The importance of Lead and Uranium group abundances in cosmic rays is discussed in understanding their evolution and propagation. The electronic detectors can provide good charge resolution but poor data statistics. The plastic detectors can provide somewhat better statistics but charge resolution deteriorates. The extraterrestrial crystals can provide good statistics but with poor charge resolution. Recent studies of extraterrestrial crystals regarding their calibration to accelerated uranium ion beam and track etch kinetics are discussed. It is hoped that a charge resolution of two charge units can be achieved provided an additional parameter is taken into account. The prospects to study abundances of Lead group, Uranium group and superheavy element in extraterrestrial crystals are discussed, and usefulness of these studies in the light of studies with electronic and plastic detectors is assessed.
Prions have served as pathfinders that reveal many aspects of proteostasis in neurons. The recent realization that several prominent neurodegenerative diseases spread via a prion-like mechanism illuminates new possibilities for diagnostics and therapeutics. Thus, key proteins in Alzheimer Disease and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), including amyloid-β precursor protein, Tau and superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1), spread to adjacent cells in their misfolded aggregated forms and exhibit template-directed misfolding to induce further misfolding, disruptions to proteostasis and toxicity. Here we invert this comparison to ask what these prion-like diseases can teach us about the broad prion disease class, especially regarding the loss of these key proteins' function(s) as they misfold and aggregate. We also consider whether functional amyloids might reveal a role for subverted protein function in neurodegenerative disease. Our synthesis identifies SOD1 as an exemplar of protein functions being lost during prion-like protein misfolding, because SOD1 is inherently unstable and loses function in its misfolded disease-associated form. This has under-appreciated parallels amongst the canonical prion diseases, wherein the normally folded prion protein, PrP C , is reduced in abundance in fatal familial insomnia patients and during the preclinical phase in animal models, apparently via proteostatic mechanisms. Thus while template-directed misfolding and infectious properties represent gain-of-function that fascinates proteostasis researchers and defines (is required for) the prion(-like) diseases, loss and subversion of the functions attributed to hallmark proteins in neurodegenerative disease needs to be integrated into design towards effective therapeutics. We propose experiments to uniquely test these ideas.
NGC - Super Mario Sunshine [JPN] 270
Here, the bulk locality in the constructive holographic renormalization group requires miraculous cancellations among various local renormalization group functions. The cancellation is not only from the properties of the spectrum but from more detailed aspects of operator product expansions in relation to conformal anomaly. It is remarkable that one-loop computation of the universal local renormalization group functions in the weakly coupled limit of the N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory fulfils the necessary condition for the cancellation in the strongly coupled limit in its SL(2, Z) duality invariant form. From the consistency between the quantum renormalization group and the holographicmore renormalization group, we determine some unexplored local renormalization group functions (e.g. diffusive term in the beta function for the gauge coupling constant) in the strongly coupled limit of the planar N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory. less
The CO2/CH4 adsorption behaviors in brown coal at the temperatures of 298, 313, and 373 K and in the pressure range of 0.005-10 MPa were investigated by molecular dynamics (MD), density functional theory (DFT), and grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulations. The absolute adsorption isotherms of single-component CH4 and CO2 exhibit type-I Langmuir adsorption behavior showing a negative influence of temperature. For the binary CO2/CH4 mixture, brown coal shows super high selectivity of CO2 over CH4 at pressures below 0.2 MPa, which then decreases quickly and finally tends to be constant when the pressure increases. The high competitive adsorption of CO2 originates from the effects of (i) the large electrostatic contributions, (ii) the conducive micropore environment with pore sizes below 0.56 nm, and (iii) the stronger adsorption of CO2 with respect to CH4. These effects are strengthened by the high-density oxygen-containing, pyridine, and thiophene functional groups contained in brown coal, which provide abundant and strong adsorption sites for CO2, but show weaker affinity to CH4. Furthermore, the influence of various nitrogen- and sulfur-containing functional groups on the CO2 adsorption capacity was also investigated. The results indicate that the basicity of the oxygen- and nitrogen-containing groups has a large influence on the CO2 adsorption, while for the sulfur functional groups the determining factor is the polarity.
Urbanization negatively affects biodiversity, yet some urban habitat features can support diversity. Parasitoid wasps, an abundant and highly diverse group of arthropods, can inhabit urban areas and do well in areas with higher host abundance, floral resources, or local or landscape complexity. Parasitoids provide biological control services in many agricultural habitats, yet few studies have examined diversity and abundance of parasitoids in urban agroecosystems to understand how to promote conservation and function. We examined the local habitat and landscape drivers of parasitoid abundance, superfamily and family richness, and parasitoid composition in urban gardens in the California central coast. Local factors included garden size, ground cover type, herbaceous plant species, and number of trees and shrubs. Landscape characteristics included land cover and landscape diversity around gardens. We found that garden size, mulch cover, and urban cover within 500 m of gardens predicted increases in parasitoid abundance within gardens. The height of herbaceous vegetation and tree and shrub richness predicted increases in superfamily and family richness whereas increases in urban cover resulted in declines in parasitoid richness. Abundance of individual superfamilies and families responded to a wide array of local and landscape factors, sometimes in opposite ways. Composition of parasitoid communities responded to changes in garden size, herbaceous plant cover, and number of flowers. Thus, both local scale management and landscape planning may impact the abundance, diversity, and community composition of parasitoids in urban gardens, and may result in differences in the effectiveness of parasitoids in biological control. The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Entomological Society of America. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.
We derive abundances and central star parameters for 15 planetary nebulae (PNe) in M31: 12 in the bulge and 3 in a disk field 14 kpc from the nucleus. No single abundance value characterizes the bulge stars: although the median abundances of the sample are similar to those seen for PNe in the LMC, the distribution of abundances is several times broader, spanning over 1 decade. None of the PNe in our sample approach the super metal-rich ([Fe/H] approximately 0.25) expectations for the bulge of M31, although a few PNe in the sample of Stasinska, Richer, & Mc Call (1998) come close. This [O/H] vs [Fe/H] discrepancy is likely due to a combination of factors, including an inability of metal-rich stars to produce bright PNe, a luminosity selection effect, and an abundance gradient in the bulge of M31. We show that PNe that are near the bright limit of the [O III] lambda.5007 planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF) span nearly a decade in oxygen abundance, and thus, support the use of the PNLF for deriving distances to galaxies (Jacoby 1996) with differing metallicities. We also identify a correlation between central star mass and PN dust formation that partially alleviates any dependence of the PNLF maximum magnitude on population age. Additionally, we identify a spatially compact group of 5 PNe having unusually high O/H; this subgroup may arise from a recent merger, but velocity information is needed to assess the true nature of the objects.
Based on MUSE integral-field data we present evidence for a radial variation at the low-mass end of the stellar initial-mass function (IMF) in the central regions of the giant early-type galaxy NGC 4486 (M87). We used state-of-the-art stellar population models and the observed strength of various IMF-sensitive absorption-line features to solve for the best low-mass tapered "bimodal" form of the IMF, while accounting also for variations in stellar metallicity, the overall α-elements abundance and the abundance of individual elements such as Ti, O, Na and Ca. Our analysis reveals a strong negative IMF gradient corresponding to an exceeding fraction of low-mass stars compared to the case of the Milky Way toward the center of M87, which drops to nearly Milky-way levels by 0.4 Re. Such IMF variations correspond to over a factor two increase in stellar mass-to-light M/L ratio compared to the case of a Milky-way IMF, consistent with independent constraints on M/L radial variations in M87 from dynamical models. We also looked into the abundance of Sodium in M87, which turned up to be super-Solar over the entire radial range of our MUSE observations and to exhibit a considerable negative gradient. These findings suggest an additional role of metallicity in boosting the Na-yields in the central, metal-rich regions of M87 during its early and brief star-formation history. Our work adds M87 to the few objects that presently have radial constraints on their IMF or [Na/Fe] abundance, while also illustrating the accuracy that MUSE could bring to this kind of investigations.
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