Deformation regime and long-term precursors to eruption at large calderas: Rabaul, Papua New Guinea

Eruptions at large calderas are normally preceded by variable rates of unrest that continue for decades or more. A classic example is the 1994 eruption of Rabaul caldera, in Papua New Guinea, which began after 23 years of surface uplift and volcano-tectonic (VT) seismicity at rates that changed unevenly with time by an order of magnitude. Although the VT event rate and uplift rate peaked in 1983–1985, eruptions only began a decade later and followed just 27 hours of anomalous changes in precursory signal. Here we argue that the entire 23 years of unrest belongs to a single sequence of damage accumulation in the crust and that, in 1991–1992, the crust's response to applied stress changed from quasi-elastic (elastic deformation with minor fault movement) to inelastic (deformation predominantly by fault movement alone). The change in behaviour yields limiting trends in the variation of VT event rate with deformation and can be quantified with a mean-field model for an elastic crust that contains a dispersed population of small faults. The results show that identifying the deformation regime for elastic–brittle crust provides new criteria for using precursory time series to evaluate the potential for eruption. They suggest that, in the quasi-elastic regime, short-term increases in rates of deformation and VT events are unreliable indicators of an imminent eruption, but that, in the inelastic regime, the precursory rates may follow hyperbolic increases with time and offer the promise of developing forecasts of eruption as much as months beforehand

Robust Multi-Image HDR Reconstruction for the Modulo Camera

Photographing scenes with high dynamic range (HDR) poses great challenges to consumer cameras with their limited sensor bit depth. To address this, Zhao et al. recently proposed a novel sensor concept - the modulo camera - which captures the least significant bits of the recorded scene instead of going into saturation. Similar to conventional pipelines, HDR images can be reconstructed from multiple exposures, but significantly fewer images are needed than with a typical saturating sensor. While the concept is appealing, we show that the original reconstruction approach assumes noise-free measurements and quickly breaks down otherwise. To address this, we propose a novel reconstruction algorithm that is robust to image noise and produces significantly fewer artifacts. We theoretically analyze correctness as well as limitations, and show that our approach significantly outperforms the baseline on real data.Comment: to appear at the 39th German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) 201

Modular Biological Function Is Most Effectively Captured by Combining Molecular Interaction Data Types

PublishedLarge-scale molecular interaction data sets have the potential to provide a comprehensive, system-wide understanding of biological function. Although individual molecules can be promiscuous in terms of their contribution to function, molecular functions emerge from the specific interactions of molecules giving rise to modular organisation. As functions often derive from a range of mechanisms, we demonstrate that they are best studied using networks derived from different sources. Implementing a graph partitioning algorithm we identify subnetworks in yeast protein-protein interaction (PPI), genetic interaction and gene co-regulation networks. Among these subnetworks we identify cohesive subgraphs that we expect to represent functional modules in the different data types. We demonstrate significant overlap between the subgraphs generated from the different data types and show these overlaps can represent related functions as represented by the Gene Ontology (GO). Next, we investigate the correspondence between our subgraphs and the Gene Ontology. This revealed varying degrees of coverage of the biological process, molecular function and cellular component ontologies, dependent on the data type. For example, subgraphs from the PPI show enrichment for 84%, 58% and 93% of annotated GO terms, respectively. Integrating the interaction data into a combined network increases the coverage of GO. Furthermore, the different annotation types of GO are not predominantly associated with one of the interaction data types. Collectively our results demonstrate that successful capture of functional relationships by network data depends on both the specific biological function being characterised and the type of network data being used. We identify functions that require integrated information to be accurately represented, demonstrating the limitations of individual data types. Combining interaction subnetworks across data types is therefore essential for fully understanding the complex and emergent nature of biological function.JIM was funded by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) CASE studentship with industry partner Pfizer and RMA by a BBSRC studentship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Gene Duplication and Environmental Adaptation within Yeast Populations

PublishedPopulation-level differences in the number of copies of genes resulting from gene duplication and loss have recently been recognized as an important source of variation in eukaryotes. However, except for a small number of cases, the phenotypic effects of this variation are unknown. Data from the Saccharomyces Genome Resequencing Project permit the study of duplication in genome sequences from a set of individuals within the same population. These sequences can be correlated with available information on the environments from which these yeast strains were isolated. We find that yeast show an abundance of duplicate genes that are lineage specific, leading to a large degree of variation in gene content between individual strains. There is a detectable bias for specific functions, indicating that selection is acting to preferentially retain certain duplicates. Most strikingly, we find that sets of over- and underrepresented duplicates correlate with the environment from which they were isolated. Together, these observations indicate that gene duplication can give rise to substantial phenotypic differences within populations that in turn can offer a shortcut to evolutionary adaptation.This work was funded by BBSRC grant BB/F007620/1

Institutional Effects in a Simple Model of Educational Production

This paper presents a model of educational production that tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximize its net benefits. In the jointly determined equilibrium, schooling quality is shown to depend on several institutionally determined parameters. The impact on student performance of institutions such as central examinations, centralization versus school autonomy, teachers\u27 influence, parental influence, and competition from private schools is analyzed. Furthermore, the model can rationalize why positive resource effects may be lacking in educational production

The Power of Cut-Based Parameters for Computing Edge Disjoint Paths

This paper revisits the classical Edge Disjoint Paths (EDP) problem, where one is given an undirected graph G and a set of terminal pairs P and asks whether G contains a set of pairwise edge-disjoint paths connecting every terminal pair in P. Our aim is to identify structural properties (parameters) of graphs which allow the efficient solution of EDP without restricting the placement of terminals in P in any way. In this setting, EDP is known to remain NP-hard even on extremely restricted graph classes, such as graphs with a vertex cover of size 3. We present three results which use edge-separator based parameters to chart new islands of tractability in the complexity landscape of EDP. Our first and main result utilizes the fairly recent structural parameter treecut width (a parameter with fundamental ties to graph immersions and graph cuts): we obtain a polynomial-time algorithm for EDP on every graph class of bounded treecut width. Our second result shows that EDP parameterized by treecut width is unlikely to be fixed-parameter tractable. Our final, third result is a polynomial kernel for EDP parameterized by the size of a minimum feedback edge set in the graph

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee: Yet Another No Go for Cardiac Patients?: Editorial to “Caffeinated Coffee Blunts the Myocardial Protective Effects of Statins Against Ischemia–reperfusion Injury in the Rat” by Ye et al.

Contains fulltext : 69414.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access

Stem cell differentiation increases membrane-actin adhesion regulating cell blebability, migration and mechanics

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder in order to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/K. S. is funded by an EPSRC PhD studentship. S.T. is funded by an EU Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship (GENOMICDIFF)

A model of population dynamics of TB in a prison system and application to South Africa

BACKGROUND: Tuberculosis (TB) continues to spread in South African prisons in particular, as prisons are over-capacitated and have poor ventilation. The awaiting trial detainees are not screened on admission and are at high risk of getting infected with TB. RESULTS: We propose a compartmental model to describe the population dynamics of TB disease in prisons. Our model considers the inflow of susceptible, exposed and TB infectives into the prison population. Removal of individuals out of the prison population can be either by death or by being released from prison, as compared to a general population in which removal is only by death. We describe conditions, including non-inflow of infectives into the prison, which will ensure that TB can be eradicated from the prison population. The model is calibrated for the South African prison system, by using data in existing literature. The model can be used to make quantitative projections of TB prevalence and to measure the effect of interventions. Illustrative simulations in this regard are presented. The model can be used for other prison populations too, if data is available to calculate the model parameters. CONCLUSIONS: Various simulations generated with our model serve to illustrate how it can be utilized in making future projections of the levels of prevalence of TB, and to quantify the effect of interventions such as screening, treatment or reduction of transmission parameter values through improved living conditions for inmates. This makes it particularly useful as there are various targets set by the World Health Organization and by governments, for reduction of TB prevalence and ultimately its eradication. Towards eradication of TB from a prison system, the theorem on global stability of the disease-free state is a useful indicator

Steiner trees for hereditary graph classes.

We consider the classical problems (Edge) Steiner Tree and Vertex Steiner Tree after restricting the input to some class of graphs characterized by a small set of forbidden induced subgraphs. We show a dichotomy for the former problem restricted to (H1,H2) -free graphs and a dichotomy for the latter problem restricted to H-free graphs. We find that there exists an infinite family of graphs H such that Vertex Steiner Tree is polynomial-time solvable for H-free graphs, whereas there exist only two graphs H for which this holds for Edge Steiner Tree. We also find that Edge Steiner Tree is polynomial-time solvable for (H1,H2) -free graphs if and only if the treewidth of the class of (H1,H2) -free graphs is bounded (subject to P≠NP ). To obtain the latter result, we determine all pairs (H1,H2) for which the class of (H1,H2) -free graphs has bounded treewidth