6,832 research outputs found
Galileo early cruise, including Venus, first Earth, and Gaspra encounters
This article documents Deep Space Network (DSN) support for the Galileo cruise to Jupiter. The unique trajectory affords multiple encounters during this cruise phase. Each encounter had or will have unique requirements for data acquisition and DSN support configurations. An overview of the cruise and encounters through the asteroid Gaspra encounter is provided
Medium corrections in the formation of light charged particles in heavy ion reactions
Within a microscopic statistical description of heavy ion collisions, we
investigate the effect of the medium on the formation of light clusters. The
dominant medium effects are self-energy corrections and Pauli blocking that
produce the Mott effect for composite particles and enhanced reaction rates in
the collision integrals. Microscopic description of composites in the medium
follows the Dyson equation approach combined with the cluster mean-field
expansion. The resulting effective few-body problem is solved within a properly
modified Alt-Grassberger-Sandhas formalism. The results are incorporated in a
Boltzmann-Uehling-Uhlenbeck simulation for heavy ion collisions. The number and
spectra of light charged particles emerging from a heavy ion collision changes
in a significant manner in effect of the medium modification of production and
absorption processes.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure
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Failure of Sterne- and Pasteur-Like Strains of Bacillus anthracis to Replicate and Survive in the Urban Bluebottle Blow Fly Calliphora vicina under Laboratory Conditions
Britta von Terzi, Peter C. B. Turnbull, Wolfgang Beyer, University of Hohenheim, Institute of Environmental and Animal Hygiene, Stuttgart, GermanySteve E. Bellan, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States of AmericaThis study aimed to elucidate the bacteriological events occurring within the gut of Calliphora vicina, selected as the European representative of blow flies held responsible for the spread of anthrax during epidemics in certain parts of the world. Green-fluorescent-protein-carrying derivatives of Bacillus anthracis were used. These lacked either one of the virulence plasmids pXO1 and pXO2 and were infected, or not infected, with a worm intestine phage (Wip4) known to influence the phenotype and survival of the pathogen. Blood meals were prepared for the flies by inoculation of sheep blood with germinated and, in case of pXO2+ strains, encapsulated cells of the four B. anthracis strains. After being fed for 4 h an initial 10 flies were externally disinfected with peracetic acid to ensure subsequent quantitation representing ingested B. anthracis only. Following neutralization, they were crushed in sterile saline. Over each of the ensuing 7 to 10 days, 10 flies were removed and processed the same way. In the absence of Wip4, strains showed steady declines to undetectable in the total B. anthracis counts, within 7–9 days. With the phage infected strains, the falls in viable counts were significantly more rapid than in their uninfected counterparts. Spores were detectable in flies for longer periods than vegetative bacteria. In line with the findings in both biting and non-biting flies of early workers our results indicate that B. anthracis does not multiply in the guts of blow flies and survival is limited to a matter of days.This work was funded by grant BE 2157/3-1 of the German Research Foundation (DFG). SEB was funded by a United States National Institute of General Medical Sciences MIDAS grant U01GM087719 to Lauren A. Meyers and Alison P. Galvani. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Center for Computational Biology and BioinformaticsEmail: [email protected]
Benchmark generator for CEC 2009 competition on dynamic optimization
Evolutionary algorithms(EAs) have been widely applied to solve stationary optimization problems. However, many real-world applications are actually dynamic. In order to study the performance of EAs in dynamic environments, one important task is to develop proper dynamic benchmark problems. Over the years, researchers have applied a number of dynamic test problems to compare the performance of EAs in dynamic environments, e.g., the “moving peaks ” benchmark (MPB) proposed by Branke [1], the DF1 generator introduced by Morrison and De Jong [6], the singleand multi-objective dynamic test problem generator by dynamically combining different objective functions of exiting stationary multi-objective benchmark problems suggested by Jin and Sendhoff [2], Yang and Yao’s exclusive-or (XOR) operator [10, 11, 12], Kang’s dynamic traveling salesman problem (DTSP) [3] and dynamic multi knapsack problem (DKP), etc. Though a number of DOP generators exist in the literature, there is no unified approach of constructing dynamic problems across the binary space, real space and combinatorial space so far. This report uses the generalized dynamic benchmark generator (GDBG) proposed in [4], which construct dynamic environments for all the three solution spaces. Especially, in the rea
Influence of Axial Workpiece Positioning during Magnetic Pulse Welding of Aluminum-Steel Joints
Magnetic Pulse Welding (MPW) offers a method to economically join similar and dissimilar
metals without the need for external physical or chemical binders, while avoiding the
adverse heating effects seen in many welding techniques. MPW allows for the fabrication
of joints via the harnessing of Lorentz forces, which result from discharging a current
pulse through a coil. In the process an outer piece (flyer) is accelerated onto an inner
piece (parent), and welding is achieved using propagating impact fronts. There are
several geometrical factors to be considered including the flyer-coil distance, the parentflyer
distance, as well as the axial relationship between flyer and coil (working length).
Various shapes of the front are possible and each configuration has its own advantages
and drawbacks. The goal of this work is to show not only how the aforementioned
parameters are related, but also ways to optimize front propagations, which are vital to the
welding result. This is done primarily by determining the influence of the working length of
tubular MPW specimens. It is shown that for steel-aluminum joints in the given
arrangements, three different front regimes exist, which are related to geometrical factors.
These results are especially useful to avoid seemingly favorable but nevertheless
suboptimal conditions for flyer movement that would reduce weld quality and energy
efficiency of the process
Electron acceleration in a JET disruption simulation
Runaways are suprathermal electrons having sufficiently high energy to be
continuously accelerated up to tens of MeV by a driving electric field [1].
Highly energetic runaway electron (RE) beams capable of damaging the tokamak
first wall can be observed after a plasma disruption [2]. Therefore, it is of
primary importance to fully understand their generation mechanisms in order to
design mitigation systems able to guarantee safe tokamak operations. In a
previous work, [3], a test particle tracker was introduced in the JOREK 3D
non-linear MHD code and used for studying the electron confinement during a
simulated JET-like disruption. It was found in [3] that relativistic electrons
are not completely deconfined by the stochastic magnetic field taking place
during the disruption thermal quench (TQ). This is due to the reformation of
closed magnetic surfaces at the beginning of the current quench (CQ). This
result was obtained neglecting the inductive electric field in order to avoid
the unrealistic particle acceleration which otherwise would have happened due
to the absence of collision effects. The present paper extends [3] analysing
test electron dynamics in the same simulated JET-like disruption using the
complete electric field. For doing so, a simplified collision model is
introduced in the particle tracker guiding center equations. We show that
electrons at thermal energies can become RE during or promptly after the TQ due
to a combination of three phenomena: a first REs acceleration during the TQ due
to the presence of a complex MHD-induced electric field, particle reconfinement
caused by the fast reformation of closed magnetic surfaces after the TQ and a
secondary acceleration induced by the CQ electric field
Characterization of estrogenicity of phytoestrogens in an endometrial-derived experimental model.
Severe developmental and reproductive disorders in wild animals have been linked to high exposure to persistent environmental chemicals with hormonal activity. These adverse effects of environmental estrogens have raised considerable concern and have received increasing attention. Although numerous chemicals with the capacity to interfere with the estrogen receptor (ER) have been identified, information on their molecular mechanism of action and their relative potency is rather limited. For the endometrium, the lack of information is due to the lack of a suitable experimental model. We investigated the functions of phytoestrogens in an endometrial-derived model, RUCA-I rat endometrial adenocarcinoma cells. The cells were cultured on a reconstituted basement membrane to preserve their functional differentiation and estrogen responsiveness. We assessed the relative binding affinity to the estrogen receptor of the selected phytoestrogens coumestrol, genistein, daidzein, and the putative phytoestrogen mangostin compared to estradiol by a competitive Scatchard analysis. The following affinity ranking was measured: 17beta-estradiol >>> coumestrol > genistein > daidzein >>> mangostin. In addition, we investigated the capacity of these compounds to promote the increased production of complement C3, a well-known estradiol-regulated protein of the rat endometrium. All substances tested increased the production of complement C3, although different concentrations were necessary to achieve equivalent levels of induction compared to estradiol. Mechanistically we were able to demonstrate that the increase of complement C3 production was mediated by primarily increasing its steady-state mRNA level. These findings indicate that RUCA-I cells represent a sensitive model system to elucidate relative potencies and functions of environmental estrogens in an endometrium-derived model
Dissociation energy of the hydrogen molecule at 10 accuracy
The ionization energy of ortho-H has been determined to be
cm
from measurements of the GK(1,1)--X(0,1) interval by Doppler-free two-photon
spectroscopy using a narrow band 179-nm laser source and the ionization energy
of the GK(1,1) state by continuous-wave near-infrared laser spectroscopy.
(H) was used to derive the dissociation energy of
H, (H), at cm with a
precision that is more than one order of magnitude better than all previous
results. The new result challenges calculations of this quantity and represents
a benchmark value for future relativistic and QED calculations of molecular
energies.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Parameter-Independent Strategies for pMDPs via POMDPs
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a popular class of models suitable for
solving control decision problems in probabilistic reactive systems. We
consider parametric MDPs (pMDPs) that include parameters in some of the
transition probabilities to account for stochastic uncertainties of the
environment such as noise or input disturbances.
We study pMDPs with reachability objectives where the parameter values are
unknown and impossible to measure directly during execution, but there is a
probability distribution known over the parameter values. We study for the
first time computing parameter-independent strategies that are expectation
optimal, i.e., optimize the expected reachability probability under the
probability distribution over the parameters. We present an encoding of our
problem to partially observable MDPs (POMDPs), i.e., a reduction of our problem
to computing optimal strategies in POMDPs.
We evaluate our method experimentally on several benchmarks: a motivating
(repeated) learner model; a series of benchmarks of varying configurations of a
robot moving on a grid; and a consensus protocol.Comment: Extended version of a QEST 2018 pape
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