A Woman\u27s Kind of Love: Female Longing in the Tamil Alvar Poetry

In the eighth section of Andal\u27s Nacciyar Tirumoli, a woman calls to the clouds and bids them to take a message of love to her delinquent lover, Vishnu, here figured as the lord of Venkatam. In the opening verse of the decad, she begins by plaintively questioning the clouds of her beloved\u27s whereabouts only to end with a bitter complaint about her sullied womanhood -- pen-nirmai. Bracketed by her eager questions -- has the lord of Venkatam come with you -- and her bitter complaint -- how does this bring him pride -- is the landscape of her body. Her tears are waterfalls, her breasts mountains, and just as the waterfalls erode the soil from the mountain slopes, her tears erase her womanhood. The black mark against the unrepentant divine lover is not just her (implied) lost chastity, but the gradual corrosion of her very self

The effect of environment on post surgical overall well-being and pain sensitivity in an animal model

With chronic post surgical pain affecting up to one third of patients undergoing surgeries and the price of treatment being astoundingly high there has been a transition in research to investigate and identify risk factors. Through identification of risk factors new preventative measures can be taken to ensure better surgical outcomes. The role that psychosocial factors can play in the development of chronic post surgical pain has long been recognized yet its mechanisms are still unknown. We aim to investigate how environment can play a direct role in pain perception and sensitivity. We used a Chronic Mild Stress (CMS) paradigm to induce depression in 10 adult male mice, we used 10 control mice who were left in standard opti cages, and 10 enriched mice who were placed in large enrichment cages. CMS mice were exposed to a series of stressors and all mice underwent spared nerve injury surgery. During spared nerve injury the common peroneal and tibial branches of the sciatic nerve were severed while the sural branch was left intact. Overall well-being and pain threshold of mice were tested via Von Frey, Hot Plate, Heat Place Preference, Dynamic Weight Bearing, Hole Board, and Social Interaction. It was found that CMS mice experienced thermal hyperalgesia yet normal thermal threshold sensation. CMS mice also spent less time interacting with novel mice in social interaction, and less amount of time exploring the center of the hole board arena than control or enriched mice. While Von Frey results did not change over the course of the experiment, dynamic weight bearing results indicated spared nerve injury surgery was successful and produced chronic pain. Results indicate that environment plays a role in thermal pain perception and CMS affected overall well being of mice as CMS mice exhibited more timid and anxious behavior

Optimal Source Tracking and Beaming of LISA

We revisit the directionally optimal data streams of LISA first introduced in Nayak etal. It was shown that by using appropriate choice of Time delay interferometric (TDI) combinations, a monochromatic fixed source in the barycentric frame can be optimally tracked in the LISA frame. In this work, we study the beaming properties of these optimal streams. We show that all the three streams V+, Vx and Vo with maximum, minimum and zero directional SNR respectively are highly beamed. We study in detail the frequency dependence of the beaming.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. To appear in the proceedings of Sixth International LISA Symposiu

Genomic analysis suggests that mRNA destabilization by the microprocessor is specialized for the auto-regulation of Dgcr8.

BackgroundThe Microprocessor, containing the RNA binding protein Dgcr8 and RNase III enzyme Drosha, is responsible for processing primary microRNAs to precursor microRNAs. The Microprocessor regulates its own levels by cleaving hairpins in the 5'UTR and coding region of the Dgcr8 mRNA, thereby destabilizing the mature transcript.Methodology/principal findingsTo determine whether the Microprocessor has a broader role in directly regulating other coding mRNA levels, we integrated results from expression profiling and ultra high-throughput deep sequencing of small RNAs. Expression analysis of mRNAs in wild-type, Dgcr8 knockout, and Dicer knockout mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells uncovered mRNAs that were specifically upregulated in the Dgcr8 null background. A number of these transcripts had evolutionarily conserved predicted hairpin targets for the Microprocessor. However, analysis of deep sequencing data of 18 to 200nt small RNAs in mouse ES, HeLa, and HepG2 indicates that exonic sequence reads that map in a pattern consistent with Microprocessor activity are unique to Dgcr8.Conclusion/significanceWe conclude that the Microprocessor's role in directly destabilizing coding mRNAs is likely specifically targeted to Dgcr8 itself, suggesting a specialized cellular mechanism for gene auto-regulation

Towards realistic simulations of QED cascades: non-ideal laser and electron seeding effects

A number of analytical and numerical studies has been performed to investigate the onset and the development of QED cascades in the collision of two counterpropagating laser pulses as a function of the laser intensity. However, it has been recently demonstrated [M. Tamburini et al., Sci. Rep. 7, 5694 (2017)] that the onset of QED cascades is also strongly influenced by the structure of the laser pulses, such as the laser pulse waist radius. Here we investigate how QED cascades are affected by: (a) the laser pulse duration, (b) the presence of a relative delay for the peak of the laser pulses to reach the focus, (c) the existence of a mismatch between the laser focal axis of the two laser pulses. This is especially important as, in realistic laboratory conditions, fluctuations may arise in the temporal and point stability of the lasers.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in Physics of Plasma

A Framework for Semi-automated Web Service Composition in Semantic Web

Number of web services available on Internet and its usage are increasing very fast. In many cases, one service is not enough to complete the business requirement; composition of web services is carried out. Autonomous composition of web services to achieve new functionality is generating considerable attention in semantic web domain. Development time and effort for new applications can be reduced with service composition. Various approaches to carry out automated composition of web services are discussed in literature. Web service composition using ontologies is one of the effective approaches. In this paper we demonstrate how the ontology based composition can be made faster for each customer. We propose a framework to provide precomposed web services to fulfil user requirements. We detail how ontology merging can be used for composition which expedites the whole process. We discuss how framework provides customer specific ontology merging and repository. We also elaborate on how merging of ontologies is carried out.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures; CUBE 2013 International Conferenc