The Biological Overview Effect: Our Place in Nature

While gazing at the Earth from orbit, some astronauts have described a cognitive shift known as the overview effect. Here we describe an analogous biological overview effect produced by looking at the tiny twig of humanity on the tree of life. We describe the increasingly precise phylogenetic tree of all life on Earth and how it shows us our place in nature. We discuss problems with this tree including the assumption of sexual isolation, purely vertical gene transmission and the dependence of LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) on the completeness of the tree. We compile and present the most concise taxonomic overview of the evolution of our lineage from Archaea to humans

STEER: Beam Selection for Full-Duplex Millimeter Wave Communication Systems

Modern millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems rely on beam alignment to deliver sufficient beamforming gain to close the link between devices. We present a novel beam selection methodology for multi-panel, full-duplex mmWave systems, which we call STEER, that delivers high beamforming gain while significantly reducing the full-duplex self-interference coupled between the transmit and receive beams. STEER does not necessitate changes to conventional beam alignment methodologies nor additional over-the-air feedback, making it compatible with existing cellular standards. Instead, STEER uses conventional beam alignment to identify the general directions beams should be steered, and then it makes use of a minimal number of self-interference measurements to jointly select transmit and receive beams that deliver high gain in these directions while coupling low self-interference. We implement STEER on an industry-grade 28 GHz phased array platform and use further simulation to show that full-duplex operation with beams selected by STEER can notably outperform both half-duplex and full-duplex operation with beams chosen via conventional beam selection. For instance, STEER can reliably reduce self-interference by more than 20 dB and improve SINR by more than 10 dB, compared to conventional beam selection. Our experimental results highlight that beam alignment can be used not only to deliver high beamforming gain in full-duplex mmWave systems but also to mitigate self-interference to levels near or below the noise floor, rendering additional self-interference cancellation unnecessary with STEER

PyATMOS: A Scalable Grid of Hypothetical Planetary Atmospheres

Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the statistical distributions and properties of potentially habitable planetary atmospheres we implemented a parallelised climate modelling tool to scan a range of hypothetical atmospheres.Starting with a modern day Earth atmosphere, we iteratively and incrementally simulated a range of atmospheres to infer the landscape of the multi-parameter space, such as the abundances of biological mediated gases (\ce{O2}, \ce{CO2}, \ce{H2O}, \ce{CH4}, \ce{H2}, and \ce{N2}) that would yield `steady state' planetary atmospheres on Earth-like planets around solar-type stars. Our current datasets comprises of \numatmospheres simulated models of exoplanet atmospheres and is available publicly on the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Our scalable approach of analysing atmospheres could also help interpret future observations of planetary atmospheres by providing estimates of atmospheric gas fluxes and temperatures as a function of altitude. Such data could enable high-throughput first-order assessment of the potential habitability of exoplanetary surfaces and sepcan be a learning dataset for machine learning applications in the atmospheric and exoplanet science domain.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Minimal Symptom Expression' in Patients With Acetylcholine Receptor Antibody-Positive Refractory Generalized Myasthenia Gravis Treated With Eculizumab

The efficacy and tolerability of eculizumab were assessed in REGAIN, a 26-week, phase 3, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in anti-acetylcholine receptor antibody-positive (AChR+) refractory generalized myasthenia gravis (gMG), and its open-label extension

Chemotherapy elicits pro-metastatic extracellular vesicles in breast cancer models

Cytotoxic chemotherapy is an effective treatment for invasive breast cancer. However, experimental studies in mice also suggest that chemotherapy has pro-metastatic effects. Primary tumours release extracellular vesicles (EVs), including exosomes, that can facilitate the seeding and growth of metastatic cancer cells in distant organs, but the effects of chemotherapy on tumour-derived EVs remain unclear. Here we show that two classes of cytotoxic drugs broadly employed in pre-operative (neoadjuvant) breast cancer therapy, taxanes and anthracyclines, elicit tumour-derived EVs with enhanced pro-metastatic capacity. Chemotherapy-elicited EVs are enriched in annexin A6 (ANXA6), a Ca2+-dependent protein that promotes NF-κB-dependent endothelial cell activation, Ccl2 induction and Ly6C+CCR2+ monocyte expansion in the pulmonary pre-metastatic niche to facilitate the establishment of lung metastasis. Genetic inactivation of Anxa6 in cancer cells or Ccr2 in host cells blunts the prometastatic effects of chemotherapy-elicited EVs. ANXA6 is detected, and potentially enriched, in the circulating EVs of breast cancer patients undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy

Modeling and mitigation of interference in wireless receivers with multiple antennae

textRecent wireless communication research faces the challenge of meeting a predicted 1000x increase in demand for wireless Internet data over the next decade. Among the key reasons for such explosive increase in demand include the evolution of Internet as a provider of high-definition video entertainment and two-way video communication, accessed via mobile wireless devices. One way to meet some of this demand is by using multiple antennae at the transmitter and receiver in a wireless device. For example, a system with 4 transmit and 4 receive antennae can provide up to a 4x increase in data throughput. Another key aspect of the overall solution would require sharing radio frequency spectral resources among users, causing severe amounts of interference to wireless systems. Consequently, wireless receivers with multiple antennae would be deployed in network environments that are rife with interference primarily due to wireless resource sharing among users. Other significant sources of interference include computational platform subsystems, signal leakage, and external electronics. Interference causes severe degradation in communication performance of wireless receivers. Having accurate statistical models of interference is a key requirement to designing, and analyzing the communication performance of, multi-antenna wireless receivers in the presence of interference. Prior work on statistical modeling of interference in multi-antenna receivers utilizes either the Gaussian distribution, or non-Gaussian distributions exhibiting either statistical independence or spherical isotropy. This dissertation proposes a framework, based on underlying statistical-physical mechanism of interference generation and propagation, for modeling multi-antenna interference in various network topologies. This framework can model interference which is spherically isotropic, or statistically independent, or somewhere on a continuum between these two extremes. The dissertation then utilizes the derived statistical models to analyze communication performance of multi-antenna receivers in interference-limited wireless networks. Accurate communication performance analysis can highlight the tradeoffs between communication performance and computational complexity of various multi-antenna receiver designs. Finally, using interference statistics, this dissertation proposes receiver algorithms that best mitigate the impact of interference on communication performance. The proposed algorithms include multi-antenna combining strategies, as well as, antenna selection algorithms for cooperative communications.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

The habitability of our earth and other earths: Astrophysical, geochemical, geophysical, and biological limits on planet habitability

For life-forms like us, the most important feature of Earth is its habitability. Understanding habitability and using that knowledge to locate the nearest habitable planet may be crucial for our survival as a species. During the past decade, expectation