Elevating crop disease resistance with cloned genes

Essentially all plant species exhibit heritable genetic variation for resistance to a variety of plant diseases caused by fungi, bacteria, oomycetes or viruses. Disease losses in crop monocultures are already significant, and would be greater but for applications of disease-controlling agrichemicals. For sustainable intensification of crop production, we argue that disease control should as far as possible be achieved using genetics rather than using costly recurrent chemical sprays. The latter imply CO2 emissions from diesel fuel and potential soil compaction from tractor journeys. Great progress has been made in the past 25 years in our understanding of the molecular basis of plant disease resistance mechanisms, and of how pathogens circumvent them. These insights can inform more sophisticated approaches to elevating disease resistance in crops that help us tip the evolutionary balance in favour of the crop and away from the pathogen. We illustrate this theme with an account of a genetically modified (GM) blight-resistant potato trial in Norwich, using the Rpi-vnt1.1 gene isolated from a wild relative of potato, Solanum venturii, and introduced by GM methods into the potato variety Desiree

Breathe the Machine

Breathe the Machine interspecies morph edition featuring a video conference and solo or synched blow-ins Teresa Carmody Dengke Chen Matt Roberts Terri Witek The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be? A collaborative group composed of a prose writer, new media artist, 3-D animator, and poet enter your personal computers and suggest that in this particularly viral moment, individual breaths + machines may be the closest we get to community touch. An animated video conference offers the project\u27s conceptual framework, including questions about invasive species and intimacy in this new world where we stand masked and apart, not quite meeting another’s onscreen eyes. Participants in Breathe the Machine will each breathe into their own computer mics to both create onscreen reactions and change an animated world. Each transformation will become part of a larger story built from the computers’ individual data. At a designated moment in the conference, we\u27ll combine breaths in a synched group Blow-In. Their conceiving mind quit avoiding their body; their body, they realized, had already FaaD. Donna Haraway is just one theorist who argues that as we acquire more mechanical parts, and as technology takes on increasingly human functions, we are already participants in interspecies interactions; a fact made disturbingly clear and re-capitalized by the unseen transmissions of a global pandemic. Breathe the Machine challenges us to think of screens as partners in new, combinatory narratives that converge technology and the human into uneasy, resilient allies. Each breath, then, can become a cross-species touch, an interactive installation, an archive, a fiction, a world and a landscape. A prompt. This is how we morph. Project website: https://btm19.weebly.com/ To participate in this event, download and open the app, then blow onto your computer’s microphone. Using this app, we will meet at a specific time to participate in a live streamed event. The app, instructions, and story of the FaaS can be found on our project website

Geodesic stability, Lyapunov exponents and quasinormal modes

Geodesic motion determines important features of spacetimes. Null unstable geodesics are closely related to the appearance of compact objects to external observers and have been associated with the characteristic modes of black holes. By computing the Lyapunov exponent, which is the inverse of the instability timescale associated with this geodesic motion, we show that, in the eikonal limit, quasinormal modes of black holes in any dimensions are determined by the parameters of the circular null geodesics. This result is independent of the field equations and only assumes a stationary, spherically symmetric and asymptotically flat line element, but it does not seem to be easily extendable to anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We further show that (i) in spacetime dimensions greater than four, equatorial circular timelike geodesics in a Myers-Perry black hole background are unstable, and (ii) the instability timescale of equatorial null geodesics in Myers-Perry spacetimes has a local minimum for spacetimes of dimension d > 5.Comment: 13 pages, 2 Figs, RevTex4. v2: Minor corrections. v3: more minor correction

Head-on collisions of unequal mass black holes in D=5 dimensions

We study head-on collisions of unequal mass black hole binaries in D=5 space-time dimensions, with mass ratios between 1:1 and 1:4. Information about gravitational radiation is extracted by using the Kodama-Ishibashi gauge-invariant formalism and details of the apparent horizon of the final black hole. For the first time, we present waveforms, total integrated energy and momentum for this process. Our results show surprisingly good agreement, within 5% or less, with those extrapolated from linearized, point-particle calculations. Our results also show that consistency with the area theorem bound requires that the same process in a large number of spacetime dimensions must display new features.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, RevTex4. v2: Published versio

Constraints on the upper mantle structure beneath the Pacific from 3‐D anisotropic waveform modelling

Seismic radial anisotropy is a crucial tool to help constrain flow in the Earth's mantle. However, Earth structure beneath the oceans imaged by current 3‐D radially anisotropic mantle models shows large discrepancies. In this study, we provide constraints on the radially anisotropic upper mantle structure beneath the Pacific by waveform modelling and subsequent inversion. Specifically, we objectively evaluate three 3‐D tomography mantle models which exhibit varying distributions of radial anisotropy through comparisons of independent real datasets with synthetic seismograms computed with the spectral‐element method. The data require an asymmetry at the East Pacific Rise (EPR) with stronger positive radial anisotropy ξ = \frac{{V_{SH}}^{2}}{{V_{SV}}^{2}}=1.13‐1.16 at ∼100 km depth to the west of the East Pacific Rise than to the east (ξ = 1.11‐1.13). This suggests that the anisotropy in this region is due to the lattice preferred orientation (LPO) of anisotropic mantle minerals produced by shear‐driven asthenospheric flow beneath the South Pacific Superswell. Our new radial anisotropy constraints in the Pacific show three distinct positive linear anomalies at ∼100 km depth. These anomalies are possibly related to mantle entrainment at the Nazca‐South America subduction zone, flow at the East Pacific Rise and from the South Pacific Superswell and SPO (shape‐preferred orientation) of melt beneath Hawaii. Radial anisotropy reduces with lithospheric age to ξ < 1.05 in the west at ∼100 km depth, which possibly reflects a deviation from horizontal flow as the mantle is entrained with subducting slabs, a change in temperature or water content that could alter the anisotropic olivine fabric or the shape‐preferred orientation of melt

Numerical Relativity in D dimensional space-times: Collisions of unequal mass black holes

We present unequal mass head-on collisions of black holes in D = 5 dimensional space-times. We have simulated BH systems with mass ratios q = 1,1/2,1/3,1/4. We extract the total energy radiated throughout the collision and compute the linear momentum flux and the recoil velocity of the final black hole. The numerical results show very good agreement with point particle calculations when extrapolated to this limit

Numerical Relativity in D dimensional space-times: Collisions of unequal mass black holes

We present unequal mass head-on collisions of black holes in D = 5 dimensional space-times. We have simulated BH systems with mass ratios q = 1,1/2,1/3,1/4. We extract the total energy radiated throughout the collision and compute the linear momentum flux and the recoil velocity of the final black hole. The numerical results show very good agreement with point particle calculations when extrapolated to this limit

Numerical Relativity in D dimensional space-times: Collisions of unequal mass black holes

We present unequal mass head-on collisions of black holes in D = 5 dimensional space-times. We have simulated BH systems with mass ratios q = 1,1/2,1/3,1/4. We extract the total energy radiated throughout the collision and compute the linear momentum flux and the recoil velocity of the final black hole. The numerical results show very good agreement with point particle calculations when extrapolated to this limit

What role does the new interactive educational tool NearPod have in small group anatomy teaching at medical school?

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Black hole hair formation in shift-symmetric generalised scalar-tensor gravity

A linear coupling between a scalar field and the Gauss–Bonnet invariant is the only known interaction term between a scalar and the metric that: respects shift symmetry; does not lead to higher order equations; inevitably introduces black hole hair in asymptotically flat, 4-dimensional spacetimes. Here we focus on the simplest theory that includes such a term and we explore the dynamical formation of scalar hair. In particular, we work in the decoupling limit that neglects the backreaction of the scalar onto the metric and evolve the scalar configuration numerically in the background of a Schwarzschild black hole and a collapsing dust star described by the Oppenheimer–Snyder solution. For all types of initial data that we consider, the scalar relaxes at late times to the known, static, analytic configuration that is associated with a hairy, spherically symmetric black hole. This suggests that the corresponding black hole solutions are indeed endpoints of collapse