Infrared-ultraviolet spectra of active galactic nuclei

Data from IRAS and IUE were combined with ground based optical and infrared spectrophotometry to derive emission line free spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for 29 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) between 0.1 and 100 microns. The IRAS data were scaled down to account for extended emission. These correction factors, determined by comparing small aperture ground based 10.6 micron data with large aperture IRAS 12 micron fluxes, were usually less than 25%. These corrected SEDs are shown

And We cast upon his throne a mere body: A Historiographical Reading of Q. 38:34

This paper focuses on Q. 38:34 from the perspective of early and medieval works of Islamic historiography and collections of tales of the prophets: the early tenth century works of 'Umara b. Wathima and Tabari, the eleventh century Tales of the Prophets by Tha'labi, the twelfth century folkloric collection of Kisa'i, along with Ibn 'Asakir's History of Damascus, the thirteenth century world history by Ibn al-Athir, and the fourteenth century historiographical work by Ibn Kathir. These various works are viewed not as any particular stage in the development of a genre, but as variations on a (Qur'anic) theme, and the avenue of medieval historiographers and storytellers is utilised as a bridge to explore various possible interpretations of the Qur'anic passage. Historiographers and storytellers provide us with an illustration of how lessons of admonition implied in the Qur'anic text were perceived in medieval Islamic society. They also, as will become clear, provide a picture of Solomon that is consistent with the Qur'anic figure as a whole

Symmetry Breaking for Matter Coupled to Linearized Supergravity From the Perspective of the Current Supermultiplet

We consider a generic supersymmetric matter theory coupled to linearized supergravity, and analyze scenarios for spontaneous symmetry breaking in terms of vacuum expectation values of components of the current supermultiplet. When the vacuum expectation of the energy momentum tensor is zero, but the scalar current or pseudoscalar current gets an expectation, evaluation of the gravitino self energy using the supersymmetry current algebra shows that there is an induced gravitino mass term. The structure of this term generalizes the supergravity action with cosmological constant to theories with CP violation. When the vacuum expectation of the energy momentum tensor is nonzero, supersymmetry is broken; requiring cancellation of the cosmological constant gives the corresponding generalized gravitino mass formula.Comment: 11 page

MiniBooNE

The physics motivations, design, and status of the Booster Neutrino Experiment at Fermilab, MiniBooNE, are briefly discussed. Particular emphasis is given on the ongoing preparatory work that is needed for the MiniBooNE muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillation appearance search. This search aims to confirm or refute in a definitive and independent way the evidence for neutrino oscillations reported by the LSND experiment.Comment: 3 pages, no figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2005), Zaragoza, Spain, 10-14 Sep 200

Heavy-light quark pseudoscalar and vector mesons at finite temperature

The temperature dependence of the mass, leptonic decay constant, and width of heavy-light quark peseudoscalar and vector mesons is obtained in the framework of thermal Hilbert moment QCD sum rules. The leptonic decay constants of both pseudoscalar and vector mesons decrease with increasing $T$, and vanish at a critical temperature $T_c$, while the mesons develop a width which increases dramatically and diverges at $T_c$, where $T_c$ is the temperature for chiral-symmetry restoration. These results indicate the disappearance of hadrons from the spectral function, which then becomes a smooth function of the energy. This is interpreted as a signal for deconfinement at $T=T_c$. In contrast, the masses show little dependence on the temperature, except very close to $T_c$, where the pseudoscalar meson mass increases slightly by 10-20 %, and the vector meson mass decreases by some 20-30

Innate immune activating ligand SUMOylation affects tumor cell recognition by NK cells

Natural Killer cells are innate lymphocytes involved in tumor immunosurveillance. They express activating receptors able to recognize self-molecules poorly expressed on healthy cells but up-regulated upon stress conditions, including transformation. Regulation of ligand expression in tumor cells mainly relays on transcriptional mechanisms, while the involvement of ubiquitin or ubiquitin-like modifiers remains largely unexplored. Here, we focused on the SUMO pathway and demonstrated that the ligand of DNAM1 activating receptor, PVR, undergoes SUMOylation in multiple myeloma. Concurrently, we found that PVR is preferentially located in intracellular compartments in human multiple myeloma cell lines and malignant plasma cells and that inhibition of the SUMO pathway promotes its translocation to the cell surface, increasing tumor cell susceptibility to NK cell-mediated cytolysis. Our findings provide the first evidence of an innate immune activating ligand regulated by SUMOylation, and confer to this modification a novel role in impairing recognition and killing of tumor cells.Natural Killer cells are innate lymphocytes involved in tumor immunosurveillance. They express activating receptors able to recognize self-molecules poorly expressed on healthy cells but up-regulated upon stress conditions, including transformation. Regulation of ligand expression in tumor cells mainly relays on transcriptional mechanisms, while the involvement of ubiquitin or ubiquitin-like modifiers remains largely unexplored. Here, we focused on the SUMO pathway and demonstrated that the ligand of DNAM1 activating receptor, PVR, undergoes SUMOylation in multiple myeloma. Concurrently, we found that PVR is preferentially located in intracellular compartments in human multiple myeloma cell lines and malignant plasma cells and that inhibition of the SUMO pathway promotes its translocation to the cell surface, increasing tumor cell susceptibility to NK cell-mediated cytolysis. Our findings provide the first evidence of an innate immune activating ligand regulated by SUMOylation, and confer to this modification a novel role in impairing recognition and killing of tumor cells

Quark mixing from softly broken symmetries

Quark flavor mixing may originate in the soft breaking of horizontal symmetries. Those symmetries, which in the simplest case are three family U(1) groups, are obeyed only by the dimension-4 Yukawa couplings and lead, when unbroken, to the absence of mixing. Their breaking may arise from the dimension-3 mass terms of SU(2)-singlet vector-like quarks. Those gauge-singlet mass terms break the horizontal symmetries at a scale much higher than the Fermi scale, yet softly, leading to quark mixing while the quark masses remain unsuppressed.Comment: 9 pages, plain Latex, no figure

Nonrenormalization of Flux Superpotentials in String Theory

Recent progress in understanding modulus stabilization in string theory relies on the existence of a non-renormalization theorem for the 4D compactifications of Type IIB supergravity which preserve N=1 supersymmetry. We provide a simple proof of this non-renormalization theorem for a broad class of Type IIB vacua using the known symmetries of these compactifications, thereby putting them on a similar footing as the better-known non-renormalization theorems of heterotic vacua without fluxes. The explicit dependence of the tree-level flux superpotential on the dilaton field makes the proof more subtle than in the absence of fluxes.Comment: 16 pages, no figures. Final version, to appear in JHEP. Arguments for validity of R-symmetry made more explicit. Minor extra comments and references adde

MAISTAS: a tool for automatic structural evaluation of alternative splicing products

Motivation: Analysis of the human genome revealed that the amount of transcribed sequence is an order of magnitude greater than the number of predicted and well-characterized genes. A sizeable fraction of these transcripts is related to alternatively spliced forms of known protein coding genes. Inspection of the alternatively spliced transcripts identified in the pilot phase of the ENCODE project has clearly shown that often their structure might substantially differ from that of other isoforms of the same gene, and therefore that they might perform unrelated functions, or that they might even not correspond to a functional protein. Identifying these cases is obviously relevant for the functional assignment of gene products and for the interpretation of the effect of variations in the corresponding proteins