89,851 research outputs found
Allergic fetal priming leads to developmental, behavioral and neurobiological changes in mice.
The state of the mother's immune system during pregnancy has an important role in fetal development and disruptions in the balance of this system are associated with a range of neurologic, neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Epidemiological and clinical reports reveal various clues that suggest a possible association between developmental neuropsychiatric disorders and family history of immune system dysfunction. Over the past three decades, analogous increases have been reported in both the incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders and immune-related disorders, particularly allergy and asthma, raising the question of whether allergic asthma and characteristics of various neurodevelopmental disorders share common causal links. We used a mouse model of maternal allergic asthma to test this novel hypothesis that early fetal priming with an allergenic exposure during gestation produces behavioral deficits in offspring. Mothers were primed with an exposure to ovalbumin (OVA) before pregnancy, then exposed to either aerosolized OVA or vehicle during gestation. Both male and female mice born to mothers exposed to aerosolized OVA during gestation exhibited altered developmental trajectories in weight and length, decreased sociability and increased marble-burying behavior. Moreover, offspring of OVA-exposed mothers were observed to have increased serotonin transporter protein levels in the cortex. These data demonstrate that behavioral and neurobiological effects can be elicited following early fetal priming with maternal allergic asthma and provide support that maternal allergic asthma may, in some cases, be a contributing factor to neurodevelopmental disorders
Exploring Dark Matter with Milky Way substructure
The unambiguous detection of Galactic dark matter annihilation would unravel
one of the most outstanding puzzles in particle physics and cosmology. Recent
observations have motivated models in which the annihilation rate is boosted by
the Sommerfeld effect, a non-perturbative enhancement arising from a long range
attractive force. Here we apply the Sommerfeld correction to Via Lactea II, a
high resolution N-body simulation of a Milky-Way-size galaxy, to investigate
the phase-space structure of the Galactic halo. We show that the annihilation
luminosity from kinematically cold substructure can be enhanced by orders of
magnitude relative to previous calculations, leading to the prediction of
gamma-ray fluxes from up to hundreds of dark clumps that should be detectable
by the Fermi satellite.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures (includes Supporting Online Material), accepted
for publication in Science, v2: added reference, fixed typo
Rational Approximate Symmetries of KdV Equation
We construct one-parameter deformation of the Dorfman Hamiltonian operator
for the Riemann hierarchy using the quasi-Miura transformation from topological
field theory. In this way, one can get the approximately rational symmetries of
KdV equation and then investigate its bi-Hamiltonian structure.Comment: 14 pages, no figure
Characterization of a multimode coplanar waveguide parametric amplifier
We characterize a novel Josephson parametric amplifier based on a
flux-tunable quarter-wavelength resonator. The fundamental resonance frequency
is ~1GHz, but we use higher modes of the resonator for our measurements. An
on-chip tuning line allows for magnetic flux pumping of the amplifier. We
investigate and compare degenerate parametric amplification, involving a single
mode, and nondegenerate parametric amplification, using a pair of modes. We
show that we reach quantum-limited noise performance in both cases, and we show
that the added noise can be less than 0.5 added photons in the case of low
gain
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