Wrinkle ridges in the floor material of Kasei Valles, Mars: Nature and origin

Wrinkle ridges on Mars occur almost exclusively in smooth plains material referred to as ridged plains. One of the largest contiguous units of ridged plains occurs on Lunae Planum on the eastern flank of the Tharsis rise. The eastern, western, and northern margins of the ridged plains of Lunae Planum suffered extensive erosion in early Amazonian channel-forming events. The most dramatic example of erosion in early Amazonian plains is in Kasei Valles. The nature an origin of the wrinkle ridges in the floor material of Kasei Valles are discussed

Is wave-particle objectivity compatible with determinism and locality?

Wave-particle duality, superposition and entanglement are among the most counterintuitive features of quantum theory. Their clash with our classical expectations motivated hidden-variable (HV) theories. With the emergence of quantum technologies we can test experimentally the predictions of quantum theory {\em versus} HV theories and put strong restrictions on their key assumptions. Here we study an entanglement-assisted version of the quantum delayed-choice experiment and show that the extension of HV to the controlling devices only exacerbates the contradiction. We compare HV theories that satisfy the conditions of objectivity (a property of photons being either particles or waves, but not both), determinism, and local independence of hidden variables with quantum mechanics. Any two of the above conditions are compatible with it. The conflict becomes manifest when all three conditions are imposed and persists for any non-zero value of entanglement. We propose an experiment to test our conclusions.Comment: A published version. The logic is similar to the original version, but many changes were introduce

Targeted genome modifications in soybean with CRISPR/Cas9

Background: The ability to selectively alter genomic DNA sequences in vivo is a powerful tool for basic and applied research. The CRISPR/Cas9 system precisely mutates DNA sequences in a number of organisms. Here, the CRISPR/Cas9 system is shown to be effective in soybean by knocking-out a green fluorescent protein (GFP) transgene and modifying nine endogenous loci. Results: Targeted DNA mutations were detected in 95% of 88 hairy-root transgenic events analyzed. Bi-allelic mutations were detected in events transformed with eight of the nine targeting vectors. Small deletions were the most common type of mutation produced, although SNPs and short insertions were also observed. Homoeologous genes were successfully targeted singly and together, demonstrating that CRISPR/Cas9 can both selectively, and generally, target members of gene families. Somatic embryo cultures were also modified to enable the production of plants with heritable mutations, with the frequency of DNA modifications increasing with culture time. A novel cloning strategy and vector system based on In-Fusion (R) cloning was developed to simplify the production of CRISPR/Cas9 targeting vectors, which should be applicable for targeting any gene in any organism. Conclusions: The CRISPR/Cas9 is a simple, efficient, and highly specific genome editing tool in soybean. Although some vectors are more efficient than others, it is possible to edit duplicated genes relatively easily. The vectors and methods developed here will be useful for the application of CRISPR/Cas9 to soybean and other plant species

Running a distributed virtual observatory: US Virtual Astronomical Observatory operations

Operation of the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory shares some issues with modern physical observatories, e.g., intimidating data volumes and rapid technological change, and must also address unique concerns like the lack of direct control of the underlying and scattered data resources, and the distributed nature of the observatory itself. In this paper we discuss how the VAO has addressed these challenges to provide the astronomical community with a coherent set of science-enabling tools and services. The distributed nature of our virtual observatory-with data and personnel spanning geographic, institutional and regime boundaries-is simultaneously a major operational headache and the primary science motivation for the VAO. Most astronomy today uses data from many resources. Facilitation of matching heterogeneous datasets is a fundamental reason for the virtual observatory. Key aspects of our approach include continuous monitoring and validation of VAO and VO services and the datasets provided by the community, monitoring of user requests to optimize access, caching for large datasets, and providing distributed storage services that allow user to collect results near large data repositories. Some elements are now fully implemented, while others are planned for subsequent years. The distributed nature of the VAO requires careful attention to what can be a straightforward operation at a conventional observatory, e.g., the organization of the web site or the collection and combined analysis of logs. Many of these strategies use and extend protocols developed by the international virtual observatory community.Comment: 7 pages with 2 figures included within PD

Variability of Temperature and Salinity in the Middle Atlantic Bight and Gulf of Maine

Monitoring of the waters of the Middle Atlantic Bight and Gulf of Maine has been conducted by the MARMAP Ships of Opportunity Program since the early 1970's. Presented in this atlas are portrayals of the temporal and spatial patterns of surface and bottom temperature and surface salinity for these areas during the period 1978-1990. These patterns are shown in the form of time-space diagrams for single-year and multiyear (base period) time frames. Each base period figure shows thirteen-year (1978-1990) mean conditions, sample variance in the form of standard deviations of the measured values, and data locations. Each single-year figure displays annual conditions, sampling locations, and departures of annual conditions from the thirteen-year means, expressed as algebraic anomalies and standardized anomalies. (PDF file contains 112 pages.

Helicity operators for mesons in flight on the lattice

Motivated by the desire to construct meson-meson operators of definite relative momentum in order to study resonances in lattice QCD, we present a set of single-meson interpolating fields at non-zero momentum that respect the reduced symmetry of a cubic lattice in a finite cubic volume. These operators follow from the subduction of operators of definite helicity into irreducible representations of the appropriate little groups. We show their effectiveness in explicit computations where we find that the spectrum of states interpolated by these operators is close to diagonal in helicity, admitting a description in terms of single-meson states of identified J^{PC}. The variationally determined optimal superpositions of the operators for each state give rapid relaxation in Euclidean time to that state, ideal for the construction of meson-meson operators and for the evaluation of matrix elements at finite momentum.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures; v2: minor changes to reflect journal versio