Bringing researchers to the consumer table: The process and outcomes of a consumer roundtable on telehealth.

Introduction: Despite the significant expansion and rapid uptake of telehealth services as a COVID-19 response, the pandemic restricted opportunities to involve health consumers in telehealth research. Authentic consumer and community involvement in research begins with engagement in priority-setting. We report here on the process and outcomes of a consumer-led event intended to support involvement of consumers, from early in the research process.

Prevalence of health anxiety problems in medical clinics.

Objectives: To determine the prevalence of significant health anxiety (hypochondriasis) in patients aged 16-75 in cardiology, respiratory medicine, neurological, endocrine and gastrointestinal clinics in general hospitals in London, Middlesex and North Nottinghamshire.

Method: The Health Anxiety Inventory (HAI) (short form) was administered to patients attending the five clinics over a 21 month period and all those who scored 20 or more invited to take part in a further assessment for a randomised controlled trial.

Results: Of 43,205 patients attending the clinics 28,991 (67.

Coherence of supercontinua generated by ultrashort pulses compressed in optical fibers.

Femtosecond fiber lasers together with nonlinear fibers are compact, reliable, all-fiber supercontinuum sources. Maintaining an all-fiber configuration, however, necessitates pulse compression in an optical fiber, which can lead to nonlinearities for subhundred femtosecond, nanojoule pulses. In this work we show that using large-mode-area fibers for pulse compression mitigates the nonlinearity, resulting in compressed pulses with significantly reduced satellite pulses.

Visible continuum generation using a femtosecond erbium-doped fiber laser and a silica nonlinear fiber.

Supercontinuum extending to visible wavelengths is generated in a hybrid silica nonlinear fiber pumped at 1560 nm by a femtosecond, erbium-doped fiber laser. The hybrid nonlinear fiber consists of a short length of highly nonlinear, germano-silicate fiber (HNLF) spliced to a length of photonic crystal fiber (PCF). A 2 cm length of HNLF provides an initial stage of continuum generation due to higher-order soliton compression and dispersive wave generation before launching into the PCF.

In situ scanning tunneling microscopy of corrosion of silver-gold alloys.

An in situ scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was used to observe the morphological changes accompanying the selective dissolution of Ag from low-Ag content Ag-Au alloys in dilute perchloric acid. This study was undertaken to explore the role of surface diffusion in alloy corrosion processes. These results are interpreted within the framework of the kink-ledge-terrace model of a crystal surface and a recent model of alloy corrosion based on a variant of percolation theory.