BACKGROUND Blast-related traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a common cause of injury in the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. How the primary blast wave affects the brain is not well understood. The aim of the present study was to examine whether blast exposure affects the cerebral vasculature in a rodent model. We analyzed the brains of rats exposed to single or multiple (three) 74.5 k...

Protecting a soldier’s head from injury is critical to function and survivability. Traditionally, combat helmets have been utilized to provide protection against shrapnel and ballistic threats, which have reduced head injuries and fatalities. However, home-made bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have been increasingly used in theatre of operations since the Iraq and Afghanistan confli...

With the rapid increase in the number of blast induced traumatic brain injuries and associated neuropsychological consequences in veterans returning from the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the need to better understand the neuropathological sequelae following exposure to an open field blast exposure is still critical. Although a large body of experimental studies have attempted to address ...

The conventional practice in open cut coal strip mining has been to blast the overburden or coal layers in separate blast events. This is done in order to maximise the benefits from throw blasting and also to limit coal losses. Each blast event usually has a particular design of hole diameters, burdens and spacings, explosive charges and blast timing in order to achieve the required blast outco...

The ability to perform genome-wide and cross-genome data analyses can dramatically reduce the time required for new biological discoveries. This raises important issues in bioinformatics database research involving data representations and data integration. Essential biological datatypes (such as sequence locations) and tools (such as the popular BLAST sequence alignment tools) are not supporte...

Estimating the costs of blasting operations is an important parameter in open-pit mining. Blasting and rock fragmentation depend on two groups of variables. The first group consists of mass properties, which are uncontrollable, and the second one is the drill-and-blast design parameters, which can be controlled and optimized. The design parameters include burden, spacing, hole length, hole diam...

Abrasive blasting materials, such as coal slag garnet and copper slag, are often used for cleaning metal surfaces to remove rust and to prepare a surface before the application of a coating. The pre-blast and post-blast (spent) abrasive materials contain traces of heavy metal constituents such as Cr, Mn, Ni, Pb Fe, and Ba. Hence, the health risk associated with the resultant particulate emissio...

OBJECTIVES The present retrospective study was performed to determine the incidence and outcome of primary blast injury and to identify possible changes over the course of the conflicts between 2003 and 2006. SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA Combat physicians treating patients injured in overseas contingency operations observed an increase in the severity of explosion injuries occurring during this pe...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the most frequent causes of combat casualties in Operations Iraqi Freedom (OIF), Enduring Freedom (OEF), and New Dawn (OND). Although less common than combat-related blast exposure, there have been significant numbers of blast injuries in civilian populations in the United States. Current United States Department of Defense (DoD) ICD-9 derived diagnoses of...

This paper aims to analyse the performance of spatial modulation (SM) techniques under imperfect channel state information (iCSI), i.e., errors in the estimation of channel coefficients. The results are compared with the classic spatial multiplexing technique V-BLAST. Furthermore, computational complexity for both SM and V-BLAST are evaluated in terms of complex-values operations under the same...