Genetic, Physiological, and Pharmacological Amelioration of Ischemic Injury

Organ transplantation is the treatment of choice for end stage organ failure, and in recent decades one year results have greatly improved. Two major problems facing the transplant community remain; long-term survival of organ grafts has still not reached its full potential, and the shortage of suitable donor organs is still increasing. Long-term graft survival is significantly hampered by chronic transplant dysfunction (CTD). This still poorly defined process of untreatable functional deterioration of an organ following transplantation accounts for approximately 30 percent of graft loss in the first 5 years after transplantation. In the kidney CTD, also known as chronic allograft nephropathy (CAN), is clinically characterized by progressive renal dysfunction, associated with hypertension and proteinuria. Renal biopsies show characteristic but nonspecific histopathological ch

Formation and Disruption of Cosmological Low Mass Objects

We investigate the evolution of cosmological low mass (low virial temperature) objects and the formation of the first luminous objects. First, the `cooling diagram' for low mass objects is shown. We assess the cooling rate taking into account the contribution of H_2, which is not in chemical equilibrium generally, with a simple argument of time scales. The reaction rates and the cooling rate of H_2 are taken from the recent results by Galli & Palla (1998). Using this cooling diagram, we also estimate the formation condition of luminous objects taking into account the supernova (SN) disruption of virialized clouds. We find that the mass of the first luminous object is several times 10^7 solar mass, because smaller objects may be disrupted by the SNe before they become luminous. Metal pollution of low mass (Ly-alpha) clouds also discussed. The resultant metallicity of the clouds is about 1/1000 of the solar metallicity.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, To appear in ApJ

Quantifying Genuine Multipartite Correlations and their Pattern Complexity

We propose an information-theoretic framework to quantify multipartite correlations in classical and quantum systems, answering questions such as what is the amount of seven-partite correlations in a given state of ten particles? We identify measures of genuine multipartite correlations, i.e., statistical dependencies that cannot be ascribed to bipartite correlations, satisfying a set of desirable properties. Inspired by ideas developed in complexity science, we then introduce the concept of weaving to classify states that display different correlation patterns, but cannot be distinguished by correlation measures. The weaving of a state is defined as the weighted sum of correlations of every order. Weaving measures are good descriptors of the complexity of correlation structures in multipartite systems

Regulated star formation in forming disk galaxies under ultraviolet radiation background

We perform radiation hydrodynamics simulations on the evolution of galactic gas disks irradiated by ultraviolet radiation background. We find gas disks with N_H > 10^21 cm^-2 exposed to ultraviolet radiation at a level of I_21=1 can be self-shielded from photoheating, whereas the disk with N_H < 10^21 cm^-2 cannot. We also find that the unshielded disks keep smooth density distribution without any sign of fragmentation, while the self-shielded disks easily fragment into small pieces by self-gravity, possibly followed by star formation. The suppression of star formation in unshielded disks is different from photoevaporation effect, since the assumed dark halo potential is deep enough to keep the photoheated gas. Presence of such critical threshold column density would be one of the reason for the so-called down-sizing feature of present-day galaxies.Comment: 12pages, 10figures, ApJ accepte

Radiation Hydrodynamical Instabilities in Cosmological and Galactic Ionization Fronts

Ionization fronts, the sharp radiation fronts behind which H/He ionizing photons from massive stars and galaxies propagate through space, were ubiquitous in the universe from its earliest times. The cosmic dark ages ended with the formation of the first primeval stars and galaxies a few hundred Myr after the Big Bang. Numerical simulations suggest that stars in this era were very massive, 25 - 500 solar masses, with H II regions of up to 30,000 light-years in diameter. We present three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamical calculations that reveal that the I-fronts of the first stars and galaxies were prone to violent instabilities, enhancing the escape of UV photons into the early intergalactic medium (IGM) and forming clumpy media in which supernovae later exploded. The enrichment of such clumps with metals by the first supernovae may have led to the prompt formation of a second generation of low-mass stars, profoundly transforming the nature of the first protogalaxies. Cosmological radiation hydrodynamics is unique because ionizing photons coupled strongly to both gas flows and primordial chemistry at early epochs, introducing a hierarchy of disparate characteristic timescales whose relative magnitudes can vary greatly throughout a given calculation. We describe the adaptive multistep integration scheme we have developed for the self-consistent transport of both cosmological and galactic ionization fronts.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for proceedings of HEDLA2010, Caltech, March 15 - 18, 201

Facial Identification at a Virtual Reality Airport

Person identification at airports requires the comparison of a passport photograph with its bearer. In psychology, this process is typically studied with static pairs of face photographs that require identity-match (same person shown) versus mismatch (two different people) decisions, but this approach provides a limited proxy for studying how environment and social interaction factors affect this task. In this study, we explore the feasibility of virtual reality (VR) as a solution to this problem, by examining the identity matching of avatars in a VR airport. We show that facial photographs of real people can be rendered into VR avatars in a manner that preserves image and identity information (Experiments 1 to 3). We then show that identity matching of avatar pairs reflects similar cognitive processes to the matching of face photographs (Experiments 4 and 5). This pattern holds when avatar matching is assessed in a VR airport (Experiments 6 and 7). These findings demonstrate the feasibility of VR as a new method for investigating face matching in complex environments

The ACS LCID project. VI. The SFH of the Tucana dSph and the relative ages of the isolated dSph galaxies

We present a detailed study of the star formation history (SFH) of the Tucana dwarf spheroidal galaxy. High quality, deep HST/ACS data, allowed us to obtain the deepest color-magnitude diagram to date, reaching the old main sequence turnoff (F814 ~ 29) with good photometric accuracy. Our analysis, based on three different SFH codes, shows that Tucana is an old and metal-poor stellar system, which experienced a strong initial burst of star formation at a very early epoch (~ 13 Gyr ago) which lasted a maximum of 1 Gyr (sigma value). We are not able to unambiguously answer the question of whether most star formation in Tucana occurred before or after the end of the reionization era, and we analyze alternative scenarios that may explain the transformation of Tucana from a gas-rich galaxy into a dSph. Current measurements of its radial velocity do not preclude that Tucana may have crossed the inner regions of the Local Group once, and so gas stripping by ram pressure and tides due to a close interaction cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, the high star formation rate measured at early times may have injected enough energy into the interstellar medium to blow out a significant fraction of the initial gas content. Gas that is heated but not blown out would also be more easily stripped via ram pressure. We compare the SFH inferred for Tucana with that of Cetus, the other isolated LG dSph galaxy in the LCID sample. We show that the formation time of the bulk of star formation in Cetus is clearly delayed with respect to that of Tucana. This reinforces the conclusion of Monelli et al. (2010) that Cetus formed the vast majority of its stars after the end of the reionization era implying, therefore, that small dwarf galaxies are not necessarily strongly affected by reionization, in agreement with many state-of-the-art cosmological models. [abridged]Comment: Accepted for publication on ApJ, 19 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables. A version with full resolution figures is available at http://www.iac.es/project/LCID/?p=publication

Phase-space dependence of particle-ratio fluctuations in Pb+Pb collisions from 20A to 158A GeV beam energy

A novel approach, the identity method, was used for particle identification and the study of fluctuations of particle yield ratios in Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). This procedure allows to unfold the moments of the unknown multiplicity distributions of protons (p), kaons (K), pions ($\pi$) and electrons (e). Using these moments the excitation function of the fluctuation measure $\nu_{\text{\text{dyn}}}$[A,B] was measured, with A and B denoting different particle types. The obtained energy dependence of $\nu_{\text{dyn}}$ agrees with previously published NA49 results on the related measure $\sigma_{\text{dyn}}$. Moreover, $\nu_{\text{dyn}}$ was found to depend on the phase space coverage for [K,p] and [K,$\pi$] pairs. This feature most likely explains the reported differences between measurements of NA49 and those of STAR in central Au+Au collisions