This study investigated the effects of navigation speed on the level of motion sickness during and after a 30-min head-steered virtual environment. Root-mean-squares for 8 speeds in the fore-and-aft axis were 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 24, 30, and 59 m/s. Participants were 96 Chinese men. Both the nausea and vection ratings increased significantly with speeds increasing from 3 m/s to 10 m/s. At speeds exceeding 10 m/s, the ratings stabilized. Navigation speeds were found to significantly affect the onset times of vection and nausea but did not affect their rates of increase with duration of exposure. For the various Simulator Sickness Questionnaire scores, navigation speed had a significant influence on only the oculomotor subscore. Actual or potential applications of this research include the prediction of sickness associated with simulation tours in a virtual environment at different navigation speeds.
Abstract. The occurrence of typhoon Herb in 1996 caused massive landslides in the Shenmu area of Taiwan. Many people died and stream and river beds were covered by meters of debris. Debris flows almost always take place in the Shenmu area during the flood season, especially in the catchment areas around Tsushui river and Aiyuzih river. Anthropogenic and natural factors that cause debris flow occurrences are complex and numerous. The precise conditions of initiation are difficult to be identified, but three factors are generally considered to be the most important ones, i.e. rainfall characteristics, geologic conditions and topography. This study proposes a simple and feasible process that combines remote sensing technology and multi-stage high-precision DTMs from aerial orthoimages and airborne LiDAR with field surveys to establish a connection between three major occurrence factors that trigger debris flows in the Shenmu area.
BACKGROUND: We examined the associations between germline variants and breast cancer mortality using a large meta-analysis of women of European ancestry. METHODS: Meta-analyses included summary estimates based on Cox models of twelve datasets using ~10.4 million variants for 96,661 women with breast cancer and 7697 events (breast cancer-specific deaths). Oestrogen receptor (ER)-specific analyses were based on 64,171 ER-positive (4116) and 16,172 ER-negative (2125) patients. We evaluated the probability of a signal to be a true positive using the Bayesian false discovery probability (BFDP). RESULTS: We did not find any variant associated with breast cancer-specific mortality at P < 5 × 10-8. For ER-positive disease, the most significantly associated variant was chr7:rs4717568 (BFDP = 7%, P = 1.28 × 10-7, hazard ratio [HR] = 0.88, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.84-0.92); the closest gene is AUTS2. For ER-negative disease, the most significant variant was chr7:rs67918676 (BFDP = 11%, P = 1.38 × 10-7, HR = 1.27, 95% CI = 1.16-1.39); located within a long intergenic non-coding RNA gene (AC004009.3), close to the HOXA gene cluster. CONCLUSIONS: We uncovered germline variants on chromosome 7 at BFDP < 15% close to genes for which there is biological evidence related to breast cancer outcome. However, the paucity of variants associated with mortality at genome-wide significance underpins the challenge in providing genetic-based individualised prognostic information for breast cancer patients. ; BCAC is funded by Cancer Research UK [C1287/A16563 and C1287/A10118], the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant numbers 634935 and 633784 for BRIDGES and B-CAST, respectively), and by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement number 223175 (Grant number HEALTH-F2-2009-223175) (COGS).