Automated Measurement of Spatially Resolved Hair-Hair Single Fiber Adhesion.

The adhesion force between individual human hair fibers in a crosshair geometry was measured by observing their natural bending and adhesive jumps out of contact, using optical video microscopy. The hair fibers' natural elastic responses, calibrated by measuring their natural resonant frequencies, were used to measure the forces. Using a custom-designed, automated apparatus to measure thousands of individual hair-hair contacts along millimeter length scales of hair, it was found that a broad, yet characteristic, spatially variant distribution in adhesion force is measured on the 1 to 1000 nN scale for both clean and conditioner-treated hair fibers. Comparison between the measured adhesion forces and adhesion forces modeled from the hairs' surface topography (measured using confocal laser profilometry) shows they have a good order-of-magnitude agreement and have similar breadth and shape. The agreement between the measurements and the model suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that hair-hair adhesion is governed, to a first approximation, by the unique surface structure of the hairs' cuticles and, therefore, the large distribution in local mean curvature at the various individual contact points along the hairs' lengths. We posit that haircare products could best control the surface properties (or at least the adhesive properties) between hairs by directly modifying the hair surface microstructure

Spontaneous Magnetisation in a Quantum Wire

An existence of predominant symmetrical spin configuration (spin polarised phase) and "diluted" density of states (pseudo-gap) in a layer under the Fermi level in a quantum wire is predicted. The condition of cross-over from non-polarised phase to polarised one was derived. The transition occurs for sufficiently low electron density in a wire and is accompanied by an acute decrease of electron density of states near the Fermi level.It may result in a corresponding decrease of conductance. A similar effect may exist in a two-dimensional electron gas.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

Optical Diagnostics on Helical Flux Compression Generators

Explosively driven magnetic flux compression (MFC) has been object of research for more than three decades. Actual interest in the basic physical picture of flux compression has been heightened by a newly started Department of Defense (DoD) Multi-University Research Initiative. The emphasis is on helical flux compression generators comprising a hollow cylindrical metal liner filled with high explosives and at least one helical coil surrounding the liner. After the application of a seed current, magnetic flux is trapped and high current is generated by moving, i.e., expanding, the liner explosively along the winding of the helical coil. Several key factors involved in the temporal development can be addresses by optical diagnostics. 1) The uniformity of liner expansion is captured by framing camera photography and supplemented by laser illuminated high spatial and temporal resolution imaging. Also, X-ray flash photography is insensitive to possible image blur by shockwaves coming from the exploding liner. 2) The thermodynamic state of the shocked gas is assessed by spatially and temporally resolved emission spectroscopy. 3) The moving liner-coil contact point is a possible source of high electric losses and is preferentially monitored also by emission spectroscopy. Since optical access to the region between liner and coil is not always guaranteed, optical fibers can he used to extract light from the generator. The information so gained will give, together with detailed electrical diagnostics, more insight in the physical loss mechanisms involved in MFC

Five Planets Transiting a Ninth Magnitude Star

The Kepler mission has revealed a great diversity of planetary systems and architectures, but most of the planets discovered by Kepler orbit faint stars. Using new data from the K2 mission, we present the discovery of a five planet system transiting a bright (V = 8.9, K = 7.7) star called HIP 41378. HIP 41378 is a slightly metal-poor late F-type star with moderate rotation (v sin(i) = 7 km/s) and lies at a distance of 116 +/- 18 from Earth. We find that HIP 41378 hosts two sub-Neptune sized planets orbiting 3.5% outside a 2:1 period commensurability in 15.6 and 31.7 day orbits. In addition, we detect three planets which each transit once during the 75 days spanned by K2 observations. One planet is Neptune sized in a likely ~160 day orbit, one is sub-Saturn sized likely in a ~130 day orbit, and one is a Jupiter sized planet in a likely ~1 year orbit. We show that these estimates for the orbital periods can be made more precise by taking into account dynamical stability considerations. We also calculate the distribution of stellar reflex velocities expected for this system, and show that it provides a good target for future radial velocity observations. If a precise orbital period can be determined for the outer Jovian planet through future observations, it will be an excellent candidate for follow-up transit observations to study its atmosphere and measure its oblateness.Comment: Accepted by ApJL. 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Promoter hypermethylation of SHOX2 and SEPT9 is a potential biomarker for minimally invasive diagnosis in adenocarcinomas of the biliary tract

Clinicopathological data of the 20 biliary tract cancer cases and 100 gender- and age-matched controls included in plasma study. (XLSX 116 kb

A Roman provincial city and its contamination legacy from artisanal and daily-life activities

Funding: This project was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation (R.R., www.carlsbergfondet.dk, Grant CF14-0467), Danish National Research Foundation (R.R., www.dg.dk, Grant 119), the Deutsche Forchungsgemeinschaft (A.L., https://www.dfg.de/, grant nos LI978/4-1 and LI978/4-2), the Deutscher Palästinaverein (A.L., https://www.palaestina-verein.de/), the Danish EliteForsk Award (R.R., https://ufm.dk/forskning-og-innovation/forskningsformidling/eliteforsk, grant 4094-00077B), and H. P. Hjerl Hansens Mindefondet for Dansk Palæstinaforskning (RR).Roman metal use and related extraction activities resulted in heavy metal pollution and contamination, in particular of Pb near ancient mines and harbors, as well as producing a global atmospheric impact. New evidence from ancient Gerasa (Jerash), Jordan, suggests that small-scale but intense Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad period urban, artisanal, and everyday site activities contributed to substantial heavy metal contamination of the city and its hinterland wadi, even though no metal mining took place and hardly any lead water pipes were used. Distribution of heavy metal contaminants, especially Pb, observed in the urban soils and sediments within this ancient city and its hinterland wadi resulted from aeolian, fluvial, cultural and post-depositional processes. These represent the contamination pathways of an ancient city-hinterland setting and reflect long-term anthropogenic legacies at local and regional scales beginning in the Roman period. Thus, urban use and re-use of heavy metal sources should be factored into understanding historical global-scale contaminant distributions.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Quantitative real-time RT-PCR of CD24 mRNA in the detection of prostate cancer

BACKGROUND: Gene expression profiling has recently shown that the mRNA for CD24 is overexpressed in prostate carcinomas (Pca) compared to benign or normal prostate epithelial tissues. Immunohistochemical studies have reported the usefulness of anti-CD24 for detecting prostate cancer over the full range of prostate specimens encountered in surgical pathology, e.g. needle biopsies, transurethral resection of prostate chips, or prostatectomies. It is a small mucin-like cell surface protein and thus promises to become at least a standard adjunctive stain for atypical prostate biopsies. We tested the usefulness of real-time RT-PCR for specific and sensitive detection of CD24 transcripts as a supplementary measure for discriminating between malignant and benign lesions in prostatic tissues. METHODS: Total RNA was isolated from snap-frozen chips in 55 cases of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and from frozen sections in 59 prostatectomy cases. The latter contain at least 50% malignant epithelia. Relative quantification of CD24 transcripts was performed on the LightCycler instrument using hybridization probes for detection and porphobilinogen deaminase transcripts (PBGD) for normalization. RESULTS: Normalized CD24 transcript levels showed an average 2.69-fold increase in 59 Pca-cases (mean 0.21) when compared to 55 cases of BPH (mean 0.08). This difference was highly significant (p < 0.0001). The method has a moderate specificity (47.3%) but a high sensitivity (86.4%) if the cutoff is set at 0.0498. CD24 expression levels among Pca cases were not statistically associated with the tumor and lymph-node stage, the grading (WHO), the surgical margins, or the Gleason score. CONCLUSION: The present study demonstrates the feasibility of quantitative CD24 RNA transcript detection in prostatic tissues even without previous laser microdissection

CMBPol Mission Concept Study: Prospects for polarized foreground removal

In this report we discuss the impact of polarized foregrounds on a future CMBPol satellite mission. We review our current knowledge of Galactic polarized emission at microwave frequencies, including synchrotron and thermal dust emission. We use existing data and our understanding of the physical behavior of the sources of foreground emission to generate sky templates, and start to assess how well primordial gravitational wave signals can be separated from foreground contaminants for a CMBPol mission. At the estimated foreground minimum of ~100 GHz, the polarized foregrounds are expected to be lower than a primordial polarization signal with tensor-to-scalar ratio r=0.01, in a small patch (~1%) of the sky known to have low Galactic emission. Over 75% of the sky we expect the foreground amplitude to exceed the primordial signal by about a factor of eight at the foreground minimum and on scales of two degrees. Only on the largest scales does the polarized foreground amplitude exceed the primordial signal by a larger factor of about 20. The prospects for detecting an r=0.01 signal including degree-scale measurements appear promising, with 5 sigma_r ~0.003 forecast from multiple methods. A mission that observes a range of scales offers better prospects from the foregrounds perspective than one targeting only the lowest few multipoles. We begin to explore how optimizing the composition of frequency channels in the focal plane can maximize our ability to perform component separation, with a range of typically 40 < nu < 300 GHz preferred for ten channels. Foreground cleaning methods are already in place to tackle a CMBPol mission data set, and further investigation of the optimization and detectability of the primordial signal will be useful for mission design.Comment: 42 pages, 14 figures, Foreground Removal Working Group contribution to the CMBPol Mission Concept Study, v2, matches AIP versio

Entropy inflection and invisible low-energy states: Defensive alliance example

Lower temperature leads to a higher probability of visiting low-energy states. This intuitive belief underlies most physics-inspired strategies for addressing hard optimization problems. For instance, the popular simulated annealing (SA) dynamics is expected to approach a ground state if the temperature is lowered appropriately. Here, we demonstrate that this belief is not always justified. Specifically, we employ the cavity method to analyze the minimum strong defensive alliance problem and discover a bifurcation in the solution space, induced by an inflection point in the entropy-energy profile. While easily accessible configurations are associated with the lower-free-energy branch, the low-energy configurations are associated with the higher-free-energy branch within the same temperature range. There is a discontinuous phase transition between the high-energy configurations and the ground states, which generally cannot be followed by SA. We introduce an energy-clamping strategy to obtain superior solutions by following the higher-free-energy branch, overcoming the limitations of SA