House of Flags, Parliament Square, London

The House of Flags was a temporary freestanding structure erected on Parliament Square for the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was one of the Mayor of London’s ‘Wonder Series’ of installations to celebrate the capital’s design talent by showcasing cutting edge architectural projects throughout London. It was made of plywood panels containing cut out symbols, each printed with the flag of a nation participating in the games. Together the flag panels created a large timber jigsaw, a matrix of symbols, shimmering colours, shadows and perforations, inviting the public to experience an image of the cosmopolitan world as well as an image of multi-ethnic London. The structure was designed to be demounted and installed elsewhere. The installation responded to the following research questions: How can the unifying spirit of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the cosmopolitanism of London be reflected in a temporary installation? How can the design objectives of an interlocking, stacked structure be reconciled with the protocols of heraldry? How can a temporary installation be prefabricated for hand assembly, demounting and reassembly? Once the initial decision to design an interlocking, stacked structure had been made, the architects worked closely with manufacturers and printers to research the production of the CNC cut printed plywood panels. Panels were designed to be lighter towards the top of the structure to facilitate hand assembly. The architects worked closely with the Flag Institute, the world’s leading research and documentation centre for flag information, to determine how flag designs and relationships could correspond with their strict protocols. The structure was a highly visible installation and popular photographic backdrop throughout the Olympic and Paralympic games and was widely disseminated in the media as a symbol of the games. This output will also be returned by Yeoryia Manolopoulou for University College London

Gravitational cubic interactions for a massive mixed symmetry gauge field

In a recent paper arXiv:1107.1872 cubic gravitational interactions for a massless mixed symmetry field in AdS space have been constructed. In the current paper we extend these results to the case of massive field. We work in a Fradkin-Vasiliev approach and use frame-like gauge invariant description for massive field which works in (A)dS spaces with arbitrary values of cosmological constant including flat Minkowski space. In this, massless limit in AdS space coincides with the results of arXiv:1107.1872 while we show that it is impossible to switch on gravitational interaction for massless field in dS space.Comment: 13 page

Mixed-symmetry tensor conserved currents and AdS/CFT correspondence

We present the full list of conserved currents built of two massless spinor fields in Minkowski space and their derivatives multiplied by Clifford algebra elements. The currents have particular mixed-symmetry type described by Young diagrams with one row and one column of arbitrary lengths and heights. Along with Yukawa-like totally antisymmetric currents the complete set of constructed currents exactly matches the spectrum of AdS mixed-symmetry fields arising in the generalized Flato-Fronsdal theorem for two spinor singletons. As a by-product, we formulate and study general properties of primary fields and conserved currents of mixed-symmetry type.Comment: 17 pages; v2: typos corrected, clarifications and refs added; v3: more explanations and refs added; contribution to the J.Phys.A special volume on "Higher Spin Theories and AdS/CFT" edited by Matthias Gaberdiel and Mikhail Vasilie

Identification of the major tRNAPhe binding domain in the tetrameric structure of cytoplasmic phenylalanyl-tRNA synthetase from baker's yeast

AbstractNative cytoplasmic phenylalanyl-tRNA synthetase from baker's yeast is a tetramer of the α2β2 type. On mild tryptic cleavage it gives rise to a modified ∡2β′2 form that has lost the tRNAPhe binding capacity but is still able to activate phenylalanine. In this paper are presented data concerning peptides released by this limited proteolytic conversion as well as those arising from exhaustive tryptic digestion of the truncated β′ subunit. Each purified peptide was unambiguously assigned to a unique stretch of the β subunit amino acid sequence that was recently determined via gene cloning and DNA sequencing. Together with earlier results from affinity labelling studies the present data show that the Lys 172—Ile 173 bond is the unique target of trypsin under mild conditions and that the N-terminal domain of each β subunit (residues 1–172) contains the major tRNAPhe binding sites

Higher-Spin Fermionic Gauge Fields and Their Electromagnetic Coupling

We study the electromagnetic coupling of massless higher-spin fermions in flat space. Under the assumptions of locality and Poincare invariance, we employ the BRST-BV cohomological methods to construct consistent parity-preserving off-shell cubic 1-s-s vertices. Consistency and non-triviality of the deformations not only rule out minimal coupling, but also restrict the possible number of derivatives. Our findings are in complete agreement with, but derived in a manner independent from, the light-cone-formulation results of Metsaev and the string-theory-inspired results of Sagnotti-Taronna. We prove that any gauge-algebra-preserving vertex cannot deform the gauge transformations. We also show that in a local theory, without additional dynamical higher-spin gauge fields, the non-abelian vertices are eliminated by the lack of consistent second-order deformations.Comment: 44 pages; references added, minor changes made, to appear in JHE

Evidence for dust evolution within the Taurus Complex from Spitzer images

We present Spitzer images of the Taurus Complex (TC) and take advantage of the sensitivity and spatial resolution of the observations to characterize the diffuse IR emission across the cloud. This work highlights evidence of dust evolution within the translucent sections of the archetype reference for studies of quiescent molecular clouds. We combine Spitzer 160 um and IRAS 100 um observations to produce a dust temperature map and a far-IR dust opacity map at 5' resolution. The average dust temperature is about 14.5K with a dispersion of +/-1K across the cloud. The far-IR dust opacity is a factor 2 larger than the average value for the diffuse ISM. This opacity increase and the attenuation of the radiation field (RF) both contribute to account for the lower emission temperature of the large grains. The structure of the TC significantly changes in the mid-IR images that trace emission from PAHs and VSGs. We focus our analysis of the mid-IR emission to a range of ecliptic latitudes where the zodiacal light residuals are small. Within this cloud area, there are no 8 and 24 um counterparts to the brightest 160 um emission features. Conversely, the 8 and 24 um images reveal filamentary structure that is strikingly inconspicuous in the 160 um and extinction maps. The IR colors vary over sub-parsec distances across this filamentary structure. We compare the observed colors with model calculations quantifying the impact of the RF intensity and the abundance of stochastically heated particles on the dust SED. To match the range of observed colors, we have to invoke variations by a factor of a few of both the interstellar RF and the abundance of PAHs and VSGs. We conclude that within this filamentary structure a significant fraction of the dust mass cycles in and out the small size end of the dust size distribution.Comment: 43 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in Ap