192 research outputs found
Deterrents and Their Effects on the Feeding Behavior and Sensory Physiology of Insects
The gustatory system of insects is a prominent model in neuroscience. This important sensory system allows insects to detect, encode, and process gustatory information. This important sensory modality allows insects to perceive their environment. All animals detect and react to chemicals in their environment. Using insects as model systems allows us to obtain fundamental information regarding the processing of sensory information in the brain of the animal. Stimuli, associated with taste and smell, are responsible in insects being able to locate and select food sources, mates, and egg-laying sites. One line of research can be directed to better understanding gustatory cues in the selection of food sources by insects. Experimentally, this will involve feeding behavioral and electrophysiological testing in insects. Examining the structural organization of the gustatory organs using transmission electron and scanning electron microscopy will shed more light on the detailed structure of these taste sensory organs, the sensilla. During feeding, these taste organs sample the plant sap that contains a multitude of phytochemicals. Gustatory sensory input is encoded as patterns of nerve impulses by gustatory receptor cells which are housed in these taste sensory organs. Taste information gathered by these receptor cells will allow the insect to determine if the food is palatable or should be rejected
A Stochastic Multi-scale Approach for Numerical Modeling of Complex Materials - Application to Uniaxial Cyclic Response of Concrete
In complex materials, numerous intertwined phenomena underlie the overall
response at macroscale. These phenomena can pertain to different engineering
fields (mechanical , chemical, electrical), occur at different scales, can
appear as uncertain, and are nonlinear. Interacting with complex materials thus
calls for developing nonlinear computational approaches where multi-scale
techniques that grasp key phenomena at the relevant scale need to be mingled
with stochastic methods accounting for uncertainties. In this chapter, we
develop such a computational approach for modeling the mechanical response of a
representative volume of concrete in uniaxial cyclic loading. A mesoscale is
defined such that it represents an equivalent heterogeneous medium: nonlinear
local response is modeled in the framework of Thermodynamics with Internal
Variables; spatial variability of the local response is represented by
correlated random vector fields generated with the Spectral Representation
Method. Macroscale response is recovered through standard ho-mogenization
procedure from Micromechanics and shows salient features of the uniaxial cyclic
response of concrete that are not explicitly modeled at mesoscale.Comment: Computational Methods for Solids and Fluids, 41, Springer
International Publishing, pp.123-160, 2016, Computational Methods in Applied
Sciences, 978-3-319-27994-
Self-assembled InAs quantum dot formation on GaAs ring-like nanostructure templates
The evolution of InAs quantum dot (QD) formation is studied on GaAs ring-like nanostructures fabricated by droplet homo-epitaxy. This growth mode, exclusively performed by a hybrid approach of droplet homo-epitaxy and Stransky-Krastanor (S-K) based QD self-assembly, enables one to form new QD morphologies that may find use in optoelectronic applications. Increased deposition of InAs on the GaAs ring first produced a QD in the hole followed by QDs around the GaAs ring and on the GaAs (100) surface. This behavior indicates that the QDs prefer to nucleate at locations of high monolayer (ML) step density
Meta-analysis of type 2 Diabetes in African Americans Consortium
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is more prevalent in African Americans than in Europeans. However, little is known about the genetic risk in African Americans despite the recent identification of more than 70 T2D loci primarily by genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in individuals of European ancestry. In order to investigate the genetic architecture of T2D in African Americans, the MEta-analysis of type 2 DIabetes in African Americans (MEDIA) Consortium examined 17 GWAS on T2D comprising 8,284 cases and 15,543 controls in African Americans in stage 1 analysis. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) association analysis was conducted in each study under the additive model after adjustment for age, sex, study site, and principal components. Meta-analysis of approximately 2.6 million genotyped and imputed SNPs in all studies was conducted using an inverse variance-weighted fixed effect model. Replications were performed to follow up 21 loci in up to 6,061 cases and 5,483 controls in African Americans, and 8,130 cases and 38,987 controls of European ancestry. We identified three known loci (TCF7L2, HMGA2 and KCNQ1) and two novel loci (HLA-B and INS-IGF2) at genome-wide significance (4.15 × 10(-94)<P<5 × 10(-8), odds ratio (OR) = 1.09 to 1.36). Fine-mapping revealed that 88 of 158 previously identified T2D or glucose homeostasis loci demonstrated nominal to highly significant association (2.2 × 10(-23) < locus-wide P<0.05). These novel and previously identified loci yielded a sibling relative risk of 1.19, explaining 17.5% of the phenotypic variance of T2D on the liability scale in African Americans. Overall, this study identified two novel susceptibility loci for T2D in African Americans. A substantial number of previously reported loci are transferable to African Americans after accounting for linkage disequilibrium, enabling fine mapping of causal variants in trans-ethnic meta-analysis studies.Peer reviewe
Search for the doubly heavy baryon decaying to
A first search for the
decay is performed by the LHCb experiment with a data sample of proton-proton
collisions, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of
recorded at centre-of-mass energies of 7, 8, and . Two peaking structures are seen with a local (global) significance of
and standard deviations at masses of
and , respectively. Upper limits are set on the baryon
production cross-section times the branching fraction relative to that of the
decay at centre-of-mass energies of 8 and
, in the and in the
rapidity and transverse-momentum ranges from 2.0 to 4.5 and 0 to
, respectively. Upper limits are presented
as a function of the mass and lifetime.Comment: All figures and tables, along with machine-readable versions and any
supplementary material and additional information, are available at
https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2022-005.html (LHCb
public pages
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