109,849 research outputs found
Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP) of semiconductors in space
The progress achieved on the project entitled 'Rapid Thermal Processing of Semiconductors in Space' for a 12 month period of activity ending March 31, 1993 is summarized. The activity of this group is being performed under the direct auspices of the ROMPS program. The main objective of this program is to develop and demonstrate the use of advanced robotics in space with rapid thermal process (RTP) of semiconductors providing the test technology. Rapid thermal processing is an ideal processing step for demonstration purposes since it encompasses many of the characteristics of other processes used in solid state device manufacturing. Furthermore, a low thermal budget is becoming more important in existing manufacturing practice, while a low thermal budget is critical to successful processing in space. A secondary objective of this project is to determine the influence of microgravity on the rapid thermal process for a variety of operating modes. In many instances, this involves one or more fluid phases. The advancement of microgravity processing science is an important ancillary objective
Perspectives on Nuclear Structure and Scattering with the Ab Initio No-Core Shell Model
Nuclear structure and reaction theory are undergoing a major renaissance with
advances in many-body methods, strong interactions with greatly improved links
to Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the advent of high performance computing, and
improved computational algorithms. Predictive power, with well-quantified
uncertainty, is emerging from non-perturbative approaches along with the
potential for new discoveries such as predicting nuclear phenomena before they
are measured. We present an overview of some recent developments and discuss
challenges that lie ahead. Our focus is on explorations of alternative
truncation schemes in the harmonic oscillator basis, of which our
Japanese--United States collaborative work on the No-Core Monte-Carlo Shell
Model is an example. Collaborations with Professor Takaharu Otsuka and his
group have been instrumental in these developments.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Proceedings of
Perspectives of the Physics of Nuclear Structure, JPS Conference Proceedings,
Japan (to appear
The Arecibo HII Region Discovery Survey
We report the detection of radio recombination line emission (RRL) using the
Arecibo Observatory at X-band (9GHz, 3cm) from 37 previously unknown HII
regions in the Galactic zone 66 deg. > l > 31 deg. and |b| < 1 deg. This
Arecibo HII Region Discovery Survey (Arecibo HRDS) is a continuation of the
Green Bank Telescope (GBT) HRDS. The targets for the Arecibo HRDS have
spatially coincident 24 micron and 20 cm emission of a similar angular
morphology and extent. To take advantage of Arecibo's sensitivity and small
beam size, sources in this sample are fainter, smaller in angle, or in more
crowded fields compared to those of the GBT HRDS. These Arecibo nebulae are
some of the faintest HII regions ever detected in RRL emission. Our detection
rate is 58%, which is low compared to the 95% detection rate for GBT HRDS
targets. We derive kinematic distances to 23 of the Arecibo HRDS detections.
Four nebulae have negative LSR velocities and are thus unambiguously in the
outer Galaxy. The remaining sources are at the tangent point distance or
farther. We identify a large, diffuse HII region complex that has an associated
HI and 13CO shell. The ~90 pc diameter of the G52L nebula in this complex may
be the largest Galactic HII region known, and yet it has escaped previous
detection.Comment: Accepted to ApJ Data can be found here: http://go.nrao.edu/hrd
Unexpected Accumulation of ncm\u3csup\u3e5\u3c/sup\u3eU and ncm\u3csup\u3e5\u3c/sup\u3es\u3csup\u3e2\u3c/sup\u3eU in a \u3cem\u3etrm9\u3c/em\u3e Mutant Suggests an Additional Step in the Synthesis of mcm\u3csup\u3e5\u3c/sup\u3eU and mcm\u3csup\u3e5\u3c/sup\u3es\u3csup\u3e2\u3c/sup\u3eU
Background
Transfer RNAs are synthesized as a primary transcript that is processed to produce a mature tRNA. As part of the maturation process, a subset of the nucleosides are modified. Modifications in the anticodon region often modulate the decoding ability of the tRNA. At position 34, the majority of yeast cytosolic tRNA species that have a uridine are modified to 5-carbamoylmethyluridine (ncm5U), 5-carbamoylmethyl-2′-O-methyluridine (ncm5Um), 5-methoxycarbonylmethyl-uridine (mcm5U) or 5-methoxycarbonylmethyl-2-thiouridine (mcm5s2U). The formation of mcm5 and ncm5 side chains involves a complex pathway, where the last step in formation of mcm5 is a methyl esterification of cm5 dependent on the Trm9 and Trm112 proteins.
Methodology and Principal Findings
Both Trm9 and Trm112 are required for the last step in formation of mcm5 side chains at wobble uridines. By co-expressing a histidine-tagged Trm9p together with a native Trm112p in E. coli, these two proteins purified as a complex. The presence of Trm112p dramatically improves the methyltransferase activity of Trm9p in vitro. Single tRNA species that normally contain mcm5U or mcm5s2U nucleosides were isolated from trm9Δ or trm112Δ mutants and the presence of modified nucleosides was analyzed by HPLC. In both mutants, mcm5U and mcm5s2U nucleosides are absent in tRNAs and the major intermediates accumulating were ncm5U and ncm5s2U, not the expected cm5U and cm5s2U.
Conclusions
Trm9p and Trm112p function together at the final step in formation of mcm5U in tRNA by using the intermediate cm5U as a substrate. In tRNA isolated from trm9Δ and trm112Δ strains, ncm5U and ncm5s2U nucleosides accumulate, questioning the order of nucleoside intermediate formation of the mcm5 side chain. We propose two alternative explanations for this observation. One is that the intermediate cm5U is generated from ncm5U by a yet unknown mechanism and the other is that cm5U is formed before ncm5U and mcm5U
Development and validation of 'AutoRIF': Software for the automated analysis of radiation-induced foci
Copyright @ 2012 McVean et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: The quantification of radiation-induced foci (RIF) to investigate the induction and subsequent repair of DNA double strands breaks is now commonplace. Over the last decade systems specific for the automatic quantification of RIF have been developed for this purpose, however to ask more mechanistic questions on the spatio-temporal aspects of RIF, an automated RIF analysis platform that also quantifies RIF size/volume and relative three-dimensional (3D) distribution of RIF within individual nuclei, is required.
Results: A java-based image analysis system has been developed (AutoRIF) that quantifies the number, size/volume and relative nuclear locations of RIF within 3D nuclear volumes. Our approach identifies nuclei using the dynamic Otsu threshold and RIF by enhanced Laplacian filtering and maximum entropy thresholding steps and, has an application ‘batch optimisation’ process to ensure reproducible quantification of RIF. AutoRIF was validated by comparing output against manual quantification of the same 2D and 3D image stacks with results showing excellent concordance over a whole range of sample time points (and therefore range of total RIF/nucleus) after low-LET radiation exposure.
Conclusions: This high-throughput automated RIF analysis system generates data with greater depth of information and reproducibility than that which can be achieved manually and may contribute toward the standardisation of RIF analysis. In particular, AutoRIF is a powerful tool for studying spatio-temporal relationships of RIF using a range of DNA damage response markers and can be run independently of other software, enabling most personal computers to perform image analysis. Future considerations for AutoRIF will likely include more complex algorithms that enable multiplex analysis for increasing combinations of cellular markers.This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund
Schema Independent Relational Learning
Learning novel concepts and relations from relational databases is an
important problem with many applications in database systems and machine
learning. Relational learning algorithms learn the definition of a new relation
in terms of existing relations in the database. Nevertheless, the same data set
may be represented under different schemas for various reasons, such as
efficiency, data quality, and usability. Unfortunately, the output of current
relational learning algorithms tends to vary quite substantially over the
choice of schema, both in terms of learning accuracy and efficiency. This
variation complicates their off-the-shelf application. In this paper, we
introduce and formalize the property of schema independence of relational
learning algorithms, and study both the theoretical and empirical dependence of
existing algorithms on the common class of (de) composition schema
transformations. We study both sample-based learning algorithms, which learn
from sets of labeled examples, and query-based algorithms, which learn by
asking queries to an oracle. We prove that current relational learning
algorithms are generally not schema independent. For query-based learning
algorithms we show that the (de) composition transformations influence their
query complexity. We propose Castor, a sample-based relational learning
algorithm that achieves schema independence by leveraging data dependencies. We
support the theoretical results with an empirical study that demonstrates the
schema dependence/independence of several algorithms on existing benchmark and
real-world datasets under (de) compositions
Natural clustering: the modularity approach
We show that modularity, a quantity introduced in the study of networked
systems, can be generalized and used in the clustering problem as an indicator
for the quality of the solution. The introduction of this measure arises very
naturally in the case of clustering algorithms that are rooted in Statistical
Mechanics and use the analogy with a physical system.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure enlarged versio
Untangling the Recombination Line Emission from HII Regions with Multiple Velocity Components
HII regions are the ionized spheres surrounding high-mass stars. They are
ideal targets for tracing Galactic structure because they are predominantly
found in spiral arms and have high luminosities at infrared and radio
wavelengths. In the Green Bank Telescope HII Region Discovery Survey (GBT HRDS)
we found that >30% of first Galactic quadrant HII regions have multiple
hydrogen radio recombination line (RRL) velocities, which makes determining
their Galactic locations and physical properties impossible. Here we make
additional GBT RRL observations to determine the discrete HII region velocity
for all 117 multiple-velocity sources within 18deg. < l < 65deg. The
multiple-velocity sources are concentrated in the zone 22deg. < l < 32deg.,
coinciding with the largest regions of massive star formation, which implies
that the diffuse emission is caused by leaked ionizing photons. We combine our
observations with analyses of the electron temperature, molecular gas, and
carbon recombination lines to determine the source velocities for 103 discrete
H II regions (88% of the sample). With the source velocities known, we resolve
the kinematic distance ambiguity for 47 regions, and thus determine their
heliocentric distances.Comment: 44 pages, 5 figures, 16 pages of tables; Accepted by ApJ
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