Weather Extremes in Modern Times

<abstract> <p>Effective approaches for modulating the evolution of cheese quality attributes are needed for mitigating challenges that are associated with fluctuating supply and demand as well as with disrupt supply chain. Proteolysis is the most important and most complex cascade of events that affects the evolution of cheese quality attributes. Information about the effects of small changes in temperature during isothermal and non-isothermal aging of Cheddar cheese at temperatures lower than 10 ℃ on proteolysis has been developed to a very limited extent. The objective of the research was to age FF and RF Cheddar cheeses for six months at different isothermal and non-isothermal time-at-temperature regimes at temperature ranging from 5 to 8 ℃ and to investigate the effects of these conditions on proteolysis. Changes in the level of cheese-N fractions that are soluble at pH 4.6, soluble in 12% TCA and soluble in 5% PTA were monitored. The proteolytic cascade during aging was significantly (p < 0.05) influenced by a combined impact of the time-at-temperature details of aging and cheese composition. The highest and lowest levels of the investigated fractions were found in cheeses that had been aged isothermally at 8 and 5 ℃, respectively. In most cases, proteolysis in the FF cheeses was to a higher extent than in the RF ones. Proteolysis during non-isothermal aging was significantly affected by the aging regime in a time-at-temperature-specific manner (p < 0.05). The results can offer new opportunities for modulating the rate of cheese aging. The demonstrated significant effect of a very small change in aging temperature on proteolysis during cheese aging also highlights the critical importance of establishing and maintaining isotropic temperature distribution in cheese aging rooms.</p> </abstract>

APD-type photo sensors are widely used in several applications when a low level of light must be measured such as phosphorescence; fluorescence measurements. In such applications, Avalanche Photo Diodes must work in the avalanche region of APD in order to achieve high light-current gain. But the curve is extremely sensitive and, so the gain changes in temperature. Under these conditions, an small change in the temperature of diode can introduce errors and increases the uncertainty because changes in output current can be produced by changes in the input signal (light) or changes in the gain of APD (due to temperature). The total uncertainty could seem too small to be taking into account but a variation of temperature less than 0.001 p.u. will introduce notable drift in output signal. Moreover, this effect is not only an offset in output signal because small thermal oscillations or sustained changes in room temperature can add to output signal as a perturbation of low or medium frequency. In this paper, a new low-cost solution (DC/T converter) is presented. This system uses the cooling capability of Peltier cells and the reliability of high frequency switching power regulators in order to guarantee a low and extremely constant temperature in an APD. In next sections, principles of operation, system blocks and experimental results will be discussed. A DC/T converter uses a power source (dc source) as input and a regulator controls the power introduced into the thermal transducer. The output variable is the temperature and, consequently, a feedback loop must be placed to inform regulator and to hold the desired value of temperature.

Precise and detailed knowledge of the dynamic characteristics of structures has become increasingly important in recent years. As a consequence, the accuracy of experimental data, which is often used to validate and to update finite element models, has become extremely important. It has been shown experimentally that small changes in ambient temperature can cause distinct variations in the natural frequencies of a lightly damped structure which, in turn, may result in significant errors in experimental and analytical results. Therefore, a good understanding of the physical driving mechanisms involved is necessary so that adequate stability control measures may be implemented. This paper presents an analytical investigation of the variations in natural frequency caused by small changes in temperature. An analytical plate dynamic model is developed accounting for the effects of temperature- dependent material properties. Changes in temperature influence Young's modulus, structural dimensions (via thermal expansion), and boundary condition effects. These change cause variations in the natural frequencies which result in marked changes in structural dynamic response at frequencies near resonance, especially when damping is low. Natural frequencies decrease linearly with increasing temperature over the limited temperature range in this study. A sensitivity analysis indicates that the temperature-dependence of Young's modulus is the dominant factor influencing the variations in natural frequency, but boundary condition effects may also be important.

Temperature is known to influence the extent of anoxic/ischemic injury in gray matter of the brain. We tested the hypothesis that small changes in temperature during anoxic exposure could affect the degree of functional injury seen in white matter, using the isolated rat optic nerve, a typical CNS white matter tract (Foster et al., 1982). Functional recovery after anoxia was monitored by quantitative assessment of the compound action potential (CAP) area. Small changes in ambient temperature, within a range of 32 to 42 degrees C, mildly affected the CAP of the optic nerve under normoxic conditions. Reducing the temperature to < 37 degrees C caused a reversible increase in the CAP area and in the latencies of all three CAP peaks; increasing the temperature to > 37 degrees C had opposite effects. Functional recovery of white matter following 60 min of anoxia was strongly influenced by temperature during the period of anoxia. The average recovery of the CAP, relative to control, after 60 min of anoxia administered at 37 degrees C was 35.4 +/- 7%; when the temperature was lowered by 2.5 degrees C (i.e., to 34.5 degrees C) for the period of anoxic exposure, the extent of functional recovery improved to 64.6 +/- 15% (p < 0.00001). Lowering the temperature to 32 degrees C during anoxic exposure for 60 min resulted in even greater functional recovery (100.5 +/- 14% of the control CAP area). Conversely, if temperature was increased to > 37 degrees C during anoxia, the functional outcome worsened, e.g., CAP recovery at 42 degrees C was 8.5 +/- 7% (p < 0.00001). Hypothermia (i.e., 32 degrees C) for 30 min immediately following anoxia at 37 degrees C did not improve the functional outcome. Many processes within the brain are temperature sensitive, including O2 consumption, and it is not clear which of these is most relevant to the observed effects of temperature on recovery of white matter from anoxic injury. Unlike the situation in gray matter, the temperature dependency of anoxic injury cannot be related to reduced release of excitotoxins like glutamate, because neurotransmitters play no role in the pathophysiology of anoxic damage in white matter (Ransom et al., 1990a). It is more likely that temperature affects the rate of ion transport by the Na(+)-Ca2+ exchanger, the transporter responsible for intracellular Ca2+ loading during anoxia in white matter, and/or the rate of some destructive intracellular enzymatic mechanism(s) activated by pathological increases in intracellular Ca2+.

quite ferocious.’ Clearly he didn’t suffer fools gladly. His acerbic wit is well illustrated in his response to a query as to how he would like the Corpus to be bound – ‘in the hide of Robin Dudley Edwards, the thickest and most impenetrable hide in Ireland’, was his answer. Like many, Binchy was disillusioned with post-war Ireland, and he viewed the state’s Irish languagerevival policy with scepticism. Daniel Binchy’s fine portrait by Sir William Orpen hangs in the DIAS. It might have been given a more prominent position in the book, where, reduced to a small scale, it is relegated to the back cover. However, it is surely appropriate that Ireland’s greatest portraitist should have been the one to paint perhaps the country’s greatest Celtic scholar. Although he is occasionally prone to digress, Professor Garvin has written a fine biography of Binchy that is at once rounded, readable and scholarly. The text is frequently enlivened by the author’s own pungent opinions. Dr Harman Murtagh is a Visiting Fellow at Athlone Institute of Technology. He writes on local and military history and is completing a study of King James II’s Irish army. Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish?, Liam Kennedy (Sallins: Merrion Press, 2016), 272 pages. Liam Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at Queen’s University Belfast. This book comprises a series of essays written over a period of twenty years, addressing some major aspects of modern Irish history. The title is based on a quote from Berthold Brecht – ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes’ – and the author casts a very cold eye on some of the heroes, and some of what he would regard as the myths, of Irish historiography. The first part of the book, under the heading ‘The Long View’, is the only one which explicitly addresses the issue of oppression. In the first chapter Kennedy introduces the concept of MOPE – the Most Oppressed People Ever – which he describes as the master template for writing about modern Ireland. In debunking this notion he observes that both Northern Ireland and the Republic are among the richest regions in the world and analyses the freedoms enjoyed in both places since the nineteenth century. He observes Spring 2017: Book Reviews 122 Studies • volume 106 • number 421 that most Irish emigration has been voluntary and resorted to for economic reasons, with none of the restrictions on freedom of movement which presented elsewhere in Europe. He concludes that whether it is location, climate, land occupancy, political and religious rights, economic welfare or violence, the Irish record is no worse than the modal European experience and is, in a variety of respects, more fortunate. The two other chapters in the first part of the book are titled ‘The Planter and the Gael’and ‘Nationalism and Unionism in Ireland’. The cultural revival of the late nineteenth century in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, placed a value on ethnic and linguistic purity and on racial origins. Yet Ireland, as a small island on the western edge of Europe, has been open to waves of warriors, predators and settlers riding in from western and northern Europe. Kennedy regards the idea of an original ethnic stem or a pure Gael as a piece of fiction and ideological make-believe. He looks at some of the cultural, ethnic and religious issues which caused unionism and nationalism to diverge in the nineteenth century. He analyses economic progress in both northern and southern Ireland in the period 1800-1914 and concludes that the north prospered over the south. He stresses the importance of industrialisation and urbanisation, without which there would not have been a sufficiently populous Protestant presence for effective opposition to home rule and the creation of the statelet of Northern Ireland. The second part of the book, ‘Famine in Ireland’, looks at comparisons which have been made between the Great Irish Famine of 1845-47 and the Shoah, and at the allegation that the British government was guilty of genocide during the famine. He makes a number of comparisons between the Irish famine and the twentieth-century Jewish Holocaust. He maintains that...

Annually resolved and absolutely dated tree-ring chronologies are the most important proxy archives to reconstruct climate variability over centuries to millennia. However, the suitability of tree-ring chronologies to reflect the “true” spectral properties of past changes in temperature and hydroclimate has recently been debated. At issue is the accurate quantification of temperature differences between early nineteenth-century cooling and recent warming. In this regard, central Europe (CEU) offers the unique opportunity to compare evidence from instrumental measurements, paleomodel simulations, and proxy reconstructions covering both the exceptionally hot summer of 2003 and the year without summer in 1816. This study uses 565 Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra) ring width samples from high-elevation sites in the Slovakian Tatra Mountains and Austrian Alps to reconstruct CEU summer temperatures over the past three centuries. This new temperature history is compared to different sets of instrumental measurements and state-of-the-art climate model simulations. All records independently reveal the coolest conditions in the 1810s and warmest after 1996, but the ring width–based reconstruction overestimates the intensity and duration of the early nineteenth-century summer cooling by approximately 1.5°C at decadal scales. This proxy-specific deviation is most likely triggered by inflated biological memory in response to reduced warm season temperature, together with changes in radiation and precipitation following the Tambora eruption in April 1815. While suggesting there exists a specific limitation in ring width chronologies to capture abrupt climate perturbations with increased climate system inertia, the results underline the importance of alternative dendrochronological and wood anatomical parameters, including stable isotopes and maximum density, to assess the frequency and severity of climatic extremes.

Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry is used to measure distributed displacement and temperature change with very high sensitivity and precision by measuring the phase change of an optical fiber sensor as a function of distance with high spatial resolution and accuracy. A fiber containing semi-continuous Bragg gratings was used as the sensor. The effective length change, or displacement, in the fiber caused by small temperature changes was measured as a function of distance with a precision of 2.4 nm and a spatial resolution of 1.5 mm. The temperature changes calculated from this displacement were measured with precision of 0.001 C with an effective sensor gauge length of 12 cm. These results demonstrate that the method employed of continuously tracking the phase change along the length of the fiber sensor enables high resolution distributed measurements that can be used to detect very small displacements, temperature changes, or strains.

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite in the Nineteenth Century: The Example of the Senillosas

The thermoelastic effect in a generic orthotropic body under adiabatic and linear elastic stress conditions induces small and reversible temperature changes that can be correlated with the stress field by means of linear relationships. Infrared techniques are mainly used to measure temperature changes on the component surface [1], while adiabatic conditions are generally achieved by applying cyclic loads above a threshold frequency. The resolution resulting from implementing a Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) technique is a combination of the infrared acquiring system resolution and of the signal post-processing procedure. State of the art infrared detectors have NETD (Noise Equivalent Temperature Difference) values ranging between 0.1 and 0.01 K. In order to further enhance the resolution and to filter out noisy components affecting the small temperature changes induced by the thermoelastic effect, the most employed signal processing technique is a lock-in analysis. This results in a narrow-band filter where the components of the measured signal at frequencies different from a reference one are identified and rejected. If the reference frequency is the loading frequency, the harmonic filtered is the one carrying the amplitude and phase information of the thermoelastic signal.

ABSTRACTStaphylococcus aureus is an opportunistic pathogen that colonizes the anterior nares of 30 to 50% of the population. Colonization is most often asymptomatic; however, self-inoculation can give rise to potentially fatal infections of the deeper tissues and blood. Like all bacteria, S. aureus can sense and respond to environmental cues and modify gene expression to adapt to specific environmental conditions. The transition of S. aureus from the nares to the deeper tissues and blood is accompanied by changes in environmental conditions, such as nutrient availability, pH, and temperature. In this study, we perform transcriptomics and proteomics on S. aureus cultures growing at three physiologically relevant temperatures, 34°C (nares), 37°C (body), and 40°C (pyrexia), to determine if small scale, biologically meaningful alterations in temperature impact S. aureus gene expression. Results show that small but definite temperature changes elicit a large-scale restructuring of the S. aureus transcriptome and proteome in a manner that, most often, inversely correlates with increasing temperature. We also provide evidence that a large majority of these changes are modulated at the posttranscriptional level, possibly by sRNA regulatory elements. Phenotypic analyses were also performed to demonstrate that these changes have physiological relevance. Finally, we investigate the impact of temperature-dependent alterations in gene expression on S. aureus pathogenesis and demonstrate decreased intracellular invasion of S. aureus grown at 34°C. Collectively, our results demonstrate that small but biologically meaningful alterations in temperature influence S. aureus gene expression, a process that is likely a major contributor to the transition from a commensal to pathogen.IMPORTANCE Enteric bacterial pathogens, like Escherichia coli, are known to experience large temperature differences as they are transmitted through the fecal oral route. This change in temperature has been demonstrated to influence bacterial gene expression and facilitate infection. Staphylococcus aureus is a human-associated pathogen that can live as a commensal on the skin and nares or cause invasive infections of the deeper tissues and blood. Factors influencing S. aureus nasal colonization are not fully understood; however, individuals colonized with S. aureus are at increased risk of invasive infections through self-inoculation. The transition of S. aureus from the nose (colonization) to the body (infection) is accompanied by a modest but definite temperature increase, from 34°C to 37°C. In this study, we investigate whether these host-associated small temperature changes can influence S. aureus gene expression. Results show widespread changes in the bacterial transcriptome and proteome at three physiologically relevant temperatures (34°C, 37°C, and 40°C).

Despite geographical distance and cultural dissimilarity, the European and Chinese sides of the early modern debate over what constitutes “fine art” start from similar premises and arrive at similar conclusions. Europeans concluded that Chinese painting should only be regarded, at best, as decorative art and never as “fine art”—and so has no place in the tradition of the grand masters, and Chinese concluded that European painting, despite its technical mastery of the secrets of visual illusion, should only be regarded as illustration and so belongs to the craft of painting and not the tradition of fine art in China, the tradition of scholar or literati painting—their version of le grand gout “grand taste.” The inability to see with different eyes or to judge except in terms of one’s own cultural and aesthetic standards, the lack of trans-cultural objectivity, all these mark both the European and the Chinese mentality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prisoners in their own cultures, each side could only think as they did. The mutual enrichment that did occur despite such limitations of taste and judgment happened on the peripheries of art and not at its core—Chinese painting added significantly to European notions of decoration and design, and European painting added significantly to the art of illustration in China, all while leaving basic standards and assumptions intact. With the confluence of decorative and fine art in Europe during the nineteenth century and with the confluence of the popular crafts and the tradition of literati painting in China during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in China, the dichotomies that so marked earlier eras began to fail, to be replaced by increasing sensitivity on both sides to the possibilities of creating new visions, new expressions, new techniques, through the amalgamation and fusion of differences.

Introduction to the Special Issue <i>Catholicism and Gender in Modern Spain</i>^†

Reviewed by: The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840 Thomas Bartlett The Bible War in Ireland: the "Second Reformation" and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800-1840. By Irene Whelan. [History of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora.] (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 347. $60.00.) This is a significant book that breaks new ground in its description, analysis, and contextualization of Protestant and Catholic hatred (not too strong a word for it) for each other in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Ireland. It makes a valuable contribution to an understanding of the origins of what was to become the endemic sectarianization of Irish society. And it offers an important perspective on the phenomenon of anti-Catholicism in Britain and the United States in the later nineteenth century. The book's main theses are based on a very extensive study of the main documentary archives—notable use being made in particular of the Methodist Missionary Society papers—and also of the published religious ephemera produced by the contending parties. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the emergence of an Irish Catholic identity in the nineteenth century and in Protestant-Catholic relations in that period not only in Ireland but in the Anglophone world. Dr. Whelan examines the emergence in Ireland in the last decade of the eighteenth century of a strong Protestant evangelical movement which took as its objective the conversion of the priest-dominated Irish Catholics. This was a task that had been talked about and even acted upon fitfully since the late sixteenth century, but the results had been, to say the least, disappointing. By 1790 Ireland was infinitely more "Catholic" than she had been two hundred years earlier. This stark fact was a standing reproof to the Protestant Ascendancy that had governed Ireland since the seventeenth century, but until the late eighteenth century there had been for some time a weary, and indeed wary, acceptance that it might not be possible or indeed advisable, to do anything about it. In the 1790's, however, the shattering experience of polarized community relations and religious mayhem culminating in the 1798 rebellion—widely depicted as a sectarian civil war—forced a re-think. One lesson from the rebellion was that Protestantism could never be safe while the mass of the people remained in thrall to their priests, and hence a strong evangelical movement embracing not just Methodists but also key personnel in the Church of Ireland was got under way. This was to culminate in the 1822 declaration of the absolute necessity for a "Second Reformation" by the newly installed Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, William Magee. The Catholic Church, experiencing a resurgence in the early nineteenth century, and under the redoubtable leadership of Bishop James Doyle of Kildare and Leighlin fought back against what it saw as a declaration of war. It was no coincidence that this confessional conflict in the 1820's overlapped with the campaign for Catholic Emancipation led by Daniel O'Connell. Each drew upon the other, each sharpened the bitterness with which the debates and the elections were conducted, and when the contest ebbed religion and politics were inextricably [End Page 990] linked for the forseeable future. The "Bible War'' may have peaked in the 1830's, as Dr. Whelan argues, but it continued diminuendo for many decades and arguably formed the crucible of modern Irish Catholic identity. By the 1830's to be Irish was to Catholic and, in Ireland, to be Catholic was to be Irish, a synchronicity which had not been the case in the mid-eighteenth century, but which was to persist by and large to the present day. Thomas Bartlett University College Dublin Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Thermography of the Chest

Non-invasive detection of small temperature changes (C) is pivotal to the further advance of regional hyperthermia as a treatment modality for deep-seated tumours. Magnetic resonance (MR) thermography methods are considered to be a promising approach. Four methods exploiting temperature-dependent parameters were evaluated in phantom experiments. The investigated temperature indicators were spin-lattice relaxation time , diffusion coefficient D, shift of water proton resonance frequency (water PRF) and resonance frequency shift of the methoxy group of the praseodymium complex (Pr probe). The respective pulse sequences employed to detect temperature-dependent signal changes were the multiple readout single inversion recovery (T One by Multiple Read Out Pulses; TOMROP), the pulsed gradient spin echo (PGSE), the fast low-angle shot (FLASH) with phase difference reconstruction, and the classical chemical shift imaging (CSI). Applying these sequences, experiments were performed in two separate and consecutive steps. In the first step, calibration curves were recorded for all four methods. In the second step, applying these calibration data, maps of temperature changes were generated and verified. With the equal total acquisition time of approximately 4 min for all four methods, the uncertainties of temperature changes derived from the calibration curves were less than C (Pr probe C, water PRF C, C and C). The corresponding maps of temperature changes exhibited slightly higher errors but still in the range or less than C (C, C, C, C respectively). The calibration results indicate the Pr probe method to be most sensitive and accurate. However, this advantage could only be partially transferred to the thermographic maps because of the coarse matrix of the classical CSI sequence. Therefore, at present the water PRF method appears to be most suitable for MR monitoring of small temperature changes during hyperthermia treatment.