897 research outputs found
Wind-tunnel free-flight investigation of a supersonic persistence fighter
Wind-tunnel free-flight tests have been conducted in the Langley 30- by 60-Foot Wind Tunnel to examine the high-angle-of-attack stability and control characteristics and control law design of a supersonic persistence fighter (SSPF) at 1 g flight conditions. In addition to conventional control surfaces, the SSPF incorporated deflectable wingtips (tiperons) and pitch and yaw thrust vectoring. A direct eigenstructure assignment technique was used to design control laws to provide good flying characteristics well into the poststall angle-of-attack region. Free-flight tests indicated that it was possible to blend effectively conventional and unconventional control surfaces to achieve good flying characteristics well into the poststall angle-of-attack region
Evaluation of effects caused by differentially spliced Ets-1 transcripts in fibroblasts
The transcription factor Ets-1 is known to be involved in a broad variety of cellular functions such as cell proliferation, migration, invasion, apoptosis and angiogenesis. In nearly all these reports, the full-length Ets-1 (p51) is commonly considered to be the active form and the role of the Ets-1?VII splice variant (p42) has not been addressed. Therefore, we studied the functional effects of p42 Ets-1 in comparison to p51 Ets-1 expression in a well-characterized mouse fibroblast cell line. Furthermore, the specific role of Ets-1 was evaluated using mouse fibroblasts with a reduced Ets-1 expression caused by RNAi and compared to fibroblasts with a binding inhibition of the whole ETS transcription factor family by stably overexpressing the ETS DNA binding domain as transdominant-negative mutant. Our results demonstrate that p42 Ets-1 has quite different functions and target genes compared to p51 Ets-1 (e.g. TIMP-4, MMP-3, MMP-9, MMP-13). In some cases (e.g. in cytokine expression) p42 Ets-1 is a functional transcription factor which acts in the same manner as a transdominant-negative approach
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Dynamic Load and Storage Integration
Modern technology combined with the desire to minimize the size and weight of a ship’s power system are leading to renewed interest in more electric or all electric ships. An important characteristic of the emerging ship power system is an increasing level of load variability, with some future pulsed loads requiring peak power in excess of the available steady– state power. This inevitably leads to the need for some additional energy storage beyond that inherent in the fuel. With the current and evolving technology, it appears that storage will be in the form of batteries, rotating machines, and capacitors. All of these are in use on ships today and all have enjoyed significant technological improvements over the last decade. Moreover all are expected to be further enhanced by today’s materials research. A key benefit of storage is that, when it can be justified for a given load, it can have additional beneficial uses such as ride-through capability to restart a gas turbine if there is an unanticipated power loss; alternatively, storage can be used to stabilize the power grid when switching large loads. Knowing when to stage gas turbine utilization versus energy storage is a key subject in this paper. The clear need for storage has raised the opportunity to design a comprehensive storage system, sometimes called an energy magazine, that can combine intermittent generation as well as any or all of the other storage technologies to provide a smaller, lighter and better performing system than would individual storage solutions for each potential application.Center for Electromechanic
Analysis of High-Throughput Flow Cytometry Data Using plateCore
Flow cytometry (FCM) software packages from R/Bioconductor, such as flowCore and flowViz, serve as an open platform for development of new analysis tools and methods. We created plateCore, a new package that extends the functionality in these core packages to enable automated negative control-based gating and make the processing and analysis of plate-based data sets from high-throughput FCM screening experiments easier. plateCore was used to analyze data from a BD FACS CAP screening experiment where five Peripheral Blood Mononucleocyte Cell (PBMC) samples were assayed for 189 different human cell surface markers. This same data set was also manually analyzed by a cytometry expert using the FlowJo data analysis software package (TreeStar, USA). We show that the expression values for markers characterized using the automated approach in plateCore are in good agreement with those from FlowJo, and that using plateCore allows for more reproducible analyses of FCM screening data
A computational framework to emulate the human perspective in flow cytometric data analysis
Background: In recent years, intense research efforts have focused on developing methods for automated flow cytometric data analysis. However, while designing such applications, little or no attention has been paid to the human perspective that is absolutely central to the manual gating process of identifying and characterizing cell populations. In particular, the assumption of many common techniques that cell populations could be modeled reliably with pre-specified distributions may not hold true in real-life samples, which can have populations of arbitrary shapes and considerable inter-sample variation.
<p/>Results: To address this, we developed a new framework flowScape for emulating certain key aspects of the human perspective in analyzing flow data, which we implemented in multiple steps. First, flowScape begins with creating a mathematically rigorous map of the high-dimensional flow data landscape based on dense and sparse regions defined by relative concentrations of events around modes. In the second step, these modal clusters are connected with a global hierarchical structure. This representation allows flowScape to perform ridgeline analysis for both traversing the landscape and isolating cell populations at different levels of resolution. Finally, we extended manual gating with a new capacity for constructing templates that can identify target populations in terms of their relative parameters, as opposed to the more commonly used absolute or physical parameters. This allows flowScape to apply such templates in batch mode for detecting the corresponding populations in a flexible, sample-specific manner. We also demonstrated different applications of our framework to flow data analysis and show its superiority over other analytical methods.
<p/>Conclusions: The human perspective, built on top of intuition and experience, is a very important component of flow cytometric data analysis. By emulating some of its approaches and extending these with automation and rigor, flowScape provides a flexible and robust framework for computational cytomics
Strong quantum violation of the gravitational weak equivalence principle by a non-Gaussian wave-packet
The weak equivalence principle of gravity is examined at the quantum level in
two ways. First, the position detection probabilities of particles described by
a non-Gaussian wave-packet projected upwards against gravity around the
classical turning point and also around the point of initial projection are
calculated. These probabilities exhibit mass-dependence at both these points,
thereby reflecting the quantum violation of the weak equivalence principle.
Secondly, the mean arrival time of freely falling particles is calculated using
the quantum probability current, which also turns out to be mass dependent.
Such a mass-dependence is shown to be enhanced by increasing the
non-Gaussianity parameter of the wave packet, thus signifying a stronger
violation of the weak equivalence principle through a greater departure from
Gaussianity of the initial wave packet. The mass-dependence of both the
position detection probabilities and the mean arrival time vanish in the limit
of large mass. Thus, compatibility between the weak equivalence principle and
quantum mechanics is recovered in the macroscopic limit of the latter. A
selection of Bohm trajectories is exhibited to illustrate these features in the
free fall case.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
Flow cytometry data standards
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Flow cytometry is a widely used analytical technique for examining microscopic particles, such as cells. The Flow Cytometry Standard (FCS) was developed in 1984 for storing flow data and it is supported by all instrument and third party software vendors. However, FCS does not capture the full scope of flow cytometry (FCM)-related data and metadata, and data standards have recently been developed to address this shortcoming.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>The Data Standards Task Force (DSTF) of the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) has developed several data standards to complement the raw data encoded in FCS files. Efforts started with the Minimum Information about a Flow Cytometry Experiment, a minimal data reporting standard of details necessary to include when publishing FCM experiments to facilitate third party understanding. MIFlowCyt is now being recommended to authors by publishers as part of manuscript submission, and manuscripts are being checked by reviewers and editors for compliance. Gating-ML was then introduced to capture gating descriptions - an essential part of FCM data analysis describing the selection of cell populations of interest. The Classification Results File Format was developed to accommodate results of the gating process, mostly within the context of automated clustering. Additionally, the Archival Cytometry Standard bundles data with all the other components describing experiments. Here, we introduce these recent standards and provide the very first example of how they can be used to report FCM data including analysis and results in a standardized, computationally exchangeable form.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Reporting standards and open file formats are essential for scientific collaboration and independent validation. The recently developed FCM data standards are now being incorporated into third party software tools and data repositories, which will ultimately facilitate understanding and data reuse.</p
Schroedinger equation for joint bidirectional motion in time
The conventional, time-dependent Schroedinger equation describes only
unidirectional time evolution of the state of a physical system, i.e., forward
or, less commonly, backward. This paper proposes a generalized quantum dynamics
for the description of joint, and interactive, forward and backward time
evolution within a physical system. [...] Three applications are studied: (1) a
formal theory of collisions in terms of perturbation theory; (2) a
relativistically invariant quantum field theory for a system that kinematically
comprises the direct sum of two quantized real scalar fields, such that one
field evolves forward and the other backward in time, and such that there is
dynamical coupling between the subfields; (3) an argument that in the latter
field theory, the dynamics predicts that in a range of values of the coupling
constants, the expectation value of the vacuum energy of the universe is forced
to be zero to high accuracy. [...]Comment: 30 pages, no figures. Related material is in quant-ph/0404012.
Differs from published version by a few added remarks on the possibility of a
large-scale-average negative energy density in spac
Pseudo-Hermitian Hamiltonians, indefinite inner product spaces and their symmetries
We extend the definition of generalized parity , charge-conjugation
and time-reversal operators to nondiagonalizable pseudo-Hermitian
Hamiltonians, and we use these generalized operators to describe the full set
of symmetries of a pseudo-Hermitian Hamiltonian according to a fourfold
classification. In particular we show that and are the generators of
the antiunitary symmetries; moreover, a necessary and sufficient condition is
provided for a pseudo-Hermitian Hamiltonian to admit a -reflecting
symmetry which generates the -pseudounitary and the -pseudoantiunitary
symmetries. Finally, a physical example is considered and some hints on the
-unitary evolution of a physical system are also given.Comment: 20 page
flowCore: a Bioconductor package for high throughput flow cytometry
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent advances in automation technologies have enabled the use of flow cytometry for high throughput screening, generating large complex data sets often in clinical trials or drug discovery settings. However, data management and data analysis methods have not advanced sufficiently far from the initial small-scale studies to support modeling in the presence of multiple covariates.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We developed a set of flexible open source computational tools in the R package flowCore to facilitate the analysis of these complex data. A key component of which is having suitable data structures that support the application of similar operations to a collection of samples or a clinical cohort. In addition, our software constitutes a shared and extensible research platform that enables collaboration between bioinformaticians, computer scientists, statisticians, biologists and clinicians. This platform will foster the development of novel analytic methods for flow cytometry.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The software has been applied in the analysis of various data sets and its data structures have proven to be highly efficient in capturing and organizing the analytic work flow. Finally, a number of additional Bioconductor packages successfully build on the infrastructure provided by flowCore, open new avenues for flow data analysis.</p
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