A Compact Degenerate Primary-Star Progenitor of SN 2011fe

While a white dwarf is, from a theoretical perspective, the most plausible primary star in Type Ia supernova (SN Ia), many other candidates have not been formally ruled out. Shock energy deposited in the envelope of any exploding primary contributes to the early SN brightness and, since this radiation energy is degraded by expansion after the explosion, the diffusive luminosity depends on the initial primary radius. We present a new non-detection limit of the nearby SN Ia 2011fe, obtained what appears to be just 4 hours after explosion, allowing us to directly constrain the initial primary radius, R_p. Coupled with the non-detection of a quiescent X-ray counterpart and the inferred synthesized Ni mass, we show that R_p <~ 0.02 R_sun (a factor of 5 smaller than previously inferred), that the average density of the primary must be rho_p > 10,000 gm cm^{-3}, and that the effective temperature must be less than a few x 10^5 K. This rules out hydrogen burning main sequence stars and giants. Constructing the helium-burning main sequence and carbon-burning main sequence, we find such objects are also excluded. By process of elimination, we find that only degeneracy-supported compact objects---WDs and neutron stars---are viable as the primary star of SN 2011fe. With few caveats, we also restrict the companion (secondary) star radius to R_ c <~ 0.1 R_sun, excluding Roche-Lobe overflowing red giant and main-sequence companions to high significance.Comment: Submitted to ApJ Letters (17 October 2011). 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Construction of a dairy microbial genome catalog opens new perspectives for the metagenomic analysis of dairy fermented products

Microbial communities of traditional cheeses are complex and insufficiently characterized. The origin, safety and functional role in cheese making of these microbial communities are still not well understood. Metagenomic analysis of these communities by high throughput shotgun sequencing is a promising approach to characterize their genomic and functional profiles. Such analyses, however, critically depend on the availability of appropriate reference genome databases against which the sequencing reads can be aligned. We built a reference genome catalog suitable for short read metagenomic analysis using a low-cost sequencing strategy. We selected 142 bacteria isolated from dairy products belonging to 137 different species and 67 genera, and succeeded to reconstruct the draft genome of 117 of them at a standard or high quality level, including isolates from the genera Kluyvera, Luteococcus and Marinilactibacillus, still missing from public database. To demonstrate the potential of this catalog, we analysed the microbial composition of the surface of two smear cheeses and one blue-veined cheese, and showed that a significant part of the microbiota of these traditional cheeses was composed of microorganisms newly sequenced in our study. Our study provides data, which combined with publicly available genome references, represents the most expansive catalog to date of cheese-associated bacteria. Using this extended dairy catalog, we revealed the presence in traditional cheese of dominant microorganisms not deliberately inoculated, mainly Gram-negative genera such as Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis or Psychrobacter immobilis, that may contribute to the characteristics of cheese produced through traditional methods.https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2164-15-110

Ultrasonic partial glossectomy

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Empirical Phi-Discrepancies and Quasi-Empirical Likelihood: Exponential Bounds

We review some recent extensions of the so-called generalized empirical likelihood method, when the Kullback distance is replaced by some general convex divergence. We propose to use, instead of empirical likelihood, some regularized form or quasi-empirical likelihood method, corresponding to a convex combination of Kullback and χ2 discrepancies. We show that for some adequate choice of the weight in this combination, the corresponding quasi-empirical likelihood is Bartlett-correctable. We also establish some non-asymptotic exponential bounds for the confidence regions obtained by using this method. These bounds are derived via bounds for self-normalized sums in the multivariate case obtained in a previous work by the authors. We also show that this kind of results may be extended to process valued infinite dimensional parameters. In this case some known results about self-normalized processes may be used to control the behavior of generalized empirical likelihood

Bulk neutrinos and core collapse supernovae

We discuss the phenomenology of neutrino mixing with bulk fermions in the context of supernova physics. The constraints on the parameter space following from the usual energy loss argument can be relaxed by four orders of magnitude due to a feedback mechanism that takes place in a broad region of the parameter space. Such a mechanism also affects the protoneutron star evolution through a non trivial interplay with neutrino diffusion. The consistency with the SN 1987A signal is discussed, as well as the implications for deleptonization, cooling, composition of the neutrino flux and the delayed explosion scenario.Comment: 23 pages, 5 eps figures; v2: minor comments and references added, version to appear on Phys.Rev.

Monitoring Black Sea environmental changes from space: New products for altimetry, ocean colour and salinity. Potentialities and requirements for a dedicated in-situ observing system

21 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables, supplementary material https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.998970/full#supplementary-material.-- Data availability statement: The datasets generated for this study can be found on the web interface (http://www.eo4sibs.uliege.be/) and on Zenodo under data doi: 10.5281/zenodo.6397223 with a full documentation that include Products User Manuals (PUM) and Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD). All these products are distributed in netCDF files Grégoire et al. (2022). SMOS SSS and CDM products are also available at https://bec.icm.csic.es/bec-ftp-service/In this paper, satellite products developed during the Earth Observation for Science and Innovation in the Black Sea (EO4SIBS) ESA project are presented. Ocean colour, sea level anomaly and sea surface salinity datasets are produced for the last decade and validated with regional in-situ observations. New data processing is tested to appropriately tackle the Black Sea’s particular configuration and geophysical characteristics. For altimetry, the full rate (20Hz) altimeter measurements from Cryosat-2 and Sentinel-3A are processed to deliver a 5Hz along-track product. This product is combined with existing 1Hz product to produce gridded datasets for the sea level anomaly, mean dynamic topography, geostrophic currents. This new set of altimetry gridded products offers a better definition of the main Black Sea current, a more accurate reconstruction and characterization of eddies structure, in particular, in coastal areas, and improves the observable wavelength by a factor of 1.6. The EO4SIBS sea surface salinity from SMOS is the first satellite product for salinity in the Black Sea. Specific data treatments are applied to remedy the issue of land-sea and radio frequency interference contamination and to adapt the dielectric constant model to the low salinity and cold waters of the Black Sea. The quality of the SMOS products is assessed and shows a significant improvement from Level-2 to Level -3 and Level-4 products. Level-4 products accuracy is 0.4-0.6 psu, a comparable value to that in the Mediterranean Sea. On average SMOS sea surface salinity is lower than salinity measured by Argo floats, with a larger error in the eastern basin. The adequacy of SMOS SSS to reproduce the spatial characteristics of the Black Sea surface salinity and, in particular, plume patterns is analyzed. For ocean colour, chlorophyll-a, turbidity and suspended particulate materials are proposed using regional calibrated algorithms and satellite data provided by OLCI sensor onboard Sentinel-3 mission. The seasonal cycle of ocean colour products is described and a water classification scheme is proposed. The development of these three types of products has suffered from important in-situ data gaps that hinder a sound calibration of the algorithms and a proper assessment of the datasets quality. We propose recommendations for improving the in-situ observing system that will support the development of satellite productsThis work has been carried out as part of the European Space Agency contract Earth Observation data For Science and Innovations in the Black Sea (EO4SIBS, ESA contract n° 4000127237/19/I-EF). MG received fundings from the Copernicus Marine Service (CMEMS), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 BRIDGE-BS project under grant agreement No. 101000240 and by the Project CE2COAST funded by ANR(FR), BELSPO (BE), FCT (PT), IZM (LV), MI (IE), MIUR (IT), Rannis (IS), and RCN (NO) through the 2019 “Joint Transnational Call on Next Generation Climate Science in Europe for Oceans” initiated by JPI Climate and JPI Oceans. The research on SMOS SSS has been also supported in part by the Spanish R&D project INTERACT (PID2020-114623RB-C31), which is funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, funding from the Spanish government through the “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence” accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S) and the CSIC Thematic Interdisciplinary Platform TeledetectPeer reviewe

A global multinational survey of cefotaxime-resistant coliforms in urban wastewater treatment plants

The World Health Organization Global Action Plan recommends integrated surveillance programs as crucial strategies for monitoring antibiotic resistance. Although several national surveillance programs are in place for clinical and veterinary settings, no such schemes exist for monitoring antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the environment. In this transnational study, we developed, validated, and tested a low-cost surveillance and easy to implement approach to evaluate antibiotic resistance in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) by targeting cefotaxime-resistant (CTX-R) coliforms as indicators. The rationale for this approach was: i) coliform quantification methods are internationally accepted as indicators of fecal contamination in recreational waters and are therefore routinely applied in analytical labs; ii) CTX-R coliforms are clinically relevant, associated with extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs), and are rare in pristine environments. We analyzed 57 WWTPs in 22 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America. CTX-R coliforms were ubiquitous in raw sewage and their relative abundance varied significantly (<0.1% to 38.3%), being positively correlated (p < 0.001) with regional atmospheric temperatures. Although most WWTPs removed large proportions of CTX-R coliforms, loads over 10 colony-forming units per mL were occasionally observed in final effluents. We demonstrate that CTX-R coliform monitoring is a feasible and affordable approach to assess wastewater antibiotic resistance status. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

A global multinational survey of cefotaxime-resistant coliforms in urban wastewater treatment plants

The World Health Organization Global Action Plan recommends integrated surveillance programs as crucial strategies for monitoring antibiotic resistance. Although several national surveillance programs are in place for clinical and veterinary settings, no such schemes exist for monitoring antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the environment. In this transnational study, we developed, validated, and tested a low-cost surveillance and easy to implement approach to evaluate antibiotic resistance in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) by targeting cefotaxime-resistant (CTX-R) coliforms as indicators. The rationale for this approach was: i) coliform quantification methods are internationally accepted as indicators of fecal contamination in recreational waters and are therefore routinely applied in analytical labs; ii) CTX-R coliforms are clinically relevant, associated with extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs), and are rare in pristine environments. We analyzed 57 WWTPs in 22 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America. CTX-R coliforms were ubiquitous in raw sewage and their relative abundance varied significantly (&lt;0.1% to 38.3%), being positively correlated (p &lt; 0.001) with regional atmospheric temperatures. Although most WWTPs removed large proportions of CTX-R coliforms, loads over 103 colony-forming units per mL were occasionally observed in final effluents. We demonstrate that CTX-R coliform monitoring is a feasible and affordable approach to assess wastewater antibiotic resistance status

A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

Meeting abstrac

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe