Solvation Enhances the Distinction Between Carboxylated Armchair and Zigzag Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes (SWNT-COOH)

The effect of various solvents on the structures and properties of carboxylated SWNTs has been explored using the Same Level Different Basis Set approach (SLDB), where B3LYP functional of density functional theory (DFT) was applied. Armchair (4,4) and zigzag (8,0) and (9,0) tubes were considered as the test bed. In order to simulate varying concentration of –COOH groups, one to five acids groups were placed at one end of these tubes. These samples were placed in different solvents (namely, CS2, THF and water) with varying polarity and results were compared with gas-phase properties. Similar to the gas-phase, zigzag tubes also exhibit both regular (r-COOH, v(C=O) above 1700 cm-1) and low-frequency (lf-COOH, v(C=O) below 1700 cm-1) acid groups. Characteristics of r-COOH group are not affected much in solvents, but lf-COOH of the zigzag tube is the one that makes these tubes distinguishable from its armchair cousin. Stability and charge distribution of SWNT-COOH strongly depend on the number of acid groups in different solvents which may help controlling further functionalization. Vibrational analyses reveal certain features in the 1400-1600 cm-1 range that are characteristic of lf-COOH in different solvents, which may help in the assignment of experimental spectra of oxidized SWNT in solvents

The Long-Term Impact of Physical and Emotional Trauma: The Station Nightclub Fire

Background: Survivors of physical and emotional trauma experience enduring occupational, psychological and quality of life impairments. Examining survivors from a large fire provides a unique opportunity to distinguish the impact of physical and emotional trauma on long-term outcomes. The objective is to detail the multi-dimensional long-term effects of a large fire on its survivor population and assess differences in outcomes between survivors with and without physical injury. Methods and Findings: This is a survey-based cross-sectional study of survivors of The Station fire on February 20, 2003. The relationships between functional outcomes and physical injury were evaluated with multivariate regression models adjusted for pre-injury characteristics and post-injury outcomes. Outcome measures include quality of life (Burn Specific Health Scale–Brief), employment (time off work), post-traumatic stress symptoms (Impact of Event Scale–Revised) and depression symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory). 104 fire survivors completed the survey; 47% experienced a burn injury. There was a 42% to 72% response rate range. Although depression and quality of life were associated with burn injury in univariate analyses (p<0.05), adjusted analyses showed no significant relationship between burn injury and these outcomes (p = 0.91; p = .51). Post-traumatic stress symptoms were not associated with burn injury in the univariate (p = 0.13) or adjusted analyses (p = 0.79). Time off work was the only outcome in which physical injury remained significant in the multivariate analysis (p = 0.03). Conclusions: Survivors of this large fire experienced significant life disruption, including occupational, psychological and quality of life sequelae. The findings suggest that quality of life, depression and post-traumatic stress outcomes are related to emotional trauma, not physical injury. However, physical injury is correlated with employment outcomes. The long-term impact of this traumatic event underscores the importance of longitudinal and mental health care for trauma survivors, with attention to those with and without physical injuries

Strong Lensing Analysis of A1689 from Deep Advanced Camera Images

We analyse deep multi-colour Advanced Camera images of the largest known gravitational lens, A1689. Radial and tangential arcs delineate the critical curves in unprecedented detail and many small counter-images are found near the center of mass. We construct a flexible light deflection field to predict the appearance and positions of counter-images. The model is refined as new counter-images are identified and incorporated to improve the model, yielding a total of 106 images of 30 multiply lensed background galaxies, spanning a wide redshift range, 1.0$<$z$<$5.5. The resulting mass map is more circular in projection than the clumpy distribution of cluster galaxies and the light is more concentrated than the mass within $r<50kpc/h$. The projected mass profile flattens steadily towards the center with a shallow mean slope of $d\log\Sigma/d\log r \simeq -0.55\pm0.1$, over the observed range, r$<250kpc/h$, matching well an NFW profile, but with a relatively high concentration, $C_{vir}=8.2^{+2.1}_{-1.8}$. A softened isothermal profile ($r_{core}=20\pm2$\arcs) is not conclusively excluded, illustrating that lensing constrains only projected quantities. Regarding cosmology, we clearly detect the purely geometric increase of bend-angles with redshift. The dependence on the cosmological parameters is weak due to the proximity of A1689, $z=0.18$, constraining the locus, $\Omega_M+\Omega_{\Lambda} \leq 1.2$. This consistency with standard cosmology provides independent support for our model, because the redshift information is not required to derive an accurate mass map. Similarly, the relative fluxes of the multiple images are reproduced well by our best fitting lens model.Comment: Accepted by ApJ. For high quality figures see http://wise-obs.tau.ac.il/~kerens/A168

Generation of stable Drosophila cell lines using multicistronic vectors

Insect cell culture is becoming increasingly important for applications including recombinant protein production and cell-based screening with chemical or RNAi libraries. While stable mammalian cell lines expressing a protein of interest can be efficiently prepared using IRES-based vectors or viral-based approaches, options for stable insect cell lines are more limited. Here, we describe pAc5-STABLEs, new vectors for use in Drosophila cell culture to facilitate stable transformation. We show that viral-derived 2A-like (or "CHYSEL") peptides function in Drosophila cells and can mediate the multicistronic expression of two or three proteins of interest under control of the Actin5C constitutive promoter. The current vectors allow mCherry and/or GFP fusions to be generated for positive selection by G418 resistance in cells and should serve as a flexible platform for future applications

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

Blood Meal-Derived Heme Decreases ROS Levels in the Midgut of Aedes aegypti and Allows Proliferation of Intestinal Microbiota

The presence of bacteria in the midgut of mosquitoes antagonizes infectious agents, such as Dengue and Plasmodium, acting as a negative factor in the vectorial competence of the mosquito. Therefore, knowledge of the molecular mechanisms involved in the control of midgut microbiota could help in the development of new tools to reduce transmission. We hypothesized that toxic reactive oxygen species (ROS) generated by epithelial cells control bacterial growth in the midgut of Aedes aegypti, the vector of Yellow fever and Dengue viruses. We show that ROS are continuously present in the midgut of sugar-fed (SF) mosquitoes and a blood-meal immediately decreased ROS through a mechanism involving heme-mediated activation of PKC. This event occurred in parallel with an expansion of gut bacteria. Treatment of sugar-fed mosquitoes with increased concentrations of heme led to a dose dependent decrease in ROS levels and a consequent increase in midgut endogenous bacteria. In addition, gene silencing of dual oxidase (Duox) reduced ROS levels and also increased gut flora. Using a model of bacterial oral infection in the gut, we show that the absence of ROS resulted in decreased mosquito resistance to infection, increased midgut epithelial damage, transcriptional modulation of immune-related genes and mortality. As heme is a pro-oxidant molecule released in large amounts upon hemoglobin degradation, oxidative killing of bacteria in the gut would represent a burden to the insect, thereby creating an extra oxidative challenge to the mosquito. We propose that a controlled decrease in ROS levels in the midgut of Aedes aegypti is an adaptation to compensate for the ingestion of heme

The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment

The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in operation since July 2014. This paper describes the second data release from this phase, and the fourteenth from SDSS overall (making this, Data Release Fourteen or DR14). This release makes public data taken by SDSS-IV in its first two years of operation (July 2014-2016). Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14 is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14 is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS); the first data from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data driven machine learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of the publicly available data from SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release, and provides links to data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be followed by SDSS-V.Comment: SDSS-IV collaboration alphabetical author data release paper. DR14 happened on 31st July 2017. 19 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJS on 28th Nov 2017 (this is the "post-print" and "post-proofs" version; minor corrections only from v1, and most of errors found in proofs corrected

Parasitoid Increases Survival of Its Pupae by Inducing Hosts to Fight Predators

Many true parasites and parasitoids modify the behaviour of their host, and these changes are thought to be to the benefit of the parasites. However, field tests of this hypothesis are scarce, and it is often unclear whether the host or the parasite profits from the behavioural changes, or even if parasitism is a cause or consequence of the behaviour. We show that braconid parasitoids (Glyptapanteles sp.) induce their caterpillar host (Thyrinteina leucocerae) to behave as a bodyguard of the parasitoid pupae. After parasitoid larvae exit from the host to pupate, the host stops feeding, remains close to the pupae, knocks off predators with violent head-swings, and dies before reaching adulthood. Unparasitized caterpillars do not show these behaviours. In the field, the presence of bodyguard hosts resulted in a two-fold reduction in mortality of parasitoid pupae. Hence, the behaviour appears to be parasitoid-induced and confers benefits exclusively to the parasitoid