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

Cultural and Natural Assets for Willamette Basin, Oregon Sustainability

In this paper, we consider the transfer of environmental and cultural assets to the next generation as a potential measure of sustainability. We define “net assets” as the value of renewable and nonrenewable natural resources plus human-made, intellectual, social, and cultural capital, minus any debts. We apply this approach by first reviewing survey data reflecting how cultural capital may yield microbehaviors that add up to the macroresults of environmental protection and restoration. Second, we evaluate how human activities play out on the landscape. Rather than a dollar measure of assets, historical changes in land use are a proxy for asset change. A broad look at the Willamette Valley, Oregon’s most urban and industrial area, shows that capital in forest lands has shifted from significant loss to improvement, agricultural lands have decreased only slightly, and urban development has taken a relatively small share of the total landscape. However, sprawl is increasing despite efforts to contain urban growth. Looking at highly valuable ecological features for the future, we find that wetlands continue to be lost, important species are endangered, and the secondary impact of urbanization on the landscape is increasing.Keywords: sustainability, natural capital, land use, cultural assets, Willamette Valley, Orego

Rapid Detection of the Varicella Zoster Virus in Saliva

Varicella zoster virus (VZV) causes chicken pox on first exposure (usually in children), and reactivates from latency causing shingles (usually in adults). Shingles can be extremely painful, causing nerve damage, organ damage, and blindness in some cases. The virus can be life-threatening in immune-compromised individuals. The virus is very difficult to culture for diagnosis, requiring a week or longer. This invention is a rapid test for VZV from a saliva sample and can be performed in a doctor s office. The kit is small, compact, and lightweight. Detec tion is sensitive, specific, and noninvasive (no needles); only a saliva sample is required. The test provides results in minutes. The entire test is performed in a closed system, with no exposure to infectious materials. The components are made mostly of inexpensive plastic injection molded parts, many of which can be purchased off the shelf and merely assembled. All biological waste is contained for fast, efficient disposal. This innovation was made possible because of discovery of a NASA scientists flight experiment showing the presence of VZV in saliva during high stress periods and disease. This finding enables clinicians to quickly screen patients for VZV and treat the ones that show positive results with antiviral medicines. This promotes a rapid recovery, easing of pain and symptoms, and reduces chances of complications from zoster. Screening of high-risk patients could be incorporated as part of a regular physical exam. These patients include the elderly, pregnant women, and immune-compromised individuals. In these patients, VZV can be a life-threatening disease. In both high- and low-risk patients, early detection and treatment with antiviral drugs can dramatically decrease or even eliminate the clinical manifestation of disease

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

Stress-Induced Subclinical Reactivation of Varicella Zoster Virus in Astronauts

After primary infection, varicella-zoster virus (VZV) becomes latent in ganglia. VZV reactivation occurs primarily in elderly individuals, organ transplant recipients, and patients with cancer and AIDS, correlating with a specific decline in cell-mediated immunity to VZV. VZV can also reactivate after surgical stress. To determine whether VZV can also reactivate after acute non-surgical stress, we examined total DNA extracted from 312 saliva samples of eight astronauts before, during and after space flight for VZV DNA by PCR: 112 samples were obtained 234 to 265 days before flight, 84 samples on days 2 through 13 of space flight, and 116 samples on days 1 through 15 after flight. Before space flight only one of the 112 saliva samples from a single astronaut was positive for VZV DNA. In contrast, during and after space flight, 61 of 200 (30%) saliva samples were positive in all 8 astronauts. No VZV DNA was detected in any of 88 saliva samples from 10 healthy control subjects. These data indicate that VZV can reactivate subclinically in healthy individuals after acute stress

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 (&gt; 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.</p

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 $dE/df$ are rich in information about the hydrodynamics of merger and coalescence. In particular, our results demonstrate that detailed information on both $GM/Rc^2$ 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

General relativistic radiation hydrodynamics of accretion flows. I: Bondi-Hoyle accretion

We present a new code for performing general-relativistic radiation-hydrodynamics simulations of accretion flows onto black holes. The radiation field is treated in the optically-thick approximation, with the opacity contributed by Thomson scattering and thermal bremsstrahlung. Our analysis is concentrated on a detailed numerical investigation of hot two-dimensional, Bondi-Hoyle accretion flows with various Mach numbers. We find significant differences with respect to purely hydrodynamical evolutions. In particular, once the system relaxes to a radiation-pressure dominated regime, the accretion rates become about two orders of magnitude smaller than in the purely hydrodynamical case, remaining however super-Eddington as are the luminosities. Furthermore, when increasing the Mach number of the inflowing gas, the accretion rates become smaller because of the smaller cross section of the black hole, but the luminosities increase as a result a stronger emission in the shocked regions. Overall, our approach provides the first self-consistent calculation of the Bondi-Hoyle luminosity, most of which is emitted within r~100 M from the black hole, with typical values L/L_Edd ~ 1-7, and corresponding energy efficiencies eta_BH ~ 0.09-0.5. The possibility of computing luminosities self-consistently has also allowed us to compare with the bremsstrahlung luminosity often used in modelling the electromagnetic counterparts to supermassive black-hole binaries, to find that in the optically-thick regime these more crude estimates are about 20 times larger than our radiation-hydrodynamics results.Comment: With updated bibliographyc informatio

Formation of Small-Scale Condensations in the Molecular Clouds via Thermal Instability

A systematic study of the linear thermal instability of a self-gravitating magnetic molecular cloud is carried out for the case when the unperturbed background is subject to local expansion or contraction. We consider the ambipolar diffusion, or ion-neutral friction on the perturbed states. In this way, we obtain a non-dimensional characteristic equation that reduces to the prior characteristic equation in the non-gravitating stationary background. By parametric manipulation of this characteristic equation, we conclude that there are, not only oblate condensation forming solutions, but also prolate solutions according to local expansion or contraction of the background. We obtain the conditions for existence of the Field lengths that thermal instability in the molecular clouds can occur. If these conditions establish, small-scale condensations in the form of spherical, oblate, or prolate may be produced via thermal instability.Comment: 16 page, accepted by Ap&S