The Inertial Stellar Compass: A New Direction in Spacecraft Attitude Determination

The Inertial Stellar Compass (ISC) is a real-time, miniature, low power stellar inertial attitude determination system, composed of a wide field-of-view active pixel star camera and a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyro assembly, with associated processing and power electronics. The integrated technologies enable an attitude determination system with an accuracy of 0.1 degree (1 sigma) to be realized at very low power and volume. The attitude knowledge provided by the ISC is applicable to a wide range of space and earth science missions that may include the use of highly maneuverable, stabilized, tumbling, or lost spacecraft. Under the guidance of NASA’s New Millennium ST-6 project, Draper Laboratory is currently developing the Inertial Stellar Compass. Its completion and flight validation will represent a breakthrough in real-time miniature attitude determination sensors. This paper describes system design, development, and validation activities currently underway at Draper

Earliest cranio-encephalic trauma from the Levantine Middle Palaeolithic: 3D reappraisal of the Qafzeh 11 skull, consequences of pediatric brain damage on individual life condition and social care.

The Qafzeh site (Lower Galilee, Israel) has yielded the largest Levantine hominin collection from Middle Palaeolithic layers which were dated to circa 90-100 kyrs BP or to marine isotope stage 5b-c. Within the hominin sample, Qafzeh 11, circa 12-13 yrs old at death, presents a skull lesion previously attributed to a healed trauma. Three dimensional imaging methods allowed us to better explore this lesion which appeared as being a frontal bone depressed fracture, associated with brain damage. Furthermore the endocranial volume, smaller than expected for dental age, supports the hypothesis of a growth delay due to traumatic brain injury. This trauma did not affect the typical human brain morphology pattern of the right frontal and left occipital petalia. It is highly probable that this young individual suffered from personality and neurological troubles directly related to focal cerebral damage. Interestingly this young individual benefited of a unique funerary practice among the south-western Asian burials dated to Middle Palaeolithic

Identité biologique des artisans moustériens de Kebara (Mont Carmel, Israël) Réflexions sur le concept de néanderthalien au Levant méditerranéen

Dès les premières découvertes de fossiles humains provenant du Bassin Méditerranéen oriental et datés du Pléistocène supérieur, il est apparu évident que la documentation anthropologique illustrait une hétérogénéité biologique, suscitant des interprétations différentes. Par la suite, l’enrichissement de la documentation avec de nouvelles fouilles est venu alimenter, au sein de la communauté scientifique, les discussions portant aussi bien sur les affinités phylogénétiques des fossiles que sur leur position chronologique. La prise en compte, sur ces fossiles proche-orientaux, de l’originalité de l’assemblage de caractères anatomiques présents ne doit pas être sous-estimée pour une meilleure évaluation des composantes régionales. C’est ce qui est proposé à propos de Kebara, l’objectif étant de favoriser une approche cohérente de la diversité biologique des hommes du Paléolithique moyen dans la région, qui n’exclut pas les influences extra-européennes.The southern Mediterranean Levant has attracted the attention of the scientific community since the early excavations conducted at the beginning of the 20th century on several sites, which provided a significant sample of Upper Pleistocene hominids. Additional skeletal material, circumscribed geographically and chronologically, raises several questions concerning the biological differences and similarities between the hominid samples represented, and their geographical position at the crossroads of Africa and Eurasia. The excellent state of preservation of the hominid remains enables a new insight into the anatomy of Levantine Middle Palaeolithic populations and provides important data for reconstructing the pattern of human evolution in the Near East. With this in view, re-examination of some skeletal remains recovered at Kebara Cave suggests. that biological differences and similarities may have existed between Neanderthals and Levantine Middle Palaeolithic hominids, strengthening the existence of regional variation

A new, fast algorithm for detecting protein coevolution using maximum compatible cliques

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The MatrixMatchMaker algorithm was recently introduced to detect the similarity between phylogenetic trees and thus the coevolution between proteins. MMM finds the largest common submatrices between pairs of phylogenetic distance matrices, and has numerous advantages over existing methods of coevolution detection. However, these advantages came at the cost of a very long execution time.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper, we show that the problem of finding the maximum submatrix reduces to a multiple maximum clique subproblem on a graph of protein pairs. This allowed us to develop a new algorithm and program implementation, MMMvII, which achieved more than 600× speedup with comparable accuracy to the original MMM.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>MMMvII will thus allow for more more extensive and intricate analyses of coevolution.</p> <p>Availability</p> <p>An implementation of the MMMvII algorithm is available at: <url>http://www.uhnresearch.ca/labs/tillier/MMMWEBvII/MMMWEBvII.php</url></p

New Data on the Origin of Modern Man in the Levant

Anthropolog

Elements Discrimination in the Study of Super-Heavy Elements using an Ionization Chamber

Dedicated ionization chamber was built and installed to measure the energy loss of very heavy nuclei at 2.7 MeV/u produced in fusion reactions in inverse kinematics (beam of 208Pb). After going through the ionization chamber, products of reactions on 12C, 18O targets are implanted in a Si detector. Their identification through their alpha decay chain is ambiguous when their half-life is short. After calibration with Pb and Th nuclei, the ionization chamber signal allowed us to resolve these ambiguities. In the search for rare super-heavy nuclei produced in fusion reactions in inverse or symmetric kinematics, such a chamber will provide direct information on the nuclear charge of each implanted nucleus.Comment: submitted to NIMA, 10 pages+4 figures, Latex, uses elsart.cls and grahpic

Charge and current-sensitive preamplifiers for pulse shape discrimination techniques with silicon detectors

New charge and current-sensitive preamplifiers coupled to silicon detectors and devoted to studies in nuclear structure and dynamics have been developed and tested. For the first time shapes of current pulses from light charged particles and carbon ions are presented. Capabilities for pulse shape discrimination techniques are demonstrated.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, to be published in Nucl. Inst. Meth.

Evolutionary Analysis of Mitogenomes from Parasitic and Free-Living Flatworms

Copyright: © 2015 Solà et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The attached file is the published version of the article

Оцінка якості життя у вікових першовагітних та вагітних з великим інтергенетичним інтервалом

Проведено изучение показателей качества жизни у 120 возрастных первобеременных и 240 беременных с большим интергенетическим интервалом с использованием опросника SF-36 Health Status Survey, разработанного The Health Institute, New England Medical Center, Boston, USA. Исследование показало, что пациентки обеих групп имеют низкие показатели качества жизни. При сравнении большинство изучаемых параметров оценки качества жизни в обследованных группах не отличались, однако у пациенток с большим интергенетическим интервалом – достоверно выше оценка социальной роли и энергетичности. Оценка качества жизни у возрастных первобеременных и беременных с большим интергенетическим интервалом является важным сегментом наблюдения во время беременности, который оценивает перспективы развития беременности в психологическом, физическом и социальном аспектах.A study of the life quality of 120 over-age primigravidas and of 240 women with a large intergenetic interval has been carried out using the questionnaire SF-36 Health Status Survey developed by The Health Institute, New England Medical Center, Boston, USA. This research has shown that the patients in the both groups have a low quality of life. The major part of the life quality parameters were the same in the both groups, however, in patients with a large interval between births the values of the social role and the energy level were significantly higher. The life quality of over-age primigravidas and pregnant women with a large interval between successive births is an important sector of observation during pregnancy, which allows assessing the prospects of pregnancy in the psychological, physical, and social aspects