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In very cold environments, it may be burdensome or impossible for the polar medic to prevent medicines from freezing. We sought to investigate whether orientation affected the risk that glass ampoules of 1 in 1000 adrenaline, an important emergency drug, would break during freezing and subsequent thawing. Ampoules of adrenaline were orientated either upright, horizontally or inverted. They were exposed to freezing temperatures (-25°C or -80°C) and then allowed to thaw. A crossover design was used whereby the orientation of unbroken ampoules was changed for the next trial. No ampoules broke when frozen at -25°C and then thawed. When this was repeated at -80°C, ampoules reliably broke unless they were upright with no liquid in the top part of the ampoule. Upright orientation prevents the breakage of glass ampoules of 1 in 1000 adrenaline rapidly frozen at -80°C. The polar medic may consider storing ampoules upright if they are to be exposed to very low temperatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-oxidative propane dehydrogenation is an endothermic reaction requiring thermally stable and regenerable catalysts to produce propylene. In this work, we investigate bimetallic CoXNi2-XP as an alternative, non-noble metal propane dehydrogenation catalyst. Co1Ni1P displayed higher propylene selectivity than Co2P and higher site-normalized propylene production rates than Ni2P. Different compositions of CoXNi2-XP catalysts were evaluated for propane dehydrogenation with oxidative regeneration in between each cycle. Ni-rich Co0.5Ni1.5P showed increased propylene production upon regeneration due to the formation of the Ni12P5 phase during reaction. In contrast, Co1Ni1P and Co1.25Ni0.75P showed the ability to recover > 50% of the initial activity for at least 3 oxidative regenerations, while maintaining high propylene selectivity without any phase change. This study showcases the enhancement in stability and propane dehydrogenation performance of Ni2P through Co incorporation and Ni:Co ratio control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study sought to examine the relative contributions of encoding and retrieval processes in accessing contextual information in the absence of item memory using an extralist cuing procedure in which the retrieval cues used to query memory for contextual information were "related" to the target item but never actually studied. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants studied 1 category member (e.g., "onion") from a variety of different categories and at test were presented with an unstudied category label (e.g., "vegetable") to probe memory for item and source information. In Experiments 3 and 4, 1 member of unidirectional (e.g., "credit" or "card") or bidirectional (e.g., "salt" or "pepper") associates was studied, whereas the other unstudied member served as a test probe. When recall failed, source information was accessible only when items were processed deeply during encoding (Experiments 1 and 2) and when there was strong forward associative strength between the retrieval cue and target (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings suggest that a retrieval probe diagnostic of semantically related item information reinstantiates information bound in memory during encoding that results in reactivation of associated contextual information, contingent upon sufficient learning of the item itself and the association between the item and its context information.

In event-based prospective memory, current theories make differing predictions as to whether intention-related material can be spontaneously noticed (i.e., noticed without relying on preparatory attentional processes). In 2 experiments, participants formed an intention that was contextually associated to the final phase of the experiment, and lures that overlapped to differing degrees with the features of the intention-related cues were embedded in the initial phase. When participants were outside of the appropriate responding context (i.e., the initial phase), they exhibited slower latencies to lures that exactly matched the features of their intention compared with other types of lures and control words. In addition, on a final remember/know recognition test, participants reported having greater subjective recollection for the occurrence of the exact-match lures. These results suggest that exact-match lures were spontaneously noticed and differentially processed in the absence of any observable preparatory attentional processes. The findings have implications for the theoretical debate over whether preparatory attention must always be relied upon to notice intention-related material. (Contains 4 footnotes and 3 tables.)