Infrared observations of P/Halley and P/Encke

Broadband optical/infrared photometers responding from 0.5 to 23 microns mounted on the Univ. of Minnesota (UM) O'Brien 76-cm telescope, Wyoming Infrared Observatory 234-cm telescope, and UM's Mount Lemmon Infrared Observatory 152-cm telescope were used to measure comet Halley more than 30 times between 12 Dec. 1985 to 6 May 1986. The Wyoming system was used to measure P/Encke on 24 Jul. 1987. The equipment and observations of Halley were fully described by Gehrz and Ney. Conclusions based on a preliminary analysis of the Halley and P/Encke data are reported

Chaos and Universality in a Four-Dimensional Spin Glass

We present a finite size scaling analysis of Monte Carlo simulation results on a four dimensional Ising spin glass. We study chaos with both coupling and temperature perturbations, and find the same chaos exponent in each case. Chaos is investigated both at the critical temperature and below where it seems to be more efficient (larger exponent). Dimension four seems to be above the critical dimension where chaos with temperature is no more present in the critical region. Our results are consistent with the Gaussian and bimodal coupling distributions being in the same universality class.Comment: 11 pages, including 6 postscript figures. Latex with revtex macro

Selenium-Binding Protein 1 Indicates Myocardial Stress and Risk for Adverse Outcome in Cardiac Surgery

Selenium-binding protein 1 (SELENBP1) is an intracellular protein that has been detected in the circulation in response to myocardial infarction. Hypoxia and cardiac surgery affect selenoprotein expression and selenium (Se) status. For this reason, we decided to analyze circulating SELENBP1 concentrations in patients (n = 75) necessitating cardioplegia and a cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) during the course of the cardiac surgery. Serum samples were collected at seven time-points spanning the full surgical process. SELENBP1 was quantified by a highly sensitive newly developed immunological assay. Serum concentrations of SELENBP1 increased markedly during the intervention and showed a positive association with the duration of ischemia (ρ = 0.6, p < 0.0001). Elevated serum SELENBP1 concentrations at 1 h after arrival at the intensive care unit (post-surgery) were predictive to identify patients at risk of adverse outcome (death, bradycardia or cerebral ischemia, "endpoint 1"; OR 29.9, CI 3.3-268.8, p = 0.00027). Circulating SELENBP1 during intervention (2 min after reperfusion or 15 min after weaning from the CPB) correlated positively with an established marker of myocardial infarction (CK-MB) measured after the intervention (each with ρ = 0.5, p < 0.0001). We concluded that serum concentrations of SELENBP1 were strongly associated with cardiac arrest and the duration of myocardial ischemia already early during surgery, thereby constituting a novel and promising quantitative marker for myocardial hypoxia, with a high potential to improve diagnostics and prediction in combination with the established clinical parameters

Historical vintage descriptions from Luxembourg - an indicator for the climatic conditions in the past?

Verbal vintage descriptions in a historical wine chronicle (809-1904) of the Luxembourgish winegrowing region were assigned to five wine quality and three wine quantity classes. To calibrate models describing the impact of the seasonal heat consumption on wine quality and quantity, instrumental records from Luxembourg-City in a reference period (1854-1885) and the associated vintage quality and quantity classes were correlated. Dummy regression models showed, that in the reference period the wine quality classes assigned were significantly correlated with the annual modified heliothermic index values (representing the heat consumption) (R2adj.= 0.55, p = 0.0002); whereas, the incorporation of the wine quantity as additional predictor variable did not significantly improve model output. Based on linear correlations between annual thermal conditions and wine quality descriptions, average April-September temperatures were reconstructed for the period 1200-1904. Running averages calculated using LOESS smoothing showed that periods with cooler and warmer climatic conditions alternated in the past centuries. Even though a precise reconstruction of the annual temperature conditions solely based on vintage descriptions is not possible due to the broad set of potentially interfering effects, long-term climatic trends described in the literature such as the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Little Ice Age could be retrieved

Investigation on Data Adaptation Techniques for Neural Named Entity Recognition

Data processing is an important step in various natural language processing tasks. As the commonly used datasets in named entity recognition contain only a limited number of samples, it is important to obtain additional labeled data in an efficient and reliable manner. A common practice is to utilize large monolingual unlabeled corpora. Another popular technique is to create synthetic data from the original labeled data (data augmentation). In this work, we investigate the impact of these two methods on the performance of three different named entity recognition tasks.Comment: ACL SRW 2021 - camera read

Fractal Droplets in Two Dimensional Spin Glasses

The two-dimensional Edwards-Anderson model with Gaussian bond distribution is investigated at T=0 with a numerical method. Droplet excitations are directly observed. It turns out that the averaged volume of droplets is proportional to l^D with D = 1.80(2) where l is the spanning length of droplets, revealing their fractal nature. The exponent characterizing the l dependence of the droplet excitation energy is estimated to be -0.42(4), clearly different from the stiffness exponent for domain wall excitations.Comment: 4 pages 4 figure

Effects of Trypanosoma brucei tryptophanyl-tRNA synthetases silencing by RNA interference

The kinetoplast genetic code deviates from the universal code in that 90% of mitochondrial tryptophans are specified by UGA instead of UGG codons. A single nucleus-encoded tRNA Trp(CCA) is used by both nuclear and mitochondria genes, since all kinetoplast tRNAs are imported into the mitochondria from the cytoplasm. To allow decoding of the mitochondrial UGA codons as tryptophan, the tRNA Trp(CCA) anticodon is changed to UCA by an editing event. Two tryptophanyl tRNA synthetases (TrpRSs) have been identified in Trypanosoma brucei: TbTrpRS1 and TbTrpRS2 which localize to the cytoplasm and mitochondria respectively. We used inducible RNA interference (RNAi) to assess the role of TbTrpRSs. Our data validates previous observations of TrpRS as potential drug design targets and investigates the RNAi effect on the mitochondria of the parasite