Dam safety is a significant issue being taken seriously worldwide. However, in Australia, although much attention is being devoted to the mediumto large-scale dams, minimal attention is being paid to the serious potential problems associated with smaller dams, particularly the potential cumulative safety threats they pose in catchments. This paper establishes the significance of this problem an...

In this paper, optimal design of arch dams is performed under frequency limitations. Colliding Bodies Optimization (CBO), a recently developed meta-heuristic optimization method, which has been successfully applied to several structural problems, is revised and utilized for finding the best feasible shape of arch dams. The formulation of CBO is derived from one-dimensional collisions between bo...

Maternal obesity prior to and during pregnancy has been associated with an increased incidence of childhood asthma. As diets rich in saturated fat are linked to obesity and inflammation, we created a murine model to investigate the effect of maternal high-fat diet (HFD) on adult offspring airway hyperreactivity (AHR), a cardinal feature of asthma. Balb/cByJ dams were fed a HFD (60% fat Calories...

Newly available data indicate that dams fragment the fluvial system of the continental United States and that their impact on river discharge is several times greater than impacts deemed likely as a result of global climate change. The 75,000 dams in the continental United States are capable of storing a volume of water almost equaling one year’s mean runoff, but there is considerable geographi...

Although the benefits of dam construction are numerous, particularly in the context of climate change and growing global demand for electricity, recent experience has shown that many dams have serious negative environmental, human, and political consequences. Despite an extensive literature documenting the benefits and costs of dams from a single disciplinary perspective, few studies have simul...

Tuberous sclerosis (TSC) is an autosomally dominant neurocutaneous disease notable for its high comorbidity with autism in human patients. Studies of murine models of tuberous sclerosis have found defects in cognition and learning, but thus far have not uncovered deficits in social behaviors relevant to autism. To explore social communication and interaction in TSC2 heterozygous mice, we record...

Undernutrition of dams and pups disrupts the retrieval efficiency of mothers. However, if the mothers are assessed in their home cages, they spend more time with their litters. In the present study the effect of test conditions on pup retrieval behavior of mothers receiving a 25% (well-nourished group) and 8% casein diet (undernourished group) was examined. In agreement with previous studies, u...

This paper looks at issues associated with estimating risk of seismically initiated failure (uncontrolled release of the reservoir) of dams that are co-located with respect to each other and the location of future earthquakes. These may be dams on the same river or dams regionally co-located on different rivers. Failure of one or more dams could lead to serial dam failures on a single river; or...

Aging infrastructure in the US has gained quite a bit of attention in the past decade. Being one type of a critical infrastructure, embankment dams in the US require significant investment to upgrade the deteriorated parts. Due to limited budgets, understanding the behavior of structures over time through risk assessment is essential to prioritize dams. During the risk assessment for embankment...