Standardized Catch Rates of Sandbar Sharks and Dusky Sharks in the VIMS Longline Survey: 1975-2009

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science has conducted a fishery-independent longline survey during summer months since 1974. Data for sandbar sharks and dusky sharks captured in the survey between 1975 and 2009 are presented. Most of the sandbar sharks encountered by the survey were immature, with females composing almost all of the mature sandbar catch. Almost all dusky sharks captured were immature. Most of the catch since the early 1990’s has been composed of 0-4 year age classes. Nominal and standardized catch rates are presented. CPUE for both species decreased from the early 1980’s to minima in 1992. CPUE then slightly increased and has oscillated since

Synthesis of Knowledge of Extreme Fire Behavior: Volume 2 for Fire Behavior Specialists, Researchers

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s definition of extreme fire behavior indicates a level of fire behavior characteristics that ordinarily precludes methods of direct control action. One or more of the following is usually involved: high rate of spread, prolific crowning/spotting, presence of fire whirls, and strong convection column. Predictability is difficult as such fires often influence their environment to some degree and behave erratically, sometimes dangerously. Alternate terms include “blow up” and “fire storm.” Fire managers examining fires over the last 100 years have come to understand many of the factors necessary for extreme fire behavior development. This effort produced guidelines included in current firefighter training, which presents the current methods of predicting extreme fire behavior by using the crown fire model, which is based on the environmental influences of weather, fuels, and topography. Current training does not include the full extent of scientific understanding nor does it include the most recent scientific knowledge. National Fire Plan funds and the Joint Fire Science Program have sponsored newer research related to wind profiles’ influence on fire behavior, plume growth, crown fires, fire dynamics in live fuels, and conditions associated with vortex development. Of significant concern is that characteristic features of extreme fire behavior depend on conditions undetectable on the ground, namely invisible properties such as wind shear or atmospheric stability. No one completely understands all the factors contributing to extreme fire behavior because of gaps in our knowledge. These gaps, as well as the limitations as to when various models or indices apply should be noted to avoid application where they are not appropriate or warranted. This synthesis summarizes existing extreme fire behavior knowledge. It consists of two volumes. Volume 1 is for fire managers, firefighters, and others in the fire community who are not experts or specialists in fire behavior but need to understand the basics of extreme fire behavior. Volume 2 is more technical and is intended for fire behaviorists and fire researchers

Lamellipodia are crucial for haptotactic sensing and response

Haptotaxis is the process by which cells respond to gradients of substrate-bound cues, such as extracellular matrix proteins (ECM); however, the cellular mechanism of this response remains poorly understood and has mainly been studied by comparing cell behavior on uniform ECMs with different concentrations of components. To study haptotaxis in response to gradients, we utilized microfluidic chambers to generate gradients of the ECM protein fibronectin, and imaged the cell migration response. Lamellipodia are fan-shaped protrusions that are common in migrating cells. Here, we define a new function for lamellipodia and the cellular mechanism required for haptotaxis – differential actin and lamellipodial protrusion dynamics lead to biased cell migration. Modest differences in lamellipodial dynamics occurring over time periods of seconds to minutes are summed over hours to produce differential whole cell movement towards higher concentrations of fibronectin. We identify a specific subset of lamellipodia regulators as being crucial for haptotaxis. Numerous studies have linked components of this pathway to cancer metastasis and, consistent with this, we find that expression of the oncogenic Rac1 P29S mutation abrogates haptotaxis. Finally, we show that haptotaxis also operates through this pathway in 3D environments

Cross-National Differences in Victimization : Disentangling the Impact of Composition and Context

Varying rates of criminal victimization across countries are assumed to be the outcome of countrylevel structural constraints that determine the supply ofmotivated o¡enders, as well as the differential composition within countries of suitable targets and capable guardianship. However, previous empirical tests of these ‘compositional’ and ‘contextual’ explanations of cross-national di¡erences have been performed upon macro-level crime data due to the unavailability of comparable individual-level data across countries. This limitation has had two important consequences for cross-national crime research. First, micro-/meso-level mechanisms underlying cross-national differences cannot be truly inferred from macro-level data. Secondly, the e¡ects of contextual measures (e.g. income inequality) on crime are uncontrolled for compositional heterogeneity. In this paper, these limitations are overcome by analysing individual-level victimization data across 18 countries from the International CrimeVictims Survey. Results from multi-level analyses on theft and violent victimization indicate that the national level of income inequality is positively related to risk, independent of compositional (i.e. micro- and meso-level) di¡erences. Furthermore, crossnational variation in victimization rates is not only shaped by di¡erences in national context, but also by varying composition. More speci¢cally, countries had higher crime rates the more they consisted of urban residents and regions with lowaverage social cohesion.

Waratah Seed-1: Australia\u27s First Commercial Ride Share Satellite

In this paper, we report on a 6U CubeSat named Waratah Seed-1, designed by the ARC Training Centre for CubeSats, UAVs, and their Applications (CUAVA) and partners under the Waratah Seed project. Waratah Seed is a pilot Space Qualification Mission initiated under the NSW Government\u27s Space Industry Development Strategy with partial funding from Investment NSW. The goal of the mission is to allow NSW and Australian space industry groups to test their technology in space by flying on a 6U ride-share CubeSat. This project is the first of its kind in Australia, allowing space-tech start-ups and other groups to access a satellite spaceflight to test payloads at an inexpensive rate and in a more accessible way. The mission will help overcome one of the key barriers to gaining space flight heritage and should help accelerate the development of the Australian space ecosystem. The design of the WS-1 Satellite bus is based on its predecessor, the 3U CUAVA-1 CubeSat, and its sister 6U spacecraft CUAVA-2. The main payloads are a GPS reflectometry payload from UNSW and partners and a thermal management payload from UTS in collaboration with Mawson Rovers and Spiral Blue. Furthermore, there will be one edge computing payload from Spiral Blue, two solar cell test payloads, one each by Euroka Power and Extraterrestrial Power, a material test payload by Dandelions, a tactile, force, and torque sensor test payload by Sperospace and Contactile, an electropermanent magnetotorquer from DenebSpace and a space debris and plasma environment instrument from CUAVA and the University of Sydney. The satellite is scheduled for launch in July 2024 via SpaceX\u27s Transporter 11

A substrate mimic allows high-throughput assay of the FabA protein and consequently the identification of a novel inhibitor of <i>Pseudomonas aeruginosa</i> FabA

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 223461, Senior Investigator Award WT100209MA (JHN), Swedish Science Council (GS), Wellcome Trust Strategic grant 100476/Z/12/Z (DWG) and National Institutes of Health R01GM095970 (MB). JHN & ADS are Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award holders.Eukaryotes and prokaryotes possess fatty acid synthase (FAS) biosynthetic pathway(s) that comprise iterative chain elongation, reduction, and dehydration reactions. The bacterial FASII pathway differs significantly from human FAS pathways and is a long-standing target for antibiotic development against Gram-negative bacteria due to differences from the human FAS, and several existing antibacterial agents are known to inhibit FASII enzymes. N-acetylcysteamine (NAC) fatty acid thioesters have been used as mimics of the natural acyl carrier protein (ACP) pathway intermediates to assay FASII enzymes, and we now report an assay of FabV from Pseudomonas aeruginosa using (E)-2-decenoyl-NAC. In addition, we have converted an existing UV absorbance assay for FabA, the bifunctional dehydration/epimerization enzyme and key target in the FAS II pathway, into a high throughput enzyme coupled fluorescence assay that has been employed to screen a library of diverse small molecules. With this approach, N-(4-chlorobenzyl)-3-(2-furyl)-1H-1,2,4-triazol-5-amine (N42FTA) was found to competitively inhibit (pIC50 = 5.7 ± 0.2) the processing of 3-hydroxydecanoyl-NAC by P. aeruginosa FabA. N42FTA was shown to be potent in blocking crosslinking of E. coli ACP and FabA, a direct mimic of the biological process. The co-complex structure of N42FTA with P. aeruginosa FabA protein rationalizes affinity and suggests future design opportunities. Employing NAC fatty acid mimics to developing further high throughput assays for individual enzymes in the FASII pathway should aid in the discovery of new antimicrobials.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Effects of attention and perceptual uncertainty on cerebellar activity during visual motion perception

Recent clinical and neuroimaging studies have revealed that the human cerebellum plays a role in visual motion perception, but the nature of its contribution to this function is not understood. Some reports suggest that the cerebellum might facilitate motion perception by aiding attentive tracking of visual objects. Others have identified a particular role for the cerebellum in discriminating motion signals in perceptually uncertain conditions. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine the degree to which cerebellar involvement in visual motion perception can be explained by a role in sustained attentive tracking of moving stimuli in contrast to a role in visual motion discrimination. While holding the visual displays constant, we manipulated attention by having participants attend covertly to a field of random-dot motion or a colored spot at fixation. Perceptual uncertainty was manipulated by varying the percentage of signal dots contained within the random-dot arrays. We found that attention to motion under high perceptual uncertainty was associated with strong activity in left cerebellar lobules VI and VII. By contrast, attending to motion under low perceptual uncertainty did not cause differential activation in the cerebellum. We found no evidence to support the suggestion that the cerebellum is involved in simple attentive tracking of salient moving objects. Instead, our results indicate that specific subregions of the cerebellum are involved in facilitating the detection and discrimination of task-relevant moving objects under conditions of high perceptual uncertainty. We conclude that the cerebellum aids motion perception under conditions of high perceptual demand

The JCMT BISTRO Survey: The Magnetic Field Strength in the Orion A Filament

We determine the magnetic field strength in the OMC 1 region of the Orion A filament via a new implementation of the Chandrasekhar-Fermi method using observations performed as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) B-Fields In Star-Forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey with the POL-2 instrument. We combine BISTRO data with archival SCUBA-2 and HARP observations to find a plane-of-sky magnetic field strength in OMC 1 of B_pos=6.6±4.7 mG, where δB_pos=4.7 mG represents a predominantly systematic uncertainty. We develop a new method for measuring angular dispersion, analogous to unsharp masking. We find a magnetic energy density of ~1.7×10^-7 Jm^-3 in OMC 1, comparable both to the gravitational potential energy density of OMC 1 (~10^-7 Jm^-3), and to the energy density in the Orion BN/KL outflow (~10^-7 Jm^-3). We find that neither the Alfvén velocity in OMC 1 nor the velocity of the super-Alfvénic outflow ejecta is sufficiently large for the BN/KL outflow to have caused large-scale distortion of the local magnetic field in the ~500-year lifetime of the outflow. Hence, we propose that the hour-glass field morphology in OMC 1 is caused by the distortion of a primordial cylindrically-symmetric magnetic field by the gravitational fragmentation of the filament and/or the gravitational interaction of the BN/KL and S clumps. We find that OMC 1 is currently in or near magnetically-supported equilibrium, and that the current large-scale morphology of the BN/KL outflow is regulated by the geometry of the magnetic field in OMC 1, and not vice versa