BACKGROUND Despite significant progress made in reducing dust exposures in underground coal miners in the United States, severe cases of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), including progressive massive fibrosis (PMF), continue to occur among coal miners. AIMS To identify US miners with rapidly progressive CWP and to describe their geographic distribution and associated risk factors. METHOD...

Coal miners are exposed to a wide range of genotoxic agents that can induce genome damage. In addition, miners are characterised by a high risk of the initiation of different occupational inflammatory as well as non-inflammatory diseases. The aim of this investigation is to analyse the modifying influence of occupational pulmonary inflammatory diseases on the level of chromosome aberrations (CA...

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups, i.e., it incentivizes miners to follow the protocol as prescribed....

BACKGROUND It has been suggested that health related job selection is a major cause of the healthy worker effect, and may result in inaccurate estimates of health risks of exposures in the working environment. Improved understanding of self selection, including the role of airway hyperresponsiveness, should improve accuracy in estimating occupational risks. METHODS We evaluated symptoms of th...

OBJECTIVE Diet validation research was conducted to compare the respondents' reporting of dietary intake in a food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) with intake reported in food recalls. Because the population received annual salary increments that could modify food intake, diet validation studies (DVSs) were conducted during two time intervals. DESIGN A 99-item FFQ was administered by an intervi...

In blockchain networks adopting the proof-of-work schemes, the monetary incentive is introduced by the Nakamoto consensus protocol to guide the behaviors of the full nodes (i.e., block miners) in the process of maintaining the consensus about the blockchain state. The block miners have to devote their computation power measured in hash rate in a crypto-puzzle solving competition to win the rewa...

Ataxia-telangiectasia is an autosomal recessive disease characterized by neurological and immunological symptoms, radiosensitivity and cancer predisposition. Heterozygous carriers of an ataxia-telangiectasia gene mutation are predisposed to epithelial cancers. We initiated a study to elucidate the frequency and clinical relevance of ATM gene mutations in former uranium miners exposed to high le...

The potential of coal mine dust to cause disabling pneumoconiosis has long been recognised, but research now suggests that pneumoconiosis is not the only respiratory hazard of coal mining.Over the last 30 years evidence has accumulated that miners also experience an excess of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and this has led the British Government to classify chronic bronchitis and...

Eyal and Sirer’s selfish mining strategy has demonstrated that Bitcoin system is not secure even if 50% of total mining power is held by altruistic miners [2]. Since then, researchers have been investigating either to improve the efficiency of selfish mining, or how to defend against it, typically in a single selfish miner setting. Yet there is no research on a selfish mining strategies concurr...

BACKGROUND The triple epidemic of silicosis, tuberculosis and HIV infection among migrant miners from South Africa and neighbouring countries who have worked in the South African mining industry is currently the target of regional and international control efforts. These initiatives are hampered by a lack of information on this population. METHODS This study analysed the major South African m...