A Possible Detection of Occultation by a Proto-planetary Clump in GM Cephei

GM Cep in the young (~4 Myr) open cluster Trumpler 37 has been known to be an abrupt variable and to have a circumstellar disk with very active accretion. Our monitoring observations in 2009-2011 revealed the star to show sporadic flare events, each with brightening of < 0.5 mag lasting for days. These brightening events, associated with a color change toward the blue, should originate from an increased accretion activity. Moreover, the star also underwent a brightness drop of ~1 mag lasting for about a month, during which the star became bluer when fainter. Such brightness drops seem to have a recurrence time scale of a year, as evidenced in our data and the photometric behavior of GM Cep over a century. Between consecutive drops, the star brightened gradually by about 1 mag and became blue at peak luminosity. We propose that the drop is caused by obscuration of the central star by an orbiting dust concentration. The UX Orionis type of activity in GM Cep therefore exemplifies the disk inhomogeneity process in transition between grain coagulation and planetesimal formation in a young circumstellar disk.Comment: In submission to the Astrophysical Journal, 4 figure

Photodynamic therapy for wound treatment

With a combination of photodynamic therapy using the photosensitizer toluidine blue O plus the antiseptic octenisept, it is possible to attain a sufficient bacterial-count reduction with simultaneous low cytotoxicity to human skin cells. This novel concept may find application in various clinical areas, for instance, in burn medicine or in killing antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Using the strategy we developed, it may be possible to prevent the development of resistence to a broad spectrum of pathogens due to too-frequent use of systemic antibiotics, reserving these for life-threatening infections.Durch gezielte Kombination einer photodynamischen Therapie unter Verwendung des Photosensibilisators Toluidinblau O mit dem Antiseptikum Octenisept ist es möglich, eine suffiziente Keimzahlreduktion bei gleichzeitig geringer Zytotoxizität für Zellen der menschlichen Haut zu erzielen. Dieses neuartige Konzept könnte in verschiedenen klinischen Bereichen, wie z.B. der Verbrennungsmedizin oder der Abtötung Antibiotika-resistenter Krankheitserreger Anwendung finden. Mit dieser von uns entwickelten Strategie könnte einer Resistenzentwicklung eines breiten Spektrums pathogener Erreger aufgrund eines zu häufigen Einsatzes systemischer Antibiotika vorgebeugt und diese für lebensbedrohende Infektionen reserviert werden

The mental representation of inflected words: An experimental study of adjectives and verbs in German.

The authors investigate how morphological relationships between inflected word forms are represented in the mental lexicon, focusing on paradigmatic relations between regularly inflected word forms and relationships between different stem forms of the same lexeme. We present results from a series of psycholinguistic experiments investigating German adjectives (which are inflected for case, number, and gender) and the so-called strong verbs of German, which have different stem forms when inflected for person, number, tense, or mood. Evidence from three lexical-decision experiments indicates that regular affixes are stripped off from their stems for processing purposes. It will be shown that this holds for both unmarked and marked stem forms. Another set of experiments revealed priming effects between different paradigmatically related affixes and between different stem forms of the same lexeme. We will show that associative models of inflection do not capture these findings, and we explain our results in terms of combinatorial models of inflection in which regular affixes are represented in inflectional paradigms and stem variants are represented in structured lexical entries. We will also argue that the morphosyntactic features of stems and affixes form abstract underspecified entries. The experimental results indicate that the human language processor makes use of these representations