Angiocardiographic and hemodynamic study of transverse
Cardiopulmonary hemodynamics in dogs under transverse acceleration studied in terms of changes in heart and lungs
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Cardiopulmonary hemodynamics in dogs under transverse acceleration studied in terms of changes in heart and lungs
Experimental subjects wore goggles that restricted monocular vision to a luminous line fixed relative to the head, and they were exposed on one occasion to a straight-ahead acceleration of an aircraft and on another occasion to a tilting chair. The magnitude of change of direction of the resultant acceleration was the same on both occasions, but the perceived movement of the luminous line from the two stimuli was very different. In response to the aircraft stimulus, the oculogravic illusion was experienced and the luminous line was perceived as tilting relative to the subject, in response to the tilting chair stimulus, the line was perceived as remaining fixed relative to the subject. It was concluded that the oculogravic illusion, as experienced in the aircraft (and previously in centrifuges), is a true illusion and not merely a fact of physics.
The horizontal angular vestibuloocular reflex (VOR) evoked by high-frequency, high-acceleration rotations was studied in four squirrel monkeys after unilateral labyrinthectomy. Spontaneous nystagmus was measured at the beginning and end of each testing session. During the period that animals were kept in darkness (4 days), the nystagmus at each of these times measured approximately 20 degrees /s. Within 18-24 h after return to the light, the nystagmus (measured in darkness) decreased to 2.8 +/- 1.5 degrees /s (mean +/- SD) when recorded at the beginning but was 20.3 +/- 3.9 degrees /s at the end of the testing session. The latency of the VOR measured from responses to steps of acceleration (3,000 degrees /s(2) reaching a velocity of 150 degrees /s) was 8.4 +/- 0.3 ms for responses to ipsilesional rotations and 7.7 +/- 0.4 ms for contralesional rotations. During the period that animals were kept in darkness after the labyrinthectomy, the gain of the VOR measured during the steps of acceleration was 0.67 +/- 0.12 for contralesional rotations and 0.39 +/- 0.04 for ipsilesional rotations. Within 18-24 h after return to light, the VOR gain for contralesional rotations increased to 0.87 +/- 0.08, whereas there was only a slight increase for ipsilesional rotations to 0.41 +/- 0. 06. A symmetrical increase in the gain measured at the plateau of head velocity was noted after the animals were returned to light. The VOR evoked by sinusoidal rotations of 2-15 Hz, +/-20 degrees /s, showed a better recovery of gain at lower (2-4 Hz) than at higher (6-15 Hz) frequencies. At 0.5 Hz, gain decreased symmetrically when the peak amplitude was increased from 20 to 100 degrees /s. At 10 Hz, gain was decreased for ipsilesional half-cycles and increased for contralesional half-cycles when velocity was raised from 20 to 50 degrees /s. A model incorporating linear and nonlinear pathways was used to simulate the data. Selective increases in the gain for the linear pathway accounted for the recovery in VOR gain for responses at the velocity plateau of the steps of acceleration and for the sinusoidal rotations at lower peak velocities. The increase in gain for contralesional responses to steps of acceleration and sinusoidal rotations at higher frequencies and velocities was due to an increase in the contribution of the nonlinear pathway. This pathway was driven into cutoff and therefore did not affect responses for rotations toward the lesioned side.
Caveolae are plasmalemmal domains enriched with cholesterol, caveolins, and signaling molecules. Endothelial cells in vivo are continuously exposed to shear conditions, and their caveolae density and location may be different from that of static cultured cells. Here, we show that chronic shear exposure regulates formation and localization of caveolae and caveolin-1 in bovine aortic endothelial cells (BAEC). Chronic exposure (1 or 3 days) of BAEC to laminar shear increased the total number of caveolae by 45-48% above static control. This increase was due to a rise in the luminal caveolae density without changing abluminal caveolae numbers or increasing caveolin-1 mRNA and protein levels. Whereas some caveolin-1 was found in the plasma membrane in static-cultured cells, it was predominantly localized in the Golgi. In contrast, chronic shear-exposed cells showed intense caveolin-1 staining in the luminal plasma membrane with minimum Golgi association. The preferential luminal localization of caveolae may play an important role in endothelial mechanosensing. Indeed, we found that chronic shear exposure (preconditioning) altered activation patterns of two well-known shear-sensitive signaling molecules (ERK and Akt) in response to a step increase in shear stress. ERK activation was blunted in shear preconditioned cells, whereas the Akt response was accelerated. These results suggest that chronic shear stimulates caveolae formation by translocating caveolin-1 from the Golgi to the luminal plasma membrane and alters cell signaling responses.
Human response to angular acceleration, discussing implications for motion capability in flight simulator
Animals physiological responses to gravity chronic acceleration
Research program provides better understanding of pyrotechnic phenomenon for design purposes. Evaluating potential for damage to spacecraft by activation of pyrotechnic mechanisms, pyrotechnic-shock tests conducted on three configurations: pin pullers on orthogonal double Hopkinson bar arrangement; pin pullers on mockup of Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) structure; and section of separation joint on single Hopkinson bar. Strains and accelerations measured. Strains converted to output stresses, forces, and moments. Acceleration shock-response spectra obtained for both acceleration and force signals. Results of research useful to designers in making comparison and evaluation tests before committing to costly spacecraft hardware.
Long term spaceflight and habitation of a space station and/or the moon require that astronauts be provided with sufficient environmental and physiological support so that they can not only function in microgravity but be returned to earth safely. As the duration of habitation in microgravity increase the effects of the concomitant deconditioning of body systems becomes a concern for added exercise in space and for reentry to Earth gravity. Many countermeasures have been proposed to maintain proper functioning of the body, but none have proved sufficient, especially when the cost of crew time spent in these activities is considered. The issue of appropriate countermeasures remains unresolved. Spaceflight deconditioning decreases tolerance to +Gz acceleration, head to foot, the direction which is experienced during reentry; the result is that the crew member is more prone to becoming pre-syncopal or syncopal, thus exacerbating the orthostatic intolerance. All ground-based research using microgravity analogues has produced this same lowered G tolerance. When intermittent exposure to +1 to +4 Gz acceleration training was used, some alleviation of orthosatic intolerance and negative physiological effects of deconditioning occurred. Exercise alone was not as effective; but the added G force was. The physiological responses to acceleration added to exercise training have not been clearly shown. We will test the hypothesis that there will be no difference in the exercise oxygen uptake-exercise load relationship with added +Gz acceleration. We wi also compare oxygen uptake during graded exercise-acceleration loads in the human-powered short arm centrifuge with those from normal supine exercise loads. The human-powered short arm centrifuge was built by NASA engineers at Ames Research Center.
Compound action potentials of the vestibular nerve were measured from the surface of the scalp in 148 chickens (Gallus domesticus). Ages ranged from incubation day 18 (E18) to 22 days posthatch (P22). Responses were elicited using linear acceleration cranial pulses. Response thresholds decreased at an average rate of -0.45 dB/day. The decrease was best fit by an exponential model with half-maturity time constant of 5.1 days and asymptote of approximately -25.9 dB re:1.0 g/ms. Mean threshold approached within 3 dB of the asymptote by ages P6-P9. Similarly, response latencies decreased exponentially to within 3% of mature values at ages beyond P9. The half-maturity time constant for peripheral response peak latencies P1, N1, and P2 was comparable to thresholds and ranged from approximately 4.6 to 6.2 days, whereas central peaks (N2, P3, and N3) ranged from 2.9 to 3.4 days. Latency-intensity slopes for P1, N1, and P2 tended to decrease with age, reaching mature values within approximately 100 hours of hatching. Amplitudes increased as a function of age with average growth rates for response peaks ranging from 0.04 to 0.09 microV/day. There was no obvious asymptote to the growth of amplitudes over the ages studied. Amplitude-intensity slopes also increased modestly with age. The results show that gravity receptors are responsive to transient cranial stimuli as early as E19 in the chicken embryo. The functional response of gravity receptors continues to develop for many days after all major morphological structures are in place. Distinct maturational processes can be identified in central and peripheral neural relays. Functional improvements during maturation may result from refinements in the receptor epithelia, improvements in central and peripheral synaptic transmission, increased neural myelination, as well as changes in the mechanical coupling between the cranium and receptor organ.
Proposed electromechanical infrared detector improved version of device described in "Micromachined Electron-Tunneling Infrared Detectors" (NPO-18413). Fabrication easier, and undesired sensitivity to acceleration reduced. In devices, diaphragms and other components made of micromachined silicon, and displacements of diaphragms measured by electron tunneling displacement transducer {see "Micromachined Tunneling Accelerometer" (NPO-18513)}. Improved version offers enhanced frequency response and less spurious response to acceleration.
The primary objective of the Space Acceleration Measurement Systems (SAMS) project is to provide an acceleration measurement system capable of serving a wide variety of space experiments. The design of the system being developed under this project takes into consideration requirements for experiments located in the middeck, in the orbiter bay, and in Spacelab. In addition to measuring, conditioning, and recording accelerations, the system will be capable of performing complex calculations and interactive control. The main components consist of a remote triaxial optical storage device. In operation, the triaxial sensor head produces output signals in response to acceleration inputs. These signals are preamplified, filtered and converted into digital data which is then transferred to optical memory. The system design is modular, facilitating both software and hardware upgrading as technology advances. Two complete acceleration measurement flight systems will be build and tested under this project.
The utility of Design Spectrum Analysis is to give a mode by mode characterization of the behavior of a design under a given loading. The theory of design spectrum is discussed after operations are explained. User instructions are taken up here in three parts: Transient Preface, Maximum Envelope Spectrum, and RMS Average Spectrum followed by a Summary Table. A single DMAP ALTER packet will provide for all parts of the design spectrum operations. The starting point for getting a modal break-down of the response to acceleration loading is the Modal Transient rigid format. After eigenvalue extraction, modal vectors need to be isolated in the full set of physical coordinates (P-sized as opposed to the D-sized vectors in RF 12). After integration for transient response the results are scanned over the solution time interval for the peak values and for the times that they occur. A module called SCAN was written to do this job, that organizes these maxima into a diagonal output matrix. The maximum amplifier in each mode is applied to the eigenvector of each mode which then reveals the maximum displacements, stresses, forces and boundary reactions that the structure will experience for a load history, mode by mode. The standard NASTRAN output processors have been modified for this task. It is required that modes be normalized to mass.
Solar flares often accelerate ions and electrons to relativistic energies. The details of the acceleration process are not well understood, but until recently the main trend was to divide the acceleration process into two phases. During the first phase elctrons and ions are heated and accelerated up to several hundreds of keV simultaneously with the energy release. These mildly relativistic electrons interact with the ambient plasma and magnetic fields and generate hard X-ray and radio radiation. The second phase, usually delayed from the first by several minutes, is responsible for accelerating ions and electrons to relativistic energies. Relativistic electrons and ions interact with the solar atmosphere or escape from the Sun and generate gamma ray continuum, gamma ray line emission, neutron emission or are detected in space by spacecraft. In several flares the second phase is coincident with the start of a type 2 radio burst that is believed to be the signature of a shock wave. Observations from the Solar Maximum Mission spacecraft have shown, for the first time, that several flares accelerate particles to all energies nearly simultaneously. These results posed a new theoretical problem: How fast are shocks and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence formed and how quickly can they accelerate ions to 50 MeV in the lower corona? This problem is discussed.
Unconventional multi-core processors (e.g., IBM Cell B/E and NYIDIDA GPU) have emerged as accelerators in climate simulation. However, climate models typically run on parallel computers with conventional processors (e.g., Intel and AMD) using MPI. Connecting accelerators to this architecture efficiently and easily becomes a critical issue. When using MPI for connection, we identified two challenges: (1) identical MPI implementation is required in both systems, and; (2) existing MPI code must be modified to accommodate the accelerators. In response, we have extended and deployed IBM Dynamic Application Virtualization (DAV) in a hybrid computing prototype system (one blade with two Intel quad-core processors, two IBM QS22 Cell blades, connected with Infiniband), allowing for seamlessly offloading compute-intensive functions to remote, heterogeneous accelerators in a scalable, load-balanced manner. Currently, a climate solar radiation model running with multiple MPI processes has been offloaded to multiple Cell blades with approx.10% network overhead.
The largest and most efficient particle accelerators in the solar system are the giant events consisting of a fast coronal mass ejection (CME) and an intense X-class solar flare. Both flares and CMEs can produce l0(exp 32) ergs or more in nonthermal particles. Two general processes are believed to be responsible: particle acceleration at the strong shock ahead of the CME, and reconnection-driven acceleration in the flare current sheet. Although shock acceleration is relatively well understood, the mechanism by which flare reconnection produces nonthermal particles is still an issue of great debate. We address the question of CME/flare particle acceleration in the context of the breakout model using 2.5D MHD simulations with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). The AMR capability allows us to achieve ultra-high numerical resolution and, thereby, determine the detailed structure and dynamics of the flare reconnection region. Furthermore, we employ newly developed numerical analysis tools for identifying and characterizing magnetic nulls, so that we can quantify accurately the number and location of magnetic islands during reconnection. Our calculations show that flare reconnection is dominated by the formation of magnetic islands. In agreement with many other studies, we find that the number of islands scales with the effective Lundquist number. This result supports the recent work by Drake and co-workers that postulates particle acceleration by magnetic islands. On the other hand, our calculations also show that the flare reconnection region is populated by numerous shocks and other indicators of strong turbulence, which can also accelerate particles. We discuss the implications of our calculations for the flare particle acceleration mechanism and for observational tests of the models.
Physiological criteria as index of response to stress of chronic acceleration in chickens
We present observations of energetic ions (E approximately 1 MeV) from the Ulysses spacecraft during its first pass from the ecliptic plane to the southern high-latitude regions of the heliosphere. At latitudes less than approximately 13 deg S Ulysses was completely immersed in the heliomagnetic streamer belt, and observed a approximately 1 MeV proton intensity which showed little evidence of a periodic structure. Between approximately 13 deg S and approximately 29 deg S Ulysses observed one dominant recurrent co-rotating interaction region, its reverse shocks being mainly responsible for accelerating the approximately 1 MeV protons. At approximately 29 deg S the spacecraft left this region and entered the solar wind flow from the polar coronal hole. From approximately 29 deg up to approximately 45 deg S, reverse shocks from this and other interaction regions were still being observed. Accelerated energetic ions, with proton-to-alpha ratio signatures consistent with having been accelerated by the reverse shocks of these co-rotating interacting regions, were still being observed up to latitudes of approximately 50 deg S.
We investigate the origins and the transport of ions observed in the near-Earth plasma sheet during the growth and expansion phases of a magnetospheric substorm that occurred on November 24, 1996. Ions observed at Geotail were traced backward in time in time-dependent magnetic and electric fields to determine their origins and the acceleration mechanisms responsible for their energization. Results from this investigation indicate that, during the growth phase of the substorm, most of the ions reaching Geotail had origins in the low latitude boundary layer (LLBL) and had alread@, entered the magnetosphere when the growth phase began. Late in the growth phase and in the expansion phase a higher proportion of the ions reaching Geotail had their origin in the plasma mantle. Indeed, during the expansion phase more than 90% of the ions seen by Geotail were from the mantle. The ions were accelerated enroute to the spacecraft; however, most of the ions' energy gain was achieved by non-adiabatic acceleration while crossing the equatorial current sheet just prior to their detection by Geotail. In general, the plasma mantle from both southern and northern hemispheres supplied non-adiabatic ions to Geotail, whereas the LLBL supplied mostly adiabatic ions to the distributions measured by the spacecraft.