Uranus's and Neptune’s stratospheric water abundance and vertical profile from Herschel-HIFI

Here we present new constraints on Uranus’s and Neptune’s externally sourced stratospheric water abundance using disk-averaged observations of the 557 GHz emission line from Herschel’s Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared. Derived stratospheric column water abundances are × 1014 cm−2 for Uranus and ×1014 cm−2 for Neptune, consistent with previous determinations using ISO-SWS and Herschel-PACS. For Uranus, excellent observational fits are obtained by scaling photochemical model profiles or with step-type profiles with water vapor limited to ≤0.6 mbar. However, Uranus’s cold stratospheric temperatures imply a ∼0.03 mbar condensation level, which further limits water vapor to pressures ≤0.03 mbar. Neptune’s warmer stratosphere has a deeper ∼1 mbar condensation level, so emission-line pressure broadening can be used to further constrain the water profile. For Neptune, excellent fits are obtained using step-type profiles with cutoffs of ∼0.3–0.6 mbar or by scaling a photochemical model profile. Step-type profiles with cutoffs ≥1.0 mbar or ≤0.1 mbar can be rejected with 4σ significance. Rescaling photochemical model profiles from Moses & Poppe to match our observed column abundances implies similar external water fluxes for both planets: × 104 cm−2 s−1 for Uranus and ×104 cm−2 s−1 for Neptune. This suggests that Neptune’s ∼4 times greater observed water column abundance is primarily caused by its warmer stratosphere preventing loss by condensation, rather than by a significantly more intense external source. To reconcile these water fluxes with other stratospheric oxygen species (CO and CO2) requires either a significant CO component in interplanetary dust particles (Uranus) or contributions from cometary impacts (Uranus, Neptune

Anti-hyperglycemic effects of aqueous Lenzites betulina extracts from the Philippines on the blood glucose levels of the ICR mice (Mus musculus)

AbstractObjectiveTo examine the anti-hyperglycemic effects of aqueous Lenzites betulina (L. betulina) extracts on normoglycemic glucose-loaded mice.MethodsDifferent doses of aqueous extract from L. betulina were administered to 45 ICR mice (Mus musculus) to determine whether there was an effect of L. betulina extracts on the blood glucose level of the ICR mice. Aqueous extracts of L. betulina were orally gavaged to mice using oral glucose tolerance test. A total of five groups were used to determine the effect of the fungi on blood glucose of the mice. Group A (positive control) was given 16.7 μg/kg glimepiride; Group B (negative control) was given distilled water; Group C (low dosage) was given 200 mg/kg aqueous extract; Group D (mid dosage) was given 400 mg/kg aqueous extract and Group E (high dosage) was given 800 mg/kg aqueous extract. Baseline blood glucose value was firstly acquired before induction of hyperglycemia through d-glucose, after which another check on blood glucose was made after 0.5 h. Immediately, after the acquisition of hyperglycemic blood glucose level, the individual administration of treatments were done. After that, three blood collections were done spanning 3 h with 1 h interval.ResultsThe low dose (200 mg/kg) and the mid dose (400 mg/kg) of L. betulina extracts were significantly different (P < 0.05) from their respective baseline values throughout the whole experiment with the latter surpassing its baseline value during the 3rd hour. On the other hand, the high dose (800 mg/kg) during the 1st hour after administration was not significantly different (P > 0.05) from its corresponding baseline value, acting faster than the positive control (glimepiride), which only became significantly different (P < 0.05) at the 2nd hour.ConclusionsAqueous L. betulina extract is able to produce hypoglycemic effects on the mice with all doses, which are able to normalize blood glucose levels at varying times

Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching

This paper presents a robotic pick-and-place system that is capable of grasping and recognizing both known and novel objects in cluttered environments. The key new feature of the system is that it handles a wide range of object categories without needing any task-specific training data for novel objects. To achieve this, it first uses a category-agnostic affordance prediction algorithm to select and execute among four different grasping primitive behaviors. It then recognizes picked objects with a cross-domain image classification framework that matches observed images to product images. Since product images are readily available for a wide range of objects (e.g., from the web), the system works out-of-the-box for novel objects without requiring any additional training data. Exhaustive experimental results demonstrate that our multi-affordance grasping achieves high success rates for a wide variety of objects in clutter, and our recognition algorithm achieves high accuracy for both known and novel grasped objects. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 1st place in the stowing task at the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. All code, datasets, and pre-trained models are available online at http://arc.cs.princeton.eduComment: Project webpage: http://arc.cs.princeton.edu Summary video: https://youtu.be/6fG7zwGfIk

Public Health Liberation – An Emerging Transdiscipline to Elucidate and Transform the Public Health Economy

Public Health Liberation (PHL) is an innovative general theory of public health aimed at accelerating health equity. This paper provides a rich synthesis of philosophical traditions, novel theories, and approaches to establish the basis for a new public health transdiscipline. The authors argue that the public health economy as a single analytic lens elucidates the contradictions and tensions that reproduce vast health inequity. Authored by a majority of Black women, community experiences and perspectives are a major strength of this paper because they draw upon leadership experiences with contemporary issues. The authors begin by describing their background in public health advocacy and by demonstrating the need for PHL using lead-contaminated water crises from Flint, Michigan and Washington, DC. They discuss the benefits of horizontal and vertical integration that broaden public health discourse to include affected populations and that seek opportunities throughout the public health economy. Their philosophical and theoretical reasoning reinterprets and adopts disciplinary concepts in political theory, sociology, women\u27s studies, African American emancipatory writing, anti-racism, and community psychology to form a culturally relevant worldview and cogent thesis. Several new constructs emerge that do not appear elsewhere in the literature - Gaze of the Enslaved, Morality Principle, liberation, illiberation, liberation safe spaces, public health realism, and hegemony. The authors use their ethical and theoretical assumptions to guide practice and community self-help. Public Health Liberation presents a major challenge to assumptions about public health effectiveness in addressing vast health inequity

The Origin of Titan’s External Oxygen:Further Constraints from ALMA Upper Limits on CS and CH₂NH

Titan's atmospheric inventory of oxygen compounds (H2O, CO2, CO) are thought to result from photochemistry acting on externally supplied oxygen species (O+, OH, H2O). These species potentially originate from two main sources: (1) cryogenic plumes from the active moon Enceladus and (2) micrometeoroid ablation. Enceladus is already suspected to be the major O+ source, which is required for CO creation. However, photochemical models also require H2O and OH influx to reproduce observed quantities of CO2 and H2O. Here, we exploit sulphur as a tracer to investigate the oxygen source because it has very different relative abundances in micrometeorites (S/O ~ 10−2) and Enceladus' plumes (S/O ~ 10−5). Photochemical models predict most sulphur is converted to CS in the upper atmosphere, so we use Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations at ~340 GHz to search for CS emission. We determined stringent CS 3σ stratospheric upper limits of 0.0074 ppb (uniform above 100 km) and 0.0256 ppb (uniform above 200 km). These upper limits are not quite stringent enough to distinguish between Enceladus and micrometeorite sources at the 3σ level and a contribution from micrometeorites cannot be ruled out, especially if external flux is toward the lower end of current estimates. Only the high-flux micrometeorite source model of Hickson et al. can be rejected at 3σ. We determined a 3σ stratospheric upper limit for CH2NH of 0.35 ppb, which suggests cosmic rays may have a smaller influence in the lower stratosphere than predicted by some photochemical models. Disk-averaged C3H4 and C2H5CN profiles were determined and are consistent with previous ALMA and Cassini/CIRS measurements

The ocean sampling day consortium

Ocean Sampling Day was initiated by the EU-funded Micro B3 (Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology) project to obtain a snapshot of the marine microbial biodiversity and function of the world’s oceans. It is a simultaneous global mega-sequencing campaign aiming to generate the largest standardized microbial data set in a single day. This will be achievable only through the coordinated efforts of an Ocean Sampling Day Consortium, supportive partnerships and networks between sites. This commentary outlines the establishment, function and aims of the Consortium and describes our vision for a sustainable study of marine microbial communities and their embedded functional traits

CovR-Controlled Global Regulation of Gene Expression in Streptococcus mutans

CovR/S is a two-component signal transduction system (TCS) that controls the expression of various virulence related genes in many streptococci. However, in the dental pathogen Streptococcus mutans, the response regulator CovR appears to be an orphan since the cognate sensor kinase CovS is absent. In this study, we explored the global transcriptional regulation by CovR in S. mutans. Comparison of the transcriptome profiles of the wild-type strain UA159 with its isogenic covR deleted strain IBS10 indicated that at least 128 genes (∼6.5% of the genome) were differentially regulated. Among these genes, 69 were down regulated, while 59 were up regulated in the IBS10 strain. The S. mutans CovR regulon included competence genes, virulence related genes, and genes encoded within two genomic islands (GI). Genes encoded by the GI TnSmu2 were found to be dramatically reduced in IBS10, while genes encoded by the GI TnSmu1 were up regulated in the mutant. The microarray data were further confirmed by real-time RT-PCR analyses. Furthermore, direct regulation of some of the differentially expressed genes was demonstrated by electrophoretic mobility shift assays using purified CovR protein. A proteomic study was also carried out that showed a general perturbation of protein expression in the mutant strain. Our results indicate that CovR truly plays a significant role in the regulation of several virulence related traits in this pathogenic streptococcus

The Evolutionary Dynamics of the Lion Panthera leo Revealed by Host and Viral Population Genomics

The lion Panthera leo is one of the world's most charismatic carnivores and is one of Africa's key predators. Here, we used a large dataset from 357 lions comprehending 1.13 megabases of sequence data and genotypes from 22 microsatellite loci to characterize its recent evolutionary history. Patterns of molecular genetic variation in multiple maternal (mtDNA), paternal (Y-chromosome), and biparental nuclear (nDNA) genetic markers were compared with patterns of sequence and subtype variation of the lion feline immunodeficiency virus (FIVPle), a lentivirus analogous to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In spite of the ability of lions to disperse long distances, patterns of lion genetic diversity suggest substantial population subdivision (mtDNA ΦST = 0.92; nDNA FST = 0.18), and reduced gene flow, which, along with large differences in sero-prevalence of six distinct FIVPle subtypes among lion populations, refute the hypothesis that African lions consist of a single panmictic population. Our results suggest that extant lion populations derive from several Pleistocene refugia in East and Southern Africa (∼324,000–169,000 years ago), which expanded during the Late Pleistocene (∼100,000 years ago) into Central and North Africa and into Asia. During the Pleistocene/Holocene transition (∼14,000–7,000 years), another expansion occurred from southern refugia northwards towards East Africa, causing population interbreeding. In particular, lion and FIVPle variation affirms that the large, well-studied lion population occupying the greater Serengeti Ecosystem is derived from three distinct populations that admixed recently

Erratum to: Methods for evaluating medical tests and biomarkers

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s41512-016-0001-y.]

The Ocean Sampling Day Consortium

Ocean Sampling Day was initiated by the EU-funded Micro B3 (Marine Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology) project to obtain a snapshot of the marine microbial biodiversity and function of the world’s oceans. It is a simultaneous global mega-sequencing campaign aiming to generate the largest standardized microbial data set in a single day. This will be achievable only through the coordinated efforts of an Ocean Sampling Day Consortium, supportive partnerships and networks between sites. This commentary outlines the establishment, function and aims of the Consortium and describes our vision for a sustainable study of marine microbial communities and their embedded functional traits