Poverty and income maintenance in old age: A cross-national view of low income older women

Great strides have been made in reducing poverty amongst the elderly in most rich countries over the past forty years. But pensioner poverty has not been eradicated, especially in the English-speaking nations. Poverty rates amongst older women are much higher than those for older men and much higher in the United States compared to other nations. In general, poverty rates rise with both age and changes in living arrangements though living alone has a larger effect for women. Poverty rates among older women are highest amongst the divorced, widowed and never- married, groups whose prevalence within the elder population will rise significantly over the next decades. The challenge for policy makers is to design systems of retirement benefits that guarantee minimum standards of living for all elderly women while also preserving incentives for self-financed retirement

Inverse perturbation method for structural redesign with frequency and mode shape constraints

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76581/1/AIAA-8777-705.pd

Autocrine production of extracellular catalase prevents apoptosis of the human CEM T-cell line in serum-free medium.

CCRF-CEM is a human T-cell line originally isolated from a child with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. At cell densities > 2 x 10 cells per ml, CEM cells grow in serum-free medium, but at lower cell densities the cultures rapidly undergo apoptosis, or programmed cell death. The viability of lowdensity CEM cells could be preserved by supplementing the serum-free medium with "conditioned" medium from highdensity CEM cultures, but a variety of known growth factors and lymphokines were ineffective. Fractionation ofconditioned medium by sequential chromatography on DEAE-cellulose, propyl agarose, chromatofocusing, and hydrophobic-interaction HPLC resulted in the isolation of a 60-kDa protein capable of sustaining CEM growth in the absence ofserum. The active protein was identified as human catalase based on its amino acid sequence and composition and was subsequently shown to exhibit catalase activity and to be replaceable by human erythrocyte catalase or bovine liver catalase. Comparison of the level of intracellular catalase activity with the amount released into the culture medium demonstrated that the latter accounted for <3% of the total catalase activity present in the cell culture. These findings show that, despite its low amount, the catalase released by CEM cells, and perhaps by T cells in general, provides a critical rust Ilne of defense against hydrogen peroxide (11202) present in the extracellular milieu. Originally published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 90, No. 10, May 199

The Structure of a Low-Metallicity Giant Molecular Cloud Complex

To understand the impact of low metallicities on giant molecular cloud (GMC) structure, we compare far infrared dust emission, CO emission, and dynamics in the star-forming complex N83 in the Wing of the Small Magellanic Cloud. Dust emission (measured by Spitzer as part of the S3MC and SAGE-SMC surveys) probes the total gas column independent of molecular line emission and traces shielding from photodissociating radiation. We calibrate a method to estimate the dust column using only the high-resolution Spitzer data and verify that dust traces the ISM in the HI-dominated region around N83. This allows us to resolve the relative structures of H2, dust, and CO within a giant molecular cloud complex, one of the first times such a measurement has been made in a low-metallicity galaxy. Our results support the hypothesis that CO is photodissociated while H2 self-shields in the outer parts of low-metallicity GMCs, so that dust/self shielding is the primary factor determining the distribution of CO emission. Four pieces of evidence support this view. First, the CO-to-H2 conversion factor averaged over the whole cloud is very high 4-11 \times 10^21 cm^-2/(K km/s), or 20-55 times the Galactic value. Second, the CO-to-H2 conversion factor varies across the complex, with its lowest (most nearly Galactic) values near the CO peaks. Third, bright CO emission is largely confined to regions of relatively high line-of-sight extinction, A_V >~ 2 mag, in agreement with PDR models and Galactic observations. Fourth, a simple model in which CO emerges from a smaller sphere nested inside a larger cloud can roughly relate the H2 masses measured from CO kinematics and dust.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures (including appendix), accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa