Empirical pseudopotential calculations of Cd1-xMnxTe

Empirical pseudopotential calculations for the entire range of alloy concentrations of cubic Cd(1-x)Mn(x)Te are presented. The atomic form factors have been deduced empirically by fitting the band structure to spectroscopic data available from the literature. The pseudopotential band structures indicate optical bowing may occur in the alloy Cd(1-x)Mn(x)Te and have been used to determine the effective masses of the electron and light, and heavy holes, which for CdTe are in agreement with accepted values. The effective masses for Cd(1-x)Mn(x)Te are given for the first time, acid are expressed as first- and second-order polynomials in x. The implications of these results for spectroscopic experiments are discussed. © 1996 American Institute of Physics

The structural dependence of the effective mass and Luttinger parameters in semiconductor quantum wells

A detailed comparison of the empirical pseudopotential method with single and multiple band calculations based on the envelope function and effective mass approximations are presented. It is shown that, in order to give agreement with the more rigorous microscopic approach of the pseudopotential method, structural dependent effective masses and Luttinger parameters must be invoked. The CdTe/Cd(1 – x)Mn(x)Te system has been employed as an example, and the first pseudopotential calculations of quantum wells and superlattices in this material are presented. It is shown that the electron, light- and heavy-hole effective masses tend towards twice their bulk values in the limit of narrow quantum wells. © 1997 American Institute of Physics

Glaciology, Byrd Station and Marie Byrd Land Traverse, 1958-1959.

Submitted to the U.S. National Committee for the IGY, National Academy of Sciences, in partial fulfillment of IGY Project Number 4.10 - NSF Grant No. Y/4.10/285.The glaciological program at Byrd Station, Antarctica, during the 1959-59 traverse was essentially a continuation of the program initiated by Vernon Anderson and Mario Giovinetto during 1957 and 1958. As in previous years, the work was divided into traverse glaciological studies during the summer and station observations during the winter. Certain modifications and additions to some of the original studies were made. This report is divided into two parts, traverse glaciology and station glaciology.National Science Foundation Grant No. Y/4.10/285

Relativistic Calculation of the Meson Spectrum: a Fully Covariant Treatment Versus Standard Treatments

A large number of treatments of the meson spectrum have been tried that consider mesons as quark - anti quark bound states. Recently, we used relativistic quantum "constraint" mechanics to introduce a fully covariant treatment defined by two coupled Dirac equations. For field-theoretic interactions, this procedure functions as a "quantum mechanical transform of Bethe-Salpeter equation". Here, we test its spectral fits against those provided by an assortment of models: Wisconsin model, Iowa State model, Brayshaw model, and the popular semi-relativistic treatment of Godfrey and Isgur. We find that the fit provided by the two-body Dirac model for the entire meson spectrum competes with the best fits to partial spectra provided by the others and does so with the smallest number of interaction functions without additional cutoff parameters necessary to make other approaches numerically tractable. We discuss the distinguishing features of our model that may account for the relative overall success of its fits. Note especially that in our approach for QCD, the resulting pion mass and associated Goldstone behavior depend sensitively on the preservation of relativistic couplings that are crucial for its success when solved nonperturbatively for the analogous two-body bound-states of QED.Comment: 75 pages, 6 figures, revised content

An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics

For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of clinicopathologic annotations for over 11,000 cancer patients in the TCGA program leads to the generation of TCGA Clinical Data Resource, which provides recommendations of clinical outcome endpoint usage for 33 cancer types

Huntington's disease cerebrospinal fluid seeds aggregation of mutant huntingtin

Huntington's disease (HD), a progressive neurodegenerative disease, is caused by an expanded CAG triplet repeat producing a mutant huntingtin protein (mHTT) with a polyglutamine-repeat expansion. Onset of symptoms in mutant huntingtin gene-carrying individuals remains unpredictable. We report that synthetic polyglutamine oligomers and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from BACHD transgenic rats and from human HD subjects can seed mutant huntingtin aggregation in a cell model and its cell lysate. Our studies demonstrate that seeding requires the mutant huntingtin template and may reflect an underlying prion-like protein propagation mechanism. Light and cryo-electron microscopy show that synthetic seeds nucleate and enhance mutant huntingtin aggregation. This seeding assay distinguishes HD subjects from healthy and non-HD dementia controls without overlap (blinded samples). Ultimately, this seeding property in HD patient CSF may form the basis of a molecular biomarker assay to monitor HD and evaluate therapies that target mHTT

Closed-Form transformation between geodetic and ellipsoidal coordinates

We present formulas for direct closed-form transformation between geodetic coordinates(Φ, λ, h) and ellipsoidal coordinates (β, λ, u) for any oblate ellipsoid of revolution.These will be useful for those dealing with ellipsoidal representations of the Earth's gravityfield or other oblate ellipsoidal figures. The numerical stability of the transformations for nearpolarand near-equatorial regions is also considered

Driver Fusions and Their Implications in the Development and Treatment of Human Cancers.

Gene fusions represent an important class of somatic alterations in cancer. We systematically investigated fusions in 9,624 tumors across 33 cancer types using multiple fusion calling tools. We identified a total of 25,664 fusions, with a 63% validation rate. Integration of gene expression, copy number, and fusion annotation data revealed that fusions involving oncogenes tend to exhibit increased expression, whereas fusions involving tumor suppressors have the opposite effect. For fusions involving kinases, we found 1,275 with an intact kinase domain, the proportion of which varied significantly across cancer types. Our study suggests that fusions drive the development of 16.5% of cancer cases and function as the sole driver in more than 1% of them. Finally, we identified druggable fusions involving genes such as TMPRSS2, RET, FGFR3, ALK, and ESR1 in 6.0% of cases, and we predicted immunogenic peptides, suggesting that fusions may provide leads for targeted drug and immune therapy