of 2013-2019 combining the 3-dimension chemical transport model and the Column Radiation Model (CRM) simulations...

The U.S. Air Force asked RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF) to help assess the well-being of its wounded members and the quality of services provided to facilitate their recovery and reintegration. RAND PAF fielded a survey in the fall of 2016 to assess wounded airmen's functioning in the domains of physical health, mental health, interpersonal relationships, unemployment, and financial status, as well as their utilization and perceptions of Air Force nonmedical programs for wounded airmen. The authors of this study invited all 713 wounded airmen enrolled in the Air Force Wounded Warrior program to complete the survey, and 270 airmen (38 percent) completed it...

Functional networks have emerged as powerful instruments to characterize the propagation of information in complex systems, with applications ranging from neuroscience to climate and air transport. In spite of their success, reliable methods for validating the resulting structures are still missing, forcing the community to resort to expert knowledge or simplified models of the system's dynamics. We here propose the use of a real-world problem, involving the reconstruction of the structure of flights in the US air transport system from the activity of individual airports, as a way to explore the limits of such an approach...

A study is presented of the thermal-mechanical noise and response to sound of microphones that are designed to be driven by the viscous forces in air rather than by sound pressure. Virtually all existing microphone designs are intended to respond to sound pressure. The structures examined here consist of thin, micro-scale, cantilever beams. The viscous forces that drive the beams are proportional to the relative velocity between the beams and fluid medium. The beams' movement in response to sound is similar to that of the air in a plane acoustic wave...

Transcriptomics provides a versatile tool for ecological monitoring. Here, through genome-guided profiling of transcripts mapping to 33 042 gene models, expression differences can be discerned among multi-year and seasonal leaf samples collected from American beech trees at two latitudinally separated sites. Despite a bottleneck due to post-Columbian deforestation, the single nucleotide polymorphism-based population genetic background analysis has yielded sufficient variation to account for differences between populations and among individuals...

Star copolymer films were produced by using spin-coating, drop-casting, and casting deposition techniques, thus obtaining ultrathin and thick films, respectively. The morphology is generally flat, but it becomes substrate-dependent for ultrathin films where the planarization effect of films is not efficient. The indentation hardness of films was investigated by Force Volume Maps in both the air and liquid. In the air, ultrathin films are in the substrate-dominated zone and, thus, the elastic modulus E is overestimated, while E reaches its bulk value for drop-casted ultrathin and thick films...

Drying is a universal method applied for food preservation. To date, several models have been developed to evaluate drying kinetics. In this study, lychee was dried employing a hot air dryer, and the drying kinetics was evaluated by comparing the Newtonian model, Henderson and Pabis model, Page model, and Logarithmic model. However, temperature and relative humidity, the key driving forces for drying kinetics, are not considered by these models. Thus, an integrated drying model, as a function of temperature and relative humidity, was developed to predict the hot air-drying kinetics and mass transfer phenomena of lychee followed by the calibration and validation of the model with independent experimental datasets...

Hypothermia in a trauma patient has been associated with increased morbidity and mortality and is more frequently seen in those sustaining traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). Acidosis is an important consequence of hypothermia that leads to derangements across the spectrum of the coagulation cascade. Here, we present a case of a 31-year-old male presented after suffering a right parietal penetrating ballistic injury with an associated subdural hematoma and 7 mm midline shift requiring decompressive craniectomy and external ventricular drain (EVD) placement in the setting of severe hypothermia (28°C) and acidosis (pH 7...

BACKGROUND: Oxygenators, as used in cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) circuits, are components with good air removal properties. However, under some conditions the semipermeable characteristics of hollow fibers allow air to accidentally enter the blood side of the CPB circuit. This may occur when a fluid in motion is stopped suddenly by which the rapid change in momentum may cause a relative negative pressure drop, the so-called hammer effect. The hammer effect is not yet described in literature related to CPB...

INTRODUCTION: Neodymium-iron-boron magnets have been suggested as a contemporary method for accelerating the process of orthodontic tooth movement (OTM). A limited number of clinical trials evaluated their effectiveness in accelerating OTM which is desirable for both orthodontists and patients. The present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a low-intensity static magnetic field (SMF) in accelerating upper canine retraction movement. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Seventeen patients (mean age 20...