Stuttering Min oscillations within E. coli bacteria: A stochastic polymerization model

We have developed a 3D off-lattice stochastic polymerization model to study subcellular oscillation of Min proteins in the bacteria Escherichia coli, and used it to investigate the experimental phenomenon of Min oscillation stuttering. Stuttering was affected by the rate of immediate rebinding of MinE released from depolymerizing filament tips (processivity), protection of depolymerizing filament tips from MinD binding, and fragmentation of MinD filaments due to MinE. Each of processivity, protection, and fragmentation reduces stuttering, speeds oscillations, and reduces MinD filament lengths. Neither processivity or tip-protection were, on their own, sufficient to produce fast stutter-free oscillations. While filament fragmentation could, on its own, lead to fast oscillations with infrequent stuttering; high levels of fragmentation degraded oscillations. The infrequent stuttering observed in standard Min oscillations are consistent with short filaments of MinD, while we expect that mutants that exhibit higher stuttering frequencies will exhibit longer MinD filaments. Increased stuttering rate may be a useful diagnostic to find observable MinD polymerization in experimental conditions.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, missing unit for k_f inserte

DDASaccident302

On 5 October at 12:55, [the victim] was carrying out normal demining duties with complete PPE on. He was clearing in the Cordon Sanitaire when a mine suspected to R2M2 model detonated on its own 2,5 metres in front of him. At that particular time [the victim] was in a kneeling position excavating to try and locate another mine

Driving the HD Machine in the African Bush

Almost every country in Southern Africa has a mine problem and most of these countries have a tradition of solving their own problems. Because the region is famous for its mine-resistant vehicles, this paper concentrates on innovative mechanical technologies—but it could just as easily have concentrated on PPE or testing facilities where Southern Africa also leads the way

Pookie Rides Again

Following the buzz caused by sniffer wasps and the scurry from mine-seeking rats, now it seems it is time for the concept of Pookie to come into its own. Mine clearance specialist MineTech International is completing work on a three-year project to transform an abandoned Zimbabwean war relic into a cost-effective mine detection platform for the 21st century. Project leader Willie Lawrence of MineTech International plots the progress of the revival of Pookie

Identification of Acid Mine Drainage Microorganisms from a Coal Mine in South Africa

Acid mine drainage (AMD) generated from mining processes is an on-going environmental concern. This study aimed to identify microorganisms (MOs) from a coal mine water source to determine organism diversity for its use as a bioremediation method of AMD contaminated sources. For the purpose of this study, a culture-dependent sample, previously collected from an open-mine-water-pit was used to assess the microbial community by 18S rRNA gene amplification and BLAST analysis. The analysis revealed the presence of 94 MOs, with 3 dominant MOs namely, Cercozoan; an uncultured bacterium and Chorella vulgaris. The use of this culture is not promising as the presence of Cercozoan, a protist type body will target other species for its own survival, hence inhibiting any positive effect the algae or bacteria may have on bioremediation potential of harmful AMD elements

TAXATION-PERCENTAGE DEPLETION ALLOWANCE ON INCOME RECEIVED FROM THE REWORKING OF DUMPS AND TAILINGS DEPOSITS

A dump of waste material and low-grade ore resulted from mining operations by a lessee in the American Mine. London Extension owned an undivided one-half interest in the claims which made up the mine. In 1940 London acquired the lease on the property. Chicago Mines, a wholly-owned subsidiary of London, then took a lease on the dump, agreeing to pay to London a royalty of twenty per cent of the net smelter returns. Chicago worked the dump for a few months, after which it was worked by London. In filing its income tax return for the year, Chicago claimed a percentage depletion allowance on account of its working of the dump. London claimed a percentage depletion allowance based on the amount it received from Chicago as royalties, plus the amount it received from its own working of the dump. On appeal from a Tax Court decision adverse to the taxpayer, the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the controlling question was whether or not the dump was a mine within the meaning of section 23(m) of the Internal Revenue Code. The court found that the dump was not a mine and therefore the depletion allowance was not available. Chicago Mines Co. v. Commissioner, (10th Cir. 1947) 164 F. (2d) 785

TAXATION-PERCENTAGE DEPLETION ALLOWANCE ON INCOME RECEIVED FROM THE REWORKING OF DUMPS AND TAILINGS DEPOSITS

A dump of waste material and low-grade ore resulted from mining operations by a lessee in the American Mine. London Extension owned an undivided one-half interest in the claims which made up the mine. In 1940 London acquired the lease on the property. Chicago Mines, a wholly-owned subsidiary of London, then took a lease on the dump, agreeing to pay to London a royalty of twenty per cent of the net smelter returns. Chicago worked the dump for a few months, after which it was worked by London. In filing its income tax return for the year, Chicago claimed a percentage depletion allowance on account of its working of the dump. London claimed a percentage depletion allowance based on the amount it received from Chicago as royalties, plus the amount it received from its own working of the dump. On appeal from a Tax Court decision adverse to the taxpayer, the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the controlling question was whether or not the dump was a mine within the meaning of section 23(m) of the Internal Revenue Code. The court found that the dump was not a mine and therefore the depletion allowance was not available. Chicago Mines Co. v. Commissioner, (10th Cir. 1947) 164 F. (2d) 785

Montana Environmental Information Center v. Department of Environmental Quality

The DEQ renewed a 1999 MPDES Permit on September 14, 2012 that allowed Western Energy Company to discharge pollutants from the Rosebud Mine into streams. Environmental groups MEIC and the Sierra Club sued, arguing this violated both the Montana Water Quality Act and federal Clean Water Act because the DEQ’s interpretation of its own regulations that exempted waters with ephemeral characteristics from water quality standards was arbitrary and capricious. The district court agreed, but the Montana Supreme Court reversed. It held the DEQ’s interpretation was lawful and remanded for further fact finding to assess how the DEQ applied the interpretation and to require the agency to explain how its representative monitoring of precipitation-driven discharges at the mine were representative of the monitored activity in fact

The Message is the Medium: Electronically Helping Writing Tutors Help Electronically

The history of online writing centers is a history of doubt. I experienced those reservations in 2009, when, in addition to traditional face-to-face peer tutoring, I launched my own online peer tutoring program and began training undergraduates to respond to student submissions. Online writing centers were already common, but the decision the begin tutoring online was not all mine—the university administration was encouraging faculty to create online and web-assisted courses, and it expected its academic support keep up with the pace of technology, distance learning, and even fears that a future pandemic could hinder face to face learning. After consulting with tutors and instructional technology staff, I decided on asynchronous peer tutoring: students would fill out an intake form and questionnaire about their assignment and writing process, and then they would upload what they had written; tutors would then respond via email within 24 hours, even on weekends. This system allowed us to help as many students as quickly as possible, particularly non-traditional, commuting, and working students unable to meet face to face.University Writing Cente

Learn More for Food Recognition via Progressive Self-Distillation

Food recognition has a wide range of applications, such as health-aware recommendation and self-service restaurants. Most previous methods of food recognition firstly locate informative regions in some weakly-supervised manners and then aggregate their features. However, location errors of informative regions limit the effectiveness of these methods to some extent. Instead of locating multiple regions, we propose a Progressive Self-Distillation (PSD) method, which progressively enhances the ability of network to mine more details for food recognition. The training of PSD simultaneously contains multiple self-distillations, in which a teacher network and a student network share the same embedding network. Since the student network receives a modified image from its teacher network by masking some informative regions, the teacher network outputs stronger semantic representations than the student network. Guided by such teacher network with stronger semantics, the student network is encouraged to mine more useful regions from the modified image by enhancing its own ability. The ability of the teacher network is also enhanced with the shared embedding network. By using progressive training, the teacher network incrementally improves its ability to mine more discriminative regions. In inference phase, only the teacher network is used without the help of the student network. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and state-of-the-art performance.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202