Music and Medicine Come Together Over Pain in the Air Medical Transport Environment.

Objective: This study aimed to determine if noise-canceling headphones (NCHs) with music supersedes pain reduction of other hearing protection for patients transported by Guardian Air Transport via rotor or fixed wing aircraft from 2017 to 2019.

Methods: We designed a randomized pilot study in which patients who received NCHs with or without music were compared with controls who received non-NCH hearing protection alone. Four hundred fifty-four adults 19 to 64 years of age and 36 pediatric patients 4 to 18 years old who received ≥ 1 dose of opioids were included.

The onset of star formation 250 million years after the Big Bang.

A fundamental quest of modern astronomy is to locate the earliest galaxies and study how they influenced the intergalactic medium a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The abundance of star-forming galaxies is known to decline from redshifts of about 6 to 10, but a key question is the extent of star formation at even earlier times, corresponding to the period when the first galaxies might have emerged. Here we report spectroscopic observations of MACS1149-JD1 , a gravitationally lensed galaxy observed when the Universe was less than four per cent of its present age.

Early star-forming galaxies and the reionization of the Universe.

Star-forming galaxies trace cosmic history. Recent observational progress with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope has led to the discovery and study of the earliest known galaxies, which correspond to a period when the Universe was only ∼800 million years old. Intense ultraviolet radiation from these early galaxies probably induced a major event in cosmic history: the reionization of intergalactic hydrogen.

Gravitational lensing: a unique probe of dark matter and dark energy.

I review the development of gravitational lensing as a powerful tool of the observational cosmologist. After the historic eclipse expedition organized by Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson, the subject lay observationally dormant for 60 years. However, subsequent progress has been astonishingly rapid, especially in the past decade, so that gravitational lensing now holds the key to unravelling the two most profound mysteries of our Universe-the nature and distribution of dark matter, and the origin of the puzzling cosmic acceleration first identified in the late 1990s.

The formation and assembly of a typical star-forming galaxy at redshift z approximately 3.

Recent studies of galaxies approximately 2-3 Gyr after the Big Bang have revealed large, rotating disks, similar to those of galaxies today. The existence of well-ordered rotation in galaxies during this peak epoch of cosmic star formation indicates that gas accretion is likely to be the dominant mode by which galaxies grow, because major mergers of galaxies would completely disrupt the observed velocity fields. But poor spatial resolution and sensitivity have hampered this interpretation; such studies have been limited to the largest and most luminous galaxies, which may have fundamentally different modes of assembly from those of more typical galaxies (which are thought to grow into the spheroidal components at the centres of galaxies similar to the Milky Way).

The type Ia supernova SNLS-03D3bb from a super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf star.

The accelerating expansion of the Universe, and the need for dark energy, were inferred from observations of type Ia supernovae. There is a consensus that type Ia supernovae are thermonuclear explosions that destroy carbon-oxygen white dwarf stars that have accreted matter from a companion star, although the nature of this companion remains uncertain. These supernovae are thought to be reliable distance indicators because they have a standard amount of fuel and a uniform trigger: they are predicted to explode when the mass of the white dwarf nears the Chandrasekhar mass of 1.

Nonconcave entropies from generalized canonical ensembles.

It is well known that the entropy of the microcanonical ensemble cannot be calculated as the Legendre transform of the canonical free energy when the entropy is nonconcave. To circumvent this problem, a generalization of the canonical ensemble that allows for the calculation of nonconcave entropies was recently proposed. Here, we study the mean-field Curie-Weiss-Potts spin model and show, by direct calculations, that the nonconcave entropy of this model can be obtained by using a specific instance of the generalized canonical ensemble known as the Gaussian ensemble.