665 research outputs found
Hydrolytic and Photochemical Degradation of Organophosphorus Pesticides
To keep pace with demands for increasing food supplies to satisfy the expanding world population, modern agriculture has utilized the latest scientific and technological knowledge available. Increases in crop production through the use of growth regulators, fertilizers , herbicides, and insecticides have been little short of phenomenal, and drugs, feed additives, and higher-quality grain and forage have dramatically increased livestock production. But, as is usually the case, this progress has been accompanied by problems, one of the more serious being contamination of our environment by chemicals. Only in recent years have the full effects of these pollutants on the ecological balance of nature begun to be understood in all the intricacies and implications
Conformation of the Transmembrane Domain of the Anthrax Toxin Receptor
Restauració dels vitrallsFoto final, plafó a6, cara interna, amb llum a través. Geomètric
TGF- mediates early angiogenesis and latent fibrosis in an Emilin1-deficient mouse model of aortic valve disease
Metamorphosis of plasma turbulence-shear flow dynamics through a transcritical bifurcation
The structural properties of an economical model for a confined plasma
turbulence governor are investigated through bifurcation and stability
analyses. A close relationship is demonstrated between the underlying
bifurcation framework of the model and typical behavior associated with low- to
high-confinement transitions such as shear flow stabilization of turbulence and
oscillatory collective action. In particular, the analysis evinces two types of
discontinuous transition that are qualitatively distinct. One involves
classical hysteresis, governed by viscous dissipation. The other is
intrinsically oscillatory and non-hysteretic, and thus provides a model for the
so-called dithering transitions that are frequently observed. This
metamorphosis, or transformation, of the system dynamics is an important late
side-effect of symmetry-breaking, which manifests as an unusual non-symmetric
transcritical bifurcation induced by a significant shear flow drive.Comment: 17 pages, revtex text, 9 figures comprised of 16 postscript files.
Submitted to Phys. Rev.
Quasar accretion disk sizes from continuum reverberation mapping in the DES standard-star fields
Measurements of the physical properties of accretion disks in active galactic
nuclei are important for better understanding the growth and evolution of
supermassive black holes. We present the accretion disk sizes of 22 quasars
from continuum reverberation mapping with data from the Dark Energy Survey
(DES) standard star fields and the supernova C fields. We construct continuum
lightcurves with the \textit{griz} photometry that span five seasons of DES
observations. These data sample the time variability of the quasars with a
cadence as short as one day, which corresponds to a rest frame cadence that is
a factor of a few higher than most previous work. We derive time lags between
bands with both JAVELIN and the interpolated cross-correlation function method,
and fit for accretion disk sizes using the JAVELIN Thin Disk model. These new
measurements include disks around black holes with masses as small as
, which have equivalent sizes at 2500\AA \, as small as
light days in the rest frame. We find that most objects have
accretion disk sizes consistent with the prediction of the standard thin disk
model when we take disk variability into account. We have also simulated the
expected yield of accretion disk measurements under various observational
scenarios for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Deep Drilling Fields. We find
that the number of disk measurements would increase significantly if the
default cadence is changed from three days to two days or one day.Comment: 33 pages, 24 figure
Automatic detection of Ionospheric Alfvén Resonances in magnetic spectrograms using U-net
Ionospheric Alfven Resonances (IARs) are weak discrete non-stationary Alfven waves along magnetic field lines, at periods of ~0.5-20 Hz, that occur during local night-time, particularly during low geomagnetic activity. They are detectable through time-frequency analysis (spectrograms) of measurements made by sensitive search coil magnetometers. The IARs are generated by the interaction of electromagnetic energy partially trapped in the Earth-ionosphere cavity with the main geomagnetic field and their behavior provides proxy information about atmospheric ion density between 100-1000 km altitude. Limited methods exist to automatically detect and analyse their properties and behavior as they are difficult to extract using standard image and signal processing techniques. We present a new method for the detection of IARs based on the fully convolutional neural network U-net. U-net was chosen as it is able to perform accurate image segmentation and it can be trained in a supervised fashion on a relatively small labeled dataset utilizing data augmentation. We show that the resulting predictive model generated by training the U-net is able to detect IAR signals while mislabelling considerably less noise than other data analysis methods. We achieved our best results by using a training set of 178 hand-digitized examples from high-quality spectrograms measured at the Eskdalemuir Geophysical Observatory (UK). We find that the network converges in ten iterations with a final intersection over union (IoU) metric of 0.9 and a training loss of below 0.2. We use the trained network to extract IARs from over 2300 images, covering six years of search coil magnetometer data measured at the Eskdalemuir Observatory. U-net can also automatically handle missing data or days without IARs, giving a null result as expected. This constitutes the first use of a neural network for pattern recognition of unstructured image data such as spectrograms containing IAR signals, though the method is applicable to other types of resonances or geophysical features in the time-frequency domain
The Astropy Problem
The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community
effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster
interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this
project has been managed, written, and operated as a grassroots,
self-organized, almost entirely volunteer effort while the software is used by
the majority of the astronomical community. Despite this, the project has
always been and remains to this day effectively unfunded. Further, contributors
receive little or no formal recognition for creating and supporting what is now
critical software. This paper explores the problem in detail, outlines possible
solutions to correct this, and presents a few suggestions on how to address the
sustainability of general purpose astronomical software
FMRP Mediates mGluR(5)-Dependent Translation of Amyloid Precursor Protein
Amyloid precursor protein (APP) facilitates synapse formation in the developing brain, while beta-amyloid (Aβ) accumulation, which is associated with Alzheimer disease, results in synaptic loss and impaired neurotransmission. Fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) is a cytoplasmic mRNA binding protein whose expression is lost in fragile X syndrome. Here we show that FMRP binds to the coding region of APP mRNA at a guanine-rich, G-quartet–like sequence. Stimulation of cortical synaptoneurosomes or primary neuronal cells with the metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist DHPG increased APP translation in wild-type but not fmr-1 knockout samples. APP mRNA coimmunoprecipitated with FMRP in resting synaptoneurosomes, but the interaction was lost shortly after DHPG treatment. Soluble Aβ(40) or Aβ(42) levels were significantly higher in multiple strains of fmr-1 knockout mice compared to wild-type controls. Our data indicate that postsynaptic FMRP binds to and regulates the translation of APP mRNA through metabotropic glutamate receptor activation and suggests a possible link between Alzheimer disease and fragile X syndrome
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