The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the international space station: Part II — Results from the first seven years

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is a precision particle physics detector on the International Space Station (ISS) conducting a unique, long-duration mission of fundamental physics research in space. The physics objectives include the precise studies of the origin of dark matter, antimatter, and cosmic rays as well as the exploration of new phenomena. Following a 16-year period of construction and testing, and a precursor flight on the Space Shuttle, AMS was installed on the ISS on May 19, 2011. In this report we present results based on 120 billion charged cosmic ray events up to multi-TeV energies. This includes the fluxes of positrons, electrons, antiprotons, protons, and nuclei. These results provide unexpected information, which cannot be explained by the current theoretical models. The accuracy and characteristics of the data, simultaneously from many different types of cosmic rays, provide unique input to the understanding of origins, acceleration, and propagation of cosmic rays.</p

A structured chitosan-based platform for biomolecule attachment to solid surfaces: application to DNA microarray preparation

A structured chemical platform based on chitosan, an amine-rich polysaccharide, is presented as an alternative chemistry to functionalize solid support (in this case, glass slides) for grafting biomolecules. This approach has been adopted for generating arrays using amino-modified oligonucleotides with two different lengths (25-mer and 70-mer) for different purposes. Results using these chitosan-activated surfaces indicate high oligonucleotide loading capacity, good availability to hybridization against targets, and activeness in enzyme-mediated single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection procedures by DNA polymerase and DNA ligase enzymes with low background. Universal arrays have been prepared and extensively used with excellent results in different applications. The chitosan-treated surfaces were also evaluated for their performance in a gene expression experiment