Gravity Sensing, Graviorientation and Microgravity

Gravity has constantly governed the evolution of life on Earth over the last 3.5 billion years while the magnetic field of the Earth has fluctuated over the eons, temperatures constantly change, and the light intensity undergoes seasonal and daily cycles. All forms of life are permanently exposed to gravity and it can be assumed that almost all organisms have developed sensors and respond in one way or the other to the unidirectional acceleration force. Here we summarize what is currently known about gravity sensing and response mechanisms in microorganisms, lower and higher plants starting from the historical eye-opening experiments from the nineteenth century up to today’s extremely rapidly advancing cellular, molecular and biotechnological research. In addition to high-tech methods, in particular experimentation in the microgravity environment of parabolic flights and in the low Earth orbit as well as in “microgravity simulators” have considerably improved our knowledge of the fascinating sensing and response mechanisms which enable organisms to explore and exploit the environment on, above and below the surface of the Earth and which was fundamental for evolution of life on Earth

Joint Analysis of BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck Data

We report the results of a joint analysis of data from BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck. BICEP2 and Keck Array have observed the same approximately 400 deg2 patch of sky centered on RA 0 h, Dec. -57.5 \ub0 . The combined maps reach a depth of 57 nK deg in Stokes Q and U in a band centered at 150 GHz. Planck has observed the full sky in polarization at seven frequencies from 30 to 353 GHz, but much less deeply in any given region (1.2 \u3bc K deg in Q and U at 143 GHz). We detect 150 7353 cross-correlation in B modes at high significance. We fit the single- and cross-frequency power spectra at frequencies 65150 GHz to a lensed-\u39b CDM model that includes dust and a possible contribution from inflationary gravitational waves (as parametrized by the tensor-to-scalar ratio r), using a prior on the frequency spectral behavior of polarized dust emission from previous Planck analysis of other regions of the sky. We find strong evidence for dust and no statistically significant evidence for tensor modes. We probe various model variations and extensions, including adding a synchrotron component in combination with lower frequency data, and find that these make little difference to the r constraint. Finally, we present an alternative analysis which is similar to a map-based cleaning of the dust contribution, and show that this gives similar constraints. The final result is expressed as a likelihood curve for r, and yields an upper limit r0.05<0.12 at 95% confidence. Marginalizing over dust and r, lensing B modes are detected at 7.0 \u3c3 significance