Seismic reflection imaging of the Juan de Fuca plate from ridge to trench : new constraints on the distribution of faulting and evolution of the crust prior to subduction

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 121 (2016): 1849–1872, doi:10.1002/2015JB012416.We present prestack time-migrated multichannel seismic images along two cross-plate transects from the Juan de Fuca (JdF) Ridge to the Cascadia deformation front (DF) offshore Oregon and Washington from which we characterize crustal structure, distribution and extent of faults across the plate interior as the crust ages and near the DF in response to subduction bending. Within the plate interior, we observe numerous small offset faults in the sediment section beginning 50–70 km from the ridge axis with sparse fault plane reflections confined to the upper crust. Plate bending due to sediment loading and subduction initiates at ~120–150 km and ~65–80 km seaward of the DF, respectively, and is accompanied by increase in sediment fault offsets and enhancement of deeper fault plane reflectivity. Most bend faulting deformation occurs within 40 km from the DF; on the Oregon transect, bright fault plane reflections that extend through the crust and 6–7 km into the mantle are observed. If attributed to serpentinization, ~0.12–0.92 wt % water within the uppermost 6 km of the mantle is estimated. On the Washington transect, bending faults are confined to the sediment section and upper-middle crust. The regional difference in subduction bend-faulting and potential hydration of the JdF plate is inconsistent with the spatial distribution of intermediate-depth intraslab seismicity at Cascadia. A series of distinctive, ridgeward dipping (20°–40°) lower crustal reflections are imaged in ~6–8 Ma crust along both transects and are interpreted as ductile shear zones formed within the ridge's accretionary zone in response to temporal variations in mantle upwelling, possibly associated with previously recognized plate reorganizations at 8.5 Ma and 5.9 Ma.NSF Grant Numbers: OCE 1029411, 10293052016-09-2

A 2-D tomographic model of the Juan de Fuca plate from accretion at axial seamount to subduction at the Cascadia margin from an active source ocean bottom seismometer survey

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 121 (2016): 5859–5879, doi:10.1002/2016JB013228.We report results from a wide-angle controlled source seismic experiment across the Juan de Fuca plate designed to investigate the evolution of the plate from accretion at the Juan de Fuca ridge to subduction at the Cascadia margin. A two-dimensional velocity model of the crust and upper mantle is derived from a joint reflection-refraction traveltime inversion. To interpret our tomography results, we first generate a plausible baseline velocity model, assuming a plate cooling model and realistic oceanic lithologies. We then use an effective medium theory to infer from our tomography results the extent of porosity, alteration, and water content that would be required to explain the departure from the baseline model. In crust of ages >1 Ma and away from propagator wakes and regions of faulting due to plate bending, we obtain estimates of upper crustal hydration of 0.5–2.1 wt % and find mostly dry lower crust and upper mantle. In sections of the crust affected by propagator wakes we find upper estimates of upper crustal, lower crustal, and upper mantle hydration of 3.1, 0.8, and 1.8 wt %, respectively. At the Cascadia deformation front, we find that the amount of water stored at uppermost mantle levels in the downgoing JdF plate is very limited (<0.3 wt %), with most of the water carried into the subduction zone being stored in the oceanic crust.NSF Grant Numbers: OCE-1029305, OCE-1029411, OCE-12493532017-02-1

Controlled safety study of a hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier, DCLHb, in acute ischemic stroke

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Diaspirin cross-linked hemoglobin (DCLHb) is a purified, cell-free human hemoglobin solution. In animal stroke models its use led to a significant reduction in the extent of brain injury. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of DCLHb in patients with acute ischemic stroke. METHODS: DCLHb or saline was administered to 85 patients with acute ischemic stroke in the anterior circulation, within 18 hours of onset of symptoms, in a multicenter, randomized, single-blind, dose-finding, controlled safety trial, consisting of 3 parts: 12 doses of 25, 50, and 100 mg/kg DCLHb over 72 hours. RESULTS: DCLHb caused a rapid rise in mean arterial blood pressure. The pressor effect was not accompanied by complications or excessive need for antihypertensive treatment. Two patients in the 100 mg/kg group had adverse events that were possibly drug related: one suffered fatal brain and pulmonary edema, the other transient renal and pancreatic insufficiency. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that a severe stroke at baseline and treatment with DCLHb (OR, 4.0; CI, 1.4 to 12.0) were independent predictors of a worse outcome (Rankin Scale score of 3 to 6) at 3 months. CONCLUSIONS: Outcome scale scores were worse in the DCLHb group, and more serious adverse events and deaths occurred in DCLHb-treated patients than in control patients. We recommend that additional safety studies be performed, preferably with a second generation, genetically engineered hemoglobin

Increasing compliance with wearing a medical device in children with autism

Health professionals often recommend the use of medical devices to assess the health, monitor the well-being, or improve the quality of life of their patients. Children with autism may present challenges in these situations as their sensory peculiarities may increase refusals to wear such devices. To address this issue, we systematically replicated prior research by examining the effects of differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) to increase compliance with wearing a heart rate monitor in 2 children with autism. The intervention increased compliance to 100% for both participants when an edible reinforcer was delivered every 90 s. The results indicate that DRO does not require the implementation of extinction to increase compliance with wearing a medical device. More research is needed to examine whether the reinforcement schedule can be further thinned

A common p73 polymorphism is associated with a reduced incidence of oesophageal carcinoma

The incidence of oesophageal adenocarcinoma is rising; to date, no susceptibility genes have been identified. p73, a novel p53 homologue, maps to chromosome 1p36, a region commonly deleted in oesophageal cancers. p73 shares some p53-like activity, but in addition, may also play a role in gastrointestinal epithelial inflammatory responses. A non-coding p73 polymorphism (denoted AT or GC) may be functionally significant. We investigated whether this polymorphism might play a role in the aetiopathogenesis of oesophageal cancer. This was a case–control, retrospective study. 84 cases of oesophageal cancer (25 squamous and 59 adenocarcinoma) and 152 normal population controls were genotyped for this polymorphism. Informative cases were examined for p73 LOH within the tumour. AT/AT homozygotes were significantly less prevalent in the oesophageal cancer population (1/84 = 1.2%) compared to controls (15/152 = 9.9%) (P < 0.02), corresponding to an odds ratio of 0.11 (95% C.I. 0.02–0.6, P < 0.02), or 9-fold reduced risk. Moreover, AT/AT homozygotes were significantly less frequent in the cancer population than would be expected under the Hardy–Weinberg hypothesis (P = 0.0099). LOH at the p73 locus was observed in 37.8% (14/37) of the AT/GC heterozygotes studied; in all cases there was loss of the AT allele. Our findings indicate that p73 AT/AT homozygotes appear to be protected against the development of oesophageal cancer. Clinically, this observation could have implications in aiding identification of high-risk Barrett's oesophagus patients.© 2001 Cancer Research Campaign  http://www.bjcancer.co

First-Order Melting and Dynamics of Flux Lines in a Model for YBa2_2Cu3_3O7−δ_{7-\delta}

We have studied the statics and dynamics of flux lines in a model for YBCO, using both Monte Carlo simulations and Langevin dynamics. For a clean system, both approaches yield the same melting curve, which is found to be weakly first order with a heat of fusion of about $0.02 k_BT_m$ per vortex pancake at a field of $50 {\rm kG}.$ The time averaged magnetic field distribution experienced by a fixed spin is found to undergo a qualitative change at freezing, in agreement with NMR and $\mu {\rm SR}$ experiments. Melting in the clean system is accompanied by a proliferation of free disclinations which show a clear B-dependent 3D-2D crossover from long disclination lines parallel to the c-axis at low fields, to 2D ``pancake'' disclinations at higher fields. Strong point pins produce a logarithmical $\ln t$ relaxation which results from slow annealing out of disclinations in disordered samples.Comment: 31 pages, latex, revtex, 12 figures available upon request, No major changes to the original text, but some errors in the axes scale for Figures 6 and 7 were corrected(new figures available upon request), to be published in Physical Review B, July 199

Exploiting the Temporal Logic Hierarchy and the Non-Confluence Property for Efficient LTL Synthesis

The classic approaches to synthesize a reactive system from a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification first translate the given LTL formula to an equivalent omega-automaton and then compute a winning strategy for the corresponding omega-regular game. To this end, the obtained omega-automata have to be (pseudo)-determinized where typically a variant of Safra's determinization procedure is used. In this paper, we show that this determinization step can be significantly improved for tool implementations by replacing Safra's determinization by simpler determinization procedures. In particular, we exploit (1) the temporal logic hierarchy that corresponds to the well-known automata hierarchy consisting of safety, liveness, Buechi, and co-Buechi automata as well as their boolean closures, (2) the non-confluence property of omega-automata that result from certain translations of LTL formulas, and (3) symbolic implementations of determinization procedures for the Rabin-Scott and the Miyano-Hayashi breakpoint construction. In particular, we present convincing experimental results that demonstrate the practical applicability of our new synthesis procedure

STEP-UP: Enabling low-cost IMU sensors to predict the type of dementia during everyday stair climbing

Posterior Cortical Atrophy is a rare but significant form of dementia which affects peoples’ visual ability before their memory. This is often misdiagnosed as an eyesight rather than brain sight problem. This paper aims to address the frequent, initial misdiagnosis of this disease as a vision problem through the use of an intelligent, cost-effective, wearable system, alongside diagnosis of the more typical Alzheimer’s Disease. We propose low-level features constructed from the IMU data gathered from 35 participants, while they performed a stair climbing and descending task in a real-world simulated environment. We demonstrate that with these features the machine learning models predict dementia with 87.02% accuracy. Furthermore, we investigate how system parameters, such as number of sensors, affect the prediction accuracy. This lays the groundwork for a simple clinical test to enable detection of dementia which can be carried out in the wild