Hot-melt extrusion technology and pharmaceutical application

The use of hot-melt extrusion (HME) within the pharmaceutical industry is steadily increasing, due to its proven ability to efficiently manufacture novel products. The process has been utilized readily in the plastics industry for over a century and has been used to manufacture medical devices for several decades. The development of novel drugs with poor solubility and bioavailability brought the application of HME into the realm of drug-delivery systems. This has specifically been shown in the development of drug-delivery systems of both solid dosage forms and transdermal patches. HME involves the application of heat, pressure and agitation through an extrusion channel to mix materials together, and subsequently forcing them out through a die. Twin-screw extruders are most popular in solid dosage form development as it imparts both dispersive and distributive mixing. It blends materials while also imparting high shear to break-up particles and disperse them. HME extrusion has been shown to molecularly disperse poorly soluble drugs in a polymer carrier, increasing dissolution rates and bioavailability. The most common difficulty encountered in producing such dispersions is stabilization of amorphous drugs, which prevents them from recrystallization during storage. Pharmaceutical industrial suppliers, of both materials and equipment, have increased their development of equipment and chemicals for specific use with HME. Clearly, HME has been identified as an important and significant process to further enhance drug solubility and solid-dispersion production. © 2012 Future Science Ltd.

Claiming and displaying national identity: Irish Travellers' and students' strategic use of 'banal' and 'hot' national identity in talk

Two complementary explanations have been offered by social psychologists to account for the universal hold of national identity, first that national identity is ideologically assumed, as it forms the ‘banal’ background of everyday life, and second that national identity is ‘hotly’ constructed and contested in political and everyday settings to great effect. However, ‘banal’ and ‘hot’ aspects of national identity have been found to be distributed unevenly across national and subnational groups and banality itself can be strategically used to distinguish between different groups. The present paper develops these ideas by examining possible reasons for these different modes and strategies of identity expression. Drawing upon intergroup theories of minority and majority relations, we examine how a group who see themselves unequivocally as a minority, Irish Travellers, talk about their national identity in comparison to an age and gender-matched sample of Irish students. We find that Travellers proactively display and claim ‘hot’ national identity in order to establish their Irishness. Irish students ‘do banality’, police the boundaries and reputation of Irishness, and actively reject and disparage proactive displays of Irishness. The implications for discursive understandings of identity, the study of intra-national group relations and policies of minority inclusion are discussed.

Mass-loss rates for hot luminous stars:The influence of line branching

The effect of photon frequency redistribution by line branching on mass-loss rates for hot luminous stars is investigated. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for a range of OB star models which show that previous mass-loss calculations which neglect non-resonance line scattering overestimate mass-loss rates for luminous O stars by ~20 per cent. For luminous B stars the effect is somewhat larger, typically ~50 per cent. A Wolf-Rayet star model is used to investigate line branching in the strong wind limit. In this case the effect of line branching is much greater, giving mass-loss rates that are smaller by a factor ~3 from computations which neglect branching.

Preliminary Report of the 1 field season at Gubbio.:Malone, C.A.T. and S.K.F. Stoddart,

Xerox circulation to sponsors. Cambridge University.

Preliminary report of the 1984 field season at Gubbio.,

Malone, C.A.T., et al., in Xerox circulation to sponsors. 1984. Cambridge University.

Provisional report. 1986 Season. Gubbio Project.

Stoddart, S.K.F. and C. Malone, ProXerox circulation to sponsors. 1986.

Provisional report. 1987 Season. Gubbio Project

Stoddart, S.K.F. and C. Malone,. Xerox circulation to sponsors. 1987.

1988 Season. Cambridge Gozo Project.

Stoddart, S.K.F.M., C and Trump. D, Provisional report. Xerox circulation to sponsors. 1988.

Provisional report. 1990 Season. Gozo Project.

Malone, C.A.T. and S.K.F. Stoddart, 1990. Cambridge

Provisional Report of the 1994 season of the Gozo Project.

Stoddart, S. and C. Malone, PPrivate Circulation to sponsors. 1994.

Provisional Report of the 1996 season of the Gozo Project.

Stoddart, S. and C. Malone, Private Circulation to sponsors. 1996.

Short report on the 1997 field survey season of the Troina project.

Stoddart, S. and M. C, Private circulation to sponsors. 1997.