Spatially-Resolved Spectra of the "Teacup" AGN: Tracing the History of a Dying Quasar

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Galaxy Zoo project has revealed a number of spectacular galaxies possessing Extended Emission-Line Regions (EELRs), the most famous being Hanny's Voorwerp galaxy. We present another EELR object discovered in the SDSS endeavor: the Teacup Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), nicknamed for its EELR, which has a handle like structure protruding 15 kpc into the northeast quadrant of the galaxy. We analyze physical conditions of this galaxy with long-slit ground based spectroscopy from Lowell, Lick, and KPNO observatories. With the Lowell 1.8m Perkin's telescope we took multiple observations at different offset positions, allowing us to recover spatially resolved spectra across the galaxy. Line diagnostics indicate the ionized gas is photoionized primarily by the AGN. Additionally we are able to derive the hydrogen density from the [S II] 6716/6731 ratio. We generated two-component photoionization models for each spatially resolved Lowell spectrum. These models allow us to calculate the AGN bolometric luminosity seen by the gas at different radii from the nuclear center of the Teacup. Our results show a drop in bolometric luminosity by more than two orders of magnitude from the EELR to the nucleus, suggesting that the AGN has decreased in luminosity by this amount in a continuous fashion over 46,000 years, supporting the case for a dying AGN in this galaxy independent of any IR based evidence. We demonstrate that spatially resolved photoionization modeling could be applied to EELRs to investigate long time scale variability.Comment: 38 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Assessment of C, N and Si isotopes as tracers of past ocean nutrient and carbon cycling

Biological productivity in the ocean directly influences the partitioning of carbon between the atmosphere and ocean interior. Through this carbon cycle feedback, changing ocean productivity has long been hypothesized as a key pathway for modulating past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and hence global climate. Because phytoplankton preferentially assimilate the light isotopes of carbon and the major nutrients nitrate and silicic acid, stable isotopes of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and silicon (Si) in seawater and marine sediments can inform on ocean carbon and nutrient cycling, and by extension the relationship with biological productivity and global climate. Here, we compile water column C, N, and Si stable isotopes from GEOTRACES-era data in four key ocean regions to review geochemical proxies of oceanic carbon and nutrient cycling based on the C, N, and Si isotopic composition of marine sediments. External sources and sinks as well as internal cycling (including assimilation, particulate matter export, and regeneration) are discussed as likely drivers of observed C, N, and Si isotope distributions in the ocean. The potential for C, N, and Si isotope measurements in sedimentary archives to record aspects of past ocean C and nutrient cycling is evaluated, along with key uncertainties and limitations associated with each proxy. Constraints on ocean C and nutrient cycling during late Quaternary glacial-interglacial cycles and over the Cenozoic are examined. This review highlights opportunities for future research using multielement stable isotope proxy applications and emphasizes the importance of such applications to reconstructing past changes in the oceans and climate system

Assessment of C, N, and Si Isotopes as Tracers of Past Ocean Nutrient and Carbon Cycling

28 pages, 6 figures, 1 box, 1 appendix.-- Data Availability Statement: Data sets presented in this research are available via the following repositories and study (listed by Figure): Figures 3 and 4: (1)δ13CDIC:(a) CLIVAR P16S (Feely et al., 2008) from GLODAPv2.2020 database (Olsen et al., 2020): https://www.glodap.info/index.php/merged-and-adjusted-data-product/. (b) GEOTRACES GA03 (Quay & Wu, 2015) and GP16 (P. Quay, unpublished data) from GEOTRACES IDP2017 (Schlitzer et al., 2018): https://www.bodc.ac.uk/geotraces/data/idp2017/. (2) δ15Nnitrate:(a) CLIVAR P16S (Rafter et al., 2013) from BCO-DMO: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/651722. (b) GEOTRACES GA03 (Marconi et al., 2015) and GP16 (Peters et al., 2018) from GEOTRACES IDP2017 (Schlitzer et al., 2018): https://www.bodc.ac.uk/geotraces/data/idp2017/. (3) δ30Si: GEOTRACES GA03 (Brzezinski & Jones, 2015) and GIPY04 (Fripiat et al., 2012) from GEOTRACES IDP2017 (Schlitzer et al., 2018): https://www.bodc.ac.uk/geotraces/data/idp2017/. (4) Figure 4a POC Flux (DeVries & Weber, 2017): SIMPLE-TRIM Output from https://tdevries.eri.ucsb.edu/models-and-data-products/. Figure 5: (a) Antarctic CO2 composite: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo-search/study/17975. (b) ∆δ13Cthermocline-deep from Ziegler et al. (2013) supporting information: https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo1782; ∆δ13Cepifaunal-infaunal (Hoogakker et al., 2018): https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.891185. (c) SAZ FB-δ15N (Martínez-García et al., 2014): https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/18318; AZ DB-δ15N (Studer et al., 2015): https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.848271. (d) SAZ Fe flux (Martínez-García et al., 2014): https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/18318. (e) AZ diatom δ30Si (Robinson et al., 2014): https:// www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/17917. Figure 6: (a) and (b) Benthic foraminifera δ18O and δ13C (Zachos et al., 2001): https:// www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/8674. (c) FB-δ15N from Kast et al. (2019) supporting information data: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2019/04/24/364.6438.386.DC1. (d) and (e) Diatom, sponge, and radiolarian δ30Si in Egan et al. (2013) supporting information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X13002185, Fontorbe et al. (2016) supporting information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X16304265, and Fontorbe et al. (2017) supporting information: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017PA003090Biological productivity in the ocean directly influences the partitioning of carbon between the atmosphere and ocean interior. Through this carbon cycle feedback, changing ocean productivity has long been hypothesized as a key pathway for modulating past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and hence global climate. Because phytoplankton preferentially assimilate the light isotopes of carbon and the major nutrients nitrate and silicic acid, stable isotopes of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and silicon (Si) in seawater and marine sediments can inform on ocean carbon and nutrient cycling, and by extension the relationship with biological productivity and global climate. Here, we compile water column C, N, and Si stable isotopes from GEOTRACES-era data in four key ocean regions to review geochemical proxies of oceanic carbon and nutrient cycling based on the C, N, and Si isotopic composition of marine sediments. External sources and sinks as well as internal cycling (including assimilation, particulate matter export, and regeneration) are discussed as likely drivers of observed C, N, and Si isotope distributions in the ocean. The potential for C, N, and Si isotope measurements in sedimentary archives to record aspects of past ocean C and nutrient cycling is evaluated, along with key uncertainties and limitations associated with each proxy. Constraints on ocean C and nutrient cycling during late Quaternary glacial-interglacial cycles and over the Cenozoic are examined. This review highlights opportunities for future research using multielement stable isotope proxy applications and emphasizes the importance of such applications to reconstructing past changes in the oceans and climate systemThis workshop was funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) through the GEOTRACES program, the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, which in turn received support from the Swiss Academy of Sciences and NSF, and the French national program LEFE (Les Enveloppes Fluides et l'Environnement). [...] This study was supported by PAGES, LEFE, and GEOTRACES through NSF. J. R. Farmer acknowledges support from the Max Planck Society, the Tuttle Fund of the Department of Geosciences of Princeton University, the Grand Challenges Program of the Princeton Environmental Institute, and through Exxon Mobil via the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment of Princeton University. Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. [...] With the institutional support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S

Methods to identify the target population: implications for prescribing quality indicators

Background: Information on prescribing quality is increasingly used by policy makers, insurance companies and health care providers. For reliable assessment of prescribing quality it is important to correctly identify the patients eligible for recommended treatment. Often either diagnostic codes or clinical measurements are used to identify such patients. We compared these two approaches regarding the outcome of the prescribing quality assessment and their ability to identify treated and undertreated patients. Methods: The approaches were compared using electronic health records for 3214 diabetes patients from 70 general practitioners. We selected three existing prescribing quality indicators (PQI) assessing different aspects of treatment in patients with hypertension or who were overweight. We compared population level prescribing quality scores and proportions of identified patients using definitions of hypertension or being overweight based on diagnostic codes, clinical measurements or both. Results: The prescribing quality score for prescribing any antihypertensive treatment was 93% (95% confidence interval 90-95%) using the diagnostic code-based approach, and 81% (78-83%) using the measurement-based approach. Patients receiving antihypertensive treatment had a better registration of their diagnosis compared to hypertensive patients in whom such treatment was not initiated. Scores on the other two PQI were similar for the different approaches, ranging from 64 to 66%. For all PQI, the clinical measurement -based approach identified higher proportions of both well treated and undertreated patients compared to the diagnostic code -based approach. Conclusions: The use of clinical measurements is recommended when PQI are used to identify undertreated patients. Using diagnostic codes or clinical measurement values has little impact on the outcomes of proportion-based PQI when both numerator and denominator are equally affected. In situations when a diagnosis is better registered for treated than untreated patients, as we observed for hypertension, the diagnostic code-based approach results in overestimation of provided treatment

No iron fertilization in the equatorial Pacific Ocean during the last ice age

The equatorial Pacific Ocean is one of the major high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll regions in the global ocean. In such regions, the consumption of the available macro-nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate is thought to be limited in part by the low abundance of the critical micro-nutrient iron1. Greater atmospheric dust deposition2 could have fertilized the equatorial Pacific with iron during the last ice age—the Last Glacial Period (LGP) but the effect of increased ice-age dust fluxes on primary productivity in the equatorial Pacific remains uncertain. Here we present meridional transects of dust (derived from the 232Th proxy), phytoplankton productivity (using opal, 231Pa/230Th and excess Ba), and the degree of nitrate consumption (using foraminifera-bound δ15N) from six cores in the central equatorial Pacific for the Holocene (0–10,000 years ago) and the LGP (17,000–27,000 years ago). We find that, although dust deposition in the central equatorial Pacific was two to three times greater in the LGP than in the Holocene, productivity was the same or lower, and the degree of nitrate consumption was the same. These biogeochemical findings suggest that the relatively greater ice-age dust fluxes were not large enough to provide substantial iron fertilization to the central equatorial Pacific. This may have been because the absolute rate of dust deposition in the LGP (although greater than the Holocene rate) was very low. The lower productivity coupled with unchanged nitrate consumption suggests that the subsurface major nutrient concentrations were lower in the central equatorial Pacific during the LGP. As these nutrients are today dominantly sourced from the Subantarctic Zone of the Southern Ocean, we propose that the central equatorial Pacific data are consistent with more nutrient consumption in the Subantarctic Zone, possibly owing to iron fertilization as a result of higher absolute dust fluxes in this region7,8. Thus, ice-age iron fertilization in the Subantarctic Zone would have ultimately worked to lower, not raise, equatorial Pacific productivity

Creating the Back Ward: The Triumph of Custodialism and the Uses of Therapeutic Failure in Nineteenth Century Idiot Asylums

My focus in this chapter is on the origin of the back ward rather than its demise. Where did the “back wards” that [Burton] Blatt and [Senator Robert] Kennedy witnessed come from in the first place? What 3 exactly were those “antecedents of the problems observed” that Blatt cited? This chapter reviews that history and argues that, in fact, there is a specific narrative to the evolution of the institutional “back ward” as an identifiable place where people with the most significant intellectual disabilities were to be incarcerated and largely forgotten.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_books/1006/thumbnail.jp

Crime, media and the will-to-representation: Reconsidering relationships in the new media age

This paper considers the ways in which the rise of new media might challenge commonplace criminological assumptions about the crime–media interface. Established debates around crime and media have long been based upon a fairly clear demarcation between production and consumption, between object and audience – the media generates and transmits representations of crime, and audiences engage with them. However, one of the most noticeable changes occurring in the wake of the development of new media is the proliferation of self-organised production by ‘ordinary people’ – everything ranging from self-authored web pages and ‘blogs’, to self-produced video created using hand-held camcorders, camera-phones and ‘webcams’. Today we see the spectacle of people them, send them and upload them to the Internet. This kind of ‘will to representation’ may be seen in itself as a new kind of causal inducement to law- and rule-breaking behaviour. It may be that, in the new media age, the terms of criminological questioning need to be sometimes reversed: instead of asking whether ‘media’ instigates crime or fear of crime, we must ask how the very possibility of bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour.performing acts of crime and deviance in order to recordmediating oneself to an audience through self-representation might be bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour

Intestinal Microbiota Regulate Xenobiotic Metabolism in the Liver

BACKGROUND: The liver is the central organ for xenobiotic metabolism (XM) and is regulated by nuclear receptors such as CAR and PXR, which control the metabolism of drugs. Here we report that gut microbiota influences liver gene expression and alters xenobiotic metabolism in animals exposed to barbiturates. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: By comparing hepatic gene expression on microarrays from germfree (GF) and conventionally-raised mice (SPF), we identified a cluster of 112 differentially expressed target genes predominantly connected to xenobiotic metabolism and pathways inhibiting RXR function. These findings were functionally validated by exposing GF and SPF mice to pentobarbital which confirmed that xenobiotic metabolism in GF mice is significantly more efficient (shorter time of anesthesia) when compared to the SPF group. CONCLUSION: Our data demonstrate that gut microbiota modulates hepatic gene expression and function by altering its xenobiotic response to drugs without direct contact with the liver

Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping Project. VI. : reverberating disk models for NGC 5548

D.A.S. and K.D.H. acknowledge support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council through grant ST/K502339/1 and ST/J001651/1.We conduct a multiwavelength continuum variability study of the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 5548 to investigate the temperature structure of its accretion disk. The 19 overlapping continuum light curves (1158 Å to 9157 Å) combine simultaneous Hubble Space Telescope, Swift, and ground-based observations over a 180 day period from 2014 January to July. Light-curve variability is interpreted as the reverberation response of the accretion disk to irradiation by a central time-varying point source. Our model yields the disk inclination i = 36° ± 10°, temperature T1 =(44 ± 6) x 103 K at 1 light day from the black hole, and a temperature–radius slope (T α r-α) of α = 0.99 ± 0.03. We also infer the driving light curve and find that it correlates poorly with both the hard and soft X-ray light curves, suggesting that the X-rays alone may not drive the ultraviolet and optical variability over the observing period. We also decompose the light curves into bright, faint, and mean accretion-disk spectra. These spectra lie below that expected for a standard blackbody accretion disk accreting at L/LEdd=0.1.PostprintPeer reviewe

Mineral trioxyde aggregate versus calcium hydroxide in apexification of non vital immature teeth: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Pulp necrosis is one of the main complications of dental trauma. When it happens on an immature tooth, pulp necrosis implies a lack of root maturation and apical closure. A therapy called apexification is required to induce the formation of a calcified apical barrier allowing a permanent and hermetic root filling. The aim of this prospective randomized clinical trial is to compare Mineral Trioxide Aggregate(MTA)with Calcium Hydroxide(CH)as materials used to induce root-end closure in necrotic permanent immature incisors.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>This study, promoted by AP-HP, was approved by the ethics committee(CPP Paris Ile de France IV). 34 children aged from 6 to 18 years and presenting a non-vital permanent incisor are selected. Prior to treatment, an appropriate written consent has to be obtained from both parents and from children. Patients are then randomly assigned to either the MTA(experimental)or CH(control)groups. Recalls are performed after 3, 6 and 12 months to determine the presence or absence of a calcified apical barrier through the use of clinical and radiographic exams. Additional criteria such as clinical symptoms, apical radiolucencies, periapical index(PAI)are also noted.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>ClinicalTrials.gov no. <a href="http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00472173">NCT00472173</a> (First inclusion: May 10, 2007; Last inclusion: April 23, 2009; study completed: April 15, 2010)</p