Ethics in Dangerous Situations

To protect soldiers repairing a vehicle on a road, a platoon leader in Iraq provided protection for them by positioning two manned vehicles along possible routes that other vehicles, potentially laden with explosives, could use. In doing so, he decided not to follow the platoon\u27s standard operating procedure (SOP), which called for controlling traffic along the road by separating nonthreatening Iraqi vehicles from suspicious ones. He believed that he was being paid to exercise judgment, so he broke from routine. Because he knew the enemy had used snipers against soldiers on this road in the past, he calculated that the risk of them doing so again far outweighed the potential of firing on nonthreatening Iraqi vehicles because of a failure to control the traffic. Soon after getting their vehicles in position, the soldiers saw a sedan speeding toward their position. As it got closer, the platoon leader ordered one of his soldiers to fire a warning shot, after which the sedan sped up. Thinking they were in imminent danger, the soldiers trained their fire on the sedan and braced for an explosion. The sedan skidded to a stop less than five meters from the soldiers, and they soon discovered that they had killed an elderly man with thick glasses and hearing aids in both ears. When the battalion executive officer reviewed the platoon\u27s actions, he agreed with the lieutenant\u27s decision to deviate from routine and not put soldiers on the road, affirmed that the soldiers did the right thing, and called the killing of the elderly man a terrible tragedy of war

Ethics in Dangerous Situations

To protect soldiers repairing a vehicle on a road, a platoon leader in Iraq provided protection for them by positioning two manned vehicles along possible routes that other vehicles, potentially laden with explosives, could use. In doing so, he decided not to follow the platoon\u27s standard operating procedure (SOP), which called for controlling traffic along the road by separating nonthreatening Iraqi vehicles from suspicious ones. He believed that he was being paid to exercise judgment, so he broke from routine. Because he knew the enemy had used snipers against soldiers on this road in the past, he calculated that the risk of them doing so again far outweighed the potential of firing on nonthreatening Iraqi vehicles because of a failure to control the traffic. Soon after getting their vehicles in position, the soldiers saw a sedan speeding toward their position. As it got closer, the platoon leader ordered one of his soldiers to fire a warning shot, after which the sedan sped up. Thinking they were in imminent danger, the soldiers trained their fire on the sedan and braced for an explosion. The sedan skidded to a stop less than five meters from the soldiers, and they soon discovered that they had killed an elderly man with thick glasses and hearing aids in both ears. When the battalion executive officer reviewed the platoon\u27s actions, he agreed with the lieutenant\u27s decision to deviate from routine and not put soldiers on the road, affirmed that the soldiers did the right thing, and called the killing of the elderly man a terrible tragedy of war

Exceptional flaring activity of the anomalous X-ray pulsar 1E 1547.0-5408

(Abridged) We studied an exceptional period of activity of the anomalous X-ray pulsar 1E 1547.0-5408 in January 2009, during which about 200 bursts were detected by INTEGRAL. The major activity episode happened when the source was outside the field of view of all the INTEGRAL instruments. But we were still able to study the properties of 84 bursts detected simultaneously by the anti-coincidence shield of the spectrometer SPI and by the detector of the imager ISGRI. We find that the luminosity of the 22 January 2009 bursts of 1E 1547.0-5408 was > 1e42 erg/s. This luminosity is comparable to that of the bursts of soft gamma repeaters (SGR) and is at least two orders of magnitude larger than the luminosity of the previously reported bursts from AXPs. Similarly to the SGR bursts, the brightest bursts of 1E 1547.0-5408 consist of a short spike of ~100 ms duration with a hard spectrum, followed by a softer extended tail of 1-10 s duration, which occasionally exhibits pulsations with the source spin period of ~2 s. The observation of AXP bursts with luminosities comparable to the one of SGR bursts strengthens the conjecture that AXPs and SGRs are different representatives of one and the same source type.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures, accepted to Astronomy & Astrophysic

A Novel Dynamic Impact Approach (DIA) for Functional Analysis of Time-Course Omics Studies: Validation Using the Bovine Mammary Transcriptome

The overrepresented approach (ORA) is the most widely-accepted method for functional analysis of microarray datasets. The ORA is computationally-efficient and robust; however, it suffers from the inability of comparing results from multiple gene lists particularly with time-course experiments or those involving multiple treatments. To overcome such limitation a novel method termed Dynamic Impact Approach (DIA) is proposed. The DIA provides an estimate of the biological impact of the experimental conditions and the direction of the impact. The impact is obtained by combining the proportion of differentially expressed genes (DEG) with the log2 mean fold change and mean –log P-value of genes associated with the biological term. The direction of the impact is calculated as the difference of the impact of up-regulated DEG and down-regulated DEG associated with the biological term. The DIA was validated using microarray data from a time-course experiment of bovine mammary gland across the lactation cycle. Several annotation databases were analyzed with DIA and compared to the same analysis performed by the ORA. The DIA highlighted that during lactation both BTA6 and BTA14 were the most impacted chromosomes; among Uniprot tissues those related with lactating mammary gland were the most positively-impacted; within KEGG pathways ‘Galactose metabolism’ and several metabolism categories related to lipid synthesis were among the most impacted and induced; within Gene Ontology “lactose biosynthesis” among Biological processes and “Lactose synthase activity” and “Stearoyl-CoA 9-desaturase activity” among Molecular processes were the most impacted and induced. With the exception of the terms ‘Milk’, ‘Milk protein’ and ‘Mammary gland’ among Uniprot tissues and SP_PIR_Keyword, the use of ORA failed to capture as significantly-enriched (i.e., biologically relevant) any term known to be associated with lactating mammary gland. Results indicate the DIA is a biologically-sound approach for analysis of time-course experiments. This tool represents an alternative to ORA for functional analysis

Old and New Stories: Revelations from Functional Analysis of the Bovine Mammary Transcriptome during the Lactation Cycle

The cow mammary transcriptome was explored at −30, −15, 1, 15, 30, 60, 120, 240, and 300 d relative to parturition. A total of 6,382 differentially expressed genes (DEG) at a false discovery rate ≤0.001 were found throughout lactation. The greatest number of DEG (>3,500 DEG) was observed at 60 and 120 d vs. −30 d with the largest change between consecutive time points observed at −15 vs. 1 d and 120 vs. 240 d. Functional analysis of microarray data was performed using the Dynamic Impact Approach (DIA). The DIA analysis of KEGG pathways uncovered as the most impacted and induced ‘Galactose metabolism’, ‘Glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchor biosynthesis’, and ‘PPAR signaling’; whereas, ‘Antigen processing and presentation’ was among the most inhibited. The integrated interpretation of the results suggested an overall increase in metabolism during lactation, particularly synthesis of carbohydrates and lipid. A marked degree of utilization of amino acids as energy source, an increase of protein export, and a decrease of the protein synthesis machinery as well cell cycle also were suggested by the DIA analysis. The DIA analysis of Gene Ontology and other databases uncovered an induction of Golgi apparatus and angiogenesis, and the inhibition of both immune cell activity/migration and chromosome modifications during lactation. All of the highly-impacted and activated functions during lactation were evidently activated at the onset of lactation and inhibited when milk production declined. The overall analysis indicated that the bovine mammary gland relies heavily on a coordinated transcriptional regulation to begin and end lactation. The functional analysis using DIA underscored the importance of genes associated with lactose synthesis, lipid metabolism, protein synthesis, Golgi, transport, cell cycle/death, epigenetic regulation, angiogenesis, and immune function during lactation

Dynamical heterogeneities in a supercooled Lennard-Jones liquid

We present the results of a large scale molecular dynamics computer simulation study in which we investigate whether a supercooled Lennard-Jones liquid exhibits dynamical heterogeneities. We evaluate the non-Gaussian parameter for the self part of the van Hove correlation function and use it to identify ``mobile'' particles. We find that these particles form clusters whose size grows with decreasing temperature. We also find that the relaxation time of the mobile particles is significantly shorter than that of the bulk, and that this difference increases with decreasing temperature.Comment: 8 pages of RevTex, 4 ps figure