The size and shape of the oblong dwarf planet Haumea

We use thermal radiometry and visible photometry to constrain the size, shape, and albedo of the large Kuiper belt object Haumea. The correlation between the visible and thermal photometry demonstrates that Haumea's high amplitude and quickly varying optical light curve is indeed due to Haumea's extreme shape, rather than large scale albedo variations. However, the well-sampled high precision visible data we present does require longitudinal surface heterogeneity to account for the shape of lightcurve. The thermal emission from Haumea is consistent with the expected Jacobi ellipsoid shape of a rapidly rotating body in hydrostatic equilibrium. The best Jacobi ellipsoid fit to the visible photometry implies a triaxial ellipsoid with axes of length 1920 x 1540 x 990 km and density 2.6 g cm^-3$, as found by Lellouch et al(2010). While the thermal and visible data cannot uniquely constrain the full non-spherical shape of Haumea, the match between the predicted and measured thermal flux for a dense Jacobi ellipsoid suggests that Haumea is indeed one of the densest objects in the Kuiper belt.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables -- Accepted for publication in Earth, Moon and Planet

Portfolio Planning for Planet Earth

Stadtarchiv Solingen, Bergische Arbeiterstimme 14. Mai 1915 Ein Junge wird beim Zuschauen von Kriegsspielen lebensgefährlich verletzt. Wald-Weyer. In Lebensgefahr geriet am letzten Sonntag der 12jährige Sohn einer hiesigen Familie, der dem leidigen Kriegsspiel der Jugendwehr am Jaberg in der Haaner- heide zusah. Beim Abschießen eines Böllers sprang ein solcher entzwei, wobei ein umherfliegendes Stück den etwa 200 Meter entfernt stehenden Knaben derart traf, daß der Junge blut- überstr..

Creating an Effective Education Pamphlet on Sun Protection and Skin Cancer Prevention

Melanoma and other skin cancers are increasing in incidence in the United States. In Connecticut, the melanoma rate is higher than the national average. The public health cost of skin cancer treatment ranges from $2-$8 billion annually. The costs to the individual are also high and the diagnosis of an advanced stage cancer is always emotionally challenging for a patient and his/her family. Efforts should be aimed at primary and secondary prevention of skin cancer, and patient education is an important element of this goal. The creation and use of patient education pamphlets can help to increase patient awareness of sun damage and its sequelae.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1101/thumbnail.jp

Administration of galacto-oligosaccharide prebiotics in the Flinders Sensitive Line animal model of depression

INTRODUCTION: Major depressive disorder is the leading source of disability globally and current pharmacological treatments are less than adequate. Animal models such as the Flinders Sensitive Line (FSL) rats are used to mimic aspects of the phenotype in the human disorder and to characterise candidate antidepressant agents. Communication between the gut microbiome and the brain may play an important role in psychiatric disorders such as depression. Interventions targeting the gut microbiota may serve as potential treatments for depression, and this drives increasing research into the effect of probiotics and prebiotics in neuropsychiatric disorders. Prebiotics, galacto-oligosaccharides and fructooligosaccharides that stimulate the activity of gut bacteria have been reported to have a positive impact, reducing anxiety and depressive-like phenotypes and stress-related physiology in mice and rats, as well as in humans. Bimuno, the commercially available beta-galacto-oligosaccharide, has been shown to increase gut microbiota diversity. AIM: Here, we aim to investigate the effect of Bimuno on rat anxiety-like and depressive-like behaviour and gut microbiota composition in the FSL model, a genetic model of depression, in comparison to their control, the Flinders Resistant Line (FRL) rats. METHODS: Sixty-four male rats aged 5–7 weeks, 32 FSL and 32 FRL rats, will be randomised to receive Bimuno or control (4 g/kg) daily for 4 weeks. Animals will be tested by an experimenter unaware of group allocation on the forced swim test to assessed depressive-like behaviour, the elevated plus maze to assess anxiety-like behaviour and the open field test to assess locomotion. Animals will be weighed and food and water intake, per kilogram of bodyweight, will be recorded. Faeces will be collected from each animal prior to the start of the experiment and on the final day to assess the bacterial diversity and relative abundance of bacterial genera in the gut. All outcomes and statistical analysis will be carried out blinded to group allocation, group assignments will be revealed after raw data have been uploaded to Open Science Framework. Two-way analysis of variance will be carried out to investigate the effect of treatment (control or prebiotic) and strain (FSL or FRL) on depressive-like and anxiety-like behaviours

Factors Affecting Transmission Mode Evolution In Symbioses

Symbiosis, where organisms of different species live closely together, is ubiquitous in our world. It is thought that all multicellular organisms engage in symbiosis, in relationships where the symbiont\u27s effect on the host ranges from beneficial (mutualism) to neutral (commensalism) to harmful (parasitism), and can even switch between mutualism and parasitism, depending on environmental conditions (conditional mutualism). Symbiosis can also have a large, though generally beneficial, impact on the symbiont\u27s fitness, and can further affect third parties who interact with the host or symbiont. The manner in which symbionts are transmitted between hosts can affect not only the distribution of symbionts (and hosts) but also selection on the costs and benefits of the interaction. For example, symbionts are that are transmitted from parent to offspring (vertical transmission) are predicted to evolve to benefit their hosts, while symbionts that are transmittted between unrelated individuals (horizontal transmission) are predicted to evolve intermediate virulence that maximizes their ability to infect new hosts. Understanding transmission evolution is thus important to predicting the ultimate fate of symbioses. I investigate three aspects of transmission evolution. First, since transmission evolution is known to depend on whether it is under host or symbiont control, I used phylogenetic methods to estimate control of transmission in the symbiosis between cool-season grasses (subfamily Pooideae) and their fungal endophytes (genus Epichloe). I found a signal of joint control of transmission, suggesting that the interaction of host and symbiont traits may determine the transmission mode. Second, while a great deal of theory exists about transmission evolution under different types of control in parasitic and mutualistic symbioses, less is known about transmission evolution in conditional mutualisms. These symbioses pose a problem for hosts, who benefit from acquiring the symbiont only in environments where it is beneficial. I modeled transmission evolution in a context-dependent interaction where symbiont quality varied in space and found that the aspect of host fitness the symbiont affects determines host transmission evolution. When the symbiont affects lifespan, but not fecundity, hosts are able to use horizontal transmission to contain the symbiont to the location where it is beneficial. Because environments can vary in time as well as space, I lastly modeled transmission evolution in a conditional mutualism in a spatially and temporally variable environment. In this case, I found that environmental synchronicity could allow hosts to evolve vertical transmission at high newborn host dispersal rates, where ordinarily parent and offspring environments would be too uncorrelated to allow for vertical transmission as a method of symbiont containment. I also found an emergent trade-off in hosts between horizontal and vertical transmission, suggesting that physiological constraints are not required to produce apparent constrains on the total amount of transmission

Distribution System Voltage Management and Optimization for Integration of Renewables and Electric Vehicles: Research Gap Analysis

California is striving to achieve 33% renewable penetration by 2020 in accordance with the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). The behavior of renewable resources and electric vehicles in distribution systems is creating constraints on the penetration of these resources into the distribution system. One such constraint is the ability of present-­‐‑day voltage management methodologies to maintain proper distribution system voltage profiles in the face of higher penetrations of PV and electric vehicle technologies. This white paper describes the research gaps that have been identified in current Volt/VAR Optimization and Control (VVOC) technologies, the emerging technologies which are becoming available for use in VVOC, and the research gaps which exist and must be overcome in order to realize the full promise of these emerging technologies