Experimental evaluation of transonic stators, data and performance report, multiple circular arc stator B

Transonic stator with multiple circular arc airfoils and minimum curvature tested over range of flow angles and velocities - stator

Experimental Evaluation of Transonic Stators, Data and Performance Report, Double Circular Arc Stator

Transonic stator with double circular arc airfoils tested over range of flow angles and velocitie

Study of the first paramagnetic to ferromagnetic transition in as prepared samples of Mn-Fe-P-Si magnetocaloric compounds prepared by different synthesis routes

International audienceMagnetocaloric materials with composition of Mn 1.3 Fe 0.65 P 0.5 Si 0.5 have been prepared by ball milling and solid-state reaction methods and consolidated using powder annealing, and conventional and spark plasma sintering. Magnetic and calorimetric measurements show remarkable differences upon first cooling, and slight differences on second and further coolings between the samples prepared by different synthesis routes. Further measurements using Hall probe imaging in high magnetic field have been also carried out. As-prepared samples have been cooled down just above the critical temperature, and the first phase transition has been induced by application of a magnetic field. Bulk samples show staircase isothermal magnetization curves whereas powders show smoother transition curves

Opportunities for the Primary Prevention of Obesity during Infancy

Are chubby babies healthy babies? Whereas most seem well during infancy, evidence is increasing that heavier babies have a poorer long-term health trajectory than their trimmer counterparts. Data have emerged over the past 2 decades that early life growth patterns and behaviors play an important role in the etiology of obesity, yet there has been very little focus on the primary prevention of obesity during infancy by the medical, behavioral health, and public health communities. A recent report from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) highlighted the need for very early intervention when it revealed that between 2003 and 2006, a staggering 24.4% of children aged 2 to 5 years already were overweight or obese (body mass index [BMI; calculated as the weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared] 85th–94th and ≥95th percentiles, respectively) [1]. NHANES data also have described obesity (weight-for-length/height ≥95th percentile) among infants younger than 2 years ( Fig. 1). Between the late 1970s and 2000, the prevalence of obesity among infants 6 to 23 months old increased by more than 60% [2]. Reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System [3] and a Massachusetts Health Maintenance Organization [4] similarly showed significant increases in the prevalence of overweight for infants and toddlers for all age groups since the 1980

On Actively Teaching the Crowd to Classify

Is it possible to teach workers while crowdsourcing classification tasks? Amongst the challenges: (a) workers have different (unknown) skills, competence, and learning rate to which the teaching must be adapted, (b) feedback on the workers’ progress is limited, (c) we may not have informative features for our data (otherwise crowdsourcing may be unnecessary). We propose a natural Bayesian model of the workers, modeling them as a learning entity with an initial skill, competence, and dynamics. We then show how a teaching system can exploit this model to interactively teach the workers. Our model uses feedback to adapt the teaching process to each worker, based on priors over hypotheses elicited from the crowd. Our experiments carried out on both simulated workers and real image annotation tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk show the effectiveness of crowd-teaching systems

Defining the 5 and 3 landscape of the Drosophila transcriptome with Exo-seq and RNaseH-seq

Cells regulate biological responses in part through changes in transcription start sites (TSS) or cleavage and polyadenylation sites (PAS). To fully understand gene regulatory networks, it is therefore critical to accurately annotate cell type-specific TSS and PAS. Here we present a simple and straightforward approach for genome-wide annotation of 5- and 3-RNA ends. Our approach reliably discerns bona fide PAS from false PAS that arise due to internal poly(A) tracts, a common problem with current PAS annotation methods. We applied our methodology to study the impact of temperature on the Drosophila melanogaster head transcriptome. We found hundreds of previously unidentified TSS and PAS which revealed two interesting phenomena: first, genes with multiple PASs tend to harbor a motif near the most proximal PAS, which likely represents a new cleavage and polyadenylation signal. Second, motif analysis of promoters of genes affected by temperature suggested that boundary element association factor of 32 kDa (BEAF-32) and DREF mediates a transcriptional program at warm temperatures, a result we validated in a fly line where beaf-32 is downregulated. These results demonstrate the utility of a high-throughput platform for complete experimental and computational analysis of mRNA-ends to improve gene annotation

Future changes in extreme temperature indices in Cluj-Napoca, Romania

At present, research in climatology is mainly focusing on climate change and especially on global warming. Since climate change is already affecting large areas worldwide, it is important to study in details these changes at regional and local scale and to reduce its negative impact. The aim of this study is to analyze changes on extreme temperature indices over the periods 2041-2070 and 2071-2100 in Cluj-Napoca city using a set of 21 indices recommended by Expert Team for Climate Change Detection Monitoring and Indices. Extreme temperature indices for observed and modeled data were calculated by employing ClimPACT2 software. Modeled data for daily minimum and maximum temperature was extracted from EURO-CORDEX Project database. RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios of three regional climate models (RACMO22E, RCA4, and WRF331F) were considered. Next we compared the average values of the historical period (1981-2010) with the 2041-2070 and 2071-2100 periods for each scenario (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) in order to obtain the future changes. The result of this study shows major changes for all the analyzed indices. The period 2071-2100 presents the highest changes under both analyzed scenarios

An in vivo strategy for knockdown of circular RNAs

Exonic circular RNAs (circRNAs) are highly abundant RNAs generated mostly from exons of protein-coding genes. Assaying the functions of circRNAs is not straightforward as common approaches for circRNA depletion tend to also alter the levels of mRNAs generated from the hosting gene. Here we describe a methodology for specific knockdown of circRNAs in vivo with tissue and cell resolution. We also describe an experimental and computational platform for determining the potential off-target effects as well as for verifying the obtained phenotypes. Briefly, we utilize shRNAs targeted to the circRNA-specific back-splice junction to specifically downregulate the circRNA. We utilized this methodology to downregulate five circRNAs that are highly expressed in Drosophila. There were no effects on the levels of their linear counterparts or any RNA with complementarity to the expressed shRNA. Interestingly, downregulation of circCtrip resulted in developmental lethality that was recapitulated with a second shRNA. Moreover, downregulation of individual circRNAs caused specific changes in the fly head transcriptome, suggesting roles for these circRNAs in the fly nervous system. Together, our results provide a methodological approach that enables the comprehensive study of circRNAs at the organismal and cellular levels and generated for the first time flies in which specific circRNAs are downregulated

Perturbed mitochondria-ER contacts in live neurons that model the amyloid pathology of Alzheimer\u27s disease.

The use of fixed fibroblasts from familial and sporadic Alzheimer\u27s disease patients has previously indicated an upregulation of mitochondria-ER contacts (MERCs) as a hallmark of Alzheimer\u27s disease. Despite its potential significance, the relevance of these results is limited because they were not extended to live neurons. Here we performed a dynamic in vivo analysis of MERCs in hippocampal neurons from McGill-R-Thy1-APP transgenic rats, a model of Alzheimer\u27s disease-like amyloid pathology. Live FRET imaging of neurons from transgenic rats revealed perturbed \u27lipid-MERCs\u27 (gap width \u3c10 nm), while \u27Ca2+-MERCs\u27 (10-20 nm gap width) were unchanged. In situ TEM showed no significant differences in the lipid-MERCs:total MERCs or lipid-MERCs:mitochondria ratios; however, the average length of lipid-MERCs was significantly decreased in neurons from transgenic rats as compared to controls. In accordance with FRET results, untargeted lipidomics showed significant decreases in levels of 12 lipids and bioenergetic analysis revealed respiratory dysfunction of mitochondria from transgenic rats. Thus, our results reveal changes in MERC structures coupled with impaired mitochondrial functions in Alzheimer\u27s disease-related neurons.This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper