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While New York has banned fracking, new and expanded natural gas pipelines are being constructed across the state. Our previous studies have reported that compressor stations are a major source of air pollution at fracking sites. We have used two federal datasets, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency&rsquo, s (EPA) National Emissions Inventory and Greenhouse Gas Inventory, to determine what is known concerning emissions from the compressor stations along natural gas pipelines in the state. From a total of 74 compressor stations only 18 report to EPA on emissions. In the seven year period between 2008 and 2014 they released a total of 36.99 million pounds of air pollutants, not including CO2 and methane. This included emissions of 39 chemicals known to be human carcinogens. There was in addition 6.1 billion pounds of greenhouse gases release from ten stations in a single year. These data clearly underestimate the total releases from the state&rsquo, s natural gas transportation and distribution system. However, they demonstrate significant releases of air pollutants, some of which are known to cause human disease. In addition, they release large amounts of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

Purpose To describe the clinical and molecular findings of an Italian family with a new mutation in the choroideremia (CHM) gene. Methods We performed a comprehensive ophthalmologic examination, fundus photography, macular optical coherence tomography, perimetry, electroretinography, and fluorescein angiography in an Italian family. The clinical diagnosis was supported by western blot analysis of lymphoblastoid cell lines from patients with CHM and carriers, using a monoclonal antibody against the 415 C-terminal amino acids of Rab escort protein-1 (REP-1). Sequencing of the CHM gene was undertaken on genomic DNA from affected men and carriers; the RNA transcript was analyzed with reverse transcriptase-PCR. Results The affected men showed a variability in the rate of visual change and in the degree of clinical and functional ophthalmologic involvement, mainly age-related, while the women displayed aspecific areas of chorioretinal degeneration. Western blot did not show a detectable amount of normal REP-1 protein in affected men who were hemizygous for a novel mutation, c.819+2T>A at the donor splicing site of intron 6 of the CHM gene; the mutation was confirmed in heterozygosity in the carriers. Conclusions Western blot of the REP-1 protein confirmed the clinical diagnosis, and molecular analysis showed the new in-frame mutation, c.819+2T>A, leading to loss of function of the REP-1 protein. These results emphasize the value of a diagnostic approach that correlates genetic and ophthalmologic data for identifying carriers in families with CHM. An early diagnosis might be crucial for genetic counseling of this type of progressive and still untreatable disease.

Introduction: Accomodative esotropia is secondary to inappropriate convergence during accomodative effort in an uncorrected hyperope and is often familial. Case presentation: we report the case of 20 year old Caucasian patient with congenital esotropia alternating, of 30 prism diopters distance (5 m) and 40 prism diopters of esotropia at near, in both eyes. Measures: Was performed strabismus, in peribulbar anesthesia, the right medial rectus was cashed 3.0mm, the left medial rectus was collected 3.5 mm. Results: Immediately after surgery, the patient complained of intermittent diplopia, resolved with orthotic exercise which stimulated binocular vision, Conclusion: This case report suggests that the surgical correction strabismus, should be considered with due caution in the treatment of congenital esotropia alternating and branches, and in some clinical scenarios selected to avoid the complication of postoperative diplopia, that in the case report resolved so benign. After three months surgical treatmen, remains a small angle strabismus aesthetically acceptable, has not given double vision and remains abnormal retinal correspondence with orthotic exercise.

The aims of the study were to study: (i) affective temperaments in open-angle glaucoma (OAG) patients with some degree of functional visual impairment; (ii) psychological well-being and perceived disability, and their associations with affective temperaments; and (iii) associations between visual impairment, affective temperaments and psychological well-being.Participants were 91 outpatients (39 women, and 52 men) with open-angle glaucoma (OAG) who were assessed for Visual Field Index, Mean Defect and Pattern Standard Deviation. Patients were also administered the Beck Hopelessness Scale, the TEMPS-A (Rome), the Gotland Male Depression Scale, the Emotional Well-being Scale, the Perceived Disability Questionnaire and the Suicidal History Self-Rating Screening Scale.Open-angle glaucoma patients (compared with a non-clinical sample of university students) had higher scores on the TEMP-A dysthimic and hyperthimic traits and lower scores on cyclothimic, irritability and anxiety traits. Such temperament variability was not linked to differences in severity of glaucoma. We did not find strong evidence supporting the fact that measures of visual impairment were linked to emotional well-being and depression. However, logistic regression analysis revealed that patients may have different patterns related to their illness according to specific temperaments.Patients with OAG may have different temperament profiles than non-clinical individuals. Such categorisation may be useful for predicting how they face the illness, for providing better care as well as for early recognition of mood disorders symptoms.

Glaucoma is a long-term ocular neuropathy defined by optic disc or retinal nerve fiber structural abnormalities and visual-field defects. Treatment for glaucoma consists of reducing intraocular pressure (IOP) to an acceptable target range to prevent further optic-nerve damage. Currently available treatments include topical drug (single then multidrug combinations) followed, for those patients on maximal tolerated medical therapy who still need additional IOP reduction, by laser treatments. These included laser iridotomy, laser trabeculoplasty, laser iridoplasty, laser cyclophotocoagulation. Although the various types of laser enjoyed great success as glaucoma therapy for many years, recently the excimer laser trabeculotomy is a promising IOP-lowering technique.

Hydrodynamic models are important tools in civil and environmental engineering. When properly calibrated, numerical flow simulations are helpful to study the impact of floods as natural hazards for the built environment, or as inundation dynamics connecting riparian corridors (e.g., restored) and the surrounding floodplain. However, measuring flow variables in large rivers during high flows is problematic, thus limiting the calibration and the performances of 2D models specifically to low flow conditions. In this work we use automatic pattern recognition analysis together with digital mapping, to design and test a low cost non-invasive calibration technique for 2D hydrodynamic models. The novelty and advantage of this method is that it does not require previous image orthorectification, which is known to be problematic in the case of low viewpoint shooting angles. We used a sequence of high-resolution photographs of the Thur river restored reach near Altikon (Switzerland), which were taken from an observation tower during the recession limb of a flood. A quasi-automatic algorithm for pattern recognition was developed to first recognize and isolate from the digital pictures the current amount of exposed gravel bars at each flowrate. The next step was to convert the size of the pixels of the digital picture into the effective exposed area by using an experimentally built 3D mapping function together with the actual Digital Terrain Model of the river reach. The inundation patterns resulting from flow simulations obtained for different roughness coefficients from the 2-D hydrodynamic model BASEMENT (http://www.basement.ethz.ch/) were then compared with those obtained from the digital photographs. This allowed for building an error function that uses the amount of simulated versus actual exposed area of gravel bars as the flow (and time) dependent variable for calibrating the roughness coefficient over the entire range of observed flows. The interesting results from this cheap and limited time consuming approach make its use promising and of broader application than just in the REstored CORridor Dynamics Project (RECORD, http://www.cces.ethz.ch/projects/nature/Record) where it has been developed.

Vegetation roots are known to increase soil stability on hillslopes, crops and river banks, thus reducing slide hazards, surface erosion and general processes affecting lateral channel migration. Many studies have tackled this classical engineering problem from either experimental or modelling viewpoints, in general describing the role of roots entanglement of soil particles as an additional cohesion, though non-physical. On river bedforms, the alluvial material on which pioneering plants grow is often non-cohesive. Moreover, both local and non-local erosion processes drive the mechanisms of vegetation uprooting. While the first are influenced by the ratio between non-porous obstacles diameter vs sediment grain size, the second have rather a morphodynamic origin, and are responsible for the onset and migration of alluvial bedforms. In both cases, ablation of particles does not occur as the failure of a volume along preferential sliding planes, but rather gradually when local hydrodynamic bed shear stress conditions exceed some critical value. Hence, classic soil stability models are inadequate to assess the role of roots on stabilizing riverbed sediment, and experimental methods are also not well established. This study proposes an analysis of the data available from the experimental setup of (Pasquale et al. 2011, Pasquale et al. in press), in order to inquire the effect of root reinforcement of river bedforms alluvial material. We compared the amount of sediment scouring recorded inside square plots (4 m(2)) with growing Salix cuttings with that occurring around them and caused by pure morphodynamic erosion, i.e. under the absence of obstacles inducing either deposition or erosion. We show that for those cases where the aforesaid assumptions hold, then bedload transport models can be used in an inverse way in order to explain the reduced erosion in the presence of roots as an increased critical shear stress condition, which might be more useful to morphodynamic modelling purposes. We discuss the accuracy of the proposed methodology in relation to data availability, and propose improvements to design more effective laboratory experiments.

The statistical methods used in occupational health studies were evaluated by analyzing the papers published from 1986 to 1990 in the proceedings of the annual meetings of the Italian Society of Occupational Medicine and Industrial Hygiene, in order to calculate the degree of understanding of the readers provided with only one-sided knowledge of statistical subjects and to improve the educational objectives in postgraduate schools of occupational health. Almost 70% of the 1151 articles reviewed contained some kind of statistical analysis: methods more complicated than descriptive statistics were used in about 35%. Student's t test (15%) and chi square (12%) were the most common methods. Other methods were less frequently used, so that it was possible to estimate that the learning of any new method would improve the understanding of about 1-2% of the articles. A wider use of statistical methods in data analysis is recommended; the attainment of a higher level of statistical knowledge should be a priority target in occupational health training.

The use of riparian tree cuttings for river rehabilitation relies on a good understanding of cutting survival and growth responses to environmental variables. A series of experiments aimed at studying the effects of water table fluctuation induced by streamflow variability on the development of below-ground biomass of riparian tree cuttings was performed on the Thur River (Switzerland). White willow (Salix alba) cuttings were installed in gravel bar plots at various locations to develop an understanding of how topography and flow variability control cutting root development strategies, which in turn can lead to observed different vertical root density distributions in response to varying forms of tropism. In particular, we show that the transient root growth dynamics, eventually create a distribution reflecting the hydrologic conditions experienced towards the end of the growing season. A scaling relationship is presented that is useful to predict the expected depth with the highest root density as a function of soil topography and river discharge statistics. The results have implications for predicting cutting survival and growth, along with a corresponding strengthening of the alluvial sediment, in different flow regimes. This approach is therefore useful to incorporate in morphodynamic models covering the ecological and hydraulics responses of below-ground biomass to floods. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Breathing is an involuntary action by the human body, and irregularities in breathing suggest possible respiratory disorders. This paper proposes a signal-noise separation algorithm for estimating the Oxygen partial pressure pression, an important respiratory parameter, by means of Kalman filtering. This technique is considered a powerful method to detect and isolate signal noise and it represents one of the most significant approach for multisensory data fusion measurements. Our results show that this technique can effectively filter out sensor noise.

Riparian vegetation influences hydraulic and morphodynamic river processes and may contribute to sediment stabilization. In turn, vegetation recruitment and growth on non-cohesive fluvial deposits strongly depends on river hydrology and the ability of roots to develop and to anchor efficiently to resist flow erosion. In this paper, we examine the above-ground and the below-ground seasonal growth dynamics of Salix cuttings in relation to local river hydrodynamics and morphodynamics, on the basis of a detailed and unique data set. During the two season-long campaigns in 2009 and 2010, 1188 and 1152 cuttings, respectively, were organized in square plots and planted on a gravel island of the restored reach of the River Thur (Neunforn, Thurgau, Switzerland). Each year, all cuttings were monitored almost regularly from the beginning until the end of the growing season (April-September). Root development statistics were also obtained from high-resolution scanner analysis of carefully uprooted samples from selected plots. Our results show how cutting survival and the nature and strength of correlations between island topography and cutting growth statistics depend on river hydrology. An empirical functional form that links root development based on the measured main stem length is then proposed for predictive purposes. Cutting mortality following flood events is shown to depend nonlinearly on both erosion and deposition processes, whereas it appears more linearly related to the magnitude of the bed shear stress distribution generated by the maximum seasonal flood. This analysis allows an identification of an important threshold for plant survival within different erosion and deposition regimes, which explains the spatial and temporal distribution of the surviving cuttings within the plots. These results have practical implications, for instance, for evaluating, planning and managing the use of riparian trees in restoration projects. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.