Hirschsprung's disease is relatively common, affecting roughly 1 in 5000 newly born babies each year in Australia. The disease occurs when there is an incomplete formation of the nervous system in the gut. Mathematical models can help in determining the underlying mechanisms that cause the disease. Comparisons between theoretical predictions and experimental results will be made.

Trajectory data from observations of a random walk process are often used to characterize macroscopic transport coefficients and to infer motility mechanisms in cell biology. New continuum equations describing the average moments of the position of an individual agent in a population of interacting agents are derived and validated. Unlike standard noninteracting random walks, the new moment equations explicitly represent the interactions between agents as they are coupled to the macroscopic agent density. Key issues associated with the validity of the new continuum equations and the interpretation of experimental data will be explored.

The last scientific conversation I had with Ernie Tuck was on liquid impact. As a matter of fact, we discussed the paper by J.H. Milgram, Journal of Fluid Mechanics 37 (1969), entitled "The motion of a fluid in a cylindrical container with a free surface following vertical impact." Liquid impact is a key issue in sloshing and in particular in sloshing in tanks of LNG vessels. Numerical simulations of sloshing have been performed by various groups, using various types of numerical methods. In terms of the numerical results, the outcome is often impressive, but the question remains of how relevant these results are when it comes to determining impact pressures. The numerical models are too simplified to reproduce the high variability of the measured pressures. In fact, for the time being, it is not possible to simulate accurately both global and local effects. Unfortunately it appears that local effects predominate over global effects when the behaviour of pressures is considered. Having said this, it is important to point out that numerical studies can be quite useful to perform sensitivity analyses in idealized conditions such as a liquid mass falling under gravity on top of a horizontal wall and then spreading along the lateral sides. Simple analytical models inspired by numerical results on idealized problems can also be useful to predict trends. The talk is organized as follows: After a brief introduction on the sloshing problem and on scaling laws, it will be explained to what extent numerical studies can be used to improve our understanding of impact pressures. Results on a liquid mass hitting a wall obtained by a finite-volume code with interface reconstruction as well as results obtained by a simple analytical model will be shown to reproduce the trends of experiments on sloshing. This is joint work with L. Brosset (GazTransport & Technigaz), J.-M. Ghidaglia (ENS Cachan) and J.-P. Braeunig (INRIA).