1,532 research outputs found
Cell Death and Neuronal Replacement during Formation of the Avian Ciliary Ganglion
AbstractProgrammed cell death is a prominent feature of embryonic development and is essential in matching the number of neurons to the target tissues that are innervated. Although a decrease in neuronal number which coincides with peripheral synaptogenesis has been well documented in the avian ciliary ganglion, it has not been clear whether cell death also occurs earlier. We observed TUNEL-positive neurons as early as stage 24, with a large peak at stage 29. This cell death at stage 29 was followed by a statistically significant (P < 0.0001) decrease in total neuron number at stage 31. The total number of neurons was recovered by stage 33/34. This suggested that dying neurons were replaced by new neurons. This replacement process did not involve proliferation because bromodeoxyuridine applied at stages 29 and 31 was unable to label neurons harvested at stage 33/34. The peak of cell death at stage 29 was increased 2.3-fold by removal of the optic vesicle and was reduced by 50% when chCNTF was overexpressed. Taken together, these results suggest that the regulation of neuron number in the ciliary ganglion is a dynamic process involving both cell death and neural replacement from postmitotic precursors prior to differentiation and innervation of target tissues
A Large-Diameter Hollow-Shaft Cryogenic Motor Based on a Superconducting Magnetic Bearing for Millimeter-Wave Polarimetry
In this paper we present the design and measured performance of a novel
cryogenic motor based on a superconducting magnetic bearing (SMB). The motor is
tailored for use in millimeter-wave half-wave plate (HWP) polarimeters, where a
HWP is rapidly rotated in front of a polarization analyzer or
polarization-sensitive detector. This polarimetry technique is commonly used in
cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization studies. The SMB we use is
composed of fourteen yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) disks and a contiguous
neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) ring magnet. The motor is a hollow-shaft motor
because the HWP is ultimately installed in the rotor. The motor presented here
has a 100 mm diameter rotor aperture. However, the design can be scaled up to
rotor aperture diameters of approximately 500 mm. Our motor system is composed
of four primary subsystems: (i) the rotor assembly, which includes the NdFeB
ring magnet, (ii) the stator assembly, which includes the YBCO disks, (iii) an
incremental encoder, and (iv) the drive electronics. While the YBCO is cooling
through its superconducting transition, the rotor is held above the stator by a
novel hold and release mechanism (HRM). The encoder subsystem consists of a
custom-built encoder disk read out by two fiber optic readout sensors. For the
demonstration described in this paper, we ran the motor at 50 K and tested
rotation frequencies up to approximately 10 Hz. The feedback system was able to
stabilize the the rotation speed to approximately 0.4%, and the measured rotor
orientation angle uncertainty is less than 0.15 deg. Lower temperature
operation will require additional development activities, which we will
discuss
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Geometric Aspects of Ambrosetti-Prodi operators with Lipschitz nonlinearities
For Dirichlet boundary conditions on a bounded domain, what happens to the
critical set of the Ambrosetti-Prodi operator if the nonlinearity is only a
Lipschitz map? It turns out that many properties which hold in the smooth case
are preserved, despite of the fact that the operator is not even differentiable
at some points. In particular, a global Lyapunov-Schmidt decomposition of great
convenience for numerical inversion is still available
Toolbox for analyzing finite two-state trajectories
In many experiments, the aim is to deduce an underlying multi-substate on-off
kinetic scheme (KS) from the statistical properties of a two-state trajectory.
However, the mapping of a KS into a two-state trajectory leads to the loss of
information about the KS, and so, in many cases, more than one KS can be
associated with the data. We recently showed that the optimal way to solve this
problem is to use canonical forms of reduced dimensions (RD). RD forms are
on-off networks with connections only between substates of different states,
where the connections can have non-exponential waiting time probability density
functions (WT-PDFs). In theory, only a single RD form can be associated with
the data. To utilize RD forms in the analysis of the data, a RD form should be
associated with the data. Here, we give a toolbox for building a RD form from a
finite two-state trajectory. The methods in the toolbox are based on known
statistical methods in data analysis, combined with statistical methods and
numerical algorithms designed specifically for the current problem. Our toolbox
is self-contained - it builds a mechanism based only on the information it
extracts from the data, and its implementation on the data is fast (analyzing a
10^6 cycle trajectory from a thirty-parameter mechanism takes a couple of hours
on a PC with a 2.66 GHz processor). The toolbox is automated and is freely
available for academic research upon electronic request
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