Waterloo, Ontario — A Canadian safety group has added three posters – focused on reducing the risk of MSD injuries in the knees, shoulders and lower back – to its musculoskeletal injury prevention resource library.

Greenbelt, MD — Inspectors across North America will examine braking systems, lights, tires and other commercial motor vehicle components May 17-19 during the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s annual International Roadcheck.

Arlington, VA — As the Mine Safety and Health Administration works to develop a standard on worker exposure to respirable crystalline silica, the agency has launched an enforcement initiative aimed at boosting protections against the hazardous material.

Greenbelt, MD — Law enforcement officers will have an eye out for reckless, careless or dangerous driving July 7-13 during the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s annual Operation Safe Driver Week.

Emmitsburg, MD – Home fires occur most often during the winter, and the National Fire Protection Association and U.S. Fire Administration are educating the public on fire prevention.

Workers might be facing a number of issues during the COVID-19 crisis that can have an impact on mental health, including furloughs and layoffs, social isolation, financial hardships and worries, and health concerns for themselves and their families.

The Product Focus this month is on instruments and monitors.

East Lansing, MI — Falls involving portable ladders caused 84 on-the-job deaths from 2001 to 2021 in Michigan, prompting a new hazard alert from Michigan State University.

Washington — Optimizing the health and performance of workers’ brains is the goal of a new NIOSH initiative.

San Jose, CA — Bolstering mindfulness and emotional intelligence in the transportation industry “will help foster a felt sense of psychological safety among employees, empowering them to perform their roles effectively, efficiently and safely,” a research institute says in a new report.

C16 Biosciences, makers of Palmless™, the platform for sustainable palm oil alternatives, is ramping up its capabilities in the food category, fueled by a $3.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as a $1 million investment from Elemental Excelerator.

Join the celebration at SupplySide West on October 25th at 3 p.m., where Kyowa Hakko USA will host a special event in its booth #4165. Stop by for cake and a toast as it marks this exciting milestone.

“Whether it’s walking the factory floor, taking a stroll outside during a break or getting from one meeting to another, we’re on our feet at least part of the day,” the National Safety Council says. “With all of that foot traffic, there’s always the potential for a fall.”

Florida Food Products’ expanded health and wellness portfolio includes its natural L-theanine. Derived from the leaves of green tea, L-theanine is an amino acid associated with multiple health benefits, from improved focus and sleep1 to decreased blood pressure and promoted relaxation. FFP’s natural L-theanine is an ideal ingredient solution for a wide range of health and wellness applications including beverages, foods, supplements, nutraceuticals, and more.

Stellex’s partnership with J. Skinner will support investment into production capacity expansion, increased automation, and new product development. 

While the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends an intake of added sugar of less than 10% of daily calories, only 42% of Americans are meeting this guideline.

Prepared Foods talks off-premise foodservice trends and consumer eating patterns—with Faye Schoenherr, McCain Foods’ North American Senior Brand Manager for SureCrisp French fries.

The company successfully completed a build-out with employee-centered construction for Crown Bakeries.

Dust can occur during any stages of processing—here are products to help control it.

When you speak with David Martin, you cannot help but recognize his sense of history, place and responsibility. He is the fourth generation of Martins to work at one of the country’s largest flooring retailers. 

The National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA) has launched an updated series of sales-focused courses on its online learning platform, NWFA University (NWFAU). 

We are cruising several times a year plus at least a couple of trips to Florida each year. So far we've been buying insurance through the cruise lines but I know an annual plan would offer a better value. Would want trip cancellation coverage,...

Children's Geographies; 02/01/2022
(AN 154441555); ISSN: 14733285
Academic Search Premier

Children's Geographies; 12/01/2023
(AN 174964060); ISSN: 14733285
Academic Search Premier

Today I’ll be on Focus on the Family’s Daily Broadcast talking about what families can do while stuck home together. Focus President Jim Daly and I talk about some specific ways moms and dads can be proactive about helping their kids through these strange times. If you turn on your radio to your nearest Christian radio …

Continue reading "Talking with Focus about Families Stuck at Home Together"

The post Talking with Focus about Families Stuck at Home Together appeared first on Jonathan's Blog From The Source.

I’m a pretty proud Daddy today… I just heard my daughter Alyssa rock her interview on Focus on the Family yesterday (we record these things months prior, so I had forgot how good she was- truly amazing). You can catch the whole thing on YouTube HERE: I think my favorite part was how courageous she …

Continue reading "Did you see us on Focus?"

The post Did you see us on Focus? appeared first on Jonathan's Blog From The Source.

The Dutch Euthanasia law permits euthanasia in patients with advanced dementia lacking decisional capacity based on advance euthanasia directives. Nevertheless, physicians encounter difficulties assessing the … Read the full article ›

The post A qualitative focus group study on legal experts’ views regarding euthanasia requests based on an advance euthanasia directive was curated by information for practice.

The president of Focus on the Family says he’s “encouraged” by Tuesday’s election results even as he acknowledged both victories and setbacks for the pro-life movement.

The International Safe Transit Association (ISTA), the industry developer of pre-shipment performance testing standards for packaged products, has announced programming for its annual European Packaging Symposium, which will be held 8-9 October at the Le Méridien Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany.

X-ray mirrors for synchrotron radiation are often bent into a curved figure and work under grazing-incidence conditions due to the strong penetrating nature of X-rays to most materials. Mirrors of different cross sections have been recommended to reduce the mirror's slope inaccuracy and clamping difficulty in order to overcome mechanical tolerances. With the development of hard X-ray focusing, it is difficult to meet the needs of focusing mirrors with small slope error with the existing mirror processing technology. Deformable mirrors are adaptive optics that can produce a flexible surface figure. A method of using a deformable mirror as a phase compensator is described to enhance the focusing performance of an X-ray mirror. This paper presents an active piezoelectric plane X-ray focusing mirror with a linearly changing thickness that has the ability of phase compensation while focusing X-rays. Benefiting from its special structural design, the mirror can realize flexible focusing at different focusing geometries using a single input driving voltage. A prototype was used to measure its performance under one-dimension and two-dimension conditions. The results prove that, even at a bending magnet beamline, the mirror can easily achieve a single-micrometre focusing without a complicated bending mechanism or high-precision surface processing. It is hoped that this kind of deformable mirror will have a wide and flexible application in the synchrotron radiation field.

A high-flux sub-micrometre focusing system was constructed using multilayer focusing mirrors in Kirkpatrick–Baez geometry for 100 keV X-rays. The focusing mirror system had a wide bandwidth of 5% and a high peak reflectivity of 74%. Performance was evaluated at the undulator beamline BL05XU of SPring-8, which produced an intense 100 keV X-ray beam with a bandwidth of 1%. When the light source was focused directly in both vertical and horizontal directions, the beam size was measured to be 0.32 µm (V) × 5.3 µm (H) with a flux of 1 × 1012 photons s−1. However, when a limited horizontal slit was used to form a secondary source, the focusing beam size decreased to 0.25 µm (V) × 0.26 µm (H) with a flux of 6 × 1010 photons s−1. The 200 nm line and space patterns of a Siemens star chart made of tantalum were clearly resolved by the absorption contrast of the focused beam. This 100 keV focusing system is applicable to various fields of nondestructive analyses with sub-micrometre resolutions.

A neutron time-of-flight (TOF) powder diffractometer with a continuous wide-angle array of detectors can be electronically focused to make a single pseudo-constant wavelength diffraction pattern, thus facilitating angle-dependent intensity corrections. The resulting powder diffraction peak profiles are affected by the neutron source emission profile and resemble the function currently used for TOF diffraction.

VMXm joins the suite of operational macromolecular crystallography beamlines at Diamond Light Source. It has been designed to optimize rotation data collections from protein crystals less than 10 µm and down to below 1 µm in size. The beamline has a fully focused beam of 0.3 × 2.3 µm (vertical × horizontal) with a tuneable energy range (6–28 keV) and high flux (1.6 × 1012 photons s−1 at 12.5 keV). The crystals are housed within a vacuum chamber to minimize background scatter from air. Crystals are plunge-cooled on cryo-electron microscopy grids, allowing much of the liquid surrounding the crystals to be removed. These factors improve the signal-to-noise during data collection and the lifetime of the microcrystals can be prolonged by exploiting photoelectron escape. A novel in vacuo sample environment has been designed which also houses a scanning electron microscope to aid with sample visualization. This combination of features at VMXm allows measurements at the physical limits of X-ray crystallography on biomacromolecules to be explored and exploited.

Conic sections are commonly used in reflective X-ray optics. Hyperbolic mirrors can focus a converging light source and are frequently paired with elliptical or parabolic mirrors in Wolter type configurations. This paper derives the closed-form expression for a mirror-centered hyperbolic shape, with zero-slope at the origin. Combined with the slope and curvature, such an expression facilitates metrology, manufacturing and mirror-bending calculations. Previous works consider ellipses, parabolas, magnifying hyperbolas or employ lengthy approximations. Here, the exact shape function is given in terms of the mirror incidence angle and the source and image distances.

Hard X-ray microscopes with 20–30 nm spatial resolution ranges are an advanced tool for the inspection of materials at the nanoscale. However, the limited efficiency of the focusing optics, for example, a Fresnel zone plate (ZP) lens, can significantly reduce the power of a nanoprobe. Despite several reports on ZP lenses that focus hard X-rays with 20 nm resolution – mainly constructed by zone-doubling techniques – a systematic investigation into the limiting factors has not been reported. We report the structural effects on the focusing and imaging efficiency of 20–30 nm-resolution ZPs, employing a modified beam-propagation method. The zone width and the duty cycle (zone width/ring pitch) were optimized to achieve maximum efficiency, and a comparative analysis of the zone materials was conducted. The optimized zone structures were used in the fabrication of Pt-hydrogen silsesquioxane (HSQ) ZPs. The highest focusing efficiency of the Pt-HSQ-ZP with a resolution of 30 nm was 10% at 7 keV and >5% in the range 6–10 keV, whereas the highest efficiency of the Pt-HSQ-ZP with a resolution of 20 nm was realized at 7 keV with an efficiency of 7.6%. Optical characterization conducted at X-ray beamlines demonstrated significant enhancement of the focusing and imaging efficiency in a broader range of hard X-rays from 5 keV to 10 keV, demonstrating the potential application in hard X-ray focusing and imaging.

A delegation of high school students representing the Catawba County Youth Council and 4-H attended NC Citizenship Focus, which was held in Raleigh, where more than 200 youth and adults representing over 75 counties exchanged ideas, gained knowledge and learned through hands on experiences about the different levels and branches of government.

Cognitive training, blood pressure management for people with hypertension, and increased physical activity all show modest but inconclusive evidence that they can help prevent cognitive decline and dementia, but there is insufficient evidence to support a public health campaign encouraging their adoption, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

While a variety of services and programs exist to support the needs of children with disabilities and their families, a focus on achieving specific near- and long-term goals that help prepare for adulthood and coordination of care within and across service sectors are integral to encouraging healthy growth and development, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Decision-makers leading COVID-19 vaccine rollouts need to begin communicating with the public immediately if they have not already — emphasizing public support for vaccinations, leveraging celebrity and community champion endorsements, and focusing on those who are skeptical or hesitant of the vaccines rather than firmly opposed — to ensure demand and promote uptake, says a new rapid expert consultation from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

As it drafts its next decadal strategic plan, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) should shift its focus to providing insights that help society prepare for and avoid the worst potential consequences of climate change, while protecting the most vulnerable, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Scientific thinking and knowledge are essential to democracy and the workforce, but science education is not the national priority it needs to be. The White House, with leadership from OSTP, should encourage federal agencies, state and local governments, and others to focus resources on increasing the quality and accessibility of science education.

The Gulf Research Program has launched its first undergraduate education initiative, the Gulf Scholars Program. The five-year, $12.7 million pilot program will prepare undergraduates to address the Gulf of Mexico’s most pressing environmental, health, resilience, and infrastructure challenges.

Seasonal influenza and the next influenza pandemic could emerge at any time. Four new reports examine lessons learned from COVID-19 that can improve preparedness for an influenza pandemic, including vaccine R&D, supply chain resilience, and non-vaccine public health measures.

Six scientists have been selected for the Offshore Energy Safety track of the Early-Career Research Fellowship (ECRF), announced the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The Gulf Research Program is providing awards totaling nearly $900K to five universities for the creation of interdisciplinary architectural studio design courses that engage with the unique features of the Gulf of Mexico region, such as offshore energy safety, environmental protection and stewardship, and Gulf health and resilience.

To maintain U.S. global leadership in science and technology, federal agencies should pursue a coordinated risk-management approach that protects the United States’ own capacity to innovate, rather than emphasizing the protection of specific technologies from access by competitor nations.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry should be optimized to be a user-friendly resource and focus on improving health care quality and access for veterans and providing two-way communication between veterans who participate and the VA.

Life cycle assessments of low-carbon transportation fuels — such as electricity, biofuels, or hydrogen — are valuable tools for measuring environmental impacts, but uncertainties remain in the models that are currently used, and further research should be conducted to strengthen their reliability.

IBM Executive Director Rajesh Parameswaran outlines key trends and strategies to transform manufacturing through technology.