Getting water from the water of hydration on Mars

Both Viking landers found evidence of water in small concentration in the soils of Mars. Using the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer the soil samples on Mars were heated to 500 C to release the water. This result lead researchers to believe that the water in the soil of Mars was tightly bound in a hydration state. In the laboratory several Mars analog soils and a few bench mark soils were run through a microwave to determine the amount of water released using this method. The results suggest that sufficient water can be obtained using this method to augment the activities of a human base on Mars

Active Spanning Trees with Bending Energy on Planar Maps and SLE-Decorated Liouville Quantum Gravity for κ> 8

We consider the Peano curve separating a spanning tree from its dual spanning tree on an embedded planar graph, where the tree and dual tree are weighted by $y$ to the number of active edges, and "active" is in the sense of the Tutte polynomial. When the graph is a portion of the square grid approximating a simply connected domain, it is known ($y=1$ and $y=1+\sqrt{2}$) or believed ($1<y<3$) that the Peano curve converges to a space-filling SLE$_{\kappa}$ loop, where $y=1-2\cos(4\pi/\kappa)$, corresponding to $4<\kappa\leq 8$. We argue that the same should hold for $0\le y<1$, which corresponds to $8<\kappa\leq 12$

Workers on the Run: Recession and the Pressure on Workplace Rights - The 34th Annual Kenneth M. Piper Lecture

This lecture discusses the impact of the recent recession, both directly and indirectly, on the rights of workers in the U.S. and internationally. Employers are increasingly relying on temporary/contingent workers, and even unpaid interns who have few jobs protections and no benefits. This practice negatively impacts the wages and bargaining power of the core labor force as well as overall job creation. Particularly pronounced is the misclassification of jobs and failure to pay minimum wage and/or overtime benefits contrary to contractual requirements. There is evidence that the recession has made it politically acceptable to re-write existing employment agreements, with federal and local governments seeking to reduce payouts to municipal workers, auto workers and others. Martin J. Mulloy and Gwynne A. Wilcox, two labor and employment leaders, provide commentary on the lecture

Workers on the Run: Recession and the Pressure on Workplace Rights - The 34th Annual Kenneth M. Piper Lecture

This lecture discusses the impact of the recent recession, both directly and indirectly, on the rights of workers in the U.S. and internationally. Employers are increasingly relying on temporary/contingent workers, and even unpaid interns who have few jobs protections and no benefits. This practice negatively impacts the wages and bargaining power of the core labor force as well as overall job creation. Particularly pronounced is the misclassification of jobs and failure to pay minimum wage and/or overtime benefits contrary to contractual requirements. There is evidence that the recession has made it politically acceptable to re-write existing employment agreements, with federal and local governments seeking to reduce payouts to municipal workers, auto workers and others. Martin J. Mulloy and Gwynne A. Wilcox, two labor and employment leaders, provide commentary on the lecture

Rat adrenal uptake and metabolism of high density lipoprotein cholesteryl ester

Metabolism of high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesteryl ester (CE) by cultured rat adrenal cells was studied. Addition of [3H]CE-HDL to cells pretreated with adrenocorticotrophin in lipoprotein poor media resulted in a time- and concentration-dependent accumulation of [3H]cholesteryl ester and production of [3H]cholesterol and [3H]corticosterone. HDL-CE metabolism could be described as the sum of a high affinity ([ HDL-cholesterol]1/2 max = 16 micrograms/ml) and low affinity ([ HDL-cholesterol]1/2 max greater than 70 micrograms/ml) process. [3H]Cholesterol was found both intracellularly and in the media. Accumulation of [3H]cholesteryl ester could not be attributed to uptake and re-esterification of unesterified cholesterol since addition of Sandoz 58-035, an inhibitor of acyl coenzyme A:cholesterol acyltransferase, did not prevent ester accumulation. Moreover, addition of chloroquine did not inhibit cholesteryl ester hydrolysis indicating that hydrolysis was not lysosomally mediated. Aminoglutethimide prevented conversion of [3H]CE-HDL to steroid hormones but did not inhibit [3H]cholesteryl ester uptake. Cellular accumulation of [3H] cholesteryl ester exceeded accumulation of 125I-apoproteins 5-fold at 1 h and 35-fold at 24 h indicating selective uptake of cholesteryl ester moiety. We conclude that rat adrenal cells possess a mechanism for selective uptake of HDL cholesteryl esters which provides substrate for steroidogenesis. These results constitute the first direct demonstration that cholesteryl esters in HDL can be used as steroidogenic substrate by the rat adrenal cortex

Almost sure multifractal spectrum of Schramm-Loewner evolution

Suppose that $\eta$ is a Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE$_\kappa$) in a smoothly bounded simply connected domain $D \subset {\mathbb C}$ and that $\phi$ is a conformal map from ${\mathbb D}$ to a connected component of $D \setminus \eta([0,t])$ for some $t>0$. The multifractal spectrum of $\eta$ is the function $(-1,1) \to [0,\infty)$ which, for each $s \in (-1,1)$, gives the Hausdorff dimension of the set of points $x \in \partial {\mathbb D}$ such that $|\phi'( (1-\epsilon) x)| = \epsilon^{-s+o(1)}$ as $\epsilon \to 0$. We rigorously compute the a.s. multifractal spectrum of SLE, confirming a prediction due to Duplantier. As corollaries, we confirm a conjecture made by Beliaev and Smirnov for the a.s. bulk integral means spectrum of SLE and we obtain a new derivation of the a.s. Hausdorff dimension of the SLE curve for $\kappa \leq 4$. Our results also hold for the SLE$_\kappa(\underline \rho)$ processes with general vectors of weight $\underline\rho$