A systematic review of experimental methods to manipulate secondary hyperalgesia in humans: protocol

Background Neuropathic pain affects 7–10% of people, but responds poorly to pharmacotherapy, indicating a need for better treatments. Mechanistic research on neuropathic pain frequently uses human surrogate models of the secondary hyperalgesia that is a common feature of neuropathic pain. Experimentally induced secondary hyperalgesia has been manipulated with pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods to clarify the relative contributions of different mechanisms to secondary hyperalgesia. However, this literature has not been systematically synthesised. The aim of this systematic review is to identify, describe, and compare methods that have been used to manipulate experimentally induced secondary hyperalgesia in healthy humans. Methods A systematic search strategy will be supplemented by reference list checks and direct contact with identified laboratories to maximise the identification of data reporting the experimental manipulation of experimentally induced secondary hyperalgesia in healthy humans. Duplicated screening, risk of bias assessment, and data extraction procedures will be used. Authors will be asked to provide data as necessary. Data will be pooled and meta-analyses conducted where possible, with subgrouping according to manipulation method. Manipulation methods will be ranked for potency and risk. Discussion The results of this review will provide a useful reference for researchers interested in using experimental methods to manipulate secondary hyperalgesia in humans and will help to clarify the relative contributions of different mechanisms to secondary hyperalgesia

The interstellar medium in Andromeda's dwarf spheroidal galaxies - I. Content and origin of the interstellar dust

Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are among the most numerous galaxy population in the Universe, but their main formation and evolution channels are still not well understood. The three dwarf spheroidal satellites (NGC147, NGC185, and NGC205) of the Andromeda galaxy are characterised by very different interstellar medium (ISM) properties, which might suggest them being at different galaxy evolutionary stages. While the dust content of NGC205 has been studied in detail by De Looze et al. (2012), we present new Herschel dust continuum observations of NGC147 and NGC185. The non-detection of NGC147 in Herschel SPIRE maps puts a strong constraint on its dust mass (< 128 Msun). For NGC185, we derive a total dust mass M_d = 5.1 x 10^3 Msun, which is a factor of ~2-3 higher than that derived from ISO and Spitzer observations and confirms the need for longer wavelength observations to trace more massive cold dust reservoirs. We, furthermore, estimate the dust production by asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars and supernovae (SNe). For NGC147, the upper limit on the dust mass is consistent with expectations of the material injected by the evolved stellar population. In NGC185 and NGC205, the observed dust content is one order of magnitude higher compared to the estimated dust production by AGBs and SNe. Efficient grain growth, and potentially longer dust survival times (3-6 Gyr) are required to account for their current dust content. Our study confirms the importance of grain growth in the gas phase to account for the current dust reservoir in galaxies.DL gratefully acknowledge the support of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO-Vlaanderen). PACS has been developed by a consortium of institutes led by MPE (Germany) and including UVIE (Austria); KU Leuven, CSL, IMEC (Belgium); CEA, LAM (France); MPIA (Germany); INAFIFSI/OAA/OAP/OAT, LENS, SISSA (Italy); IAC (Spain). This development has been supported by the funding agencies BMVIT (Austria), ESA-PRODEX (Belgium), CEA/CNES (France), DLR (Germany), ASI/INAF (Italy), and CICYT/MCYT (Spain). SPIRE has been developed by a consortium of institutes led by Cardiff University (UK) and including Univ. Lethbridge (Canada); NAOC (China); CEA, LAM (France); IFSI, Univ. Padua (Italy); IAC (Spain); Stockholm Observatory (Sweden); Imperial College London, RAL, UCL-MSSL, UKATC, Univ. Sussex (UK); and Caltech, JPL, NHSC, Univ. Colorado (USA). This development has been supported by national funding agencies: CSA (Canada); NAOC (China); CEA, CNES, CNRS (France); ASI (Italy); MCINN (Spain); SNSB (Sweden); STFC and UKSA (UK); and NASA (USA). This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw86

The Herschel Exploitation of Local Galaxy Andromeda (HELGA) II: Dust and Gas in Andromeda

We present an analysis of the dust and gas in Andromeda, using Herschel images sampling the entire far-infrared peak. We fit a modified-blackbody model to ~4000 quasi-independent pixels with spatial resolution of ~140pc and find that a variable dust-emissivity index (beta) is required to fit the data. We find no significant long-wavelength excess above this model suggesting there is no cold dust component. We show that the gas-to-dust ratio varies radially, increasing from ~20 in the center to ~70 in the star-forming ring at 10kpc, consistent with the metallicity gradient. In the 10kpc ring the average beta is ~1.9, in good agreement with values determined for the Milky Way (MW). However, in contrast to the MW, we find significant radial variations in beta, which increases from 1.9 at 10kpc to ~2.5 at a radius of 3.1kpc and then decreases to 1.7 in the center. The dust temperature is fairly constant in the 10kpc ring (ranging from 17-20K), but increases strongly in the bulge to ~30K. Within 3.1kpc we find the dust temperature is highly correlated with the 3.6 micron flux, suggesting the general stellar population in the bulge is the dominant source of dust heating there. At larger radii, there is a weak correlation between the star formation rate and dust temperature. We find no evidence for 'dark gas' in M31 in contrast to recent results for the MW. Finally, we obtained an estimate of the CO X-factor by minimising the dispersion in the gas-to-dust ratio, obtaining a value of (1.9+/-0.4)x10^20 cm^-2 [K kms^-1]^-1.Comment: 19 pages, 18 figures. Submitted to ApJ April 2012; Accepted July 201

Time preferences and risk aversion: tests on domain differences

The design and evaluation of environmental policy requires the incorporation of time and risk elements as many environmental outcomes extend over long time periods and involve a large degree of uncertainty. Understanding how individuals discount and evaluate risks with respect to environmental outcomes is a prime component in designing effective environmental policy to address issues of environmental sustainability, such as climate change. Our objective in this study is to investigate whether subjects' time preferences and risk aversion across the monetary domain and the environmental domain differ. Crucially, our experimental design is incentivized: in the monetary domain, time preferences and risk aversion are elicited with real monetary payoffs, whereas in the environmental domain, we elicit time preferences and risk aversion using real (bee-friendly) plants. We find that subjects' time preferences are not significantly different across the monetary and environmental domains. In contrast, subjects' risk aversion is significantly different across the two domains. More specifically, subjects (men and women) exhibit a higher degree of risk aversion in the environmental domain relative to the monetary domain. Finally, we corroborate earlier results, which document that women are more risk averse than men in the monetary domain. We show this finding to, also, hold in the environmental domain

Propagation of the Madden–Julian Oscillation and scale interaction with the diurnal cycle in a high-resolution GCM

The Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the chief source of tropical intra-seasonal variability, but is simulated poorly by most state-of-the-art GCMs. Common errors include a lack of eastward propagation at the correct frequency and zonal extent, and too small a ratio of eastward- to westward-propagating variability. Here it is shown that HiGEM, a high-resolution GCM, simulates a very realistic MJO with approximately the correct spatial and temporal scale. Many MJO studies in GCMs are limited to diagnostics which average over a latitude band around the equator, allowing an analysis of the MJO’s structure in time and longitude only. In this study a wider range of diagnostics is applied. It is argued that such an approach is necessary for a comprehensive analysis of a model’s MJO. The standard analysis of Wheeler and Hendon (Mon Wea Rev 132(8):1917–1932, 2004; WH04) is applied to produce composites, which show a realistic spatial structure in the MJO envelopes but for the timing of the peak precipitation in the inter-tropical convergence zone, which bifurcates the MJO signal. Further diagnostics are developed to analyse the MJO’s episodic nature and the “MJO inertia” (the tendency to remain in the same WH04 phase from one day to the next). HiGEM favours phases 2, 3, 6 and 7; has too much MJO inertia; and dies out too frequently in phase 3. Recent research has shown that a key feature of the MJO is its interaction with the diurnal cycle over the Maritime Continent. This interaction is present in HiGEM but is unrealistically weak

Detecting failure of climate predictions

The practical consequences of climate change challenge society to formulate responses that are more suited to achieving long-term objectives, even if those responses have to be made in the face of uncertainty. Such a decision-analytic focus uses the products of climate science as probabilistic predictions about the effects of management policies. Here we present methods to detect when climate predictions are failing to capture the system dynamics. For a single model, we measure goodness of fit based on the empirical distribution function, and define failure when the distribution of observed values significantly diverges from the modelled distribution. For a set of models, the same statistic can be used to provide relative weights for the individual models, and we define failure when there is no linear weighting of the ensemble models that produces a satisfactory match to the observations. Early detection of failure of a set of predictions is important for improving model predictions and the decisions based on them. We show that these methods would have detected a range shift in northern pintail 20 years before it was actually discovered, and are increasingly giving more weight to those climate models that forecast a September ice-free Arctic by 2055

The interstellar medium in Andromeda's dwarf spheroidal galaxies: II. Multi-phase gas content and ISM conditions

We make an inventory of the interstellar medium material in three low-metallicity dwarf spheroidal galaxies of the Local Group (NGC147, NGC185 and NGC205). Ancillary Hi, CO, \textit{Spitzer} IRS spectra, H$\alpha$ and X-ray observations are combined to trace the atomic, cold and warm molecular, ionised and hot gas phases. We present new Nobeyama CO(1-0) observations and \textit{Herschel} SPIRE FTS [Ci] observations of NGC205 to revise its molecular gas content. We derive total gas masses of Mg = 1.9-5.5x10$^5$ M$\odot$ for NGC185 and Mg = 8.6-25.0x10^5 M$\odot$ for NGC205. Non-detections combine to an upper limit on the gas mass of Mg =< 0.3-2.2x10^5 M$\odot$ for NGC147. The observed gas reservoirs are significantly lower compared to the expected gas masses based on a simple closed-box model that accounts for the gas mass returned by planetary nebulae and supernovae. The gas-to-dust mass ratios GDR~37-107 and GDR~48-139 are also considerably lower compared to the expected GDR~370 and GDR~520 for the low metal abundances in NGC 185 (0.36 Z$\odot$) and NGC205 (0.25 Z$\odot$), respectively. To simultaneously account for the gas deficiency and low gas-to-dust ratios, we require an efficient removal of a large gas fraction and a longer dust survival time (~1.6 Gyr). We believe that efficient galactic winds (combined with heating of gas to sufficiently high temperatures in order for it to escape from the galaxy) and/or environmental interactions with neighbouring galaxies are responsible for the gas removal from NGC147, NGC185 and NGC205.Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC); Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO-Vlaanderen); BMVIT (Austria); ESA-PRODEX (Belgium); CEA/CNES (France); DLR (Germany); ASI/INAF (Italy); CICYT/ MCYT (Spain); CSA (Canada); NAOC (China); CEA, CNES, CNRS (France); ASI (Italy); MCINN (Spain); SNSB (Sweden); STFC, UKSA (UK); NASA (USA