There is growing concern over the safety of artificial turf when it comes to the incidence of player injuries. The artificial surfaces can withstand more play, are cheaper to maintain, and are more predictable. However, there is concern that this beneficial durability comes at the expense of the forgiveness of the surface, leading to more injuries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterbody fusion is a workhorse technique in lumbar spine surgery that facilities indirect decompression, sagittal plane realignment, and successful bony fusion. The 2 most commonly employed cage materials are titanium (Ti) alloy and polyetheretherketone (PEEK). While Ti alloy implants have superior osteoinductive properties they more poorly match the biomechanical properties of cancellous bones.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFrozen permafrost Pleistocene mammal carcasses with soft tissue remains are subject to intensive study and help elucidate the palaeoenvironment where these animals lived. Here we present an inventory of the freshwater fauna and flora found in a sediment sample from the mummified Woolly Mammoth carcass found in August 2010, from the Oyogos Yar coast near the Kondratievo River in the Laptev Sea region, Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, NE Russia. Our study demonstrates that the waterbody where the carcass was buried could be characterized as a shallow pond or lake inhabited mainly by taxa which are present in this area today, but additionally by some branchiopod crustacean taxa currently absent or unusual in the region although they exist in the arid zone of Eurasia (steppes and semi-deserts).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe address the problem of accurately locating buried utility segments by fusing data from multiple sensors using a novel Marching-Cross-Section (MCS) algorithm. Five types of sensors are used in this work: Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), Passive Magnetic Fields (PMF), Magnetic Gradiometer (MG), Low Frequency Electromagnetic Fields (LFEM) and Vibro-Acoustics (VA). As part of the MCS algorithm, a novel formulation of the extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is proposed for marching existing utility tracks from a scan cross-section (scs) to the next one; novel rules for initializing utilities based on hypothesized detections on the first scs and for associating predicted utility tracks with hypothesized detections in the following scss are introduced.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArtificial lighting is strongly associated with urbanisation and is increasing in its extent, brightness and spectral range. Changes in urban lighting have both positive and negative effects on city performance, yet little is known about how its character and magnitude vary across the urban landscape. A major barrier to related research, planning and governance has been the lack of lighting data at the city extent, particularly at a fine spatial resolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Environ Sci Health A Tox Hazard Subst Environ Eng
July 2008
To determine the consequences of applying electrokinetics to clay soils, in terms of mechanisms acting and resulting effects on the clay, tests were conducted in which an electrical gradient was applied across controlled specimens of English China Clay (ECC) using 'inert' electrodes and a 'Reverse Osmosis' water feed to the electrodes (i.e., to mimic electrokinetic stabilisation without the stabiliser added or electrokinetic remediation without the contaminant being present).
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