A compilation of known QSOs for the Gaia mission

Quasars are essential for astrometric in the sense that they are spatial stationary because of their large distance from the Sun. The European Space Agency (ESA) space astrometric satellite Gaia is scanning the whole sky with unprecedented accuracy up to a few muas level. However, Gaia's two fields of view observations strategy may introduce a parallax bias in the Gaia catalog. Since it presents no significant parallax, quasar is perfect nature object to detect such bias. More importantly, quasars can be used to construct a Celestial Reference Frame in the optical wavelengths in Gaia mission. In this paper, we compile the most reliable quasars existing in literatures. The final compilation (designated as Known Quasars Catalog for Gaia mission, KQCG) contains 1843850 objects, among of them, 797632 objects are found in Gaia DR1 after cross-identifications. This catalog will be very useful in Gaia mission

RNAa-mediated overexpression of WT1 induces apoptosis in HepG2 cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Aim</p> <p>Recent studies have reported that double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) can activate gene expression by targeting promoter sequence in a process termed RNA activation. The present study was conducted to evaluate the potential of WT1 induction by small activating RNA targeting the WT1 promoter (dsWT1) in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The human hepatocellular carcinoma cell line HepG2 was transfected with dsRNA by liposomes. The expression of mRNA and protein in cells were investigated using real-time reverse real-time quantitative PCR and Western blot, respectively. Cell viability and clonogenicity were determined by MTT assay and clonogenicity assay, respectively. Cell apoptosis was evaluated by flow-cytometric analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Expressions of WT1 mRNA and protein in dsWT1 treated HepG2 cells were significantly elevated. Inhibition of cell viability by dsWT1 was dose-dependent and time-dependent. Reduction of the number and size of colonies formed were found in dsWT1 treated cells. dsWT1 induced significant apoptosis in HepG2 cells. The decreased anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-2 and elevated pro-apoptotic protein Bak expression were detected in dsWT1 treated cells. The level of pro-caspase-3 remarkably decreased and cleaved caspase-3 and PARP fragment were also detected in dsWT1 treated cells.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These data show that RNAa-mediated overexpression of WT1 may have therapeutic potential in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma.</p

A differential ML combiner for differential amplify-and-forward system in time-selective fading channels

We propose a new differential maximum-likelihood (DML) combiner for noncoherent detection of the differential amplify-and-forward (D-AF) relaying system in the time-selective channel. The weights are computed based on both the average channel quality and the correlation coefficient of the direct and relay channels. Moreover, we derive a closed-form approximate expression for the average bit error rate (BER), which is applicable to any single-relay D-AF system with fixed weights. Both theoretical and simulated results are presented to show that the time-selective nature of the underlying channels tends to reduce the diversity gains at the low-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) region, resulting in an asymptotic BER floor at the high-SNR region. Moreover, the proposed DML combiner is capable of providing significant BER improvements compared with the conventional differential detection (CDD) and selection-combining (SC) schemes

Entropy and Its Quantum Thermodynamical Implication for Anomalous Spectral Systems

The state function entropy and its quantum thermodynamical implication for two typical dissipative systems with anomalous spectral densities are studied by investigating on their low-temperature quantum behavior. In all cases it is found that the entropy decays quickly and vanishes as the temperature approaches zero. This reveals a good conformity with the third law of thermodynamics and provides another evidence for the validity of fundamental thermodynamical laws in the quantum dissipative region.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure