944 research outputs found

    Tables for determining lead, uranium, and thorium isotope ages

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    Tables for determining lead, uranium, and thorium isotope ages are presented in the form of computer printouts. Decay constants, analytical expressions for the functions evaluated, and the precision of the calculations are briefly discussed

    Wetlab-2 - Quantitative PCR Tools for Spaceflight Studies of Gene Expression Aboard the International Space Station

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    Wetlab-2 is a research platform for conducting real-time quantitative gene expression analysis aboard the International Space Station. The system enables spaceflight genomic studies involving a wide variety of biospecimen types in the unique microgravity environment of space. Currently, gene expression analyses of space flown biospecimens must be conducted post flight after living cultures or frozen or chemically fixed samples are returned to Earth from the space station. Post-flight analysis is limited for several reasons. First, changes in gene expression can be transient, changing over a timescale of minutes. The delay between sampling on Earth can range from days to months, and RNA may degrade during this period of time, even in fixed or frozen samples. Second, living organisms that return to Earth may quickly re-adapt to terrestrial conditions. Third, forces exerted on samples during reentry and return to Earth may affect results. Lastly, follow up experiments designed in response to post-flight results must wait for a new flight opportunity to be tested

    Inequivalence of the Massive Vector Meson and Higgs Models on a Manifold with Boundary

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    The exact quantization of two models, the massive vector meson model and the Higgs model in the London limit, both describing massive photons, is presented. Even though naive arguments (based on gauge-fixing) may indicate the equivalence of these models, it is shown here that this is not true in general when we consider these theories on manifolds with boundaries. We show, in particular, that they are equivalent only for a special choice of the boundary conditions that we are allowed to impose on the fields.Comment: 14 pages, LATEX File (revised with minor corrections

    In vivo nuclear magnetic resonance imaging

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    A number of physiological changes have been demonstrated in bone, muscle and blood after exposure of humans and animals to microgravity. Determining mechanisms and the development of effective countermeasures for long duration space missions is an important NASA goal. The advent of tomographic nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMR or MRI) gives NASA a way to greatly extend early studies of this phenomena in ways not previously possible; NMR is also noninvasive and safe. NMR provides both superb anatomical images for volume assessments of individual organs and quantification of chemical/physical changes induced in the examined tissues. The feasibility of NMR as a tool for human physiological research as it is affected by microgravity is demonstrated. The animal studies employed the rear limb suspended rat as a model of mucle atrophy that results from microgravity. And bedrest of normal male subjects was used to simulate the effects of microgravity on bone and muscle

    The rhesus measurement system: A new instrument for space research

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    The Rhesus Research Facility (RRF) is a research environment designed to study the effects of microgravity using rhesus primates as human surrogates. This experimental model allows investigators to study numerous aspects of microgravity exposure without compromising crew member activities. Currently, the RRF is slated for two missions to collect its data, the first mission is SLS-3, due to fly in late 1995. The RRF is a joint effort between the United States and France. The science and hardware portions of the project are being shared between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and France's Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales (CNES). The RRF is composed of many different subsystems in order to acquire data, provide life support, environmental enrichment, computer facilities and measurement capabilities for two rhesus primates aboard a nominal sixteen day mission. One of these subsystems is the Rhesus Measurement System (RMS). The RMS is designed to obtain in-flight physiological measurements from sensors interfaced with the subject. The RMS will acquire, preprocess, and transfer the physiologic data to the Flight Data System (FDS) for relay to the ground during flight. The measurements which will be taken by the RMS during the first flight will be respiration, measured at two different sites; electromyogram (EMG) at three different sites; electroencephalogram (EEG); electrocardiogram (ECG); and body temperature. These measurements taken by the RMS will assist the research team in meeting the science objectives of the RRF project

    Dopamine overdose hypothesis: Evidence and clinical implications

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    About a half a century has passed since dopamine was identified as a neurotransmitter, and it has been several decades since it was established that people with Parkinson's disease receive motor symptom relief from oral levodopa. Despite the evidence that levodopa can reduce motor symptoms, there has been a developing body of literature that dopaminergic therapy can improve cognitive functions in some patients but make them worse in others. Over the past two decades, several laboratories have shown that dopaminergic medications can impair the action of intact neural structures and impair the behaviors associated with these structures. In this review, we consider the evidence that has accumulated in the areas of reversal learning, motor sequence learning, and other cognitive tasks. The purported inverted‐U shaped relationship between dopamine levels and performance is complex and includes many contributory factors. The regional striatal topography of nigrostriatal denervation is a critical factor, as supported by multimodal neuroimaging studies. A patient's individual genotype will determine the relative baseline position on this inverted‐U curve. Dopaminergic pharmacotherapy and individual gene polymorphisms can affect the mesolimbic and prefrontal cortical dopaminergic functions in a comparable, inverted‐U dose‐response relationship. Depending on these factors, a patient can respond positively or negatively to levodopa when performing reversal learning and motor sequence learning tasks. These tasks may continue to be relevant as our society moves to increased technological demands of a digital world that requires newly learned motor sequences and adaptive behaviors to manage daily life activities. © 2013 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder SocietyPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102168/1/mds25687.pd

    Central charge and renormalization in supersymmetric theories with vortices

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    Some quantum features of vortices in supersymmetric theories in 1+2 dimensions are studied in a manifestly supersymmetric setting of the superfield formalism. A close examination of the supercurrent that accommodates the central charge and super-Poincare charges in a supermultiplet reveals that there is no genuine quantum anomaly in the supertrace identity and in the supercharge algebra, with the central-charge operator given by the bare Fayet-Iliopoulos term alone. The central charge and the vortex spectrum undergo renormalization on taking the expectation value of the central-charge operator. It is shown that the vortex spectrum is exactly determined at one loop while the spectrum of the elementary excitations receives higher-order corrections.Comment: 9 pages, revte

    Mode regularization of the susy sphaleron and kink: zero modes and discrete gauge symmetry

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    To obtain the one-loop corrections to the mass of a kink by mode regularization, one may take one-half the result for the mass of a widely separated kink-antikink (or sphaleron) system, where the two bosonic zero modes count as two degrees of freedom, but the two fermionic zero modes as only one degree of freedom in the sums over modes. For a single kink, there is one bosonic zero mode degree of freedom, but it is necessary to average over four sets of fermionic boundary conditions in order (i) to preserve the fermionic Z2_2 gauge invariance ψψ\psi \to -\psi, (ii) to satisfy the basic principle of mode regularization that the boundary conditions in the trivial and the kink sector should be the same, (iii) in order that the energy stored at the boundaries cancels and (iv) to avoid obtaining a finite, uniformly distributed energy which would violate cluster decomposition. The average number of fermionic zero-energy degrees of freedom in the presence of the kink is then indeed 1/2. For boundary conditions leading to only one fermionic zero-energy solution, the Z2_2 gauge invariance identifies two seemingly distinct `vacua' as the same physical ground state, and the single fermionic zero-energy solution does not correspond to a degree of freedom. Other boundary conditions lead to two spatially separated ω0\omega \sim 0 solutions, corresponding to one (spatially delocalized) degree of freedom. This nonlocality is consistent with the principle of cluster decomposition for correlators of observables.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figure
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