29 research outputs found
Atmospheric water balance
Submitted to Office of Water Resources Research, U.S. Department of Interior.Includes bibliographical references.OWRR project no. B-035-COLO
The Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 Early Release Science data: Panchromatic Faint Object Counts for 0.2-2 microns wavelength
We describe the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) Early
Release Science (ERS) observations in the Great Observatories Origins Deep
Survey (GOODS) South field. The new WFC3 ERS data provide calibrated, drizzled
mosaics in the UV filters F225W, F275W, and F336W, as well as in the near-IR
filters F098M (Ys), F125W (J), and F160W (H) with 1-2 HST orbits per filter.
Together with the existing HST Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) GOODS-South
mosaics in the BViz filters, these panchromatic 10-band ERS data cover 40-50
square arcmin at 0.2-1.7 {\mu}m in wavelength at 0.07-0.15" FWHM resolution and
0.090" Multidrizzled pixels to depths of AB\simeq 26.0-27.0 mag (5-{\sigma})
for point sources, and AB\simeq 25.5-26.5 mag for compact galaxies.
In this paper, we describe: a) the scientific rationale, and the data taking
plus reduction procedures of the panchromatic 10-band ERS mosaics; b) the
procedure of generating object catalogs across the 10 different ERS filters,
and the specific star-galaxy separation techniques used; and c) the reliability
and completeness of the object catalogs from the WFC3 ERS mosaics. The
excellent 0.07-0.15" FWHM resolution of HST/WFC3 and ACS makes star- galaxy
separation straightforward over a factor of 10 in wavelength to AB\simeq 25-26
mag from the UV to the near-IR, respectively.Comment: 51 pages, 71 figures Accepted to ApJS 2011.01.2
Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei: Past, Present and Future Research
This review discusses the current status of supermassive black hole research,
as seen from a purely observational standpoint. Since the early '90s, rapid
technological advances, most notably the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope,
the commissioning of the VLBA and improvements in near-infrared speckle imaging
techniques, have not only given us incontrovertible proof of the existence of
supermassive black holes, but have unveiled fundamental connections between the
mass of the central singularity and the global properties of the host galaxy.
It is thanks to these observations that we are now, for the first time, in a
position to understand the origin, evolution and cosmic relevance of these
fascinating objects.Comment: Invited Review, 114 pages. Because of space requirements, this
version contains low resolution figures. The full resolution version can be
downloaded from http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~lff/publications.htm
Modern optical astronomy: technology and impact of interferometry
The present `state of the art' and the path to future progress in high
spatial resolution imaging interferometry is reviewed. The review begins with a
treatment of the fundamentals of stellar optical interferometry, the origin,
properties, optical effects of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, the
passive methods that are applied on a single telescope to overcome atmospheric
image degradation such as speckle interferometry, and various other techniques.
These topics include differential speckle interferometry, speckle spectroscopy
and polarimetry, phase diversity, wavefront shearing interferometry,
phase-closure methods, dark speckle imaging, as well as the limitations imposed
by the detectors on the performance of speckle imaging. A brief account is
given of the technological innovation of adaptive-optics (AO) to compensate
such atmospheric effects on the image in real time. A major advancement
involves the transition from single-aperture to the dilute-aperture
interferometry using multiple telescopes. Therefore, the review deals with
recent developments involving ground-based, and space-based optical arrays.
Emphasis is placed on the problems specific to delay-lines, beam recombination,
polarization, dispersion, fringe-tracking, bootstrapping, coherencing and
cophasing, and recovery of the visibility functions. The role of AO in
enhancing visibilities is also discussed. The applications of interferometry,
such as imaging, astrometry, and nulling are described. The mathematical
intricacies of the various `post-detection' image-processing techniques are
examined critically. The review concludes with a discussion of the
astrophysical importance and the perspectives of interferometry.Comment: 65 pages LaTeX file including 23 figures. Reviews of Modern Physics,
2002, to appear in April issu
American palm ethnomedicine: A meta-analysis
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many recent papers have documented the phytochemical and pharmacological bases for the use of palms (<it>Arecaceae</it>) in ethnomedicine. Early publications were based almost entirely on interviews that solicited local knowledge. More recently, ethnobotanically guided searches for new medicinal plants have proven more successful than random sampling for identifying plants that contain biodynamic ingredients. However, limited laboratory time and the high cost of clinical trials make it difficult to test all potential medicinal plants in the search for new drug candidates. The purpose of this study was to summarize and analyze previous studies on the medicinal uses of American palms in order to narrow down the search for new palm-derived medicines.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Relevant literature was surveyed and data was extracted and organized into medicinal use categories. We focused on more recent literature than that considered in a review published 25 years ago. We included phytochemical and pharmacological research that explored the importance of American palms in ethnomedicine.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of 730 species of American palms, we found evidence that 106 species had known medicinal uses, ranging from treatments for diabetes and leishmaniasis to prostatic hyperplasia. Thus, the number of American palm species with known uses had increased from 48 to 106 over the last quarter of a century. Furthermore, the pharmacological bases for many of the effects are now understood.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Palms are important in American ethnomedicine. Some, like <it>Serenoa repens </it>and <it>Roystonea regia</it>, are the sources of drugs that have been approved for medicinal uses. In contrast, recent ethnopharmacological studies suggested that many of the reported uses of several other palms do not appear to have a strong physiological basis. This study has provided a useful assessment of the ethnobotanical and pharmacological data available on palms.</p
Biodiversity, traditional medicine and public health: where do they meet?
Given the increased use of traditional medicines, possibilities that would ensure its successful integration into a public health framework should be explored. This paper discusses some of the links between biodiversity and traditional medicine, and addresses their implications to public health. We explore the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services to global and human health, the risks which human impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity present to human health and welfare
The landscape of tolerated genetic variation in humans and primates.
Personalized genome sequencing has revealed millions of genetic differences between individuals, but our understanding of their clinical relevance remains largely incomplete. To systematically decipher the effects of human genetic variants, we obtained whole-genome sequencing data for 809 individuals from 233 primate species and identified 4.3 million common protein-altering variants with orthologs in humans. We show that these variants can be inferred to have nondeleterious effects in humans based on their presence at high allele frequencies in other primate populations. We use this resource to classify 6% of all possible human protein-altering variants as likely benign and impute the pathogenicity of the remaining 94% of variants with deep learning, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy for diagnosing pathogenic variants in patients with genetic diseases
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RECIPES FOR WRITING ALGORITHMS TO RETRIEVE COLUMNAR WATER VAPOR FOR 3-BAND MULTI-SPECTRAL DATA.
Many papers have considered the theory of retrieving columnar water vapor using the continuum interpolated band ratio (CIBR) and a few the atmospherically pre-corrected differential absorption (APDA) methods. In this paper we aim at giving recipes to actually implement CIBR and APDA for the Multi-spectral Thermal Imager (MTI) with the hope that they can be easily adapted to other sensors such as MODIS, AVIRIS and HYDICE. The algorithms have the four following steps in common: (1) running a radiative transfer (RT) algorithm for a range of water vapor values and a particular observation geometry, (2) computation of sensor band-averaged radiances, (3) computation of a non-linear fit of channel ratios (CIBR or APDA) as a function of water vapor, (4) application of the inverse fit to retrieve columnar water vapor as a function of channel ratio