Development of a Generic Time-to-Contact Pilot Guidance Model

The time-to-contact ττ theory posits that purposeful actions can be conducted by coupling the actor’s motion onto the so-called ττ guides generated internally by their central nervous system. Although significant advances have been made in the application of ττ for flight control purposes, little research has been conducted to investigate how pilots are able to adapt their ττ-guidance strategy to different aircraft dynamics, or how a ττ-guide-based pilot–aircraft model might be used to represent control behavior. This paper reports on the development of such a model to characterize the adaptation of pilot guidance to variations in aircraft dynamics using data obtained from a clinical pilot-in-the-loop flight simulation experiment. The results indicate that pilots tend to maintain a constant coupling between the dynamic system’s motion and the ττ guide across a range of different configuration parameters. Simultaneously, the pilot modulates the guidance maneuver period to adapt to these different aircraft dynamics that result in changes in workload. Modeling the complete pilot stabilization and guidance function as a regulator plus inverter yields good comparative results between the pilot–aircraft model and simulator trajectory data, and it supports the hypothesis that the following ττ-based guidance strategies suppress an aircraft’s natural dynamics

Temperature-dependent changes to host-parasite interactions alter the thermal performance of a bacterial host.

This is the author accepted manuscriptThermal performance curves (TPCs) are used to predict changes in species interactions, and hence, range shifts, disease dynamics and community composition, under forecasted climate change. Species interactions might in turn affect TPCs. Here, we investigate how temperature-dependent changes in a microbial host-parasite interaction (the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens, and its lytic bacteriophage, SBW[Formula: see text]) changes the host TPC and the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms underlying these changes. The bacteriophage had a narrower thermal tolerance for infection, with their critical thermal maximum ~6 °C lower than those at which the bacteria still had high growth. Consequently, in the presence of phage, the host TPC changed, resulting in a lower maximum growth rate. These changes were not just driven by differences in thermal tolerance, with temperature-dependent costs of evolved resistance also playing a major role: the largest cost of resistance occurred at the temperature at which bacteria grew best in the absence of phage. Our work highlights how ecological and evolutionary mechanisms can alter the effect of a parasite on host thermal performance, even over very short timescales.NER

Current Therapeutic Advances Targeting EGFR and EGFRvIII in Glioblastoma

EGFR and EGFRvIII analysis is of current interest in glioblastoma- the most common malignant primary CNS tumour, because of new EGFRvIII vaccine trials underway. EGFR activation in glioblastoma promotes cellular proliferation via activation of MAPK and PI3K-Akt pathways and EGFRvIII is the most common variant, leading to constitutively active EGFR. This review explains EGFR and EGFRvIII signalling in GBM; describes targeted therapy approaches to date including tyrosine kinase inhibitor, antibody-based therapies, vaccines and preclinical RNA-based therapies and discusses the difficulties encountered with these approaches including pathway redundancy and intratumoural heterogeneity

Prediction and Simulator Verification of Roll/Lateral Adverse Aeroservoelastic Rotorcraft–Pilot Couplings

The involuntary interaction of a pilot with an aircraft can be described as pilot-assisted oscillations. Such phenomena are usually only addressed late in the design process when they manifest themselves during ground/flight testing. Methods to be able to predict such phenomena as early as possible are therefore useful. This work describes a technique to predict the adverse aeroservoelastic rotorcraft–pilot couplings, specifically between a rotorcraft’s roll motion and the resultant involuntary pilot lateral cyclic motion. By coupling linear vehicle aeroservoelastic models and experimentally identified pilot biodynamic models, pilot-assisted oscillations and no-pilot-assisted oscillation conditions have been numerically predicted for a soft-in-plane hingeless helicopter with a lightly damped regressive lead–lag mode that strongly interacts with the roll modeat a frequency within the biodynamic band of the pilots. These predictions have then been verified using real-time flight-simulation experiments. The absence of any similar adverse couplings experienced while using only rigid-body models in the flight simulator verified that the observed phenomena were indeed aeroelastic in nature. The excellent agreement between the numerical predictions and the observed experimental results indicates that the techniques developed in this paper can be used to highlight the proneness of new or existing designs to pilot-assisted oscillation