314 research outputs found
Head-On Collision of Neutron Stars As A Thought Experiment
The head-on collision of identical neutron stars from rest at infinity
requires a numerical simulation in full general relativity for a complete
solution. Undaunted, we provide a relativistic, analytic argument to suggest
that during the collision, sufficient thermal pressure is always generated to
support the hot remnant in quasi-static stable equilibrium against collapse
prior to slow cooling via neutrino emission. Our conclusion is independent of
the total mass of the progenitors and holds even if the remnant greatly exceeds
the maximum mass of a cold neutron star.Comment: to appear in Physical Review D (revtex, 3 figs, 5 pgs
Subclinical Shed of Infectious Varicella zoster Virus in Astronauts
Aerosol borne varicella zoster virus (VZV) enters the nasopharynx and replicates in tonsillar T-cells, resulting in viremia and varicella (chickenpox). Virus then becomes latent in cranial nerve, dorsal root and autonomic nervous system ganglia along the entire neuraxis (1). Decades later, as cell-mediated immunity to VZV declines (4), latent VZV can reactivate to produce zoster (shingles). Infectious VZV is present in patients with varicella or zoster, but shed of infectious virus in the absence of disease has not been shown. We previously detected VZV DNA in saliva of astronauts during and shortly after spaceflight, suggesting stress induced subclinical virus reactivation (3). We show here that VZV DNA as well as infectious virus in present in astronaut saliva. VZV DNA was detected in saliva during and after a 13-day spaceflight in 2 of 3 astronauts (Fig. panel A). Ten days before liftoff, there was a rise in serum anti-VZV antibody in subjects 1 and 2, consistent with virus reactivation. In subject 3, VZV DNA was not detected in saliva, and there was no rise in anti-VZV antibody titer. Subject 3 may have been protected from virus reactivation by having zoster <10 years ago, which provides a boost in cell-medicated immunity to VZV (2). No VZV DNA was detected in astronaut saliva months before spaceflight, or in saliva of 10 age/sex-matched healthy control subjects sampled on alternate days for 3 weeks (88 saliva samples). Saliva taken 2-6 days after landing from all 3 subjects was cultured on human fetal lung cells (Fig. panel B). Infectious VZV was recovered from saliva of subjects 1 and 2 on the second day after landing. Virus specificity was confirmed by antibody staining and DNA analysis which showed it to be VZV of European descent, common in the US (5). Further, both antibody staining and DNA PCR demonstrated that no HSV-1 was detected in any infected culture. This is the first report of infectious VZV shedding in the absence of clinical disease. Spaceflight presents a uniquely stressful environment which includes physical isolation and confinement, anxiety, sleep deprivation, as well as exposure to increased radiation and microgravity. It is interesting that in our study, VZV and not HSV-1 reactivation was detected, since stress-induced HSV-1 reactivation has been reported (6). Future studies are needed to determine the specific inducer of VZV reactivation
Varicella zoster virus infection of highly pure terminally differentiated human neurons
In vitro analyses of varicella zoster virus (VZV) reactivation from latency in human ganglia have been hampered by the inability to isolate virus by explantation or cocultivation techniques. Furthermore, attempts to study interaction of VZV with neurons in experimentally infected ganglion cells in vitro have been impaired by the presence of nonneuronal cells, which become productively infected and destroy the cultures. We have developed an in vitro model of VZV infection in which highly pure (>95 %) terminally differentiated human neurons derived from pluripotent stem cells were infected with VZV. At 2 weeks post-infection, infected neurons appeared healthy compared to VZV-infected human fetal lung fibroblasts (HFLs), which developed a cytopathic effect (CPE) within 1 week. Tissue culture medium from VZV-infected neurons did not produce a CPE in uninfected HFLs and did not contain PCR-amplifiable VZV DNA, but cocultivation of infected neurons with uninfected HFLs did produce a CPE. The nonproductively infected neurons contained multiple regions of the VZV genome, as well as transcripts and proteins corresponding to VZV immediate-early, early, and late genes. No markers of the apoptotic caspase cascade were detected in healthy-appearing VZV-infected neurons. VZV infection of highly pure terminally differentiated human neurons provides a unique in vitro system to study the VZV-neuronal relationship and the potential to investigate mechanisms of VZV reactivation
Gravitational Radiation from Coalescing Binary Neutron Stars
We calculate the gravitational radiation produced by the merger and
coalescence of inspiraling binary neutron stars using 3-dimensional numerical
simulations. The stars are modeled as polytropes and start out in the
point-mass limit at wide separation. The hydrodynamic integration is performed
using smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) with Newtonian gravity, and the
gravitational radiation is calculated using the quadrupole approximation. We
have run several simulations, varying both the neutron star radius and the
equation of state. The resulting gravitational wave energy spectra are
rich in information about the hydrodynamics of merger and coalescence. In
particular, our results demonstrate that detailed information on both
and the equation of state can in principle be extracted from the spectrum.Comment: 33 pages, LaTex with RevTex macros; 21 figures available in
compressed PostScript format via anonymous ftp to
ftp://zonker.drexel.edu/papers/ns_coll_1 ; in press, Phys. Rev. D (Nov 15,
1994 issue
The Minimum Stellar Mass in Early Galaxies
The conditions for the fragmentation of the baryonic component during merging
of dark matter halos in the early Universe are studied. We assume that the
baryonic component undergoes a shock compression. The characteristic masses of
protostellar molecular clouds and the minimum masses of protostars formed in
these clouds decrease with increasing halo mass. This may indicate that the
initial stellar mass function in more massive galaxies was shifted towards
lower masses during the initial stages of their formation. This would result in
an increase of the number of stars per unit halo mass, i.e., the efficiency of
star formation.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure
Simple model for 1/f noise
We present a simple stochastic mechanism which generates pulse trains
exhibiting a power law distribution of the pulse intervals and a
power spectrum over several decades at low frequencies with close to
one. The essential ingredient of our model is a fluctuating threshold which
performs a Brownian motion. Whenever an increasing potential hits the
threshold, is reset to the origin and a pulse is emitted. We show that
if increases linearly in time, the pulse intervals can be approximated
by a random walk with multiplicative noise. Our model agrees with recent
experiments in neurobiology and explains the high interpulse interval
variability and the occurrence of noise observed in cortical
neurons and earthquake data.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Evolutionary autonomous agents and the nature of apraxia
BACKGROUND: Evolutionary autonomous agents are robots or robot simulations whose controller is a dynamical neural network and whose evolution occurs autonomously under the guidance of a fitness function without the detailed or explicit direction of an external programmer. They are embodied agents with a simple neural network controller and as such they provide the optimal forum by which sensorimotor interactions in a specified environment can be studied without the computational assumptions inherent in standard neuroscience. METHODS: Evolutionary autonomous agents were evolved that were able to perform identical movements under two different contexts, one which represented an automatic movement and one which had a symbolic context. In an attempt to model the automatic-voluntary dissociation frequently seen in ideomotor apraxia, lesions were introduced into the neural network controllers resulting in a behavioral dissociation with loss of the ability to perform the movement which had a symbolic context and preservation of the simpler, automatic movement. RESULTS: Analysis of the changes in the hierarchical organization of the networks in the apractic EAAs demonstrated consistent changes in the network dynamics across all agents with loss of longer duration time scales in the network dynamics. CONCLUSION: The concepts of determinate motor programs and perceptual representations that are implicit in the present day understanding of ideomotor apraxia are assumptions inherent in the computational understanding of brain function. The strength of the present study using EAAs to model one aspect of ideomotor apraxia is the absence of these assumptions and a grounding of all sensorimotor interactions in an embodied, autonomous agent. The consistency of the hierarchical changes in the network dynamics across all apractic agents demonstrates that this technique is tenable and will be a valuable adjunct to a computational formalism in the understanding of the physical basis of neurological disorders
Emergent complex neural dynamics
A large repertoire of spatiotemporal activity patterns in the brain is the
basis for adaptive behaviour. Understanding the mechanism by which the brain's
hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses manage to produce such a
range of cortical configurations in a flexible manner remains a fundamental
problem in neuroscience. One plausible solution is the involvement of universal
mechanisms of emergent complex phenomena evident in dynamical systems poised
near a critical point of a second-order phase transition. We review recent
theoretical and empirical results supporting the notion that the brain is
naturally poised near criticality, as well as its implications for better
understanding of the brain
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