A Question of Justice: The WTO, Africa, And Countermeasures For Breaches of International Trade, 38 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1153 (2005)

Background/aims To evaluate the perception of three-dimensional (3D) shape in patients with strabismus and the contributions of stereopsis and monocular cues to this perception. Methods Twenty-one patients with strabismus with and 20 without stereo acuity as well as 25 age-matched normal volunteers performed two tasks: (1) identifying the closest vertices of 3D shapes from monocular shading (3D-SfS), texture (3D-SfT) or motion cues (3D-SfM) and from binocular disparity (3D-SfD), (2) discriminating 1D elementary features of these cues. Results Discrimination of the elementary features of luminance, texture and motion did not differ across groups. When the distances between reported and actual closest vertices were resolved into sagittal and frontoparallel plane components, sagittal components in 3D-SfS and frontoparallel components in 3D-SfT indicated larger errors in patients with strabismus without stereo acuity than in normal subjects. These patients could not discriminate one-dimensional elementary features of binocular disparity. Patients with strabismus with stereo acuity performed worse for both components of 3D-SfD and frontoparallel components of 3D-SfT compared with normal subjects. No differences were observed in the perception of 3D-SfM across groups. A comparison between normal subjects and patients with strabismus with normal stereopsis revealed no deficit in 3D shape perception from any cue. Conclusions Binocular stereopsis is essential for fine perception of 3D shape, even when 3D shape is defined by monocular static cues. Interaction between these cues may occur in ventral occipitotemporal regions, where 3D-SfS, 3D-SfT and 3D-SfD are processed in the same or neighbouring cortical regions. Our findings demonstrate the perceptual benefit of binocular stereopsis in patients with strabismus

Trapping Records of Fruit Fly Pest Species (Diptera: Tephritidae) on Oahu (Hawaiian Islands): Analysis of Spatial Population Trends

Fruit fly monitoring traps with male lures (cue-lure, methyl eugenol, trimedlure, latilure) and food lure (torula yeast and BioLure) were maintained on the island of Oahu for three years (2006–2008) at 40 sites, characterized as rural or residential, with or without agriculture or feral forest in proximity. The 1.7 million flies collected belonged to species already known to be established in Hawaii (Bactrocera cucurbitae, B. dorsalis, B. latifrons, and Ceratitis capitata); no new invasive species were trapped, though the remotely possible presence of sibling species nearly identical to B. dorsalis can’t be ruled out. B. cucurbitae was predominant in leeward western Oahu and most abundant, in both rural and residential areas, wherever agriculture was practiced nearby. B. dorsalis was trapped in highest numbers in the windward northeastern portion of Oahu, and the presence of adjacent forest increased captures in both residential and rural environments. C. capitata was trapped in very large numbers at a coffee farm in Waialua and was rare at all other sites

FK506 and Cyclosporin A Enhance IL-6 Production in Monocytes: A single-Cell Assay

The effect of FK506 and cyclosporin A (CsA) on the production of interleukin 6 (IL-6) in adherent monocytes was studied at a single-cell level by the avidinbiotin- peroxidase complex methods. The percentage of IL-6-producing monocytes increased when stimulated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) at concentrations between 10 ng/ml and 10 μg/ml, in a dose dependent manner. Both FK506 and CsA enhanced the percentage of IL-6- producing monocytes stimulated with 100 pg/ml-1 μg/ml of LPS up to values near those obtained with 10 μg/ml of LPS. The enhancement by FK506 and CsA was not seen when monocytes were stimulated with a high concentration of LPS (10 μg/ml). When monocytes were stimulated with a low concentration of LPS (10 ng/ml), FK506 and CsA enhanced IL-6 production in a dose dependent manner, at a drug concentration of 0.12 nM–1.2 μM (0.1–1 000 ng/ml) for FK506 and 0.83 nM–8.3 μM (1–10 000 ng/ml) for CsA. The optimal effect of FK506 was achieved at a concentration 7-fold lower than that of CsA. In contrast, production of turnout necrosis factor-α (TNFα and interleukin 1β (IL-1β) was slightly suppressed by FK506 and CsA at the concentrations tested. Moreover, pretreatment of monocytes with FK506 and CsA had a significant enhancing effect on LPS-induced IL-6 production, while treatment with FK506 or CsA after LPS stimulation had no effects on IL-6 production, suggesting that the enhancing effect of each drug is exerted before LPS stimulation or at an early stage of the post-receptor pathway after LPS stimulation. These experiments demonstrate that FK506 and CsA can selectively enhance IL-6 production in monocytes under certain conditions in vitro and, possibly, also in vivo

HSRL-2 aerosol optical measurements and microphysical retrievals vs. airborne in situ measurements during DISCOVER-AQ 2013: : an intercomparison study

This is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. © Author(s) 2017. Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.We present a detailed evaluation of remotely-sensed aerosol microphysical properties obtained from an advanced, multi-wavelength High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL-2) during the 2013 NASA DISCOVER-AQ field campaign. Vertically resolved retrievals of fine mode aerosol number, surface area, and volume concentration as well as aerosol effective radius are compared to 108 co-located, airborne in situ measurement profiles in the wintertime San Joaquin Valley, California, and in summertime Houston, Texas. An algorithm for relating the dry in situ aerosol properties to those obtained by the HSRL at ambient relative humidity is discussed. We show that the HSRL-2 retrievals of ambient fine mode aerosol surface area and volume concentrations agree with the in situ measurements to within 25% and 10%, respectively, once hygroscopic growth adjustments have been applied to the dry in situ data. Despite this excellent agreement for the microphysical properties, extinction and backscatter coefficients at ambient relative humidity derived from the in situ aerosol measurements using Mie theory are consistently smaller than those measured by the HSRL, with average differences of 31% 5% and 53% 11% for California and Texas, respectively. This low bias in the in situ estimates is attributed to the presence of coarse mode aerosol that are detected by HSRL-2 but that are too large to be well sampled by the in situ instrumentation. Since the retrieval of aerosol volume is most relevant to current regulatory efforts targeting fine particle mass (PM2:5), these findings highlight the advantages of an advanced 3+2 HSRL for constraining the vertical distribution of the aerosol volume or mass loading relevant for air quality.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Beam-Breakup Instability Theory for Energy Recovery Linacs

Here we will derive the general theory of the beam-breakup instability in recirculating linear accelerators, in which the bunches do not have to be at the same RF phase during each recirculation turn. This is important for the description of energy recovery linacs (ERLs) where bunches are recirculated at a decelerating phase of the RF wave and for other recirculator arrangements where different RF phases are of an advantage. Furthermore it can be used for the analysis of phase errors of recirculated bunches. It is shown how the threshold current for a given linac can be computed and a remarkable agreement with tracking data is demonstrated. The general formulas are then analyzed for several analytically solvable cases, which show: (a) Why different higher order modes (HOM) in one cavity do not couple so that the most dangerous modes can be considered individually. (b) How different HOM frequencies have to be in order to consider them separately. (c) That no optics can cause the HOMs of two cavities to cancel. (d) How an optics can avoid the addition of the instabilities of two cavities. (e) How a HOM in a multiple-turn recirculator interferes with itself. Furthermore, a simple method to compute the orbit deviations produced by cavity misalignments has also been introduced. It is shown that the BBU instability always occurs before the orbit excursion becomes very large.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Restoration of endogenous wild-type p53 activity in a glioblastoma cell line with intrinsic temperature-sensitive p53 induces growth arrest but not apoptosis.

p53 protein is a transcription factor involved in multiple tumor-suppressor activities including cell cycle control and apoptosis. TP53 gene is frequently mutated in glioblastoma, suggesting the importance of inactivation of this gene product in gliomagenesis. Restoration of p53 function in glioblastoma cell lines deficient for p53 has shown that p53 induces growth arrest or apoptosis depending on the cell line and vector used to transduce wild-type TP53 alleles. Considering that astrocytes grow and express p53, it is not clear whether these results reflect physiologic responses or the result of p53 overexpression in combination with cellular responses to viral vector infection. Here, we reassessed this issue using a glioblastoma cell line (LN382) that expresses an endogenous temperature-sensitive mutant p53. This cell line expresses TP53 alleles (100% as determined by a p53 transcriptional assay in yeast) mutated at codon 197 GTG (Val) > CTG (Leu). We found that the p53 protein in these cells acted as an inactive mutant at 37 degrees C and as a functional wild-type p53 below 34 degrees C as demonstrated by several lines of evidence, including (i) restoration of transactivating ability in yeast, (ii) induction of p53-modulated genes such as CDKN1(p21) and transforming growth factor-alpha, (iii) disappearance of accumulated p53 protein in the nucleus and (iv) decrease in steady state p53 protein levels. This temperature switch allowed p53 levels, which were close to physiological levels to dramatically reduce LN382 cell proliferation by inducing a G(1)/S cell cycle block, but not to induce apoptosis. The lack of apoptosis was considered to be a result of the low level p53 expression, because increasing wild-type p53 levels by adenoviral-mediated gene transfer caused apoptosis in these cells. The LN382 cell line will be extremely useful for investigations into the roles of p53 in cellular responses to a variety of stimuli or damages

Bosonic t-J Model in a stacked triangular lattice and its phase diagram

In this paper, we study phase diagram of a system of two-component hard-core bosons with nearest-neighbor (NN) pseudo-spin antiferromagnetic (AF) interactions in a stacked triangular lattice. Hamiltonian of the system contains three parameters one of which is the hopping amplitude $t$ between NN sites, and the other two are the NN pseudo-spin exchange interaction $J$ and the one that measures anisotropy of pseudo-spin interactions. We investigate the system by means of the Monte-Carlo simulations and clarify the low-temperature phase diagram. In particular, we are interested in how the competing orders, i.e., AF order and superfluidity, are realized, and also whether supersolid forms as a result of hole doping into the state of the $\sqrt{3}\times \sqrt{3}$ pseudo-spin pattern with the $120^o$ structure.Comment: 18 pages, 17 figures, Version to appear in J.Phys.Soc.Jp

Tunable terahertz emission from the intrinsic Josephson junctions in acute isosceles triangular Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+delta mesas

In order to determine if the mesa geometry might affect the properties of the coherent terahertz (THz) radiation emitted from the intrinsic Josephson junctions in mesas constructed from single crystals of the high-temperature superconductor, Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+delta, we studied triangular mesas. For equilateral triangular mesas, the observed emission was found to be limited to the single mesa TM(1,0) mode. However, tunable radiation over the range from 0.495 to 0.934 THz was found to arise from an acute isosceles triangular mesa. This 47% tunability is the widest yet observed from the outer current-voltage characteristic branch of such mesas of any geometry. Although the radiation at a few of the frequencies in the tunable range appear to have been enhanced by cavity resonances, most frequencies are far from such resonance frequencies, and can only be attributed to the ac-Josephson effect

Self-organization of stack-up block copolymers into polymeric supramolecules

Polyethylene oxide –b– polypropylene oxide -b- polyethylene oxide (EO106PO70EO106) block copolymer self-organizes into polymeric supramolecules, characterized by NMR as phase transition from the isotropic stack-up block structure to the ordered cubic polymeric supramolecular structure. Its dependence on both temperature and copolymer concentration is clearly shown by the changes in line shape and chemical shift of the PO70blockβ,γresonances