US National Gemini Office in the NOIRLab era

This article presents an overview of the US National Gemini Office (US NGO) and its role within the International Gemini Observatory user community. Throughout the years, the US NGO charter changed considerably to accommodate the evolving needs of astronomers and the observatory. The current landscape of observational astronomy requires effective communication between stakeholders and reliable/accessible data reduction tools and products, which minimize the time between data gathering and publication of scientific results. Because of that, the US NGO heavily invests in producing data reduction tutorials and cookbooks. Recently, the US NGO started engaging with the Gemini user community through social media, and the results have been encouraging, increasing the observatory's visibility. The US NGO staff developed tools to assess whether the support provided to the user community is sufficient and effective, through website analytics and social media engagement numbers. These quantitative metrics serve as the baseline for internal reporting and directing efforts to new or current products. In the era of the NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), the US NGO is well-positioned to be the liaison between the US user base and the Gemini Observatory. Furthermore, collaborations within NOIRLab programs, such as the Astro Data Lab and the Time Allocation Committee, enhance the US NGO outreach to attract users and develop new products. The future landscape laid out by the Astro 2020 report confirms the need to establish such synergies and provide more integrated user support services to the astronomical community at large.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and System

BFM-SI: A new implementation of the biogeochemical flux model in sea ice

This work describes a novel implementation of the Biogeochemical Flux Model (BFM) in a sea ice system (BFMSI). The chosen representative groups of the sea ice food web rely on the same dynamics as the BFM. The main differences between BFM and BFMSI stand in the type and number of functional groups, in the parameters assigned to several physiological and ecological processes and in the dimensional size classes they represent. The differential equations of BFMSI are written here according to the nomenclature associated to the new sea ice state variables. At the boundaries, the sea ice system is also coupled to the atmosphere and to the ocean through the exchange of organic and inorganic matter. This is done by computing the entrapment of particulate and dissolved matter and gases when sea ice grows and release to the ocean when sea ice melts to ensure mass conservation. The implementation of the BFM in sea ice and the coupling structure in General Circulation Models will add a new component that may provide new adequate estimate of the role and importance of sea ice biogeochemistry in the global carbon cycle

Nutraceutical Screening in a Zebrafish Model of Muscular Dystrophy: Gingerol as a Possible Food Aid

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), caused by mutations in the dystrophin gene, is an inherited neuromuscular disorder that causes loss of muscle mass and motor skills. In the era of genomic medicine, there is still no known cure for DMD. In clinical practice, there is a growing awareness of the possible importance of nutrition in neuromuscular diseases. This is mostly the result of patients' or caregivers' empirical reports of how active substances derived from food have led to improved muscle strength and, thus, better quality of life. In this report, we investigate several nutraceutical principles in the sapje strain of zebrafish, a validated model of DMD, in order to identify possible natural products that, if supplemented in the diet, might improve the quality of life of DMD patients. Gingerol, a constituent of fresh ginger, statistically increased the locomotion of mutant larvae and upregulated the expression of heme oxygenase 1, a target gene for therapy aimed at improving dystrophic symptoms. Although three other compounds showed a partial positive effect on locomotor and muscle structure phenotypes, our nutraceutical screening study lent preliminary support to the efficacy and safety only of gingerol. Gingerol could easily be proposed as a dietary supplement in DMD

Copula Density Neural Estimation

Probability density estimation from observed data constitutes a central task in statistics. Recent advancements in machine learning offer new tools but also pose new challenges. The big data era demands analysis of long-range spatial and long-term temporal dependencies in large collections of raw data, rendering neural networks an attractive solution for density estimation. In this paper, we exploit the concept of copula to explicitly build an estimate of the probability density function associated to any observed data. In particular, we separate univariate marginal distributions from the joint dependence structure in the data, the copula itself, and we model the latter with a neural network-based method referred to as copula density neural estimation (CODINE). Results show that the novel learning approach is capable of modeling complex distributions and it can be applied for mutual information estimation and data generation.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publicatio

Asymmetric Pd(II)-catalyzed C−O, C−N, C−C bond formation using alkenes as substrates : insight into recent enantioselective developments

This Review summarizes the advances in the catalytic enantioselective mono- and difunctionalization of alkenes, highlighting the fundamental role of ligands. Several types of asymmetric reactions have been developed involving different bonds formation, C−O, C−N and C−C, highlighting the urgency to go ahead in the search for new ligands and synthetic methodologies in order to improve the control over the reaction selectivity and activity and thus, to increase the applications in the synthesis of heterocyclic scaffolds and biologically active compounds. The Review is organized into paragraphs, which discuss the type of bond formed during the nucleopalladation, C−O, C−N, C−C bonds, and the type of reaction involved