Quasar-galaxy associations

There is controversy about the measurement of statistical associations between bright quasars and faint, presumably foreground galaxies. We look at the distribution of galaxies around an unbiased sample of 63 bright, moderate redshift quasars using a new statistic based on the separation of the quasar and its nearest neighbour galaxy. We find a significant excess of close neighbours at separations less than about 10 arcsec which we attribute to the magnification by gravitational lensing of quasars which would otherwise be too faint to be included in our sample. About one quarter to one third of the quasars are so affected although the allowed error in this fraction is large.Comment: uuencoded Postscript file (including figures and tables), SUSSEX-AST 94/8-

Antioxidants that protect mitochondria reduce interleukin-6 and oxidative stress, improve mitochondrial function, and reduce biochemical markers of organ dysfunction in a rat model of acute sepsis

Funding This study was funded by the Medical Research Council (Grant number G0800149). Research material from this study is not available. Acknowledgement We are very grateful to Dr Robin A.J. Smith, Department of Chemistry, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, for the generous gifts of MitoE and MitoQ, without which this work would not have been possible.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Pharmacological activation of endogenous protective pathways against oxidative stress under conditions of sepsis

Funding The study was funded entirely by institutional funds.Peer reviewedPostprin

Microfossil Studies of Four Southwestern Ontario Bogs

The region traversed by Highway 17, between Fort William and Kenora in southwestern Ontario, Canada (Figure 1), lies within the area described by Nichols (1935) as the northern coniferous forest. This region has been severely glaciated by ice of the Fifth Wisconsin substage (Thwaites, 1934). Following the retreat of the ice, much of the area was inundated by Early Lake Agassiz and other lakes that are now smaller than in early post-Pleistocene time. During the course of postglacial time many of the ponds and shallow portions of the lakes have filled with peat, and extensive bog land is now present. The mineral soils are shallow, as one would expect in a region of extensive glacial scour. They are deepest where moraines, outwash, and glacial lake deposits are present. The underlying rocks are granites, gneisses, and basalts. Outcrops are abundant and frequently extensive. The terrain is flat to rolling, and the relief is approximately three hundred feet in parts of the region

Development of novel multiplex microsatellite polymerase chain reactions to enable high-throughput population genetic studies of Schistosoma haematobium

© 2015 Webster et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. The attached file is the published version of the article