1,705 research outputs found
What Is “Personality”? An Underexamined Paragraph in Spinoza
Um exame do significado da palavra “personalidade” na Parte 2, Capítulo 8, Parágrafo 1 da Cogitata Metaphysica de Spinoza.
AbstractAn examination of the meaning of the word “personality” in Part 2, Chapter 8, Paragraph 1 of Spinoza’s Cogitata Metaphysica
Mortality of the invasive white garden snail Theba pisana exposed to three US isolates of Phasmarhabditis spp (P. hermaphrodita, P. californica, and P. papillosa).
Theba pisana is a serious snail pest in many parts of the world and affects diverse crops including grain, vegetables, grapevines, and ornamental plants and shrubs. Due to its gregarious nature, ability to reproduce rapidly, and the difficulty of controlling it by conventional methods, it has the potential to become a significant pest where introduced. Mitigating this pest is an important challenge that must be addressed. Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, is a gastropod-killing nematode that is commercially available only in Europe (Nemaslug ®) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Slugtech ® SP). The use of effective gastropod-killing nematodes in the genus Phasmarhabditis (P. hermaphrodita, P. californica and P. papillosa) in California may provide one strategy for alleviating the potential damage and further spread of these snails, which are currently limited to San Diego and Los Angeles counties. Laboratory assays demonstrated for the first time that US isolates of P. hermaphrodita, P. californica and P. papillosa at 150 DJs/cm2 caused significant mortality and are equally lethal to T. pisana. Molluscicidal efficacy of these nematodes are comparable with those of iron phosphate, at the recommended high dose of 4.88 kg/m2. Additional trials are needed to determine their effects at lower dose and whether they are dependent on the size or age of the snails
Speech Regulation and Tobacco Harm Reduction
Regulation of commercial speech is a major component of federal regulation of tobacco products. Since adoption of federal tobacco legislation, the Food and Drug Administration has asserted regulatory authority over ENDS and other vaping products as “tobacco products,” subjecting them to the same regulatory regime as traditional tobacco products even though such projects appear to pose less of a threat to public health. Such regulation, and the restriction on truthful speech in particular, may be having negative consequences for public health. Barring producers from informing consumers about the relative risks of vaping products and their potential to reduce smoking eliminates a potentially powerful tool for consumer education. Such restrictions are constitutionally dubious under existing First Amendment jurisprudence and may undermine the protection of public health as well
ConeQuest: A Benchmark for Cone Segmentation on Mars
Over the years, space scientists have collected terabytes of Mars data from
satellites and rovers. One important set of features identified in Mars orbital
images is pitted cones, which are interpreted to be mud volcanoes believed to
form in regions that were once saturated in water (i.e., a lake or ocean).
Identifying pitted cones globally on Mars would be of great importance, but
expert geologists are unable to sort through the massive orbital image archives
to identify all examples. However, this task is well suited for computer
vision. Although several computer vision datasets exist for various
Mars-related tasks, there is currently no open-source dataset available for
cone detection/segmentation. Furthermore, previous studies trained models using
data from a single region, which limits their applicability for global
detection and mapping. Motivated by this, we introduce ConeQuest, the first
expert-annotated public dataset to identify cones on Mars. ConeQuest consists
of >13k samples from 3 different regions of Mars. We propose two benchmark
tasks using ConeQuest: (i) Spatial Generalization and (ii) Cone-size
Generalization. We finetune and evaluate widely-used segmentation models on
both benchmark tasks. Results indicate that cone segmentation is a challenging
open problem not solved by existing segmentation models, which achieve an
average IoU of 52.52% and 42.55% on in-distribution data for tasks (i) and
(ii), respectively. We believe this new benchmark dataset will facilitate the
development of more accurate and robust models for cone segmentation. Data and
code are available at https://github.com/kerner-lab/ConeQuest.Comment: Accepted at WACV 202
The inhibition of mammary epithelial cell growth by the long isoform of Angiomotin
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Mammary ductal epithelial cell growth is controlled by microenvironmental signals in serum under both normal physiological settings and during breast cancer progression. Importantly, the effects of several of these microenvironmental signals are mediated by the activities of the tumor suppressor protein kinases of the Hippo pathway. Canonically, Hippo protein kinases inhibit cellular growth through the phosphorylation and inactivation of the oncogenic transcriptional co-activator Yes-Associated Protein (YAP). This study defines an alternative mechanism whereby Hippo protein kinases induce growth arrest via the phosphorylation of the long isoform of Angiomotin (Amot130). Specifically, serum starvation is found to activate the Hippo protein kinase, Large Tumor Suppressor (LATS), which phosphorylates the adapter protein Amot130 at serine-175. Importantly, wild-type Amot130 potently inhibits mammary epithelial cell growth, unlike the Amot130 serine-175 to alanine mutant, which cannot be phosphorylated at this residue. The growth-arrested phenotype of Amot130 is likely a result of its mechanistic response to LATS signaling. Specifically, LATS activity promotes the association of Amot130 with the ubiquitin ligase Atrophin-1 Interacting Protein 4 (AIP4). As a consequence, the Amot130-AIP4 complex amplifies LATS tumor suppressive signaling by stabilizing LATS protein steady state levels via preventing AIP4-targeted degradation of LATS. Additionally, AIP4 binding to Amot130 leads to the ubiquitination and stabilization of Amot130. In turn, the Amot130-AIP4 complex signals the ubiquitination and degradation of YAP. This inhibition of YAP activity by Amot130 requires both AIP4 and the ability of Amot130 to be phosphorylated by LATS. Together, these findings significantly modify the current view that the phosphorylation of YAP by Hippo protein kinases is sufficient for YAP inhibition and cellular growth arrest. Based upon these results, the inhibition of cellular growth in the absence of serum more accurately involves the stabilization of Amot130 and LATS, which together inhibit YAP activity and mammary epithelial cell growth
A Method for Fast, High-Precision Characterization of Synthetic Biology Devices
Engineering biological systems with predictable behavior is a foundational goal of synthetic biology. To accomplish this, it is important to accurately characterize the behavior of biological devices. Prior characterization efforts, however, have generally not yielded enough high-quality information to enable compositional design. In the TASBE (A Tool-Chain to Accelerate Synthetic Biological Engineering) project we have developed a new characterization technique capable of producing such data. This document describes the techniques we have developed, along with examples of their application, so that the techniques can be accurately used by others
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