Simulation of the daytime boundary layer evolution in deep mountain valleys

December, 1981.Bibliography: pages 96-100.Sponsored by the National Science Foundation ATM76-84405.Sponsored by the National Science Foundation ATM80-15309

The Program for climate Model diagnosis and Intercomparison: 20-th anniversary Symposium

Twenty years ago, W. Lawrence (Larry) Gates approached the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Research (now the Office of Science) with a plan to coordinate the comparison and documentation of climate model differences. This effort would help improve our understanding of climate change through a systematic approach to model intercomparison. Early attempts at comparing results showed a surprisingly large range in control climate from such parameters as cloud cover, precipitation, and even atmospheric temperature. The DOE agreed to fund the effort at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in part because of the existing computing environment and because of a preexisting atmospheric science group that contained a wide variety of expertise. The project was named the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), and it has changed the international landscape of climate modeling over the past 20 years. In spring 2009 the DOE hosted a 1-day symposium to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of PCMDI and to honor its founder, Larry Gates. Through their personal experiences, the morning presenters painted an image of climate science in the 1970s and 1980s, that generated early support from the international community for model intercomparison, thereby bringing PCMDI into existence. Four talks covered GatesÃÂâÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂs early contributions to climate research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the RAND Corporation, and Oregon State University through the founding of PCMDI to coordinate the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP). The speakers were, in order of presentation, Warren Washington [National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)], Kelly Redmond (Western Regional Climate Center), George Boer (Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis), and Lennart Bengtsson [University of Reading, former director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)]. The afternoon session emphasized the scientific ideas that are the basis of PCMDIÃÂâÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂs success, summarizing their evolution and impact. Four speakers followed the various PCMDI-supported climate model intercomparison projects, beginning with early work on cloud representations in models, presented by Robert D. Cess (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Stony Brook University), and then the latest Cloud Feedback Model Intercomparison Projects (CFMIPs) led by Sandrine Bony (Laboratoire de MÃÂÃÂÃÂétÃÂÃÂÃÂéorologie Dynamique). Benjamin Santer (LLNL) presented a review of the climate change detection and attribution (D & A) work pioneered at PCMDI, and Gerald A. Meehl (NCAR) ended the day with a look toward the future of climate change research

Health care system planning for and response to a nuclear detonation

The hallmark of a successful response to a nuclear detonation will be the resilience of the community, region, and nation. An incident of this magnitude will rapidly become a national incident; however, the initial critical steps to reduce lives lost, save the lives that can be saved with the resources available, and understand and apply resources available to a complex and dynamic situation will be the responsibility of the local and regional responders and planners. Expectations of the public health and health care systems will be met to the extent possible by coordination, cooperation, and an effort to produce as consistent a response as possible for the victims. Responders will face extraordinarily stressful situations, and their own physical and psychological health is of great importance to optimizing the response. This article illustrates through vignettes and supporting text how the incident may unfold for the various components of the health and medical systems and provides additional context for the discipline-related actions outlined in the state and local planners’ playbook

Bves and NDRG4 regulate directional epicardial cell migration through autocrine extracellular matrix deposition

Directional cell movement is universally required for tissue morphogenesis. Although it is known that cell/matrix interactions are essential for directional movement in heart development, the mechanisms governing these interactions require elucidation. Here we demonstrate that a novel protein/protein interaction between blood vessel epicardial substance (Bves) and N-myc downstream regulated gene 4 (NDRG4) is critical for regulation of epicardial cell directional movement, as disruption of this interaction randomizes migratory patterns. Our studies show that Bves/NDRG4 interaction is required for trafficking of internalized fibronectin through the “autocrine extracellular matrix (ECM) deposition” fibronectin recycling pathway. Of importance, we demonstrate that Bves/NDRG4-mediated fibronectin recycling is indeed essential for epicardial cell directional movement, thus linking these two cell processes. Finally, total internal reflectance fluorescence microscopy shows that Bves/NDRG4 interaction is required for fusion of recycling endosomes with the basal cell surface, providing a molecular mechanism of motility substrate delivery that regulates cell directional movement. This is the first evidence of a molecular function for Bves and NDRG4 proteins within broader subcellular trafficking paradigms. These data identify novel regulators of a critical vesicle-docking step required for autocrine ECM deposition and explain how Bves facilitates cell-microenvironment interactions in the regulation of epicardial cell–directed movement

A Unifying Model of Genome Evolution Under Parsimony

We present a data structure called a history graph that offers a practical basis for the analysis of genome evolution. It conceptually simplifies the study of parsimonious evolutionary histories by representing both substitutions and double cut and join (DCJ) rearrangements in the presence of duplications. The problem of constructing parsimonious history graphs thus subsumes related maximum parsimony problems in the fields of phylogenetic reconstruction and genome rearrangement. We show that tractable functions can be used to define upper and lower bounds on the minimum number of substitutions and DCJ rearrangements needed to explain any history graph. These bounds become tight for a special type of unambiguous history graph called an ancestral variation graph (AVG), which constrains in its combinatorial structure the number of operations required. We finally demonstrate that for a given history graph $G$, a finite set of AVGs describe all parsimonious interpretations of $G$, and this set can be explored with a few sampling moves.Comment: 52 pages, 24 figure

Radiation Injury After a Nuclear Detonation: Medical Consequences and the Need for Scarce Resources Allocation

A 10-kiloton (kT) nuclear detonation within a US city could expose hundreds of thousands of people to radiation. The Scarce Resources for a Nuclear Detonation Project was undertaken to guide community planning and response in the aftermath of a nuclear detonation, when demand will greatly exceed available resources. This article reviews the pertinent literature on radiation injuries from human exposures and animal models to provide a foundation for the triage and management approaches outlined in this special issue. Whole-body doses \u3e2 Gy can produce clinically significant acute radiation syndrome (ARS), which classically involves the hematologic, gastrointestinal, cutaneous, and cardiovascular/central nervous systems. The severity and presentation of ARS are affected by several factors, including radiation dose and dose rate, interindividual variability in radiation response, type of radiation (eg, gamma alone, gamma plus neutrons), partial-body shielding, and possibly age, sex, and certain preexisting medical conditions. The combination of radiation with trauma, burns, or both (ie, combined injury) confers a worse prognosis than the same dose of radiation alone. Supportive care measures, including fluid support, antibiotics, and possibly myeloid cytokines (eg, granulocyte colony-stimulating factor), can improve the prognosis for some irradiated casualties. Finally, expert guidance and surge capacity for casualties with ARS are available from the Radiation Emergency Medical Management Web site and the Radiation Injury Treatment Network

Wannier-function description of the electronic polarization and infrared absorption of high-pressure hydrogen

We have constructed maximally-localized Wannier functions for prototype structures of solid molecular hydrogen under pressure, starting from LDA and tight-binding Bloch wave functions. Each occupied Wannier function can be associated with two paired protons, defining a ``Wannier molecule''. The sum of the dipole moments of these ``molecules'' always gives the correct macroscopic polarization, even under strong compression, when the overlap between nearby Wannier functions becomes significant. We find that at megabar pressures the contributions to the dipoles arising from the overlapping tails of the Wannier functions is very large. The strong vibron infrared absorption experimentally observed in phase III, above ~ 150 GPa, is analyzed in terms of the vibron-induced fluctuations of the Wannier dipoles. We decompose these fluctuations into ``static'' and ``dynamical'' contributions, and find that at such high densities the latter term, which increases much more steeply with pressure, is dominant.Comment: 17 pages, two-column style with 14 postscript figures embedded. Uses REVTEX and epsf macro