Plate tectonics drive tropical reef biodiversity dynamics

The Cretaceous breakup of Gondwana strongly modified the global distribution of shallow tropical seas reshaping the geographic configuration of marine basins. However, the links between tropical reef availability, plate tectonic processes and marine biodiversity distribution patterns are still unknown. Here, we show that a spatial diversification model constrained by absolute plate motions for the past 140 million years predicts the emergence and movement of diversity hotspots on tropical reefs. The spatial dynamics of tropical reefs explains marine fauna diversification in the Tethyan Ocean during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic, and identifies an eastward movement of ancestral marine lineages towards the Indo-Australian Archipelago in the Miocene. A mechanistic model based only on habitat-driven diversification and dispersal yields realistic predictions of current biodiversity patterns for both corals and fishes. As in terrestrial systems, we demonstrate that plate tectonics played a major role in driving tropical marine shallow reef biodiversity dynamics

First events from the CNGS neutrino beam detected in the OPERA experiment

The OPERA neutrino detector at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory (LNGS) was designed to perform the first detection of neutrino oscillations in appearance mode, through the study of nu_mu to nu_tau oscillations. The apparatus consists of a lead/emulsion-film target complemented by electronic detectors. It is placed in the high-energy, long-baseline CERN to LNGS beam (CNGS) 730 km away from the neutrino source. In August 2006 a first run with CNGS neutrinos was successfully conducted. A first sample of neutrino events was collected, statistically consistent with the integrated beam intensity. After a brief description of the beam and of the various sub-detectors, we report on the achievement of this milestone, presenting the first data and some analysis results.Comment: Submitted to the New Journal of Physic

A Q-Ising model application for linear-time image segmentation

A computational method is presented which efficiently segments digital grayscale images by directly applying the Q-state Ising (or Potts) model. Since the Potts model was first proposed in 1952, physicists have studied lattice models to gain deep insights into magnetism and other disordered systems. For some time, researchers have realized that digital images may be modeled in much the same way as these physical systems (i.e., as a square lattice of numerical values). A major drawback in using Potts model methods for image segmentation is that, with conventional methods, it processes in exponential time. Advances have been made via certain approximations to reduce the segmentation process to power-law time. However, in many applications (such as for sonar imagery), real-time processing requires much greater efficiency. This article contains a description of an energy minimization technique that applies four Potts (Q-Ising) models directly to the image and processes in linear time. The result is analogous to partitioning the system into regions of four classes of magnetism. This direct Potts segmentation technique is demonstrated on photographic, medical, and acoustic images.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, revtex, uses subfigure.sty. Central European Journal of Physics, in press (2010

A postprocessing technique for a discontinuous Galerkin discretization of time-dependent Maxwell's equations

We present a novel postprocessing technique for a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization of time-dependent Maxwell's equations that we couple with an explicit Runge-Kutta time-marching scheme. The postprocessed electromagnetic field converges one order faster than the unprocessed solution in the H(curl)-norm. The proposed approach is local, in the sense that the enhanced solution is computed independently in each cell of the computational mesh, and at each time step of interest. As a result, it is inexpensive to compute, especially if the region of interest is localized, either in time or space. The key ideas behind this postprocessing technique stem from hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) methods, which are equivalent to the analyzed DG scheme for specific choices of penalization parameters. We present several numerical experiments that highlight the superconvergence properties of the postprocessed electromagnetic field approximation

Next Generation Short-Term Forecasting of Wind Power – Overview of the ANEMOS Project.

International audienceThe aim of the European Project ANEMOS is to develop accurate and robust models that substantially outperform current state-of-the-art methods, for onshore and offshore wind power forecasting. Advanced statistical, physical and combined modelling approaches were developed for this purpose. Priority was given to methods for on-line uncertainty and prediction risk assessment. An integrated software platform, 'ANEMOS', was developed to host the various models. This system is installed by several end-users for on-line operation and evaluation at a local, regional and national scale. Finally, the project demonstrates the value of wind forecasts for the power system management and market integration of wind power. Keywords: Wind power, short-term forecasting, numerical weather predictions, on-line software, tools for wind integration

DNA methylation during human adipogenesis and the impact of fructose

Background: Increased adipogenesis and altered adipocyte function contribute to the development of obesity and associated comorbidities. Fructose modified adipocyte metabolism compared to glucose, but the regulatory mechanisms and consequences for obesity are unknown. Genome-wide methylation and global transcriptomics in SGBS pre-adipocytes exposed to 0, 2.5, 5, and 10 mM fructose, added to a 5-mM glucose-containing medium, were analyzed at 0, 24, 48, 96, 192, and 384 h following the induction of adipogenesis. Results: Time-dependent changes in DNA methylation compared to baseline (0 h) occurred during the final maturation of adipocytes, between 192 and 384 h. Larger percentages (0.1% at 192 h, 3.2% at 384 h) of differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were found in adipocytes differentiated in the glucose-containing control media compared to adipocytes differentiated in fructose-supplemented media (0.0006% for 10 mM, 0.001% for 5 mM, and 0.005% for 2.5 mM at 384 h). A total of 1437 DMRs were identified in 5237 differentially expressed genes at 384 h post-induction in glucose-containing (5 mM) control media. The majority of them inversely correlated with the gene expression, but 666 regions were positively correlated to the gene expression. Conclusions: Our studies demonstrate that DNA methylation regulates or marks the transformation of morphologically differentiating adipocytes (seen at 192 h), to the more mature and metabolically robust adipocytes (as seen at 384 h) in a genome-wide manner. Lower (2.5 mM) concentrations of fructose have the most robust effects on methylation compared to higher concentrations (5 and 10 mM), suggesting that fructose may be playing a signaling/regulatory role at lower concentrations of fructose and as a substrate at higher concentrations

DNA methylation during human adipogenesis and the impact of fructose

Background Increased adipogenesis and altered adipocyte function contribute to the development of obesity and associated comorbidities. Fructose modified adipocyte metabolism compared to glucose, but the regulatory mechanisms and consequences for obesity are unknown. Genome-wide methylation and global transcriptomics in SGBS pre-adipocytes exposed to 0, 2.5, 5, and 10 mM fructose, added to a 5-mM glucose-containing medium, were analyzed at 0, 24, 48, 96, 192, and 384 h following the induction of adipogenesis. Results Time-dependent changes in DNA methylation compared to baseline (0 h) occurred during the final maturation of adipocytes, between 192 and 384 h. Larger percentages (0.1% at 192 h, 3.2% at 384 h) of differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were found in adipocytes differentiated in the glucose-containing control media compared to adipocytes differentiated in fructose-supplemented media (0.0006% for 10 mM, 0.001% for 5 mM, and 0.005% for 2.5 mM at 384 h). A total of 1437 DMRs were identified in 5237 differentially expressed genes at 384 h post-induction in glucose-containing (5 mM) control media. The majority of them inversely correlated with the gene expression, but 666 regions were positively correlated to the gene expression. Conclusions Our studies demonstrate that DNA methylation regulates or marks the transformation of morphologically differentiating adipocytes (seen at 192 h), to the more mature and metabolically robust adipocytes (as seen at 384 h) in a genome-wide manner. Lower (2.5 mM) concentrations of fructose have the most robust effects on methylation compared to higher concentrations (5 and 10 mM), suggesting that fructose may be playing a signaling/regulatory role at lower concentrations of fructose and as a substrate at higher concentrations

Introducing space and time in local feature-based endomicroscopic image retrieval

International audienceInterpreting endomicroscopic images is still a significant challenge, especially since one single still image may not always contain enough information to make a robust diagnosis. To aid the physicians, we investigated some local feature-based retrieval methods that provide, given a query image, similar annotated images from a database of endomicroscopic images combined with high-level diagnosis represented as textual information. Local feature-based methods may be limited by the small field of view (FOV) of endomicroscopy and the fact that they do not take into account the spatial relationship between the local features, and the time relationship between successive images of the video sequences. To extract discriminative information over the entire image field, our proposed method collects local features in a dense manner instead of using a standard salient region detector. After the retrieval process, we introduce a verification step driven by the textual information in the database and in which spatial relationship between the local features is used. A spatial criterion is built from the co-occurence matrix of local features and used to remove outliers by thresholding on this criterion. To overcome the small-FOV problem and take advantage of the video sequence, we propose to combine image retrieval and mosaicing. Mosaicing essentially projects the temporal dimension onto a large field of view image. In this framework, videos, represented by mosaics, and single images can be retrieved with the same tools. With a leave-n-out cross-validation, our results show that taking into account the spatial relationship between local features and the temporal information of endomicroscopic videos by image mosaicing improves the retrieval accuracy