14,511 research outputs found
Transplacental transmission of field and rescued strains of BTV-2 and BTV-8 in experimentally infected sheep
Transplacental transmission of bluetongue virus has been shown previously for the North European strain of serotype 8 (BTV-8) and for tissue culture or chicken egg-adapted vaccine strains but not for field strains of other serotypes. In this study, pregnant ewes (6 per group) were inoculated with either field or rescued strains of BTV-2 and BTV-8 in order to determine the ability of these viruses to cross the placental barrier. The field BTV-2 and BTV-8 strains was passaged once in Culicoides KC cells and once in mammalian cells. All virus inoculated sheep became infected and seroconverted against the different BTV strains used in this study. BTV RNA was detectable in the blood of all but two ewes for over 28Â days but infectious virus could only be detected in the blood for a much shorter period. Interestingly, transplacental transmission of BTV-2 (both field and rescued strains) was demonstrated at high efficiency (6 out of 13 lambs born to BTV-2 infected ewes) while only 1 lamb of 12 born to BTV-8 infected ewes showed evidence of in utero infection. In addition, evidence for horizontal transmission of BTV-2 between ewes was observed. As expected, the parental BTV-2 and BTV-8 viruses and the viruses rescued by reverse genetics showed very similar properties to each other. This study showed, for the first time, that transplacental transmission of BTV-2, which had been minimally passaged in cell culture, can occur; hence such transmission might be more frequent than previously thought
Realizing time crystals in discrete quantum few-body systems
The exotic phenomenon of time translation symmetry breaking under periodic
driving - the time crystal - has been shown to occur in many-body systems even
in clean setups where disorder is absent. In this work, we propose the
realization of time-crystals in few-body systems, both in the context of
trapped cold atoms with strong interactions and of a circuit of superconducting
qubits. We show how these two models can be treated in a fairly similar way by
adopting an effective spin chain description, to which we apply a simple
driving protocol. We focus on the response of the magnetization in the presence
of imperfect pulses and interactions, and show how the results can be
interpreted, in the cold atomic case, in the context of experiments with
trapped bosons and fermions. Furthermore, we provide a set of realistic
parameters for the implementation of the superconducting circuit.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
Review of the literature on the subject of the control of myopia by the use of plus lenses
The purpose of this work is to review studies of the effect of plus lenses on the progression of myopia
Electron transport in single wall carbon nanotube weak links in the Fabry-Perot regime
We fabricated reproducible high transparency superconducting contacts
consisting of superconducting Ti/Al/Ti trilayers to gated single-walled carbon
nanotubes (SWCNTs). The reported semiconducting SWCNT have normal state
differential conductance up to and exhibit clear Fabry-Perot
interference patterns in the bias spectroscopy plot. We observed subharmonic
gap structure in the differential conductance and a distinct peak in the
conductance at zero bias which is interpreted as a manifestation of a
supercurrent. The gate dependence of this supercurrent as well as the excess
current are examined and compared to a coherent theory of superconducting point
contacts with good agreement.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure
Lengthscales and Cooperativity in DNA Bubble Formation
It appears that thermally activated DNA bubbles of different sizes play
central roles in important genetic processes. Here we show that the probability
for the formation of such bubbles is regulated by the number of soft AT pairs
in specific regions with lengths which at physiological temperatures are of the
order of (but not equal to) the size of the bubble. The analysis is based on
the Peyrard- Bishop-Dauxois model, whose equilibrium statistical properties
have been accurately calculated here with a transfer integral approach
Time-varying Learning and Content Analytics via Sparse Factor Analysis
We propose SPARFA-Trace, a new machine learning-based framework for
time-varying learning and content analytics for education applications. We
develop a novel message passing-based, blind, approximate Kalman filter for
sparse factor analysis (SPARFA), that jointly (i) traces learner concept
knowledge over time, (ii) analyzes learner concept knowledge state transitions
(induced by interacting with learning resources, such as textbook sections,
lecture videos, etc, or the forgetting effect), and (iii) estimates the content
organization and intrinsic difficulty of the assessment questions. These
quantities are estimated solely from binary-valued (correct/incorrect) graded
learner response data and a summary of the specific actions each learner
performs (e.g., answering a question or studying a learning resource) at each
time instance. Experimental results on two online course datasets demonstrate
that SPARFA-Trace is capable of tracing each learner's concept knowledge
evolution over time, as well as analyzing the quality and content organization
of learning resources, the question-concept associations, and the question
intrinsic difficulties. Moreover, we show that SPARFA-Trace achieves comparable
or better performance in predicting unobserved learner responses than existing
collaborative filtering and knowledge tracing approaches for personalized
education
A note on Kerr/CFT and free fields
The near-horizon geometry of the extremal four-dimensional Kerr black hole
and certain generalizations thereof has an SL(2,R) x U(1) isometry group.
Excitations around this geometry can be controlled by imposing appropriate
boundary conditions. For certain boundary conditions, the U(1) isometry is
enhanced to a Virasoro algebra. Here, we propose a free-field construction of
this Virasoro algebra.Comment: 10 pages, v2: comments and references adde
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