Keeping the spotlight on quality from a distance

 Maintaining the quality of testing in remote locations can be demanding of laboratory resources in terms of daily visits to instruments and providing support outside of normal working hours. Recently technology and software solutions have appeared to reduce this burden for laboratory scientists dramatically. The AVL Auto QC unit, in conjunction with OMNILink software, allow laboratory staff to perform many quality control and maintenance procedures on instruments in wards and medical units from a PC in the central laboratory. Assessment of this technology and software in the Special Baby Care Unit at Bradford Royal Infirmary has demonstrated many benefits including reduction in ward visits, better support out of hours, regular quality control checks, and improved analytical quality. Received: 15 April 2000 · Accepted: 15 April 2000     

Maps from a surface into a compact Lie group and curvature

Letters in Mathematical Physics - This is a brief note on curvature properties of Sobolev Lie groups of maps from a Riemann surface into a compact Lie group K. Freed showed that, in a necessarily...     

Geography of simply connected spin symplectic 4-manifolds,II

Building upon our early work, we construct infinitely many new smooth structures on closed simply connected spin 4-manifolds with nonnegative signature.     

A finite set of generators for the Kauffman bracket skein algebra

If F is a compact orientable surface it is known that the Kauffman bracket skein module of has a multiplicative structure. Our central result is the construction of a finite set of knots which generate the module as an algebra. We can then define an integer valued invariant of compact orientable 3-manifolds which characterizes . Received November 27, 1995; in final form September 29, 1997     

In-situ flow probe for improving the performance of electrochemical stripping analysis

Submersible flow probes, originally developed for in-situ electrochemical monitoring of trace metal contaminants, are used for minimizing common problems in stripping analysis, such as overlapping signals, intermetallic effects or ohmic distortions. These problems are alleviated via an internal delivery of an appropriate solution, containing a masking ligand, a third element, or a conductive matrix. Such attention to common problems, via in-situ manipulations of the collected metal, holds great promise for environmental and industrial applications. The coupling of fluid manipulations with the stripping sensor represents the first step towards the construction of miniaturised stripping analysers on a cable.     

Fiber tracking in the cervical spine and inferior brain regions with reversed gradient diffusion tensor imaging

Diffusion tensor echo planar magnetic resonance imaging of the inferior brain regions and the spinal cord suffers from tissue-air and tissue-bone interfaces, which cause severe susceptibility-induced artifacts. These artifacts consist of image distortions in the phase encode direction and also affect signal intensity. To correct for these distortions, we used the reversed gradient method. We find that most in-plane voxel displacements in the inferior brain regions and the cervical spine can be corrected, yielding a good match of white matter fiber tracts with anatomical reference images. Furthermore, uninterrupted white matter fiber tracts going from the cervical spine up to cortical areas, derived from data acquired in a single acquisition, are presented.     

Toward high-throughput synthesis of complex natural product-like compounds in the genomics and proteomics age

In the age of high-throughput biology, novel genes and proteins are emerging quickly. The need for developing organic synthesis-derived methods that allow rapid access to polyfunctional, complex natural product-like compounds is growing constantly, largely because these small-molecule-based compounds serve as smart, powerful tools both in understanding the roles and functions of emerging biological targets and in validating their biological responses. Developing asymmetric synthesis-derived organic reactions on solid phase allows the synthesis of complex natural product-like compounds in a high-throughput manner. Solid phase organic synthesis is now commonly utilized in the library synthesis of rather simple compounds (i.e., compounds with no multiple stereogenic centers). With few exceptions, the synthesis of complex natural product-like derivatives is still in its infancy. Some recent efforts made in this area indicate opportunities yet to be explored.     

Constructing infinitely many smooth structures on $3\mathbb{CP}^2 \# n\overline{\mathbb{CP}}^2$

Using Seiberg-Witten theory and rational blow-down procedures of R. Fintushel and R.J. Stern, we construct infinitely many irreducible smooth structures, both symplectic and non-symplectic, on the four-manifold for each integer n lying in the interval . Received: 17 January 2000 / Published online: 18 January 2002