In an effort to improve the fitness of youths, extensive "body building," "conditioning," or "toughening" programs have been advised and developed. Unfortunately little has been done to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs. Our experience with the testing of athletes2' 4 strengthened our belief that in order significantly to increase fitness a body-building program would have to be stre...

Using Monte Carlo simulation, we analyse the behaviour of two-dimensional hard rods in four different types of geometric confinement: (i) a slit pore where the particles are confined between two parallel walls with homeotropic anchoring; (ii) a hybrid slit pore formed by a planar and a homeotropic wall; square cavities that frustrate the orientational order by imposing either (iii) homeotropic ...

We consider a zigzag chain of coupled micropillar cavities, taking into account the polarization of polariton states. We show that the TE-TM splitting of photonic cavity modes yields topologically protected polariton edge states. During the strongly nonadiabatic process of polariton condensation, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism leads to a random choice of polarization, equivalent to the dimerization...

Here light propagation and radiation transfer of ultrafast laser pulses in heterogeneous biological tissues are simulated by use of the discrete-ordinates method (DOM). Formulations for solving the time-dependent radiation-transfer equation are deduced for three-dimensional geometries incorporating the Fresnel specularly reflecting boundary condition and characteristics of ultrafast laser pulse...

The rotating wall machine, a basic plasma physics experimental facility, has been constructed to study the role of electromagnetic boundary conditions on current-driven ideal and resistive magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, including differentially rotating conducting walls. The device, a screw pinch magnetic geometry with line-tied ends, is described. The plasma is generated by an array of 19 ...

Hydrothermal waves are longitudinal modes responsible for the onset of oscillations of low-Prandtl number flows inside end-heated cavities. We consider the flow induced by the hydrothermal wave in a rectangular enclosure whose differentially-heated side is tilted alpha degrees from the vertical position. An analytical approximation to the neutral curve and dispersion relation obtained by the Ga...

In March 2011, the UK Government mandated a 20 percent saving each year on publicly funded construction projects. That equates to £18 billion a year at total UK spend levels. So how can construction get smart and rise to the challenge?

Within the context of a first-order phase transition in the early Universe, we study the collision process for vacuum bubbles expanding in a plasma. The effects of the plasma are simulated by introducing a damping term in the equations of motion for a U(1) global field. We find that Lorentz-contracted spherically symmetric domain walls adequately describe the overdamped motion of the bubbles in...