Orbits for the Impatient: A Bayesian Rejection Sampling Method for Quickly Fitting the Orbits of Long-Period Exoplanets

We describe a Bayesian rejection sampling algorithm designed to efficiently compute posterior distributions of orbital elements for data covering short fractions of long-period exoplanet orbits. Our implementation of this method, Orbits for the Impatient (OFTI), converges up to several orders of magnitude faster than two implementations of MCMC in this regime. We illustrate the efficiency of our approach by showing that OFTI calculates accurate posteriors for all existing astrometry of the exoplanet 51 Eri b up to 100 times faster than a Metropolis-Hastings MCMC. We demonstrate the accuracy of OFTI by comparing our results for several orbiting systems with those of various MCMC implementations, finding the output posteriors to be identical within shot noise. We also describe how our algorithm was used to successfully predict the location of 51 Eri b six months in the future based on less than three months of astrometry. Finally, we apply OFTI to ten long-period exoplanets and brown dwarfs, all but one of which have been monitored over less than 3% of their orbits, producing fits to their orbits from astrometric records in the literature.Comment: 32 pages, 28 figures, Accepted to A

Treadmill exercise has minimal impact on obesogenic diet-related gut microbiome changes but alters adipose and hypothalamic gene expression in rats

Exercise has been extensively utilised as an effective therapy for overweight- and obesity-associated changes that are linked to health complications. Several preclinical rodent studies have shown that treadmill exercise alongside an unhealthy diet improves metabolic health and microbiome composition. Furthermore, chronic exercise has been shown to alter hypothalamic and adipose tissue gene expression in diet-induced obesity. However, limited work has investigated whether treadmill exercise commenced following exposure to an obesogenic diet is sufficient to alter microbiome composition and metabolic health. To address this gap in the literature, we fed rats a high-fat/high-sugar western-style cafeteria diet and assessed the effects of 4 weeks of treadmill exercise on adiposity, diet-induced gut dysbiosis, as well as hypothalamic and retroperitoneal white adipose tissue gene expression. Forty-eight male Sprague-Dawley rats were allocated to either regular chow or cafeteria diet and after 3 weeks half the rats on each diet were exposed to moderate treadmill exercise for 4 weeks while the remainder were exposed to a stationary treadmill. Microbial species diversity was uniquely reduced in exercising chow-fed rats, while microbiome composition was only changed by cafeteria diet. Despite limited effects of exercise on overall microbiome composition, exercise increased inferred microbial functions involved in metabolism, reduced fat mass, and altered adipose and hypothalamic gene expression. After controlling for diet and exercise, adipose Il6 expression and liver triglyceride concentrations were significantly associated with global microbiome composition. Moderate treadmill exercise induced subtle microbiome composition changes in chow-fed rats but did not overcome the microbiome changes induced by prolonged exposure to cafeteria diet. Predicted metabolic function of the gut microbiome was increased by exercise. The effects of exercise on the microbiome may be modulated by obesity severity. Future work should investigate whether exercise in combination with microbiome-modifying interventions can synergistically reduce diet- and obesity-associated comorbidities

Application of Spectral Kurtosis to Characterize Amplitude Variability in Power Systems’ Harmonics

The highly-changing concept of Power Quality (PQ) needs to be continuously reformulated due to the new schemas of the power grid or Smart Grid (SG). In general, the spectral content is characterized by their averaged or extreme values. However, new PQ events may consist of large variations in amplitude that occur in a short time or small variations in amplitude that take place continuously. Thus, the former second-order techniques are not suitable to monitor the dynamics of the power spectrum. In this work, a strategy based on Spectral Kurtosis (SK) is introduced to detect frequency components with a constant amplitude trend, which accounts for amplitude values’ dispersion related to the mean value of that spectral component. SK has been proven to measure frequency components that follow a constant amplitude trend. Two practical real-life cases have been considered: electric current time-series from an arc furnace and the power grid voltage supply. Both cases confirm that the more concentrated the amplitude values are around the mean value, the lower the SK values are. All this confirms SK as an effective tool for evaluating frequency components with a constant amplitude trend, being able to provide information beyond maximum variation around the mean value and giving a progressive index of value dispersion around the mean amplitude value, for each frequency component

Differential In Vitro Cultivation of Francisella tularensis Influences Live Vaccine Protective Efficacy by Altering the Immune Response

Francisella tularensis (Ft) is a biothreat agent for which there is no FDA-approved human vaccine. Currently, there are substantial efforts underway to develop both vaccines and improved tools to assess these vaccines. Ft expresses distinct sets of antigens (Ags) in vivo as compared to those expressed in vitro. Importantly, Ft grown in brain-heart infusion medium (BHIM) more closely mimics the antigenic profile of macrophage-grown Ft when compared to Mueller-Hinton medium (MHM)-grown Ft. Thus, we predicted that when used as a live vaccine BHIM-grown Ft (BHIM-Ft) would provide better protection, as compared to MHM-Ft. We first determined if there was a difference in growth kinetics between BHIM and MHM-Ft. We found that BHIM-Ft exhibited an initial growth advantage ex vivo that manifests as slightly hastened intracellular replication as compared to MHM-Ft. We also observed that BHIM-Ft exhibited an initial growth advantage in vivo represented by rapid bacterial expansion and systemic dissemination associated with a slightly shorter mean survival time of naive animals. Next, using two distinct strains of Ft LVS (WT and sodB), we observed that mice vaccinated with live BHIM-Ft LVS exhibited significantly better protection against Ft SchuS4 respiratory challenge compared to MHM-Ft-immunized mice. This enhanced protection correlated with lower bacterial burden, reduced tissue inflammation, and reduced pro-inflammatory cytokine production late in infection. Splenocytes from BHIM-Ft sodB-immunized mice contained more CD4+, effector, memory T-cells, and were more effective at limiting intracellular replication of Ft LVS in vitro. Concurrent with enhanced killing of Ft LVS, BHIM-Ft sodB-immune splenocytes produced significantly higher levels of IFN-γ and IL-17A cytokines than their MHM-Ft sodB-immunized counterparts indicating development of a more effective T cell memory response when immunizing mice with BHIM-Ft

Perceptions of an assessment literacy module to improve academic judgement – a pilot study

Expectation differences between assessors and students regarding assignment marking often results in student dissatisfaction accompanied by student complaints, indicating that despite following assignment task briefs and marking criteria, students’ desired grades were not achieved. The Assessment Literacy Module (ALM) is an online grading tool designed to promote student development of evaluative judgement. The ALM allows evaluation of sample assignments – with students being the assessor – guided by assignment marking standards that convey how assessment criteria relate to the assignment outcome; a process that often highlights discrepancies in student academic judgement. Our pilot study surveyed staff (N = 13) and students (N = 105) to gauge perceptions of the impact of the ALM on the student learning experience. Students from eight subjects in Bioscience, Science and Biomedicine, across all three undergraduate levels, indicated that they now have a better understanding of their assessment criteria (85.7%), that they found the ALM helpful in preparing their assignments (87.6%), and that they are more confident with their assessment quality (78.1%). Staff indicated that they perceived students were able to use the feedback comments on the sample assignments to better understand assignment rubrics (69.2%), and that students who used the ALM had better comprehension of assessment expectations (84.6%)

Constraints on the architecture of the HD 95086 planetary system with the Gemini Planet Imager

We present astrometric monitoring of the young exoplanet HD 95086 b obtained with the Gemini Planet Imager between 2013 and 2016. A small but significant position angle change is detected at constant separation; the orbital motion is confirmed with literature measurements. Efficient Monte Carlo techniques place preliminary constraints on the orbital parameters of HD 95086 b. With 68% confidence, a semimajor axis of 61.7^{+20.7}_{-8.4} au and an inclination of 153.0^{+9.7}_{-13.5} deg are favored, with eccentricity less than 0.21. Under the assumption of a co-planar planet-disk system, the periastron of HD 95086 b is beyond 51 au with 68% confidence. Therefore HD 95086 b cannot carve the entire gap inferred from the measured infrared excess in the SED of HD 95086. We use our sensitivity to additional planets to discuss specific scenarios presented in the literature to explain the geometry of the debris belts. We suggest that either two planets on moderately eccentric orbits or three to four planets with inhomogeneous masses and orbital properties are possible. The sensitivity to additional planetary companions within the observations presented in this study can be used to help further constrain future dynamical simulations of the planet-disk system.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ

Vesicular stomatitis virus chimeras expressing the oropouche virus glycoproteins elicit protective immune responses in mice

Oropouche virus (OROV) infection of humans is associated with a debilitating febrile illness that can progress to meningitis or encephalitis. First isolated from a forest worker in Trinidad and Tobago in 1955, the arbovirus OROV has since been detected throughout the Amazon basin with an estimated 500,000 human infections over 60 years. Like other members of the famil

orbitize!: A Comprehensive Orbit-fitting Software Package for the High-contrast Imaging Community

orbitize! is an open-source, object-oriented software package for fitting the orbits of directly imaged objects. It packages the Orbits for the Impatient (OFTI) algorithm and a parallel-tempered Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm into a consistent and intuitive Python API. orbitize! makes it easy to run standard astrometric orbit fits; in less than 10 lines of code, users can read in data, perform one fit using OFTI and another using MCMC, and make two publication-ready figures. Extensive pedagogical tutorials, intended to be navigable by both orbit-fitting novices and seasoned experts, are available on our documentation page. We have designed the orbitize! API to be flexible and easy to use/modify for unique cases. orbitize! was designed by members of the exoplanet imaging community to be a central repository for algorithms, techniques, and know-how developed by this community. We intend for it to continue to expand and change as the field progresses and new techniques are developed, and call for community involvement in this process. Complete and up-to-date documentation is available at orbitize.info, and the source code is available at github.com/sblunt/orbitize

Differential Growth of Francisella tularensis, Which Alters Expression of Virulence Factors, Dominant Antigens, and Surface-Carbohydrate Synthases, Governs the Apparent Virulence of Ft SchuS4 to Immunized Animals

The gram-negative bacterium Francisella tularensis (Ft) is both a potential biological weapon and a naturally occurring microbe that survives in arthropods, fresh water amoeba, and mammals with distinct phenotypes in various environments. Previously, we used a number of measurements to characterize Ft grown in Brain-Heart Infusion (BHI) broth as (1) more similar to infection-derived bacteria, and (2) slightly more virulent in naïve animals, compared to Ft grown in Mueller Hinton Broth (MHB). In these studies we observed that the free amino acids in MHB repress expression of select Ft virulence factors by an unknown mechanism. Here, we tested the hypotheses that Ft grown in BHI (BHI-Ft) accurately displays a full protein composition more similar to that reported for infection-derived Ft and that this similarity would make BHI-Ft more susceptible to pre-existing, vaccine-induced immunity than MHB-Ft. We performed comprehensive proteomic analysis of Ft grown in MHB, BHI, and BHI supplemented with casamino acids (BCA) and compared our findings to published “omics” data derived from Ft grown in vivo. Based on the abundance of ~1,000 proteins, the fingerprint of BHI-Ft is one of nutrient-deprived bacteria that—through induction of a stringent-starvation-like response—have induced the FevR regulon for expression of the bacterium's virulence factors, immuno-dominant antigens, and surface-carbohydrate synthases. To test the notion that increased abundance of dominant antigens expressed by BHI-Ft would render these bacteria more susceptible to pre-existing, vaccine-induced immunity, we employed a battery of LVS-vaccination and S4-challenge protocols using MHB- and BHI-grown Ft S4. Contrary to our hypothesis, these experiments reveal that LVS-immunization provides a barrier to infection that is significantly more effective against an MHB-S4 challenge than a BHI-S4 challenge. The differences in apparent virulence to immunized mice are profoundly greater than those observed with primary infection of naïve mice. Our findings suggest that tularemia vaccination studies should be critically evaluated in regard to the growth conditions of the challenge agent

Markers of Inflammation, Coagulation, and Renal Function Are Elevated in Adults with HIV Infection

(See the article by Kalayjian et al, on pages 1796-1805, and the editorial commentary by Dubé and Sattler, on pages 1783-1785.) Background. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) replication and immune activation may increase inflammation and coagulation biomarkers. Limited data exist comparing such biomarkers in persons with and without HIV infection. Methods. For persons 45-76 years of age, levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), interleukin (IL)-6, D-dimer, and cystatin C were compared in 494 HIV-infected individuals in the Strategies for Management of Anti-Retroviral Therapy (SMART) study and 5386 participants in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) study. For persons 33-44 years of age, hsCRP and IL-6 levels were compared in 287 participants in the SMART study and 3231 participants in the Coronary Artery Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. Results. hsCRP and IL-6 levels were 55% (P<.001) and 62% (P<.001) higher among HIV-infected participants than among CARDIA study participants. Compared with levels noted in MESA study participants, hsCRP, IL-6, D-dimer, and cystatin C levels were 50%, 152%, 94%, and 27% higher, respectively (P<.001 , for each), among HIV-infected participants. HIV-infected participants receiving antiretroviral therapy who had HIV RNA levels ≤400 copies/mL had levels higher (by 21% to 60%) (P<.001) than those in the general population, for all biomarkers. Conclusions. hsCRP, IL-6, D-dimer, and cystatin C levels are elevated in persons with HIV infection and remain so even after HIV RNA levels are suppressed with antiretroviral therapy. Additional research is needed on the pathophysiology of HIV-induced activation of inflammatory and coagulation pathways, to guide potential intervention