Of Some Theoretical Significance: Implications of Casimir Effects

In his autobiography Casimir barely mentioned the Casimir effect, but remarked that it is "of some theortical significance." We will describe some aspects of Casimir effects that appear to be of particular significance now, more than half a century after Casimir's famous paper

The monoclonal antibody HB1 recognizes an adhesion molecule for macrophages in the brain

The brain environment exerts a powerful influence on macrophage phenotype, as exemplified by microglia, but the mechanisms mediating this control are nuclear. Since adhesion molecules are known to transmit signals across cell membranes, we investigated adhesion receptors involved in macrophage interaction with brain tissue. We have demonstrated previously that macrophages adhere specifically to CNS neurones in an in vitro assay. Here we show that this adhesion is inhibited by lectins, including Griffonia simplicofolia isolectin B4 (GSI), which has been used as a microglial marker for many years. Adhesion is unaffected by antibodies to several known adhesion molecules but is markedly inhibited by a new monoclonal antibody: HB1. HB1 recognizes microglia in the normal brain and activated microglia and recruited monocytes during CNS pathology. It labels a subset of resident macrophages and recruited monocytes in other tissues. Using this antibody, we isolated a protein of about 110 kDa from macrophage cell lysates. This protein is recognized by GSI, providing the first evidence of a functional role for the antigen labelled by this lectin. Further study of the HB1 antigen may provide important information about the influence of the brain environment on the phenotype of monocytic cells.</p

Nonlinear Atom Optics

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The project objectives were to explore theoretically various aspects of nonlinear atom optics effects in cold-atom waves and traps. During the project a major development occurred the observation, by as many as a dozen experimental groups, of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in cold-atom traps. This stimulated us to focus our attention on those aspects of nonlinear atom optics relating to BEC, in addition to continuing our work on a nonequilibrium formalism for dealing with the interaction of an electromagnetic field with multi-level atomic systems, allowing for macroscopic coherence effects such as BEC. Studies of several problems in BEC physics have been completed or are near completion, including the suggested use of external electric fields to modify the nature of the interatomic interaction in cold-atom traps; properties of two-phase condensates; and molecular loss processes associated with BEC experiments involving a so-called Feshbach resonance