Optical properties of Southern Hemisphere aerosols: Report of the joint CSIRO/NASA study

This study was made in support of the LAWS and GLOBE programs, which aim to design a suitable Doppler lidar system for measuring global winds from a satellite. Observations were taken from 5 deg S to 45 deg S along and off the E and SE Australian coast, thus obtaining representative samples over a large latitude range. Observations were made between 0 and 6 km altitude of aerosol physical and chemical properties in situ from the CSIRO F-27 aircraft; of lidar backscatter coefficients at 10.6 micron wavelength from the F-27 aircraft; of lidar backscatter profiles at 0.694 microns at Sale, SE Australia; and of lidar backscatter profiles at 0.532 microns at Cowley Beach, NE Australia. Both calculations and observations in the free troposphere gave a backscatter coefficient of 1-2 x 10 to the -11/m/sr at 10.6 microns, although the accuracies of the instruments were marginal at this level. Equivalent figures were 2-8 x 10 to the -9/m/sr (aerosol) and 9 x 10 to the -9 to 2 x 10 to the -8/m/sr (lidar) at 0.694 microns wavelength at Sale; and 3.7 x 10 to the -9/m/sr (aerosol) and 10 to the -8 to 10 to the -7/m/sr (lidar) at 0.532 microns wavelength at Cowley Beach. The measured backscatter coefficients at 0.694 and 0.532 microns were consistently higher than the values calculated from aerosol size distributions by factors of typically 2 to 10

Pleiotropy of FRIGIDA enhances the potential for multivariate adaptation.

An evolutionary response to selection requires genetic variation; however, even if it exists, then the genetic details of the variation can constrain adaptation. In the simplest case, unlinked loci and uncorrelated phenotypes respond directly to multivariate selection and permit unrestricted paths to adaptive peaks. By contrast, 'antagonistic' pleiotropic loci may constrain adaptation by affecting variation of many traits and limiting the direction of trait correlations to vectors that are not favoured by selection. However, certain pleiotropic configurations may improve the conditions for adaptive evolution. Here, we present evidence that the Arabidopsis thaliana gene FRI (FRIGIDA) exhibits 'adaptive' pleiotropy, producing trait correlations along an axis that results in two adaptive strategies. Derived, low expression FRI alleles confer a 'drought escape' strategy owing to fast growth, low water use efficiency and early flowering. By contrast, a dehydration avoidance strategy is conferred by the ancestral phenotype of late flowering, slow growth and efficient water use during photosynthesis. The dehydration avoidant phenotype was recovered when genotypes with null FRI alleles were transformed with functional alleles. Our findings indicate that the well-documented effects of FRI on phenology result from differences in physiology, not only a simple developmental switch

Этиопатогенетические аспекты терапии хронических воспалительных заболеваний органов малого таза

Наведено сучасні принципи лікування запальних захворювань жіночих статевих органів з урахуванням етіопатогенезу запалення й особливостей продукції у цервікальному слизу запальних і протизапальних цитокинів. Показано, що включення до комплексу терапії інтерферонів сприяє відновленню порушеного імунологічного гомеостазу й зниженню ймовірності рецидивів захворювання.Modern principles of treatment of inflammatory diseases of female genitals taking into account an etiopathogenesis of an inflammation and features of production in сervical mucous inflammatory and antiinflammatory cytokines are resulted. Including in a complex of therapy of interferons is shown, that, promotes restoration of the broken immunologic homeostasis and depression of probability of relapses of disease

Time Scale for Rapid Draining of a Surficial Lake Into the Greenland Ice Sheet

A 2008 report by Das et al. documented the rapid drainage during summer 2006 of a supraglacial lake, of approximately 44×10^6 m^3, into the Greenland ice sheet over a time scale moderately longer than 1 hr. The lake had been instrumented to record the time-dependent fall of water level and the uplift of the ice nearby. Liquid water, denser than ice, was presumed to have descended through the sheet along a crevasse system and spread along the bed as a hydraulic facture. The event led two of the present authors to initiate modeling studies on such natural hydraulic fractures. Building on results of those studies, we attempt to better explain the time evolution of such a drainage event. We find that the estimated time has a strong dependence on how much a pre-existing crack/crevasse system, acting as a feeder channel to the bed, has opened by slow creep prior to the time at which a basal hydraulic fracture nucleates. We quantify the process and identify appropriate parameter ranges, particularly of the average temperature of the ice beneath the lake (important for the slow creep opening of the crevasse). We show that average ice temperatures 5–7  °C below melting allow such rapid drainage on a time scale which agrees well with the 2006 observations

Horizontal and vertical structure of reactive bromine events probed by bromine monoxide MAX-DOAS spectroscopy

Heterogeneous photochemistry converts bromide (Br−) to reactive bromine species (Br atoms and bromine monoxide, BrO) that dominate Arctic springtime chemistry. This phenomenon has many impacts such as boundary-layer ozone depletion, mercury oxidation and deposition, and modification of the fate of hydrocarbon species. To study environmental controls on reactive bromine events, the BRomine, Ozone, and Mercury EXperiment (BROMEX) was carried out from early March to mid-April 2012 near Barrow (Utqiaġvik), Alaska. We measured horizontal and vertical gradients in BrO with multiple-axis differential optical absorption spectroscopy (MAX-DOAS) instrumentation at three sites, two mobile and one fixed. During the campaign, a large crack in the sea ice (an open lead) formed pushing one instrument package ∼ 250 km downwind from Barrow (Utqiaġvik). Convection associated with the open lead converted the BrO vertical structure from a surface-based event to a lofted event downwind of the lead influence. The column abundance of BrO downwind of the re-freezing lead was comparable to upwind amounts, indicating direct reactions on frost flowers or open seawater was not a major reactive bromine source. When these three sites were separated by ∼ 30 km length scales of unbroken sea ice, the BrO amount and vertical distributions were highly correlated for most of the time, indicating the horizontal length scales of BrO events were typically larger than ∼ 30 km in the absence of sea ice features. Although BrO amount and vertical distribution were similar between sites most of the time, rapid changes in BrO with edges significantly smaller than this ∼ 30 km length scale episodically transported between the sites, indicating BrO events were large but with sharp edge contrasts. BrO was often found in shallow layers that recycled reactive bromine via heterogeneous reactions on snowpack. Episodically, these surface-based events propagated aloft when aerosol extinction was higher (\u3e 0.1 km−1); however, the presence of aerosol particles aloft was not sufficient to produce BrO aloft. Highly depleted ozone (−1) repartitioned reactive bromine away from BrO and drove BrO events aloft in cases. This work demonstrates the interplay between atmospheric mixing and heterogeneous chemistry that affects the vertical structure and horizontal extent of reactive bromine events

Three weeks of interrupting sitting lowers fasting glucose and glycemic variability, but not glucose tolerance, in free-living women and men with obesity

Funding This work was supported by grants from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF14OC0011493, NNF14OC0009941, NNF18CC0034900), Swedish Diabetes Foundation (DIA2018-357), Diabetes Wellness Sverige (1849-PG), Swedish Research Council (2015-00165, 2018-02389), the Strategic Research Programme in Diabetes at Karolinska Institutet (2009-1068), the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (2018-0094), and the Stockholm County Council (SLL20170159). D.D. is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Victorian Government’s OIS scheme. Acknowledgements We thank the Swedish Metabolomics Centre (Umeå University) for assisting with the lipidomic analysis and Mariam Nordstrand for efforts in the recruitment and screening of participants, and in muscle biopsy procedure. The current addresses for S.P. and B.M.G. are the School of Life Sciences, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, and The Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK, respectively.Peer reviewedPostprin

HRTF Magnitude Synthesis via Sparse Representation of Anthropometric Features

International audienceWe propose a method for the synthesis of the magnitudes of Head-related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) using a sparse representation of anthropometric features.Our approach treats the HRTF synthesis problem as finding a sparse representation of the subject's anthropometric features w.r.t. the anthropometric features in the training set.The fundamental assumption is that the magnitudes of a given HRTF set can be described by the same sparse combination as the anthropometric data.Thus, we learn a sparse vector that represents the subject's anthropometric features as a linear superposition of the anthropometric features of a small subset of subjects from the training data.Then, we apply the same sparse vector directly on the HRTF tensor data.For evaluation purpose we use a new dataset, containing both anthropometric features and HRTFs.We compare the proposed sparse representation based approach with ridge regression and with the data of a manikin (which was designed based on average anthropometric data), and we simulate the best and the worst possible classifiers to select one of the HRTFs from the dataset.For instrumental evaluation we use log-spectral distortion.Experiments show that our sparse representation outperforms all other evaluated techniques, and that the synthesized HRTFs are almost as good as the best possible HRTF classifier

Fundamental scaling laws of on-off intermittency in a stochastically driven dissipative pattern forming system

Noise driven electroconvection in sandwich cells of nematic liquid crystals exhibits on-off intermittent behaviour at the onset of the instability. We study laser scattering of convection rolls to characterize the wavelengths and the trajectories of the stochastic amplitudes of the intermittent structures. The pattern wavelengths and the statistics of these trajectories are in quantitative agreement with simulations of the linearized electrohydrodynamic equations. The fundamental $\tau^{-3/2}$ distribution law for the durations $\tau$ of laminar phases as well as the power law of the amplitude distribution of intermittent bursts are confirmed in the experiments. Power spectral densities of the experimental and numerically simulated trajectories are discussed.Comment: 20 pages and 17 figure