The impact of slow steaming on refrigerated exports from New Zealand

The practice of slow steaming has had a significant impact on New Zealand export industries with increased transit times in some cases causing significant reductions in shelf life once the product has reached the retail stage. The longer transit times also impose the extra cost to exporters of having more inventory tied up in transit. While there is clear evidence to suggest slow steaming has reduced fuel consumption and hence fuel emissions and fuel costs, these savings have not been passed on by the liners to their customers. However, there is no indication that slow-steaming has caused a significant reduction in export earnings for New Zealand (at least up to the middle of 2014). A predicted move to super-slow steaming would put extra strain on the New Zealand meat industry especially, with their lucrative European chilled lamb market under particular threat

FGFR4 regulates tumor subtype differentiation in luminal breast cancer and metastatic disease

Mechanisms driving tumor progression from less aggressive subtypes to more aggressive states represent key targets for therapy. We identified a subset of luminal A primary breast tumors that give rise to HER2-enriched (HER2E) subtype metastases, but remain clinically HER2 negative (cHER2-). By testing the unique genetic and transcriptomic features of these cases, we developed the hypothesis that FGFR4 likely participates in this subtype switching. To evaluate this, we developed 2 FGFR4 genomic signatures using a patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model treated with an FGFR4 inhibitor, which inhibited PDX growth in vivo. Bulk tumor gene expression analysis and single-cell RNA sequencing demonstrated that the inhibition of FGFR4 signaling caused molecular switching. In the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium (METABRIC) breast cancer cohort, FGFR4-induced and FGFR4-repressed signatures each predicted overall survival. Additionally, the FGFR4-induced signature was an independent prognostic factor beyond subtype and stage. Supervised analysis of 77 primary tumors with paired metastases revealed that the FGFR4-induced signature was significantly higher in luminal/ER+ tumor metastases compared with their primaries. Finally, multivariate analysis demonstrated that the FGFR4- induced signature also predicted site-specific metastasis for lung, liver, and brain, but not for bone or lymph nodes. These data identify a link between FGFR4-regulated genes and metastasis, suggesting treatment options for FGFR4-positive patients, whose high expression is not caused by mutation or amplification

Can black hole superradiance be induced by galactic plasmas?

Highly spinning Kerr black holes with masses M = 1-100 M(circle dot )are subject to an efficient superradiant instability in the presence of bosons with masses mu similar to 10(-10)-10(-12) eV. We observe that this matches the effective plasma-induced photon mass in diffuse galactic or intracluster environments (omega(pl )similar to 10(-10)-10(-12) eV). This suggests that bare Kerr black holes within galactic or intracluster environments, possibly even including the ones produced in recently observed gravitational wave events, are unstable to formation of a photon cloud that may contain a significant fraction of the mass of the original black hole. At maximal efficiency, the instability timescale for a massive vector is milliseconds, potentially leading to a transient rate of energy extraction from a black hole in principle as large as similar to 10(55) ergs(-1). We discuss possible astrophysical effects this could give rise to, including a speculative connection to Fast Radio Bursts. (C) 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.publishe

Superradiance in the BTZ black hole with Robin boundary conditions

We show the existence of superradiant modes of massive scalar fields propagating in BTZ black holes when certain Robin boundary conditions, which never include the commonly considered Dirichlet boundary conditions, are imposed at spatial infinity. These superradiant modes are defined as those solutions whose energy flux across the horizon is towards the exterior region. Differently from rotating, asymptotically flat black holes, we obtain that notall modes which grow up exponentially in time are superradiant; for some of these, the growth is sourced by a bulk instability of AdS(3), triggered by the scalar field with Robin boundary conditions, rather than by energy extraction from the BTZ black hole. Thus, this setup provides an example wherein Bosonic modes with low frequency are pumping energy into, rather than extracting energy from, a rotating black hole. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.publishe

Pharmacological prevention of type 2 diabetes.

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