716 research outputs found
Innate lymphoid-macrophage crosstalk promotes lung cancer regression in response to IL-12 therapy
The ability of IL-12 to affect both innate and adaptive immunity positions this cytokine as a promising candidate to overcome the immunosuppressive microenvironment within tumours. Despite its potent activity in experimental models, the clinical use of IL 12 has been thwarted by its reported toxicity in human trials. Intranasal administration of an IL-12-coding lentivirus efficiently transduced alveolar macrophages in tumour-bearing mice, restricting IL-12 expression to the lung parenchyma and promoting rejection of established lung metastases. IL-12 stimulated IFNγ production by innate lymphoid cells (ILC), inducing the activation of interstitial macrophages, whose presence was essential for tumour eradication. These data demonstrates the potent anti tumour activity of local lentiviral IL-12 therapy against metastatic disease in the lung and the critical role played by the innate crosstalk established between ILCs and tissue resident phagocytes within the lung microenvironment
Creating New Land Uses and Revenue Streams for Agassiz Village in Poland, ME
Outdoor spaces and summer camps have a myriad of positive benefits on the lives and growth of children. Access to these experiences is extremely inequitable across communities of different geography, income, and race. Agassiz Village is a non-profit camp in Poland Maine that works to expand access to Maine outdoors and summer camp experiences for kids 8 - 17 that reside in lower income neighborhoods surrounding the Boston and Maine areas. Our report provides a detailed description of our process to assist in creating new revenue streams for Agassiz Village. The aim of our work was to create an accessible, organized summary of the property owned by Agassiz Village and all of its assets and resources along with a comprehensive proposal to reduce costs and create new revenue streams. In doing so, we worked alongside Agassiz Village staff to outline current knowledge of the property they own and what can and can’t be done to the land. We then created potential ideas that can be turned into a larger project, should Agassiz Village choose to pursue
Environmental Nonadditivity and Franck-Condon physics in Nonequilibrium Quantum Systems
We show that for a quantum system coupled to both vibrational and
electromagnetic environments, enforcing additivity of their combined influences
results in non-equilibrium dynamics that does not respect the Franck-Condon
principle. We overcome this shortcoming by employing a collective coordinate
representation of the vibrational environment, which permits the derivation of
a non-additive master equation. When applied to a two-level emitter our
treatment predicts decreasing photon emission rates with increasing vibrational
coupling, consistent with Franck-Condon physics. In contrast, the additive
approximation predicts the emission rate to be completely insensitive to
vibrations. We find that non-additivity also plays a key role in the stationary
non-equilibrium model behaviour, enabling two-level population inversion under
incoherent electromagnetic excitation.Comment: 9 pages (including supplementary information), 4 figures. V2 - minor
clarifications to main text and new section in the supplemen
In-situ Water quality monitoring in Oil and Gas operations
From agriculture to mining, to energy, surface water quality monitoring is an
essential task. As oil and gas operators work to reduce the consumption of
freshwater, it is increasingly important to actively manage fresh and non-fresh
water resources over the long term. For large-scale monitoring, manual sampling
at many sites has become too time-consuming and unsustainable, given the sheer
number of dispersed ponds, small lakes, playas, and wetlands over a large area.
Therefore, satellite-based environmental monitoring presents great potential.
Many existing satellite-based monitoring studies utilize index-based methods to
monitor large water bodies such as rivers and oceans. However, these existing
methods fail when monitoring small ponds-the reflectance signal received from
small water bodies is too weak to detect. To address this challenge, we propose
a new Water Quality Enhanced Index (WQEI) Model, which is designed to enable
users to determine contamination levels in water bodies with weak reflectance
patterns. Our results show that 1) WQEI is a good indicator of water turbidity
validated with 1200 water samples measured in the laboratory, and 2) by
applying our method to commonly available satellite data (e.g. LandSat8), one
can achieve high accuracy water quality monitoring efficiently in large
regions. This provides a tool for operators to optimize the quality of water
stored within surface storage ponds and increasing the readiness and
availability of non-fresh water.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, SPIE Defense + Commercial: Algorithms,
Technologies, and Applications for Multispectral and Hyperspectral Imaging
XXI
XO-2b: a hot Jupiter with a variable host star that potentially affects its measured transit depth
The transiting hot Jupiter XO-2b is an ideal target for multi-object
photometry and spectroscopy as it has a relatively bright (-mag = 11.25) K0V
host star (XO-2N) and a large planet-to-star contrast ratio
(R/R). It also has a nearby (31.21") binary stellar
companion (XO-2S) of nearly the same brightness (-mag = 11.20) and spectral
type (G9V), allowing for the characterization and removal of shared systematic
errors (e.g., airmass brightness variations). We have therefore conducted a
multiyear (2012--2015) study of XO-2b with the University of Arizona's 61"
(1.55~m) Kuiper Telescope and Mont4k CCD in the Bessel U and Harris B
photometric passbands to measure its Rayleigh scattering slope to place upper
limits on the pressure-dependent radius at, e.g., 10~bar. Such measurements are
needed to constrain its derived molecular abundances from primary transit
observations. We have also been monitoring XO-2N since the 2013--2014 winter
season with Tennessee State University's Celestron-14 (0.36~m) automated
imaging telescope to investigate stellar variability, which could affect
XO-2b's transit depth. Our observations indicate that XO-2N is variable,
potentially due to {cool star} spots, {with a peak-to-peak amplitude of ~R-mag and a period of ~days for the 2013--2014
observing season and a peak-to-peak amplitude of ~R-mag and
~day period for the 2014--2015 observing season. Because of}
the likely influence of XO-2N's variability on the derivation of XO-2b's
transit depth, we cannot bin multiple nights of data to decrease our
uncertainties, preventing us from constraining its gas abundances. This study
demonstrates that long-term monitoring programs of exoplanet host stars are
crucial for understanding host star variability.Comment: published in ApJ, 9 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables; updated figures with
more ground-based monitoring, added more citations to previous work
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The Open University’s first one day symposium on treatment-emergent neuroendocrine prostate cancer
The Open University's first one-day symposium on treatment-emergent neuroendocrine prostate cancer attracted world-leading figures, early career researchers and industry colleagues. The symposium proved insightful into the ‘real-world’ impact and current problems faced in the diagnosis and treatment of neuroendocrine prostate cancer. It was important for this meeting to take place as the incidence of neuroendocrine prostate cancer is increasing due to the widespread use of next-generation androgen deprivation drugs. The symposium discussions proposed new molecularly driven deadlines to accelerate research and improved the treatment of this deadly and poorly recognized malignancy
Computer vision for kinetic analysis of lab- and process-scale mixing phenomena
A software platform for the computer vision-enabled analysis of mixing phenomena of relevance to process scale-up is described. By bringing new and known time-resolved mixing metrics under one platform, hitherto unavailable comparisons of pixel-derived mixing metrics are exemplified across non-chemical and chemical processes. The analytical methods described are applicable using any camera and across an appreciable range of reactor scales, from development through to process scale-up. A case study in nucleophilic aromatic substitution run on 5L-scale shows how camera and offline concentration measurements can be correlated. In some cases, it can be shown that camera data holds the power to predict reaction progress
Exact dynamics of nonadditive environments in non-Markovian open quantum systems
Funding: D.G. and D.M.R. acknowledge studentship funding from EPSRC (EP/L015110/1). B.W.L. and E.M.G. acknowledge support from EPSRC (grants EP/T014032.When a quantum system couples strongly to multiple baths, then it is generally no longer possible to describe the resulting system dynamics by simply adding the individual effects of each bath. However, capturing such multibath system dynamics typically requires approximations that can obscure some of the nonadditive effects. Here we present a numerically exact and efficient technique for tackling this problem that builds on the time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) representation. We test the method by applying it to a simple model system that exhibits nonadditive behavior: a two-level dipole coupled to both a vibrational and an optical bath. Although not directly coupled, there is an effective interaction between the baths mediated by the system that can lead to population inversion in the matter system when the vibrational coupling is strong. We benchmark and validate multibath TEMPO against two approximate methods—one based on a polaron transformation, the other on an identification of a reaction coordinate—before exploring the regime of simultaneously strong vibrational and optical coupling where the approximate techniques break down. Here we uncover a new regime where the quantum Zeno effect leads to a fully mixed state of the electronic system.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Identification and cardiotropic actions of sulfakinin peptides in the American lobster Homarus americanus
In arthropods, a group of peptides possessing a -Y(SO3H)GHM/ LRFamide carboxy-terminal motif have been collectively termed the sulfakinins. Sulfakinin isoforms have been identified from numerous insect species. In contrast, members of this peptide family have thus far been isolated from just two crustaceans, the penaeid shrimp Penaeus monodon and Litopenaeus vannamei. Here, we report the identification of a cDNA encoding prepro-sulfakinin from the American lobster Homarus americanus. Two sulfakinin-like sequences were identified within the open-reading frame of the cDNA. Based on modifications predicted by peptide modeling programs, and on homology to the known isoforms of sulfakinin, particularly those from shrimp, the mature H. americanus sulfakinins were hypothesized to be pEFDEY(SO3H)GHMRFamide (Hoa-SK I) and GGGEY(SO3H)DDY(SO3H)GHLRFamide (Hoa-SK II). Hoa-SK I is identical to one of the previously identified shrimp sulfakinins, while Hoa-SK II is a novel isoform. Exogenous application of either synthetic Hoa-SK I or Hoa-SK II to the isolated lobster heart increased both the frequency and amplitude of spontaneous heart contractions. In preparations in which spontaneous contractions were irregular, both peptides increased the regularity of the heartbeat. Our study provides the first molecular characterization of a sulfakinin-encoding cDNA from a crustacean, as well as the first demonstration of bioactivity for native sulfakinins in this group of arthropods
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