The Complement System: A Potential Target for Stroke Therapy

Anti-complement strategies appear to hold great promise for the development of stroke therapeutics. Yet caution should be exercised. It is clear that the complement cascade is a complex and intricate system with widely varied effects, and if any knowledge has been gained from the many failed attempts at translating stroke therapies to the bedside, it is that cavalier application of under-elucidated therapies that leads to wasted resources and the potential for poor patient outcomes

Magnetospheric Science Objectives of the Juno Mission

In July 2016, NASA’s Juno mission becomes the first spacecraft to enter polar orbit of Jupiter and enture deep into unexplored polar territories of the magnetosphere. Focusing on these polar regions, we review current understanding of the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere and summarize the outstanding issues. The Juno mission profile involves (a) a several-week approach from the dawn side of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, with an orbit-insertion maneuver on July 6, 2016; (b) a 107-day capture orbit, also on the dawn flank; and (c) a series of thirty 11-day science orbits with the spacecraft flying over Jupiter’s poles and ducking under the radiation belts. We show how Juno’s view of the magnetosphere evolves over the year of science orbits. The Juno spacecraft carries a range of instruments that take particles and fields measurements, remote sensing observations of auroral emissions at UV, visible, IR and radio wavelengths, and detect microwave emission from Jupiter’s radiation belts. We summarize how these Juno measurements address issues of auroral processes, microphysical plasma physics, ionosphere-magnetosphere and satellite-magnetosphere coupling, sources and sinks of plasma, the radiation belts, and the dynamics of the outer magnetosphere. To reach Jupiter, the Juno spacecraft passed close to the Earth on October 9, 2013, gaining the necessary energy to get to Jupiter. The Earth flyby provided an opportunity to test Juno’s instrumentation as well as take scientific data in the terrestrial magnetosphere, in conjunction with ground-based and Earth-orbiting assets

Exoplanetary Atmospheres—Chemistry, Formation Conditions, and Habitability

Characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets is the new frontier in exoplanetary science. The last two decades of exoplanet discoveries have revealed that exoplanets are very common and extremely diverse in their orbital and bulk properties. We now enter a new era as we begin to investigate the chemical diversity of exoplanets, their atmospheric and interior processes, and their formation conditions. Recent developments in the field have led to unprecedented advancements in our understanding of atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets and the implications for their formation conditions. We review these developments in the present work. We review in detail the theory of atmospheric chemistry in all classes of exoplanets discovered to date, from highly irradiated gas giants, ice giants, and super-Earths, to directly imaged giant planets at large orbital separations. We then review the observational detections of chemical species in exoplanetary atmospheres of these various types using different methods, including transit spectroscopy, Doppler spectroscopy, and direct imaging. In addition to chemical detections, we discuss the advances in determining chemical abundances in these atmospheres and how such abundances are being used to constrain exoplanetary formation conditions and migration mechanisms. Finally, we review recent theoretical work on the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets, followed by a discussion of future outlook of the field.M. Agúndez acknowledges funding support from Spanish MINECO through grants CSD2009-00038, AYA2009-07304, and AYA2012-32032 and from the European Research Council (ERC Grant 610256: NANOCOSMOS). J. Moses thanks the NASA Exoplanet Research program NNX15AN82G for support. Y. Hu is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China 435 (NSFC) under grants 41375072 and 41530423