Cultivation of algal biofuel feedstock in desert area of southern Nevada using municipal wastewater (NVREC project 1.3)

The second annual Nevada Renewable Energy Consortium meeting took place at UNLV on August 20. The meeting focused on the current three NVREC program areas: Solar, Biomass and Geothermal. Presentations were made by participating entities and a poster session followed

A Visual Analytics Approach to Debugging Cooperative, Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems' Worldviews

Autonomous multi-robot systems, where a team of robots shares information to perform tasks that are beyond an individual robot's abilities, hold great promise for a number of applications, such as planetary exploration missions. Each robot in a multi-robot system that uses the shared-world coordination paradigm autonomously schedules which robot should perform a given task, and when, using its worldview--the robot's internal representation of its belief about both its own state, and other robots' states. A key problem for operators is that robots' worldviews can fall out of sync (often due to weak communication links), leading to desynchronization of the robots' scheduling decisions and inconsistent emergent behavior (e.g., tasks not performed, or performed by multiple robots). Operators face the time-consuming and difficult task of making sense of the robots' scheduling decisions, detecting de-synchronizations, and pinpointing the cause by comparing every robot's worldview. To address these challenges, we introduce MOSAIC Viewer, a visual analytics system that helps operators (i) make sense of the robots' schedules and (ii) detect and conduct a root cause analysis of the robots' desynchronized worldviews. Over a year-long partnership with roboticists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we conduct a formative study to identify the necessary system design requirements and a qualitative evaluation with 12 roboticists. We find that MOSAIC Viewer is faster- and easier-to-use than the users' current approaches, and it allows them to stitch low-level details to formulate a high-level understanding of the robots' schedules and detect and pinpoint the cause of the desynchronized worldviews.Comment: To appear in IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) 202

Musculoskeletal profile of middle-aged Ving Tsun Chinese martial art practitioners: A cross-sectional study

published_or_final_versio

The Effects of Loranthus parasiticus

This study is undertaken to evaluate cognitive enhancing effect and neuroprotective effect of Loranthus parasiticus. Cognitive enhancing effect of Loranthus parasiticus was investigated on scopolamine-induced amnesia model in Morris water maze test and passive avoidance test. We also examined the neuroprotective effect on glutamate-induced cell death in HT22 cells by MTT assay. These results of Morris water maze test and passive avoidance test indicated that 10 and 50 mg/kg of Loranthus parasiticus reversed scopolamine-induced memory deficits. Loranthus parasiticus also protected against glutamate-induced cytotoxicity in HT22 cells. As a result of in vitro test for elucidating possible mechanism, Loranthus parasiticus inhibited AChE activity, ROS production, and Ca2+ accumulation. Loranthus parasiticus showed memory enhancing effect and neuroprotective effect and these effects may be related to inhibition of AChE activity, ROS level, and Ca2+ influx

Balance control, agility, eye-hand coordination, and sport performance of amateur badminton players: A cross-sectional study

© 2019 the Author(s). In this study, balance performance, agility, eye-hand coordination, and sports performance were compared between amateur badminton players and active controls. Thirty young adult badminton players and 33 active controls participated in the study. Static single-leg standing balance (with eyes closed) was measured using a force platform, and dynamic balance was measured using the Y Balance Test (lower quarter). Agility was measured using a hexagon agility test, and eye-hand coordination was measured using a computerized finger-pointing task. Sports performance was quantified by the number of times a shuttlecock fell in a designated area following a badminton serve. The badminton players had superior accuracy in badminton serving (P.05). Amateur badminton players had more favorable sports performance, but not balance performance, agility, or eye-hand coordination, than controls

Optimization and evaluation of a coarse-grained model of protein motion using X-ray crystal data

Simple coarse-grained models, such as the Gaussian Network Model, have been shown to capture some of the features of equilibrium protein dynamics. We extend this model by using atomic contacts to define residue interactions and introducing more than one interaction parameter between residues. We use B-factors from 98 ultra-high resolution X-ray crystal structures to optimize the interaction parameters. The average correlation between GNM fluctuation predictions and the B-factors is 0.64 for the data set, consistent with a previous large-scale study. By separating residue interactions into covalent and noncovalent, we achieve an average correlation of 0.74, and addition of ligands and cofactors further improves the correlation to 0.75. However, further separating the noncovalent interactions into nonpolar, polar, and mixed yields no significant improvement. The addition of simple chemical information results in better prediction quality without increasing the size of the coarse-grained model.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 supplemental file (cnm_si.tex

A Note on Vectorial AdS5_5/CFT4_4 Duality for Spin-jj Boundary Theory

The vectorial holographic correspondences between higher-spin theories in AdS$_5$ and free vector models on the boundary are extended to the cases where the latter is described by free massless spin-$j$ field. The dual higher-spin theory in the bulk does not include gravity and can only be defined on rigid AdS$_5$ background with $S^4$ boundary. We discuss various properties of these rather special higher-spin theories and calculate their one-loop free energies. We show that the result is proportional to the same quantity for spin-$j$ doubleton treated as if it is a AdS$_5$ field. Finally, we consider even more special case where the boundary theory itself is given by an infinite tower of massless higher-spin fields.Comment: 27 pages, version to appear in JHE

Muon anomalous magnetic moment and the stabilized Randall-Sundrum scenario

We study the effects of extra dimension on the muon anomalous magnetic moment in the stabilized Randall-Sundrum scenario. The effects of the Kaluza-Klein states heavier than the cut-off scale expected to be of order $\Lambda_\pi$ are neglected. Contribution from the spin-2 Kaluza-Klein states dominates over that from the spin-0 radion. The recent BNL E821 results impose a strict constraint on the parameter space of the model: $\Lambda_\pi \approx 0.4 - 2.1$ TeV with $k/ M_{\rm Pl} =0.01 - 0.1$. Small $k/M_{\rm Pl}$ is preferred if $\Lambda_\pi$ is TeV scale.Comment: 9 pages, ReVTeX, reference added, version to appear in PL

Cognitive Enhancing and Neuroprotective Effect of the Embryo of the Nelumbo nucifera

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of ENS on cognitive impairment induced by scopolamine and its potential neuroprotective effect against glutamate-induced cytotoxicity in HT22 cell and to investigate the underlying mechanisms. ENS (3, 10, 30, and 100 mg/kg), scopolamine (1 mg/kg), and donepezil (1 mg/kg) were administered to mice during a test period. Scopolamine impaired memory and learning in a water maze test and a passive avoidance test. The neuroprotective effect of ENS (10 and 100 μg/mL) was investigated on glutamate-induced cell death in HT22 cells by MTT assay. We investigated acetylcholinesterase inhibition in hippocampus and antioxidant activity, ROS levels, and Ca2+ influx in HT22 cells to elucidate the potential mechanisms of ENS. We found that ENS significantly ameliorated scopolamine-induced memory impairment and inhibited AChE activity in hippocampus. In vitro, ENS showed potent neuroprotective effects against glutamate-induced neurotoxicity in the HT22 cell. In addition, ENS induced a decrease in ROS production and intercellular Ca2+ accumulation and showed DPPH radical and H2O2 scavenging activity. In conclusion, ENS showed both a memory improving effect and a neuroprotective effect. Our results indicate that ENS may be of use in the treatment and prevention of neurodegenerative disorders

Interplay of Mre11 Nuclease with Dna2 plus Sgs1 in Rad51-Dependent Recombinational Repair

The Mre11/Rad50/Xrs2 complex initiates IR repair by binding to the end of a double-strand break, resulting in 5′ to 3′ exonuclease degradation creating a single-stranded 3′ overhang competent for strand invasion into the unbroken chromosome. The nuclease(s) involved are not well understood. Mre11 encodes a nuclease, but it has 3′ to 5′, rather than 5′ to 3′ activity. Furthermore, mutations that inactivate only the nuclease activity of Mre11 but not its other repair functions, mre11-D56N and mre11-H125N, are resistant to IR. This suggests that another nuclease can catalyze 5′ to 3′ degradation. One candidate nuclease that has not been tested to date because it is encoded by an essential gene is the Dna2 helicase/nuclease. We recently reported the ability to suppress the lethality of a dna2Δ with a pif1Δ. The dna2Δ pif1Δ mutant is IR-resistant. We have determined that dna2Δ pif1Δ mre11-D56N and dna2Δ pif1Δ mre11-H125N strains are equally as sensitive to IR as mre11Δ strains, suggesting that in the absence of Dna2, Mre11 nuclease carries out repair. The dna2Δ pif1Δ mre11-D56N triple mutant is complemented by plasmids expressing Mre11, Dna2 or dna2K1080E, a mutant with defective helicase and functional nuclease, demonstrating that the nuclease of Dna2 compensates for the absence of Mre11 nuclease in IR repair, presumably in 5′ to 3′ degradation at DSB ends. We further show that sgs1Δ mre11-H125N, but not sgs1Δ, is very sensitive to IR, implicating the Sgs1 helicase in the Dna2-mediated pathway