Planting on Rural School Grounds

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The search for novel analgesics: re-examining spinal cord circuits with new tools

In this perspective, we propose the absence of detailed information regarding spinal cord circuits that process sensory information remains a major barrier to advancing analgesia. We highlight recent advances showing that functionally discrete populations of neurons in the spinal cord dorsal horn play distinct roles in processing sensory information. We then discuss new molecular, electrophysiological, and optogenetic techniques that can be employed to understand how dorsal horn circuits process tactile and nociceptive information. We believe this information can drive the development of entirely new classes of pharmacotherapies that target key elements in spinal circuits to selectively modify sensory function and blunt pain

A sub-product construction of Poincare-Einstein metrics

Given any two Einstein (pseudo-)metrics, with scalar curvatures suitably related, we give an explicit construction of a Poincar\'e-Einstein (pseudo-)metric with conformal infinity the conformal class of the product of the initial metrics. We show that these metrics are equivalent to ambient metrics for the given conformal structure. The ambient metrics have holonomy that agrees with the conformal holonomy. In the generic case the ambient metric arises directly as a product of the metric cones over the original Einstein spaces. In general the conformal infinity of the Poincare metrics we construct is not Einstein, and so this describes a class of non-conformally Einstein metrics for which the (Fefferman-Graham) obstruction tensor vanishes.Comment: 23 pages Minor correction to section 5. References update

Canonical quantization of the WZW model with defects and Chern-Simons theory

We perform canonical quantization of the WZW model with defects and permutation branes. We establish symplectomorphism between phase space of WZW model with $N$ defects on cylinder and phase space of Chern-Simons theory on annulus times $R$ with $N$ Wilson lines, and between phase space of WZW model with $N$ defects on strip and Chern-Simons theory on disc times $R$ with $N+2$ Wilson lines. We obtained also symplectomorphism between phase space of the $N$-fold product of the WZW model with boundary conditions specified by permutation branes, and phase space of Chern-Simons theory on sphere with $N$ holes and two Wilson lines.Comment: 26 pages, minor corrections don

Application of the coherent state formalism to multiply excited states

A general expression is obtained for the matrix element of an m-body operator between coherent states constructed from multiple orthogonal coherent boson species. This allows the coherent state formalism to be applied to states possessing an arbitrarily large number of intrinsic excitation quanta. For illustration, the formalism is applied to the two-dimensional vibron model [U(3) model], to calculate the energies of all excited states in the large-N limit.Comment: LaTeX (iopart); 10 pages; to be published in J. Phys.

Neurological modeling of what experts vs. non-experts find interesting

The P3 and related ERP's have a long history of use to identify stimulus events in subjects as part of oddball-style experiments. In this work we describe the ongoing development of oddball style experiments which attempt to capture what a subject finds of interest or curious, when presented with a set of visual stimuli i.e. images. This joint work between Dublin City University (DCU) and the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team (ESA ACT) is motivated by the challenges of autonomous space exploration where the time lag for sending data back to earth for analysis and then communicating an action or decision back to the spacecraft means that decision-making is slow. Also, when extraterrestrial sensors capture data, the determination of what data to send back to earth is driven by an expertly devised rule set, that is scientists need to determine apriori what will be of interest. This cannot adapt to novel or unexpected data that a scientist may find curious. Our work is attempting to determine if it is possible to capture what a scientist (subject) finds of interest (curious) in a stream of image data through EEG measurement. One of the our challenges is to determine the difference between an expert and a lay subject response to stimulus. To investigate the theorized difference, we use a set of lifelog images as our dataset. Lifelog images are first person images taken by a small wearable camera which continuously records images whilst it is worn. We have devised two key experiments for use with this data and two classes of subjects. Our subjects are a person who has worn the personal camera, from which our collection of lifelog images is taken and who becomes our expert, and the remaining subjects are people who have no association with the captured images. Our first experiment is a traditional oddball experiment where the oddballs are people having coffee, and can be thought of as a directed information seeking task. The second experiment is to present a stream of lifelog images to the subjects and record which images cause a stimulus response. Once the data from these experiments has been captured our task is to compare the responses between the expert and lay subject groups, to determine if there are any commonalities between these groups or any distinct differences. If the latter outcome is the case the objective is then to investigate methods for capturing properties of images which cause an expert to be interested in a presented image. Further novelty is added to our work by the fact we are using entry-level off-the-shelf EEG devices, consisting of 4 nodes with a sampling rate of 255Hz

Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuations of the Coma Elliptical NGC 4874 and the Value of the Hubble Constant

We have used the Keck I Telescope to measure K-band surface brightness fluctuations (SBFs) of NGC 4874, the dominant elliptical galaxy in the Coma cluster. We use deep HST WFPC2 optical imaging to account for the contamination due to faint globular clusters and improved analysis techniques to derive measurements of the SBF apparent magnitude. Using a new SBF calibration which accounts for the dependence of K-band SBFs on the integrated color of the stellar population, we measure a distance modulus of 34.99+/-0.21 mag (100+/-10 Mpc) for the Coma cluster. The resulting value of the Hubble constant is 71+/-8 km/s/Mpc, not including any systematic error in the HST Cepheid distance scale.Comment: ApJ Letters, in press. Uses emulateapj5.st