Development of positioning jig for glass capillary bending mechanism

In a bending mechanism for glass capillary, the positioning jig to hold the capillary in place is one of the most important components to ensure the bending quality. The tapered shoulder of the capillary is used as the positioning reference. Since the dimension of the shoulder of individual capillaries varies slightly, the geometry of the capillaries is studied to identify the desired positioning spot on the shoulder. Upon determination of the positioning spot, a positioning jig is designed, which is composed of positioning, holding, and clamping units. A prototype is made and assembled onto the bending mechanism for testing. The testing results show that the mechanism is able to achieve the desired functionalities demanded by the delicate bending process.<br /

Boson Star Normal Modes

Boson stars are gravitationally bound objects that arise in ultralight dark matter models and form in the centers of galactic halos or axion miniclusters. We systematically study the excitations of a boson star, taking into account the mixing between positive and negative frequencies introduced by gravity. We show that the spectrum contains zero-energy modes in the monopole and dipole sectors resulting from spontaneous symmetry breaking by the boson star background. We analyze the general properties of the eigenmodes and derive their orthogonality and completeness conditions which have non-standard form due to the positive-negative frequency mixing. The eigenvalue problem is solved numerically for the first few energy levels in different multipole sectors and the results are compared to the solutions of the Schr\"odinger equation in fixed boson star gravitational potential. The two solutions differ significantly for the lowest modes, but get close for higher levels. We further confirm the normal mode spectrum in 3D wave simulations where we inject perturbations with different multipoles. As an application of the normal mode solutions, we compute the matrix element entering the evaporation rate of a boson star immersed in a hot axion gas. The computation combines the use of exact wavefunctions for the low-lying bound states and of the Schr\"odinger approximation for the high-energy excitations.Comment: 33 pages, 21 figure

The Association between Virus Prevalence and Intercolonial Aggression Levels in the Yellow Crazy Ant, Anoplolepis Gracilipes (Jerdon).

The recent discovery of multiple viruses in ants, along with the widespread infection of their hosts across geographic ranges, provides an excellent opportunity to test whether viral prevalence in the field is associated with the complexity of social interactions in the ant population. In this study, we examined whether the association exists between the field prevalence of a virus and the intercolonial aggression of its ant host, using the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes) and its natural viral pathogen (TR44839 virus) as a model system. We delimitated the colony boundary and composition of A. gracilipes in a total of 12 study sites in Japan (Okinawa), Taiwan, and Malaysia (Penang), through intercolonial aggression assay. The spatial distribution and prevalence level of the virus was then mapped for each site. The virus occurred at a high prevalence in the surveyed colonies of Okinawa and Taiwan (100% infection rate across all sites), whereas virus prevalence was variable (30%-100%) or none (0%) at the sites in Penang. Coincidentally, colonies in Okinawa and Taiwan displayed a weak intercolonial boundary, as aggression between colonies is generally low or moderate. Contrastingly, sites in Penang were found to harbor a high proportion of mutually aggressive colonies, a pattern potentially indicative of complex colony composition. Our statistical analyses further confirmed the observed correlation, implying that intercolonial interactions likely contribute as one of the effective facilitators of/barriers to virus prevalence in the field population of this ant species

Reducing Side Effects of Hiding Sensitive Itemsets in Privacy Preserving Data Mining

Data mining is traditionally adopted to retrieve and analyze knowledge from large amounts of data. Private or confidential data may be sanitized or suppressed before it is shared or published in public. Privacy preserving data mining (PPDM) has thus become an important issue in recent years. The most general way of PPDM is to sanitize the database to hide the sensitive information. In this paper, a novel hiding-missing-artificial utility (HMAU) algorithm is proposed to hide sensitive itemsets through transaction deletion. The transaction with the maximal ratio of sensitive to nonsensitive one is thus selected to be entirely deleted. Three side effects of hiding failures, missing itemsets, and artificial itemsets are considered to evaluate whether the transactions are required to be deleted for hiding sensitive itemsets. Three weights are also assigned as the importance to three factors, which can be set according to the requirement of users. Experiments are then conducted to show the performance of the proposed algorithm in execution time, number of deleted transactions, and number of side effects

The Interplay of Reovirus with Autophagy

Autophagy participates in multiple fundamental physiological processes, including survival, differentiation, development, and cellular homeostasis. It eliminates cytoplasmic protein aggregates and damaged organelles by triggering a series of events: sequestering the protein substrates into double-membrane vesicles, fusing the vesicles with lysosomes, and then degrading the autophagic contents. This degradation pathway is also involved in various disorders, for instance, cancers and infectious diseases. This paper provides an overview of modulation of autophagy in the course of reovirus infection and also the interplay of autophagy and reovirus

A novel regulatory event-based gene set analysis method for exploring global functional changes in heterogeneous genomic data sets

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Analyzing gene expression data by assessing the significance of pre-defined gene sets, rather than individual genes, has become a main approach in microarray data analysis and this has promisingly derive new biological interpretations of microarray data. However, the detection power of conventional gene list or gene set-based approaches is limited on highly heterogeneous samples, such as tumors.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed a novel method, the regulatory <b>e</b>vent-based <b>G</b>ene <b>S</b>et <b>A</b>nalysis (eGSA), which considers not only the consistently changed genes but also every gene regulation (event) of each sample to overcome the detection limit. In comparison with conventional methods, eGSA can detect functional changes in heterogeneous samples more precisely and robustly. Furthermore, by utilizing eGSA, we successfully revealed novel functional characteristics and potential mechanisms of very early hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our study creates a novel scheme to directly target the major cellular functional changes in heterogeneous samples. All potential regulatory routines of a functional change can be further analyzed by the regulatory event frequency. We also provide a case study on early HCCs and reveal a novel insight at the initial stage of hepatocarcinogenesis. eGSA therefore accelerates and refines the interpretation of heterogeneous genomic data sets in the absence of gene-phenotype correlations.</p