On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to The United States Court of Appeals for The Eighth Circuit, Brief of Law Professors Paul F. Rothstein, et. al., Office of the President v. Office of Independent Counsel

This Court should grant review not only because this is a case of national importance and prominence, but also because the decision below is a conspicuous departure from settled principles of evidence law. The panel majority concluded that communications between government lawyers and government officials are not protected by the attorney-client privilege, at least when those communications are sought by a federal grand jury. That conclusion conflicts with the predominant common-law understanding that the attorney-client privilege applies to government entities and that where the privilege applies, it is absolute (i.e., it protects against disclosure in all types of legal and investigative proceedings). In particular, the Court of Appeals\u27 decision rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of this Court\u27s decisions in Upjohn Co. v. United States, 449 U.S. 383 (1981), and United States v. Nixon, 418 U.s. 683 (1974). Moreover, this case warrants further review because the decision below has profound implications beyond the parties to this dispute. The Court of Appeals\u27 ruling, if allowed to stand, will create widespread uncertainty among federal, state, and local officials concerning the extent to which their communications with their agency lawyers, for the purpose of seeking legal advice in the conduct of governmental affairs, are protected by the attorney-client privilege. Unless this Court grants review and resolves this uncertainty, the decision below will likely have an adverse effect on the current and future operation of not only the Office of the President of the United States, but also government at all levels. At the very least, a decision of such vast implications (as in the present case) should be made by the highest court in the land. We accordingly urge the Court to grant the petition for review

Epigenomic Alterations in Localized and Advanced Prostate Cancer

AbstractAlthough prostate cancer (PCa) is the second leading cause of cancer death among men worldwide, not all men diagnosed with PCa will die from the disease. A critical challenge, therefore, is to distinguish indolent PCa from more advanced forms to guide appropriate treatment decisions. We used Enhanced Reduced Representation Bisulfite Sequencing, a genome-wide high-coverage single-base resolution DNA methylation method to profile seven localized PCa samples, seven matched benign prostate tissues, and six aggressive castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) samples. We integrated these data with RNA-seq and whole-genome DNA-seq data to comprehensively characterize the PCa methylome, detect changes associated with disease progression, and identify novel candidate prognostic biomarkers. Our analyses revealed the correlation of cytosine guanine dinucleotide island (CGI)-specific hypermethylation with disease severity and association of certain breakpoints (deletion, tandem duplications, and interchromosomal translocations) with DNA methylation. Furthermore, integrative analysis of methylation and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) uncovered widespread allele-specific methylation (ASM) for the first time in PCa. We found that most DNA methylation changes occurred in the context of ASM, suggesting that variations in tumor epigenetic landscape of individuals are partly mediated by genetic differences, which may affect PCa disease progression. We further selected a panel of 13 CGIs demonstrating increased DNA methylation with disease progression and validated this panel in an independent cohort of 20 benign prostate tissues, 16 PCa, and 8 aggressive CRPCs. These results warrant clinical evaluation in larger cohorts to help distinguish indolent PCa from advanced disease

Experimental demonstration of an optical differentiator based on a fiber Bragg grating in transmission

We report the first experimental demonstration of single transmissive fiber Bragg grating implementation of a first-order optical differentiation. The device has been designed and fabricated, and the experimental results show a good performance over an operational bandwidth of ∼2 nm

Further properties of causal relationship: causal structure stability, new criteria for isocausality and counterexamples

Recently ({\em Class. Quant. Grav.} {\bf 20} 625-664) the concept of {\em causal mapping} between spacetimes --essentially equivalent in this context to the {\em chronological map} one in abstract chronological spaces--, and the related notion of {\em causal structure}, have been introduced as new tools to study causality in Lorentzian geometry. In the present paper, these tools are further developed in several directions such as: (i) causal mappings --and, thus, abstract chronological ones-- do not preserve two levels of the standard hierarchy of causality conditions (however, they preserve the remaining levels as shown in the above reference), (ii) even though global hyperbolicity is a stable property (in the set of all time-oriented Lorentzian metrics on a fixed manifold), the causal structure of a globally hyperbolic spacetime can be unstable against perturbations; in fact, we show that the causal structures of Minkowski and Einstein static spacetimes remain stable, whereas that of de Sitter becomes unstable, (iii) general criteria allow us to discriminate different causal structures in some general spacetimes (e.g. globally hyperbolic, stationary standard); in particular, there are infinitely many different globally hyperbolic causal structures (and thus, different conformal ones) on $\R^2$, (iv) plane waves with the same number of positive eigenvalues in the frequency matrix share the same causal structure and, thus, they have equal causal extensions and causal boundaries.Comment: 33 pages, 9 figures, final version (the paper title has been changed). To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Thermal width and gluo-dissociation of quarkonium in pNRQCD

The thermal width of heavy-quarkonium bound states in a quark-gluon plasma has been recently derived in an effective field theory approach. Two phenomena contribute to the width: the Landau damping phenomenon and the break-up of a colour-singlet bound state into a colour-octet heavy quark-antiquark pair by absorption of a thermal gluon. In the paper, we investigate the relation between the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up and the so-called gluo-dissociation, a mechanism for quarkonium dissociation widely used in phenomenological approaches. The gluo-dissociation thermal width is obtained by convoluting the gluon thermal distribution with the cross section of a gluon and a 1S quarkonium state to a colour octet quark-antiquark state in vacuum, a cross section that at leading order, but neglecting colour-octet effects, was computed long ago by Bhanot and Peskin. We will, first, show that the effective field theory framework provides a natural derivation of the gluo-dissociation factorization formula at leading order, which is, indeed, the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up expression. Second, the singlet-to-octet thermal break-up expression will allow us to improve the Bhanot--Peskin cross section by including the contribution of the octet potential, which amounts to include final-state interactions between the heavy quark and antiquark. Finally, we will quantify the effects due to final-state interactions on the gluo-dissociation cross section and on the quarkonium thermal width.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Interface Depinning in the Absence of External Driving Force

We study the pinning-depinning phase transition of interfaces in the quenched Kardar-Parisi-Zhang model as the external driving force $F$ goes towards zero. For a fixed value of the driving force we induce depinning by increasing the nonlinear term coefficient $\lambda$, which is related to lateral growth, up to a critical threshold. We focus on the case in which there is no external force applied (F=0) and find that, contrary to a simple scaling prediction, there is a finite value of $\lambda$ that makes the interface to become depinned. The critical exponents at the transition are consistent with directed percolation depinning. Our results are relevant for paper wetting experiments, in which an interface gets moving with no external driving force.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures included, uses epsf. Submitted to PR

Tear fluid biomarkers in ocular and systemic disease: potential use for predictive, preventive and personalised medicine

In the field of predictive, preventive and personalised medicine, researchers are keen to identify novel and reliable ways to predict and diagnose disease, as well as to monitor patient response to therapeutic agents. In the last decade alone, the sensitivity of profiling technologies has undergone huge improvements in detection sensitivity, thus allowing quantification of minute samples, for example body fluids that were previously difficult to assay. As a consequence, there has been a huge increase in tear fluid investigation, predominantly in the field of ocular surface disease. As tears are a more accessible and less complex body fluid (than serum or plasma) and sampling is much less invasive, research is starting to focus on how disease processes affect the proteomic, lipidomic and metabolomic composition of the tear film. By determining compositional changes to tear profiles, crucial pathways in disease progression may be identified, allowing for more predictive and personalised therapy of the individual. This article will provide an overview of the various putative tear fluid biomarkers that have been identified to date, ranging from ocular surface disease and retinopathies to cancer and multiple sclerosis. Putative tear fluid biomarkers of ocular disorders, as well as the more recent field of systemic disease biomarkers, will be shown

Horizontal Gene Acquisitions, Mobile Element Proliferation, and Genome Decay in the Host-Restricted Plant Pathogen \u3ci\u3eErwinia Tracheiphila\u3c/i\u3e

Modern industrial agriculture depends on high-density cultivation of genetically similar crop plants, creating favorable conditions for the emergence of novel pathogens with increased fitness in managed compared with ecologically intact settings. Here, we present the genome sequence of six strains of the cucurbit bacterial wilt pathogen Erwinia tracheiphila (Enterobacteriaceae) isolated from infected squash plants in New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Michigan. These genomes exhibit a high proportion of recent horizontal gene acquisitions, invasion and remarkable amplification of mobile genetic elements, and pseudogenization of approximately 20% of the coding sequences. These genome attributes indicate that E. tracheiphila recently emerged as a host-restricted pathogen. Furthermore, chromosomal rearrangements associated with phage and transposable element proliferation contribute to substantial differences in gene content and genetic architecture between the six E. tracheiphila strains and other Erwinia species. Together, these data lead us to hypothesize that E. tracheiphila has undergone recent evolution through both genome decay (pseudogenization) and genome expansion (horizontal gene transfer and mobile element amplification). Despite evidence of dramatic genomic changes, the six strains are genetically monomorphic, suggesting a recent population bottleneck and emergence into E. tracheiphila’s current ecological niche

Impacts of Bar-driven Shear and Shocks on Star Formation

Bars drive gas inflow. As the gas flows inward, shocks and shear occur along the bar dust lanes. Such shocks and shear can affect the star formation (SF) and change the gas properties. For four barred galaxies, we present Hα velocity gradient maps that highlight bar-driven shocks and shear using data from the PHANGS-MUSE and PHANGS-ALMA surveys, which allow us to study bar kinematics in unprecedented detail. Velocity gradients are enhanced along the bar dust lanes, where shocks and shear are shown to occur in numerical simulations. Velocity gradient maps also efficiently pick up H ii regions that are expanding or moving relative to the surroundings. We put pseudo-slits on the regions where velocity gradients are enhanced and find that Hα and CO velocities jump up to ∼170 km s−1, even after removing the effects of circular motions due to the galaxy rotation. Enhanced velocity gradients either coincide with the peak of CO intensity along the bar dust lanes or are slightly offset from CO intensity peaks, depending on the objects. Using the Baldwin–Philips–Terlevich BPT diagnostic, we identify the source of ionization on each spaxel and find that SF is inhibited in the high-velocity gradient regions of the bar, and the majority of those regions are classified as a low-ionization nuclear emission-line region (LINER) or composite. This implies that SF is inhibited where bar-driven shear and shocks are strong. Our results are consistent with the results from the numerical simulations that show SF is inhibited in the bar where the shear force is strong