Performance of an alpha-vane and pitot tube in simulated heavy rain environment

Experimental tests were conducted in the UDRI Environmental Wind/Rain Tunnel to establish the performance of an alpha-vane, that measures angle of attack, in a simulated heavy rain environment. The tests consisted of emersing the alpha-vane in an airstream with a concurrent water spray penetrating vertically through the airstream. The direction of the spray was varied to make an angle of 5.8 to 18 deg with the airstream direction in order to simulate the conditions that occur when an aircraft lands in a heavy rain environment. Rainrates simulated varied from 1000 to 1200 mm/hr which are the most severe ever expected to be encountered by an aircraft over even a 30 second period. Tunnel airspeeds ranged from 85 to 125 miles per hour. The results showed that even the most severe rainrates produced a misalignment in the alpha-vane of only 1 deg away from the airstream direction. Thus for normal rain conditions experienced by landing aircraft no significant deterioration in alpha-vane performance is expected

Spoken term detection ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13636-015-0063-8Spoken term detection (STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given a textual representation of the search term. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) in that ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech data, whereas STD focuses on a selected list of search terms that must be detected within the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the STD ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation, held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the first STD evaluation that deals with Spanish language. The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the search terms, indicating their start and end times within the appropriate speech file, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the search term. The evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database, which comprises a set of talks from workshops and amounts to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metrics, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and a detailed discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show reasonable performance for moderate out-of-vocabulary term rate. This paper compares the systems submitted to the evaluation and makes a deep analysis based on some search term properties (term length, in-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary terms, single-word/multi-word terms, and in-language/foreign terms).This work has been partly supported by project CMC-V2 (TEC2012-37585-C02-01) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. This research was also funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Galician Regional Government (GRC2014/024, “Consolidation of Research Units: AtlantTIC Project” CN2012/160)

Reactive Oxygen Species Facilitate Translocation of Hormone Sensitive Lipase to the Lipid Droplet During Lipolysis in Human Differentiated Adipocytes

In obesity, there is an increase in reactive oxygen species (ROS) within adipose tissue caused by increases in inflammation and overnutrition. Hormone sensitive lipase (HSL) is part of the canonical lipolytic pathway and critical for complete lipolysis. This study hypothesizes that ROS is a signal that integrates regulation of lipolysis by targeting HSL. Experiments were performed with human differentiated adipocytes from the subcutaneous depot. Antioxidants were employed as a tool to decrease ROS, and it was found that scavenging ROS with diphenyliodonium, N-acetyl cysteine, or resveratrol decreased lipolysis in adipocytes. HSL phosphorylation of a key serine residue, Ser552, as well as translocation of this enzyme from the cytosol to the lipid droplet upon lipolytic stimulation were both abrogated by scavenging ROS. The phosphorylation status of other serine residues on HSL were not affected. These findings are significant because they document that ROS contributes to the physiological regulation of lipolysis via an effect on translocation. Such regulation could be useful in developing new obesity therapies

Comparison of viral env proteins from acute and chronic infections with subtype C human immunodeficiency virus type 1 identifies differences in glycosylation and CCR5 utilization and suggests a new strategy for immunogen design.

Understanding human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) transmission is central to developing effective prevention strategies, including a vaccine.We compared phenotypic and genetic variation in HIV-1 env genes from subjects in acute/early infection and subjects with chronic infections in the context of subtype C heterosexual transmission.We found that the transmitted viruses all used CCR5 and required high levels of CD4 to infect target cells, suggesting selection for replication in T cells and not macrophages after transmission. In addition, the transmitted viruses were more likely to use a maraviroc-sensitive conformation of CCR5, perhaps identifying a feature of the target T cell.We confirmed an earlier observation that the transmitted viruses were, on average, modestly under-glycosylated relative to the viruses from chronically infected subjects. This difference was most pronounced in comparing the viruses in acutely infected men to those in chronically infected women. These features of the transmitted virus point to selective pressures during the transmission event.We did not observe a consistent difference either in heterologous neutralization sensitivity or in sensitivity to soluble CD4 between the two groups, suggesting similar conformations between viruses from acute and chronic infection. However, the presence or absence of glycosylation sites had differential effects on neutralization sensitivity for different antibodies.We suggest that the occasional absence of glycosylation sites encoded in the conserved regions of env, further reduced in transmitted viruses, could expose specific surface structures on the protein as antibody targets

Comparison of Viral Env Proteins from Acute and Chronic Infections with Subtype C Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Identifies Differences in Glycosylation and CCR5 Utilization and Suggests a New Strategy for Immunogen Design

Understanding human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) transmission is central to developing effective prevention strategies, including a vaccine. We compared phenotypic and genetic variation in HIV-1 env genes from subjects in acute/early infection and subjects with chronic infections in the context of subtype C heterosexual transmission. We found that the transmitted viruses all used CCR5 and required high levels of CD4 to infect target cells, suggesting selection for replication in T cells and not macrophages after transmission. In addition, the transmitted viruses were more likely to use a maraviroc-sensitive conformation of CCR5, perhaps identifying a feature of the target T cell. We confirmed an earlier observation that the transmitted viruses were, on average, modestly underglycosylated relative to the viruses from chronically infected subjects. This difference was most pronounced in comparing the viruses in acutely infected men to those in chronically infected women. These features of the transmitted virus point to selective pressures during the transmission event. We did not observe a consistent difference either in heterologous neutralization sensitivity or in sensitivity to soluble CD4 between the two groups, suggesting similar conformations between viruses from acute and chronic infection. However, the presence or absence of glycosylation sites had differential effects on neutralization sensitivity for different antibodies. We suggest that the occasional absence of glycosylation sites encoded in the conserved regions of env, further reduced in transmitted viruses, could expose specific surface structures on the protein as antibody targets

Early infant HIV-1 diagnosis programs in resource-limited settings: opportunities for improved outcomes and more cost-effective interventions

Early infant diagnosis (EID) of HIV-1 infection confers substantial benefits to HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected infants, to their families, and to programs providing prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) services, but has been challenging to implement in resource-limited settings. In order to correctly inform parents/caregivers of infant infection status and link HIV-infected infants to care and treatment, a 'cascade' of events must successfully occur. A frequently cited barrier to expansion of EID programs is the cost of the required laboratory assays. However, substantial implementation barriers, as well as personnel and infrastructure requirements, exist at each step in the cascade. In this update, we review challenges to uptake at each step in the EID cascade, highlighting that even with the highest reported levels of uptake, nearly half of HIV-infected infants may not complete the cascade successfully. We next synthesize the available literature about the costs and cost effectiveness of EID programs; identify areas for future research; and place these findings within the context of the benefits and challenges to EID implementation in resource-limited settings

Maternal or Infant Antiretroviral Drugs to Reduce HIV-1 Transmission

We evaluated the efficacy of a maternal triple-drug antiretroviral regimen or infant nevirapine prophylaxis for 28 weeks during breast-feeding to reduce postnatal transmission of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) in Malawi

Efficacy and Safety of Three Antiretroviral Regimens for Initial Treatment of HIV-1: A Randomized Clinical Trial in Diverse Multinational Settings

Background:Antiretroviral regimens with simplified dosing and better safety are needed to maximize the efficiency of antiretroviral delivery in resource-limited settings. We investigated the efficacy and safety of antiretroviral regimens with once-daily compared to twice-daily dosing in diverse areas of the world.Methods and Findings:1,571 HIV-1-infected persons (47% women) from nine countries in four continents were assigned with equal probability to open-label antiretroviral therapy with efavirenz plus lamivudine-zidovudine (EFV+3TC-ZDV), atazanavir plus didanosine-EC plus emtricitabine (ATV+DDI+FTC), or efavirenz plus emtricitabine-tenofovir-disoproxil fumarate (DF) (EFV+FTC-TDF). ATV+DDI+FTC and EFV+FTC-TDF were hypothesized to be non-inferior to EFV+3TC-ZDV if the upper one-sided 95% confidence bound for the hazard ratio (HR) was ≤1.35 when 30% of participants had treatment failure.An independent monitoring board recommended stopping study follow-up prior to accumulation of 472 treatment failures. Comparing EFV+FTC-TDF to EFV+3TC-ZDV, during a median 184 wk of follow-up there were 95 treatment failures (18%) among 526 participants versus 98 failures among 519 participants (19%; HR 0.95, 95% CI 0.72-1.27; p = 0.74). Safety endpoints occurred in 243 (46%) participants assigned to EFV+FTC-TDF versus 313 (60%) assigned to EFV+3TC-ZDV (HR 0.64, CI 0.54-0.76; p<0.001) and there was a significant interaction between sex and regimen safety (HR 0.50, CI 0.39-0.64 for women; HR 0.79, CI 0.62-1.00 for men; p = 0.01). Comparing ATV+DDI+FTC to EFV+3TC-ZDV, during a median follow-up of 81 wk there were 108 failures (21%) among 526 participants assigned to ATV+DDI+FTC and 76 (15%) among 519 participants assigned to EFV+3TC-ZDV (HR 1.51, CI 1.12-2.04; p = 0.007).Conclusion: EFV+FTC-TDF had similar high efficacy compared to EFV+3TC-ZDV in this trial population, recruited in diverse multinational settings. Superior safety, especially in HIV-1-infected women, and once-daily dosing of EFV+FTC-TDF are advantageous for use of this regimen for initial treatment of HIV-1 infection in resource-limited countries. ATV+DDI+FTC had inferior efficacy and is not recommended as an initial antiretroviral regimen.Trial Registration:http://www.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00084136