Ab initio study of shock compressed oxygen

Quantum molecular dynamic simulations are introduced to study the shock compressed oxygen. The principal Hugoniot points derived from the equation of state agree well with the available experimental data. With the increase of pressure, molecular dissociation is observed. Electron spin polarization determines the electronic structure of the system under low pressure, while it is suppressed around 30 $\sim$ 50 GPa. Particularly, nonmetal-metal transition is taken into account, which also occurs at about 30 $\sim$ 50 GPa. In addition, the optical properties of shock compressed oxygen are also discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

DsD_s Asymmetry in Photoproduction

By adopting two models of strange and antistrange quark distributions inside nucleon, the light-cone meson-baryon fluctuation model and the effective chiral quark model, we calculate the $D_s^+ - D_s^-$ asymmetry in photoproduction in the framework of heavy-quark recombination mechanism. We find that the effect of asymmetry of strange sea to the $D_s$ asymmetry is considerable and depending on the different models. Therefore, we expect that with the further study in electroproduction, e.g. at HERA and CEBAF, the experimental measurements on the $D_s^+ - D_s^-$ asymmetry may impose a strong restriction on the strange-antistrange distribution asymmetry models.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented by I. Caprini at the International Conference on QCD and Hadronic Physics, June 16-20 2005, Beijin

Bounding film drainage in common thin films

A review of thin film drainage models is presented in which the predictions of thinning velocities and drainage times are compared to reported values on foam and emulsion films found in the literature. Free standing films with tangentially immobile interfaces and suppressed electrostatic repulsion are considered, such as those studied in capillary cells. The experimental thinning velocities and drainage times of foams and emulsions are shown to be bounded by predictions from the Reynolds and the theoretical MTsR equations. The semi-empirical MTsR and the surface wave equations were the most consistently accurate with all of the films considered. These results are used in an accompanying paper to develop scaling laws that bound the critical film thickness of foam and emulsion films

Markov Modeling of Breast Cancer

Previous work with respect to the treatments and relapse time for breast cancer patients is extended by applying a Markov chain to model three different types of breast cancer patients: alive without ever having relapse, alive with relapse, and deceased. It is shown that combined treatment of tamoxifen and radiation is more effective than single treatment of tamoxifen in preventing the recurrence of breast cancer. However, if the patient has already relapsed from breast cancer, single treatment of tamoxifen would be more appropriate with respect to survival time after relapse. Transition probabilities between three stages during different time periods, 2-year, 4-year, 5-year, and 10-year, are also calculated to provide information on how likely one stage moves to another stage within a specific time period

Structure-based discovery of fiber-binding compounds that reduce the cytotoxicity of amyloid beta.

Amyloid protein aggregates are associated with dozens of devastating diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and diabetes type 2. While structure-based discovery of compounds has been effective in combating numerous infectious and metabolic diseases, ignorance of amyloid structure has hindered similar approaches to amyloid disease. Here we show that knowledge of the atomic structure of one of the adhesive, steric-zipper segments of the amyloid-beta (Aβ) protein of Alzheimer's disease, when coupled with computational methods, identifies eight diverse but mainly flat compounds and three compound derivatives that reduce Aβ cytotoxicity against mammalian cells by up to 90%. Although these compounds bind to Aβ fibers, they do not reduce fiber formation of Aβ. Structure-activity relationship studies of the fiber-binding compounds and their derivatives suggest that compound binding increases fiber stability and decreases fiber toxicity, perhaps by shifting the equilibrium of Aβ from oligomers to fibers. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00857.001

Analytical modeling of water wave interaction with a bottom-mounted surface-piercing porous cylinder in front of a vertical wall

The interaction of water wave with a bottom-mounted surface-piercing porous cylinder near a rigid vertical wall is investigated by an analytical model newly developed in the present work within the context of linear potential flow theory. The image principle is used to transfer the original problem in bounded water into the equivalent problem of wave interaction with two symmetrical porous cylinders in open seas in the presence of bi-directional incident waves. The velocity potential is analytically derived by means of the eigen function expansion along with the matching technique. Furthermore, a new alternative method for the evaluation of wave force is developed via the application of the Haskind–Hanaoka relation to a porous structure. In this method, an auxiliary radiation potential is introduced to replace the diffraction potential for the calculation of wave force. The auxiliary radiation potential used here is due to the oscillation of a porous cylinder in front of a wall. The image principle is used again to search the solution of the wave radiation problem in bounded water and the original radiation problem is then transferred to that due to two porous cylinders undergoing in-phase orout-of-phase motions in open seas. After the validation of the developed model, detailed parametric study is carried out. The porosity of the cylinder, incident wave heading and spacing between the cylinder and the wall are systematically adjusted to investigate their effects on the wave force as well as the wave elevation. The extension of our model to the case of a cylinder array in front of a wall has also been performed, and the associated phenomenon has been explored