OBJECTIVE To test the effects of technique and attitude in pulling Christmas crackers. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS A binomial trial conducted at a Christmas-in-July dinner party involving five anonymous dinner guests, including two of the authors. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Number of wins achieved by different strategies, with a win defined as securing the larger portion of the cracker. RE...

Despite reported synergies between alumina rich supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) and limestone, previous studies have focused on up to 5% limestone content. Slag hydration in the presence of 10% limestone is reported in this paper. Hydration was followed through chemical shrinkage, calorimetry, thermal analysis, electron microscopy and X-ray powder diffraction. The results show that ...

objective: congestive heart failure (chf) has become one of the most important health care problems in western countries. this article focuses on the outpatient diagnosis and management of heart failure. we want to compare the outcome of patients who were treated with high dose diuretics in the emergency department (ed) without admission with patients who were admitted to hospital for standard ...

argyrophilic staining of nucleolar organizer regions (agnor) has been considered to be useful in the diagnosis and prognostic evaluation of different cutaneous tumors. in order to evaluate the role of the agnor technique in discriminating aggressive from non-aggressive basal cell carcinoma (bcc), paraffin-embedded histologic sections from 30 cases of aggressive bcc (bcc2) and 30 cases of non-ag...

BACKGROUND Oligohydramnios (reduced amniotic fluid) may be responsible for malpresentation problems, umbilical cord compression, concentration of meconium in the liquor, and difficult or failed external cephalic version. Simple maternal hydration has been suggested as a way of increasing amniotic fluid volume in order to reduce some of these problems. OBJECTIVES The objective of this review w...

a r t i c l e i n f o A hydration kinetics model for Portland cement is formulated based on thermodynamics of multiphase porous media. The mechanism of cement hydration is discussed based on literature review. The model is then developed considering the effects of chemical composition and fineness of cement, water–cement ratio, curing temperature and applied pressure. The ultimate degree of hyd...

BACKGROUND Hydration to prevent contrast-induced acute kidney injury (CI-AKI) induces a diagnostic delay when performing computed tomography-pulmonary angiography (CTPA) in patients suspected of having acute pulmonary embolism. AIM To analyze whether withholding hydration is non-inferior to sodium bicarbonate hydration before CTPA in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). METHODS We pe...

Quasielastic and inelastic neutron scattering have been highlighted as excellent tools for studying the hydration of cement components. Here, the complimentary application of inelastic and time-resolved quasielastic neutron scattering to investigate the reaction kinetics during the crucial first 24 h of hydration will be highlighted. Some recent results include the interaction of tricalcium and...