191 research outputs found
Applied science facilitates the large-scale expansion of protected areas in an Amazonian hot spot
Meeting international commitments to protect 17% of terrestrial ecosystems worldwide will require \u3e3 million square kilometers of new protected areas and strategies to create those areas in a way that respects local communities and land use. In 2000â2016, biological and social scientists worked to increase the protected proportion of Peruâs largest department via 14 interdisciplinary inventories covering \u3e9 million hectares of this megadiverse corner of the Amazon basin. In each landscape, the strategy was the same: convene diverse partners, identify biological and sociocultural assets, document residentsâ use of natural resources, and tailor the findings to the needs of decision-makers. Nine of the 14 landscapes have since been protected (5.7 million hectares of new protected areas), contributing to a quadrupling of conservation coverage in Loreto (from 6 to 23%). We outline the methods and enabling conditions most crucial for successfully applying similar campaigns elsewhere on Earth
First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data
Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of
continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a
fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters
obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto-
noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch
between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have
been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a
fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of
11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGOâs first observing run. Although we have found several initial
outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal.
Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of
the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for
the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the
spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried
out so far
Application of Multi-SNP Approaches Bayesian LASSO and AUC-RF to Detect Main Effects of Inflammatory-Gene Variants Associated with Bladder Cancer Risk
The relationship between inflammation and cancer is well established in several tumor types, including bladder cancer. We
performed an association study between 886 inflammatory-gene variants and bladder cancer risk in 1,047 cases and 988
controls from the Spanish Bladder Cancer (SBC)/EPICURO Study. A preliminary exploration with the widely used univariate
logistic regression approach did not identify any significant SNP after correcting for multiple testing. We further applied two
more comprehensive methods to capture the complexity of bladder cancer genetic susceptibility: Bayesian Threshold
LASSO (BTL), a regularized regression method, and AUC-Random Forest, a machine-learning algorithm. Both approaches
explore the joint effect of markers. BTL analysis identified a signature of 37 SNPs in 34 genes showing an association with
bladder cancer. AUC-RF detected an optimal predictive subset of 56 SNPs. 13 SNPs were identified by both methods in the
total population. Using resources from the Texas Bladder Cancer study we were able to replicate 30% of the SNPs assessed.
The associations between inflammatory SNPs and bladder cancer were reexamined among non-smokers to eliminate the
effect of tobacco, one of the strongest and most prevalent environmental risk factor for this tumor. A 9 SNP-signature was
detected by BTL. Here we report, for the first time, a set of SNP in inflammatory genes jointly associated with bladder cancer
risk. These results highlight the importance of the complex structure of genetic susceptibility associated with cancer risk.The work was partially supported by the Fondo de Investigacion Sanitaria, Instituto de Salud Carlos III (G03/174, 00/0745, PI051436, PI061614, PI09-02102, G03/174 and Sara Borrell fellowship to ELM) and Ministry of Science and Innovation (MTM2008-06747-C02-02 and FPU fellowship award to VU), Spain; AGAUR-Generalitat de Catalunya (Grant 2009SGR-581); Fundaciola Maratode TV3; Red Tematica de Investigacion Cooperativa en Cancer (RTICC); Asociacion Espanola Contra el Cancer (AECC); EU-FP7-201663; and RO1-CA089715 and CA34627; the Spanish National Institute for Bioinformatics (www.inab.org); and by the Intramural Research Program of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, USA. MD Anderson support for this project included U01 CA 127615 (XW); R01 CA 74880 (XW); P50 CA 91846 (XW, CPD); Betty B. Marcus Chair fund in Cancer Prevention (XW); UT Research Trust fund (XW) and R01 CA 131335 (JG)
Sensitivity of the Advanced LIGO detectors at the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) consists of two widely separated 4 km laser interferometers designed to detect gravitational waves from distant astrophysical sources in the frequency range from 10 Hz to 10 kHz. The first observation run of the Advanced LIGO detectors started in September 2015 and ended in January 2016. A strain sensitivity of better than 10â23/Hzââââ was achieved around 100 Hz. Understanding both the fundamental and the technical noise sources was critical for increasing the astrophysical strain sensitivity. The average distance at which coalescing binary black hole systems with individual masses of 30ââMâ could be detected above a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 8 was 1.3 Gpc, and the range for binary neutron star inspirals was about 75 Mpc. With respect to the initial detectors, the observable volume of the Universe increased by a factor 69 and 43, respectively. These improvements helped Advanced LIGO to detect the gravitational wave signal from the binary black hole coalescence, known as GW150914
Effects of Data Quality Vetoes on a Search for Compact Binary Coalescences in Advanced LIGO's First Observing Run
The first observing run of Advanced LIGO spanned 4 months, from September 12,
2015 to January 19, 2016, during which gravitational waves were directly
detected from two binary black hole systems, namely GW150914 and GW151226.
Confident detection of gravitational waves requires an understanding of
instrumental transients and artifacts that can reduce the sensitivity of a
search. Studies of the quality of the detector data yield insights into the
cause of instrumental artifacts and data quality vetoes specific to a search
are produced to mitigate the effects of problematic data. In this paper, the
systematic removal of noisy data from analysis time is shown to improve the
sensitivity of searches for compact binary coalescences. The output of the
PyCBC pipeline, which is a python-based code package used to search for
gravitational wave signals from compact binary coalescences, is used as a
metric for improvement. GW150914 was a loud enough signal that removing noisy
data did not improve its significance. However, the removal of data with excess
noise decreased the false alarm rate of GW151226 by more than two orders of
magnitude, from 1 in 770 years to less than 1 in 186000 years.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, published versio
Supplement: "Localization and broadband follow-up of the gravitational-wave transient GW150914" (2016, ApJL, 826, L13)
This Supplement provides supporting material for Abbott et al. (2016a). We briefly summarize past electromagnetic (EM) follow-up efforts as well as the organization and policy of the current EM follow-up program. We compare the four probability sky maps produced for the gravitational-wave transient GW150914, and provide additional details of the EM follow-up observations that were performed in the different bands
All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO
We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10â500Â s in a frequency band of 40â1000Â Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4Ă10â5 and 9.4Ă10â4ââMpcâ3âyrâ1 at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves
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