Anolis oculatus

Number of Pages: 4Integrative BiologyGeological Science

The Canon Wars

Canons are taking their turn down the academic runway in ways that no one would have foretold just a decade ago. Affection for canons of construction has taken center stage in recent Supreme Court cases and in constitutional theory. Harvard Dean John Manning and originalists Will Baude and Stephen Sachs have all suggested that principles of “ordinary interpretation” including canons should inform constitutional interpretation. Given this newfound enthusiasm for canons, and their convergence in both constitutional and statutory law, it is not surprising that we now have two competing book-length treatments of the canons—one by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner, Reading Law, and the other by Yale Law Professor William N. Eskridge, Interpreting Law. Both volumes purport to provide ways to use canons to read statutes and the Constitution. In this Review of Interpreting Law, we argue that this contemporary convergence on canons raises some significant interpretive questions about judicial power and the very idea of a canon

Functional characterization of a glutamate/aspartate transporter from the mosquito Aedes aegypti

Glutamate elicits a variety of effects in insects, including inhibitory and excitatory signals at both neuromuscular junctions and brain. Insect glutamatergic neurotransmission has been studied in great depth especially from the standpoint of the receptor-mediated effects, but the molecular mechanisms involved in the termination of the numerous glutamatergic signals have only recently begun to receive attention. In vertebrates, glutamatergic signals are terminated by Na^+/K^+-dependent high-affinity excitatory amino acid transporters (EAAT), which have been cloned and characterized extensively. Cloning and characterization of a few insect homologues have followed, but functional information for these homologues is still limited. Here we report a study conducted on a cloned mosquito EAAT homologue isolated from the vector of the dengue virus, Aedes aegypti. The deduced amino acid sequence of the protein, AeaEAAT, exhibits 40–50% identity with mammalian EAATs, and 45–50% identity to other insect EAATs characterized thus far. It transports l-glutamate as well as l- and d-aspartate with high affinity in the micromolar range, and demonstrates a substrate-elicited anion conductance when heterologously expressed in Xenopus laevis oocytes, as found with mammalian homologues. Analysis of the spatial distribution of the protein demonstrates high expression levels in the adult thorax, which is mostly observed in the thoracic ganglia. Together, the work presented here provides a thorough examination of the role played by glutamate transport in Ae. aegypti

Smoothing of sandpile surfaces after intermittent and continuous avalanches: three models in search of an experiment

We present and analyse in this paper three models of coupled continuum equations all united by a common theme: the intuitive notion that sandpile surfaces are left smoother by the propagation of avalanches across them. Two of these concern smoothing at the `bare' interface, appropriate to intermittent avalanche flow, while one of them models smoothing at the effective surface defined by a cloud of flowing grains across the `bare' interface, which is appropriate to the regime where avalanches flow continuously across the sandpile.Comment: 17 pages and 26 figures. Submitted to Physical Review

Genetic variation within and among asexual populations of Porphyra umbilicalis Kützing (Bangiales, Rhodophyta) in the Gulf of Maine, USA

The intertidal marine red alga Porphyra umbilicalis reproduces asexually in the Northwest Atlantic. We looked for population substructure among typical open-coastal and atypical estuarine habitats in seven asexual populations of P. umbilicalis from Maine to New Hampshire using eight expressed sequence tag-simple sequence repeats (EST-SSR) or microsatellite loci. Six genotypes were identified, four of which may represent recombinant genotypes from a recombination event that took place locally, or that took place prior to introduction to the Northwest Atlantic. Genotypic diversity was lowest in a population from Wiscasset, Maine, which inhabits an atypical habitat high in the intertidal zone of a bridge piling in an estuarine tidal rapid. Genotypic diversity was highest in the southernmost populations from New Hampshire; we identified two genotypes that were unique to the southernmost populations, and probably represent the most derived genotypes. We looked at genetic distances among populations in similar habitats, and found that populations were more closely related to their closest neighboring population than to a population in a similar habitat. We show that genotypic diversity within P. umbilicalis populations in the Gulf of Maine is relatively high and thus fits a model of high steady-state variation within asexual populations

The Modern FPGA as Discriminator, TDC and ADC

Recent generations of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become indispensible tools for complex state machine control and signal processing, and now routinely incorporate CPU cores to allow execution of user software code. At the same time, their exceptional performance permits low-power implementation of functionality previously the exclusive domain of dedicated analog electronics. Specific examples presented here use FPGAs as discriminator, time-to-digital (TDC) and analog-to-digital converter (ADC). All three cases are examples of instrumentation for current or future astroparticle experiments.Comment: 7 pages, v3 minor JINST editorial correction

Distances of Stars by mean of the Phase-lag Method

Variable OH/IR stars are Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars with an optically thick circumstellar envelope that emit strong OH 1612 MHz emission. They are commonly observed throughout the Galaxy but also in the LMC and SMC. Hence, the precise inference of the distances of these stars will ultimately result in better constraints on their mass range in different metallicity environments. Through a multi-year long-term monitoring program at the Nancay Radio telescope (NRT) and a complementary high-sensitivity mapping campaign at the eMERLIN and JVLA to measure precisely the angular diameter of the envelopes, we have been re-exploring distance determination through the phase-lag method for a sample of stars, in order to refine the poorly-constrained distances of some and infer the currently unknown distances of others. We present here an update of this project.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, to appear in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium No. 336: Astrophysical Masers: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Univers