All quiet on the neuronal front: NMDA receptor inhibition by prion protein

The normal function of the prion protein (PrP)—the causative agent of mad cow or prion disease—has long remained out of reach. Deciphering PrP's function may help to unravel the complex chain of events triggered by PrP misfolding during prion disease. In this issue of the JCB, an exciting paper (Khosravani, H., Y. Zhang, S. Tsutsui, S. Hameed, C. Altier, J. Hamid, L. Chen, M. Villemaire, Z. Ali, F.R. Jirik, and G.W. Zamponi. 2008. J. Cell Biol. 181:551–565) connects diverse observations regarding PrP into a coherent framework whereby PrP dampens the activity of an N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor (NMDAR) subtype and reduces excitotoxic lesions. The findings of this study suggest that understanding the normal function of proteins associated with neurodegenerative disease may elucidate the molecular pathogenesis

Gaussian Sum-Rule Analysis of Scalar Gluonium and Quark Mesons

Gaussian sum-rules, which are related to a two-parameter Gaussian-weighted integral of a hadronic spectral function, are able to examine the possibility that more than one resonance makes a significant contribution to the spectral function. The Gaussian sum-rules, including instanton effects, for scalar gluonic and non-strange scalar quark currents clearly indicate a distribution of the resonance strength in their respective spectral functions. Furthermore, analysis of a two narrow resonance model leads to excellent agreement between theory and phenomenology in both channels. The scalar quark and gluonic sum-rules are remarkably consistent in their prediction of masses of approximately 1.0 GeV and 1.4 GeV within this model. Such a similarity would be expected from hadronic states which are mixtures of gluonium and quark mesons.Comment: latex2e using amsmath, 11 pages, 4 eps figures embedded in latex file. Write-up of presentation for the 2003 SUNY IT (Utica) workshop on scalar meson

Masses of Open-Flavour Heavy-Light Hybrids from QCD Sum-Rules

We use QCD Laplace sum-rules to predict masses of open-flavour heavy-light hybrids where one of the hybrid's constituent quarks is a charm or bottom and the other is an up, down, or strange. We compute leading-order, diagonal correlation functions of several hybrid interpolating currents, taking into account QCD condensates up to dimension-six, and extract hybrid mass predictions for all $J^P\in\{0^{\pm},\,1^{\pm}\}$, as well as explore possible mixing effects with conventional quark-antiquark mesons. Within theoretical uncertainties, our results are consistent with a degeneracy between the heavy-nonstrange and heavy-strange hybrids in all $J^P$ channels. We find a similar mass hierarchy of $1^+$, $1^{-}$, and $0^+$ states (a $1^{+}$ state lighter than essentially degenerate $1^{-}$ and $0^{+}$ states) in both the charm and bottom sectors, and discuss an interpretation for the $0^-$ states. If conventional meson mixing is present the effect is an increase in the hybrid mass prediction, and we estimate an upper bound on this effect.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures. Mass predictions updated from previous version to reflect corrected sign error in sum rule analysis. Mixing analysis and examination of higher weight sum-rules added. To be published in JHE

Solid State Television Camera (CID)

The design, development and test are described of a charge injection device (CID) camera using a 244x248 element array. A number of video signal processing functions are included which maximize the output video dynamic range while retaining the inherently good resolution response of the CID. Some of the unique features of the camera are: low light level performance, high S/N ratio, antiblooming, geometric distortion, sequential scanning and AGC