5,737 research outputs found
Development and Validation of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics
As part of a comprehensive effort to transform our undergraduate physics
laboratories and evaluate the impacts of these efforts, we have developed the
Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics
(E-CLASS). The E-CLASS assesses the changes in students' attitudes about a
variety of scientific laboratory practices before and after a lab course and
compares attitudes with perceptions of the course grading requirements and
laboratory practices. The E-CLASS is designed to give researchers insight into
students' attitudes and also to provide actionable evidence to instructors
looking for feedback on their courses. We present the development, validation,
and preliminary results from the initial implementation of the survey in three
undergraduate physics lab courses.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, submitted to 2012 PERC Proceeding
No quantum advantage for nonlocal computation
We investigate the problem of "nonlocal" computation, in which separated
parties must compute a function with nonlocally encoded inputs and output, such
that each party individually learns nothing, yet together they compute the
correct function output. We show that the best that can be done classically is
a trivial linear approximation. Surprisingly, we also show that quantum
entanglement provides no advantage over the classical case. On the other hand,
generalized (i.e. super-quantum) nonlocal correlations allow perfect nonlocal
computation. This gives new insights into the nature of quantum nonlocality and
its relationship to generalised nonlocal correlations.Comment: 4 page
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A primary neural cell culture model to study neuron, astrocyte, and microglia interactions in neuroinflammation.
BackgroundInteractions between neurons, astrocytes, and microglia critically influence neuroinflammatory responses to insult in the central nervous system. In vitro astrocyte and microglia cultures are powerful tools to study specific molecular pathways involved in neuroinflammation; however, in order to better understand the influence of cellular crosstalk on neuroinflammation, new multicellular culture models are required.MethodsPrimary cortical cells taken from neonatal rats were cultured in a serum-free "tri-culture" medium formulated to support neurons, astrocytes, and microglia, or a "co-culture" medium formulated to support only neurons and astrocytes. Caspase 3/7 activity and morphological changes were used to quantify the response of the two culture types to different neuroinflammatory stimuli mimicking sterile bacterial infection (lipopolysaccharide (LPS) exposure), mechanical injury (scratch), and seizure activity (glutamate-induced excitotoxicity). The secreted cytokine profile of control and LPS-exposed co- and tri-cultures were also compared.ResultsThe tri-culture maintained a physiologically relevant representation of neurons, astrocytes, and microglia for 14 days in vitro, while the co-cultures maintained a similar population of neurons and astrocytes, but lacked microglia. The continuous presence of microglia did not negatively impact the overall health of the neurons in the tri-culture, which showed reduced caspase 3/7 activity and similar neurite outgrowth as the co-cultures, along with an increase in the microglia-secreted neurotrophic factor IGF-1 and a significantly reduced concentration of CX3CL1 in the conditioned media. LPS-exposed tri-cultures showed significant astrocyte hypertrophy, increase in caspase 3/7 activity, and the secretion of a number of pro-inflammatory cytokines (e.g., TNF, IL-1α, IL-1β, and IL-6), none of which were observed in LPS-exposed co-cultures. Following mechanical trauma, the tri-culture showed increased caspase 3/7 activity, as compared to the co-culture, along with increased astrocyte migration towards the source of injury. Finally, the microglia in the tri-culture played a significant neuroprotective role during glutamate-induced excitotoxicity, with significantly reduced neuron loss and astrocyte hypertrophy in the tri-culture.ConclusionsThe tri-culture consisting of neurons, astrocytes, and microglia more faithfully mimics in vivo neuroinflammatory responses than standard mono- and co-cultures. This tri-culture can be a useful tool to study neuroinflammation in vitro with improved accuracy in predicting in vivo neuroinflammatory phenomena
SAT Modulo Monotonic Theories
We define the concept of a monotonic theory and show how to build efficient
SMT (SAT Modulo Theory) solvers, including effective theory propagation and
clause learning, for such theories. We present examples showing that monotonic
theories arise from many common problems, e.g., graph properties such as
reachability, shortest paths, connected components, minimum spanning tree, and
max-flow/min-cut, and then demonstrate our framework by building SMT solvers
for each of these theories. We apply these solvers to procedural content
generation problems, demonstrating major speed-ups over state-of-the-art
approaches based on SAT or Answer Set Programming, and easily solving several
instances that were previously impractical to solve
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