PRÄZISIONSMANIPULATOREN FÜR DIE LASERTECHNIK

A family of micropositioners for laser synthese studies and other experiments is presented. It consists of mirror holders of diameter of 150 and 330mm for positioning the mirrors with 5 degrees of freedom (3 linear and 2 rotational movements) and the cross stacked stages with 2 degrees of freedoom for posltioning the specimen in the laser materials processing. All devices have been designed and produced in the Institute of Design of Precise and Optical Instruments of the Warsaw University of Technology

Increasing role of arthropod bites in tularaemia transmission in Poland – case reports and diagnostic methods

The study describes four cases of tularaemia – one developed after contact with rabbits and three developed after an arthropod bite. Due to non-specific clinical symptoms, accurate diagnosis of tularaemia may be difficult. The increasing contribution of the arthropod vectors in the transmission of the disease indicates that special effort should be made to apply sensitive and specific diagnostic methods for tularaemia, and to remind health-care workers about this route of Francisella tularensis infections. The advantages and disadvantages of various diagnostic methods – molecular, serological and microbiological culture – are discussed. The PCR as a rapid and proper diagnostic method for ulceroglandular tularaemia is presented

PreCam, a Precursor Observational Campaign for Calibration of the Dark Energy Survey

PreCam, a precursor observational campaign supporting the Dark Energy Survey (DES), is designed to produce a photometric and astrometric catalog of nearly a hundred thousand standard stars within the DES footprint, while the PreCam instrument also serves as a prototype testbed for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam)'s hardware and software. This catalog represents a potential 100-fold increase in Southern Hemisphere photometric standard stars, and therefore will be an important component in the calibration of the Dark Energy Survey. We provide details on the PreCam instrument's design, construction and testing, as well as results from a subset of the 51 nights of PreCam survey observations on the University of Michigan Department of Astronomy's Curtis-Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. We briefly describe the preliminary data processing pipeline that has been developed for PreCam data and the preliminary results of the instrument performance, as well as astrometry and photometry of a sample of stars previously included in other southern sky surveys.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, submitted to PAS

Multi-wavelength observations of blazar AO 0235+164 in the 2008-2009 flaring state

The blazar AO 0235+164 (z = 0.94) has been one of the most active objects observed by Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) since its launch in Summer 2008. In addition to the continuous coverage by Fermi, contemporaneous observations were carried out from the radio to γ-ray bands between 2008 September and 2009 February. In this paper, we summarize the rich multi-wavelength data collected during the campaign (including F-GAMMA, GASP-WEBT, Kanata, OVRO, RXTE, SMARTS, Swift, and other instruments), examine the cross-correlation between the light curves measured in the different energy bands, and interpret the resulting spectral energy distributions in the context of well-known blazar emission models. We find that the γ-ray activity is well correlated with a series of near-IR/optical flares, accompanied by an increase in the optical polarization degree. On the other hand, the X-ray light curve shows a distinct 20 day high state of unusually soft spectrum, which does not match the extrapolation of the optical/UV synchrotron spectrum. We tentatively interpret this feature as the bulk Compton emission by cold electrons contained in the jet, which requires an accretion disk corona with an effective covering factor of 19% at a distance of 100 R g. We model the broadband spectra with a leptonic model with external radiation dominated by the infrared emission from the dusty torus. © 2012. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved

Specific Bacillus anthracis identification by a plcR-targeted restriction site insertion-PCR (RSI-PCR) assay

A RSI-PCR assay was developed for the detection of a Bacillus anthracis-specific nonsense mutation in the plcR gene. The assay specificity was tested using 170 Bacillus spp. strains including 47 strains of B. anthracis. The plcR RSI-PCR distinguished Bacillus cereus group strains closely related to B. anthracis from the anthrax agent. The assay was found to be a robust, simple and cost effective tool for B. anthracis identification. In contrast to previously developed real time PCR-based methods, the RSI-PCR needs basic molecular biology equipment only, and thus may be easily introduced in developing countries, where anthrax is endemic

Increasing role of arthropod bites in tularaemia transmission in Poland - case reports and diagnostic methods

The study describes four cases of tularaemia – one developed after contact with rabbits and three developed after an arthropod bite. Due to non-specific clinical symptoms, accurate diagnosis of tularaemia may be difficult. The increasing contribution of the arthropod vectors in the transmission of the disease indicates that special effort should be made to apply sensitive and specific diagnostic methods for tularaemia, and to remind health-care workers about this route of Francisella tularensis infections. The advantages and disadvantages of various diagnostic methods – molecular, serological and microbiological culture – are discussed. The PCR as a rapid and proper diagnostic method for ulceroglandular tularaemia is presented