Shelf-edge frontal structure in the central East China Sea and its impact on low-frequency acoustic propagation

Author Posting. © IEEE, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of IEEE for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering 29 (2004): 1011-1031, doi:10.1109/JOE.2004.840842.Two field programs, both parts of the Asian Seas International Acoustics Experiment (ASIAEX), were carried out in the central East China Sea (28 to 30 N, 126 30 to 128 E) during April 2000 and June 2001. The goal of these programs was to study the interactions between the shelf edge environment and acoustic propagation at a wide range of frequencies and spatial scales. The low-frequency across-slope propagation was studied using a synthesis of data collected during both years including conductivity- temperature-depth (CTD) and mooring data from 2000, and XBT, thermistor chain, and wide-band source data from 2001. The water column variability during both years was dominated by the Kuroshio Current flowing from southwest to northeast over the continental slope. The barotropic tide was a mixed diurnal/semidiurnal tide with moderate amplitude compared to other parts of the Yellow and East China Sea. A large amplitude semidiurnal internal tide was also a prominent feature of the data during both years. Bursts of high-frequency internal waves were often observed, but these took the form of internal solitons only once, when a rapid off-shelf excursion of the Kuroshio coincided with the ebbing tide. Two case studies in the acoustic transmission loss (TL) over the continental shelf and slope were performed. First, anchor station data obtained during 2000 were used to study how a Kuroshio warm filament on the shelf induced variance in the transmission loss (TL) along the seafloor in the NW quadrant of the study region. The corresponding modeled single-frequency TL structure explained the significant fine-scale variability in time primarily by the changes in the multipath/multimode interference pattern. The interference was quite sensitive to small changes in the phase differences between individual paths/modes induced by the evolution of the warm filament. Second, the across-slope sound speed sections from 2001 were used to explain the observed phenomenon of abrupt signal attenuation as the transmission range lengthened seaward across the continental shelf and slope. This abrupt signal degradation was caused by the Kuroshio frontal gradients that produced an increasingly downward-refracting sound-speed field seaward from the shelf break. This abrupt signal dropout was explained using normal mode theory and was predictable and source depth dependent. For a source located above the turning depth of the highest-order shelf-trapped mode, none of the propagating modes on the shelf were excited, causing total signal extinction on the shelf

Internal solitons in the northeastern south China Sea. Part I: sources and deep water propagation

Author Posting. © IEEE, 2004. This article is posted here by permission of IEEE for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering 29 (2004): 1157-1181, doi:10.1109/JOE.2004.840839.A moored array of current, temperature, conductivity, and pressure sensors was deployed across the Chinese continental shelf and slope in support of the Asian Seas International Acoustics Experiment. The goal of the observations was to quantify the water column variability in order to understand the along- and across-shore low-frequency acoustic propagation in shallow water. The moorings were deployed from April 21–May 19, 2001 and sampled at 1–5 min intervals to capture the full range of temporal variability without aliasing the internal wave field. The dominant oceanographic signal by far was in fact the highly nonlinear internal waves (or solitons) which were generated near the Batan Islands in the Luzon Strait and propagated 485 km across deep water to the observation region. Dubbed trans-basin waves, to distinguish them from other, smaller nonlinear waves generated locally near the shelf break, these waves had amplitudes ranging from 29 to greater than 140 m and were among the largest such waves ever observed in the world’s oceans. The waves arrived at the most offshore mooring in two clusters lasting 7–8 days each separated by five days when no waves were observed.Within each cluster, two types of waves arrived which have been named type-a and type-b. The type-a waves had greater amplitude than the type-b waves and arrived with remarkable regularity at the same time each day, 24 h apart. The type-b waves were weaker than the type-a waves, arrived an hour later each day, and generally consisted of a single soliton growing out of the center of the wave packet. Comparison with modeled barotropic tides from the generation region revealed that: 1) The two clusters were generated around the time of the spring tides in the Luzon strait; and 2) The type-a waves were generated on the strong side of the diurnal inequality while the type-b waves were generated on the weaker beat. The position of the Kuroshio intrusion into the Luzon Strait may modulate the strength of the waves being produced. As the waves shoaled, the huge lead solitons first split into two solitons then merged together into a broad region of thermocline depression at depths less than 120 m. Elevation waves sprang up behind them as they continued to propagate onshore. The elevation waves also grew out of regions where the locally-generated internal tide forced the main thermocline down near the bottom. The “critical point” where the upper and lower layers were equal was a good indicator of when the depression or elevation waves would form, however this was not a static point, but rather varied in both space and time according to the presence or absence of the internal tides and the incoming trans-basin waves themselves.The planning, execution, and analysis of this work was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research Ocean Acoustics and Physical Oceanography Programs. Significant funding contributions were also made by the National Science Council of Taiwan

A Radio Pulsar/X-ray Binary Link

Radio pulsars with millisecond spin periods are thought to have been spun up by transfer of matter and angular momentum from a low-mass companion star during an X-ray-emitting phase. The spin periods of the neutron stars in several such low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) systems have been shown to be in the millisecond regime, but no radio pulsations have been detected. Here we report on detection and follow-up observations of a nearby radio millisecond pulsar (MSP) in a circular binary orbit with an optically identified companion star. Optical observations indicate that an accretion disk was present in this system within the last decade. Our optical data show no evidence that one exists today, suggesting that the radio MSP has turned on after a recent LMXB phase.Comment: published in Scienc

The U.S. Inland Creel and Angler Survey Catalog (CreelCat): Development, Applications, and Opportunities

Inland recreational fishing, defined as primarily leisure-driven fishing in freshwaters, is a popular pastime in the USA. State natural resource agencies endeavor to provide high-quality and sustainable fishing opportunities for anglers. Managers often use creel and other angler survey data to inform state- and waterbody-level management efforts. Despite the broad implementation of angler surveys and their importance to fisheries management at state scales, regional and national coordination among these activities is minimal, limiting data applicability for larger-scale management practices and research. Here, we introduce the U.S. Inland Creel and Angler Survey Catalog (CreelCat), a first-of-its-kind, publicly available national database of angler survey data that establishes a baseline of national inland recreational fishing metrics. We highlight research and management applications to help support sustainable inland recreational fishing practices, consider cautions, and make recommendations for implementation

Metadata stewardship in nanosafety research: learning from the past, preparing for an "on-the-fly" FAIR future

Introduction: Significant progress has been made in terms of best practice in research data management for nanosafety. Some of the underlying approaches to date are, however, overly focussed on the needs of specific research projects or aligned to a single data repository, and this “silo” approach is hampering their general adoption by the broader research community and individual labs. Methods: State-of-the-art data/knowledge collection, curation management FAIRification, and sharing solutions applied in the nanosafety field are reviewed focusing on unique features, which should be generalised and integrated into a functional FAIRification ecosystem that addresses the needs of both data generators and data (re)users. Results: The development of data capture templates has focussed on standardised single-endpoint Test Guidelines, which does not reflect the complexity of real laboratory processes, where multiple assays are interlinked into an overall study, and where non-standardised assays are developed to address novel research questions and probe mechanistic processes to generate the basis for read-across from one nanomaterial to another. By focussing on the needs of data providers and data users, we identify how existing tools and approaches can be re-framed to enable “on-the-fly” (meta) data definition, data capture, curation and FAIRification, that are sufficiently flexible to address the complexity in nanosafety research, yet harmonised enough to facilitate integration of datasets from different sources generated for different research purposes. By mapping the available tools for nanomaterials safety research (including nanomaterials characterisation, non-standard (mechanistic-focussed) methods, measurement principles and experimental setup, environmental fate and requirements from new research foci such as safe and sustainable by design), a strategy for integration and bridging between silos is presented. The NanoCommons KnowledgeBase has shown how data from different sources can be integrated into a one-stop shop for searching, browsing and accessing data (without copying), and thus how to break the boundaries between data silos. Discussion: The next steps are to generalise the approach by defining a process to build consensus (meta)data standards, develop solutions to make (meta)data more machine actionable (on the fly ontology development) and establish a distributed FAIR data ecosystem maintained by the community beyond specific projects. Since other multidisciplinary domains might also struggle with data silofication, the learnings presented here may be transferable to facilitate data sharing within other communities and support harmonization of approaches across disciplines to prepare the ground for cross-domain interoperability. Visit WorldFAIR online at http://worldfair-project.eu. WorldFAIR is funded by the EC HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-41 Coordination and Support Action under Grant Agreement No. 101058393

Antagonistic Parent-Offspring Co-Adaptation

In species across taxa, offspring have means to influence parental investment (PI). PI thus evolves as an interacting phenotype and indirect genetic effects may strongly affect the co-evolutionary dynamics of offspring and parental behaviors. Evolutionary theory focused on explaining how exaggerated offspring solicitation can be understood as resolution of parent-offspring conflict, but the evolutionary origin and diversification of different forms of family interactions remains unclear.Methodology/Principal Findings In contrast to previous theory that largely uses a static approach to predict how “offspring individuals” and “parental individuals” should interact given conflict over PI, we present a dynamic theoretical framework of antagonistic selection on the PI individuals obtain/take as offspring and the PI they provide as parents to maximize individual lifetime reproductive success; we analyze a deterministic and a stochastic version of this dynamic framework. We show that a zone for equivalent co-adaptation outcomes exists in which stable levels of PI can evolve and be maintained despite fast strategy transitions and ongoing co-evolutionary dynamics. Under antagonistic co-adaptation, cost-free solicitation can evolve as an adaptation to emerging preferences in parents. Conclusions/Significance We show that antagonistic selection across the offspring and parental life-stage of individuals favors co-adapted offspring and parental behavior within a zone of equivalent outcomes. This antagonistic parent-offspring co-adaptation does not require solicitation to be costly, allows for rapid divergence and evolutionary novelty and potentially explains the origin and diversification of the observed provisioning forms in family life

Metadata stewardship in nanosafety research: learning from the past, preparing for an "on-the-fly" FAIR future

Introduction: Significant progress has been made in terms of best practice in research data management for nanosafety. Some of the underlying approaches to date are, however, overly focussed on the needs of specific research projects or aligned to a single data repository, and this "silo" approach is hampering their general adoption by the broader research community and individual labs.Methods: State-of-the-art data/knowledge collection, curation management FAIrification, and sharing solutions applied in the nanosafety field are reviewed focusing on unique features, which should be generalised and integrated into a functional FAIRification ecosystem that addresses the needs of both data generators and data (re)users.Results: The development of data capture templates has focussed on standardised single-endpoint Test Guidelines, which does not reflect the complexity of real laboratory processes, where multiple assays are interlinked into an overall study, and where non-standardised assays are developed to address novel research questions and probe mechanistic processes to generate the basis for read-across from one nanomaterial to another. By focussing on the needs of data providers and data users, we identify how existing tools and approaches can be re-framed to enable "on-the-fly" (meta) data definition, data capture, curation and FAIRification, that are sufficiently flexible to address the complexity in nanosafety research, yet harmonised enough to facilitate integration of datasets from different sources generated for different research purposes. By mapping the available tools for nanomaterials safety research (including nanomaterials characterisation, nonstandard (mechanistic-focussed) methods, measurement principles and experimental setup, environmental fate and requirements from new research foci such as safe and sustainable by design), a strategy for integration and bridging between silos is presented. The NanoCommons KnowledgeBase has shown how data from different sources can be integrated into a one-stop shop for searching, browsing and accessing data (without copying), and thus how to break the boundaries between data silos.Discussion: The next steps are to generalise the approach by defining a process to build consensus (meta)data standards, develop solutions to make (meta)data more machine actionable (on the fly ontology development) and establish a distributed FAIR data ecosystem maintained by the community beyond specific projects. Since other multidisciplinary domains might also struggle with data silofication, the learnings presented here may be transferrable to facilitate data sharing within other communities and support harmonization of approaches across disciplines to prepare the ground for cross-domain interoperability

Polymorphisms, Mutations, and Amplification of the EGFR Gene in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancers

Masaharu Nomura and colleagues examine the distribution ofEGFR polymorphisms in different populations and find differences that might explain different responses to tyrosine kinase inhibitors in lung cancer patients

First all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves from unknown sources in binary systems

We present the first results of an all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves from unknown spinning neutron stars in binary systems using LIGO and Virgo data. Using a specially developed analysis program, the TwoSpect algorithm, the search was carried out on data from the sixth LIGO science run and the second and third Virgo science runs. The search covers a range of frequencies from 20 Hz to 520 Hz, a range of orbital periods from 2 to ∼2,254  h and a frequency- and period-dependent range of frequency modulation depths from 0.277 to 100 mHz. This corresponds to a range of projected semimajor axes of the orbit from ∼0.6 × 10[superscript −3]  ls to ∼6,500  ls assuming the orbit of the binary is circular. While no plausible candidate gravitational wave events survive the pipeline, upper limits are set on the analyzed data. The most sensitive 95% confidence upper limit obtained on gravitational wave strain is 2.3 × 10[superscript −24] at 217 Hz, assuming the source waves are circularly polarized. Although this search has been optimized for circular binary orbits, the upper limits obtained remain valid for orbital eccentricities as large as 0.9. In addition, upper limits are placed on continuous gravitational wave emission from the low-mass x-ray binary Scorpius X-1 between 20 Hz and 57.25 Hz.National Science Foundation (U.S.)United States. National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationCarnegie TrustDavid & Lucile Packard FoundationResearch CorporationAlfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Targeting HER proteins in cancer therapy and the role of the non-target HER3

Members of the human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER) family have been of considerable interest in the cancer arena due to their potential to induce tumorigenesis when their signalling functions are deregulated. The constitutive activation of these proteins is seen in a number of different common cancer subtypes, and in particular EGFR and HER2 have become highly pursued targets for anti-cancer drug development. Clinical studies in a number of different cancers known to be driven by EGFR or HER2 show mixed results, and further mechanistic understanding of drug sensitivity and resistance is needed to realise the full potential of this treatment modality. Signalling in trans is a key feature of HER family signalling, and the activation of the PI3K/Akt pathway, so critically important in tumorigenesis, is driven predominantly through phosphorylation in trans of the kinase inactive member HER3. An increasing body of evidence shows that HER3 plays a critical role in EGFR- and HER2-driven tumours. In particular, HER3 lies upstream of a critically important tumorigenic signalling pathway with extensive ability for feedback and cross-talk signalling, and targeting approaches that fail to account for this important trans-target of EGFR and HER2 can be undermined by its resiliency and resourcefulness. Since HER3 is kinase inactive, it is not a direct target of kinase inhibitors and not presently an easily drugable target. This review presents the current evidence highlighting the role of HER3 in tumorigenesis and its role in mediating resistance to inhibitors of EGFR and HER2