What are the prospects of 3D profiling systems applied to firearms and toolmark identification?

This paper details a comparative pilot study of 3D (three dimensional) imaging technologies for potential application in forensic firearms and toolmark identification; as such it reviews the most up-to-date profiling systems. In particular, the paper focuses on the application of 3D imaging and recording technology as applied to firearm identification, being a specialised field within the discipline of toolmark identification. Each technology under test employs a different technique or scientific principle to capture topographic data i.e. focus-variation microscopy, confocal microscopy, point laser profilometry and vertical scanning interferometry. To qualitatively establish the capabilities and limitations of each technology investigated, standard reference samples were used and a set of specific operational criteria devised for successful application in this field. The reference standard crucially included and centred on was the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) ‘standard bullet’. This was to ensure that evaluation represented the practical examination of ballistic samples i.e. fired cartridge cases and bullets. It is concluded that focus-variation microscopy has potentially the most promising approach for a forensic laboratory instrument, in terms of functionality and 3D imaging performance, and is worthy of further investigation

Leishmania-specific surface antigens show sub-genus sequence variation and immune recognition.

A family of hydrophilic acylated surface (HASP) proteins, containing extensive and variant amino acid repeats, is expressed at the plasma membrane in infective extracellular (metacyclic) and intracellular (amastigote) stages of Old World Leishmania species. While HASPs are antigenic in the host and can induce protective immune responses, the biological functions of these Leishmania-specific proteins remain unresolved. Previous genome analysis has suggested that parasites of the sub-genus Leishmania (Viannia) have lost HASP genes from their genomes

Profiling of Glycan Receptors for Minute Virus of Mice in Permissive Cell Lines Towards Understanding the Mechanism of Cell Recognition

The recognition of sialic acids by two strains of minute virus of mice (MVM), MVMp (prototype) and MVMi (immunosuppressive), is an essential requirement for successful infection. To understand the potential for recognition of different modifications of sialic acid by MVM, three types of capsids, virus-like particles, wild type empty (no DNA) capsids, and DNA packaged virions, were screened on a sialylated glycan microarray (SGM). Both viruses demonstrated a preference for binding to 9-O-methylated sialic acid derivatives, while MVMp showed additional binding to 9-O-acetylated and 9-O-lactoylated sialic acid derivatives, indicating recognition differences. The glycans recognized contained a type-2 Galβ1-4GlcNAc motif (Neu5Acα2-3Galβ1-4GlcNAc or 3′SIA-LN) and were biantennary complex-type N-glycans with the exception of one. To correlate the recognition of the 3′SIA-LN glycan motif as well as the biantennary structures to their natural expression in cell lines permissive for MVMp, MVMi, or both strains, the N- and O-glycans, and polar glycolipids present in three cell lines used for in vitro studies, A9 fibroblasts, EL4 T lymphocytes, and the SV40 transformed NB324K cells, were analyzed by MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometry. The cells showed an abundance of the sialylated glycan motifs recognized by the viruses in the SGM and previous glycan microarrays supporting their role in cellular recognition by MVM. Significantly, the NB324K showed fucosylation at the non-reducing end of their biantennary glycans, suggesting that recognition of these cells is possibly mediated by the Lewis X motif as in 3′SIA-LeX identified in a previous glycan microarray screen

Chronology of martian breccia NWA 7034 and the formation of the martian crustal dichotomy

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). The attached file is the published version of the article

The adult heart responds to increased workload with physiologic hypertrophy, cardiac stem cell activation, and new myocyte formation

Aims It is a dogma of cardiovascular pathophysiology that the increased cardiac mass in response to increased workload is produced by the hypertrophy of the pre-existing myocytes. The role, if any, of adult-resident endogenous cardiac stem/progenitor cells (eCSCs) and new cardiomyocyte formation in physiological cardiac remodelling remains unexplored. Methods and results In response to regular, intensity-controlled exercise training, adult rats respond with hypertrophy of the pre-existing myocytes. In addition, a significant number (∼7%) of smaller newly formed BrdU-positive cardiomyocytes are produced by the exercised animals. Capillary density significantly increased in exercised animals, balancing cardiomyogenesis with neo-angiogenesis. c-kitpos eCSCs increased their number and activated state in exercising vs. sedentary animals. c-kitpos eCSCs in exercised hearts showed an increased expression of transcription factors, indicative of their commitment to either the cardiomyocyte (Nkx2.5pos) or capillary (Ets-1pos) lineages. These adaptations were dependent on exercise duration and intensity. Insulin-like growth factor-1, transforming growth factor-β1, neuregulin-1, bone morphogenetic protein-10, and periostin were significantly up-regulated in cardiomyocytes of exercised vs. sedentary animals. These factors differentially stimulated c-kitpos eCSC proliferation and commitment in vitro, pointing to a similar role in vivo. Conclusion Intensity-controlled exercise training initiates myocardial remodelling through increased cardiomyocyte growth factor expression leading to cardiomyocyte hypertrophy and to activation and ensuing differentiation of c-kitpos eCSCs. This leads to the generation of new myocardial cells. These findings highlight the endogenous regenerative capacity of the adult heart, represented by the eCSCs, and the fact that the physiological cardiac adaptation to exercise stress is a combination of cardiomyocyte hypertrophy and hyperplasia (cardiomyocytes and capillaries)

Multipurpose High Frequency Electron Spin Resonance Spectrometer for Condensed Matter Research

We describe a quasi-optical multifrequency ESR spectrometer operating in the 75-225 GHz range and optimized at 210 GHz for general use in condensed matter physics, chemistry and biology. The quasi-optical bridge detects the change of mm wave polarization at the ESR. A controllable reference arm maintains a mm wave bias at the detector. The attained sensitivity of 2x10^10 spin/G/(Hz)1/2, measured on a dilute Mn:MgO sample in a non-resonant probe head at 222.4 GHz and 300 K, is comparable to commercial high sensitive X band spectrometers. The spectrometer has a Fabry-Perot resonator based probe head to measure aqueous solutions, and a probe head to measure magnetic field angular dependence of single crystals. The spectrometer is robust and easy to use and may be operated by undergraduate students. Its performance is demonstrated by examples from various fields of condensed matter physics.Comment: submitted to Journal of Magnetic Resonanc

What you know can influence what you are going to know (especially for older adults)

Stimuli related to an individual's knowledge/experience are often more memorable than abstract stimuli, particularly for older adults. This has been found when material that is congruent with knowledge is contrasted with material that is incongruent with knowledge, but there is little research on a possible graded effect of congruency. The present study manipulated the degree of congruency of study material with participants’ knowledge. Young and older participants associated two famous names to nonfamous faces, where the similarity between the nonfamous faces and the real famous individuals varied. These associations were incrementally easier to remember as the name-face combinations became more congruent with prior knowledge, demonstrating a graded congruency effect, as opposed to an effect based simply on the presence or absence of associations to prior knowledge. Older adults tended to show greater susceptibility to the effect than young adults, with a significant age difference for extreme stimuli, in line with previous literature showing that schematic support in memory tasks particularly benefits older adults

Reconstituting typeset Marriage Registers using simple software tools

In a world of fully integrated software applications, which can seem daunting to develop and to maintain, it is sometimes useful to recall that a system of loosely-linked software components can provide surprisingly powerful and flexible methods for software development. This paper describes a project which aims to retypeset a series of volumes from the Phillimore Marriage Registers, first published in England around the turn of the last century. The source material is plain text derived from running Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a set of page scans taken from the original printed volumes. The regular, tabular, structure of the Register pages allows us to automate the re-typesetting process. The UNIX troff software and its tbl preprocessor are used for the typesetting itself, but a series of simple awk-based software tools, all of them parsers and code generators of one sort or another, is used to bring about the OCR-to-troff transformation. By re-parsing the generated troff codes it is possible to produce a surname index as a supplement to the retypeset volume. Moreover, this second-stage parsing has been invaluable in discovering subtle ‘typos’ in the automatically generated material. With small adjustments to this parser it would be possible to output the complete marriage entries in standard XML or GEDCOM notations