Skeletal muscle transcriptional coactivator PGC-1alpha mediates mitochondrial, but not metabolic, changes during calorie restriction

Calorie restriction (CR) is a dietary intervention that extends lifespan and healthspan in a variety of organisms. CR improves mitochondrial energy production, fuel oxidation, and reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging in skeletal muscle and other tissues, and these processes are thought to be critical to the benefits of CR. PGC-1alpha is a transcriptional coactivator that regulates mitochondrial function and is induced by CR. Consequently, many of the mitochondrial and metabolic benefits of CR are attributed to increased PGC-1alpha activity. To test this model, we examined the metabolic and mitochondrial response to CR in mice lacking skeletal muscle PGC-1alpha (MKO). Surprisingly, MKO mice demonstrated a normal improvement in glucose homeostasis in response to CR, indicating that skeletal muscle PGC-1alpha is dispensable for the whole-body benefits of CR. In contrast, gene expression profiling and electron microscopy (EM) demonstrated that PGC-1alpha is required for the full CR-induced increases in mitochondrial gene expression and mitochondrial density in skeletal muscle. These results demonstrate that PGC-1alpha is a major regulator of the mitochondrial response to CR in skeletal muscle, but surprisingly show that neither PGC-1alpha nor mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle are required for the whole-body metabolic benefits of CR

Dissipation-assisted quantum gates with cold trapped ions

It is shown that a two-qubit phase gate and SWAP operation between ground states of cold trapped ions can be realised in one step by simultaneously applying two laser fields. Cooling during gate operations is possible without perturbing the computation and the scheme does not require a second ion species for sympathetic cooling. On the contrary, the cooling lasers even stabilise the desired time evolution of the system. This affords gate operation times of nearly the same order of magnitude as the inverse coupling constant of the ions to a common vibrational mode.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, substantially revised versio

Revealing Bell's Nonlocality for Unstable Systems in High Energy Physics

Entanglement and its consequences - in particular the violation of Bell inequalities, which defies our concepts of realism and locality - have been proven to play key roles in Nature by many experiments for various quantum systems. Entanglement can also be found in systems not consisting of ordinary matter and light, i.e. in massive meson--antimeson systems. Bell inequalities have been discussed for these systems, but up to date no direct experimental test to conclusively exclude local realism was found. This mainly stems from the fact that one only has access to a restricted class of observables and that these systems are also decaying. In this Letter we put forward a Bell inequality for unstable systems which can be tested at accelerator facilities with current technology. Herewith, the long awaited proof that such systems at different energy scales can reveal the sophisticated "dynamical" nonlocal feature of Nature in a direct experiment gets feasible. Moreover, the role of entanglement and CP violation, an asymmetry between matter and antimatter, is explored, a special feature offered only by these meson-antimeson systems.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Quantum entanglement with acousto-optic modulators: 2-photon beatings and Bell experiments with moving beamsplitters

We present an experiment testing quantum correlations with frequency shifted photons. We test Bell inequality with 2-photon interferometry where we replace the beamsplitters by acousto-optic modulators, which are equivalent to moving beamsplitters. We measure the 2-photon beatings induced by the frequency shifts, and we propose a cryptographic scheme in relation. Finally, setting the experiment in a relativistic configuration, we demonstrate that the quantum correlations are not only independent of the distance but also of the time ordering between the two single-photon measurements.Comment: 14 pages, 16 figure

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR

Geographical and temporal distribution of SARS-CoV-2 clades in the WHO European Region, January to June 2020

We show the distribution of SARS-CoV-2 genetic clades over time and between countries and outline potential genomic surveillance objectives. We applied three available genomic nomenclature systems for SARS-CoV-2 to all sequence data from the WHO European Region available during the COVID-19 pandemic until 10 July 2020. We highlight the importance of real-time sequencing and data dissemination in a pandemic situation. We provide a comparison of the nomenclatures and lay a foundation for future European genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2.Peer reviewe

Relationship of edge localized mode burst times with divertor flux loop signal phase in JET

A phase relationship is identified between sequential edge localized modes (ELMs) occurrence times in a set of H-mode tokamak plasmas to the voltage measured in full flux azimuthal loops in the divertor region. We focus on plasmas in the Joint European Torus where a steady H-mode is sustained over several seconds, during which ELMs are observed in the Be II emission at the divertor. The ELMs analysed arise from intrinsic ELMing, in that there is no deliberate intent to control the ELMing process by external means. We use ELM timings derived from the Be II signal to perform direct time domain analysis of the full flux loop VLD2 and VLD3 signals, which provide a high cadence global measurement proportional to the voltage induced by changes in poloidal magnetic flux. Specifically, we examine how the time interval between pairs of successive ELMs is linked to the time-evolving phase of the full flux loop signals. Each ELM produces a clear early pulse in the full flux loop signals, whose peak time is used to condition our analysis. The arrival time of the following ELM, relative to this pulse, is found to fall into one of two categories: (i) prompt ELMs, which are directly paced by the initial response seen in the flux loop signals; and (ii) all other ELMs, which occur after the initial response of the full flux loop signals has decayed in amplitude. The times at which ELMs in category (ii) occur, relative to the first ELM of the pair, are clustered at times when the instantaneous phase of the full flux loop signal is close to its value at the time of the first ELM