8,022 research outputs found
Diagnostic systems in DEMO: engineering design issues
The diagnostic systems of DEMO that are mounted on or near the torus, whether
intended for the monitoring and control functions of the engineering aspects or
the physics behaviour of the machine, will have to be designed to suit the
hostile nuclear environment. This will be necessary not just for their survival
and correct functioning but also to satisfy the pertinent regulatory bodies,
especially where any of them relate to machine protection or the prevention or
mitigation of accidents foreseen in the safety case. This paper aims to
indicate the more important of the reactor design considerations that are
likely to apply to diagnostics for DEMO, drawn from experience on JET, the
provisions in hand for ITER and modelling results for the wall erosion and
neutron damage effects in DEMO.Comment: 8 page
Projection neurons in lamina III of the rat spinal cord are selectively innervated by local dynorphin-containing excitatory neurons
Large projection neurons in lamina III of the rat spinal cord that express the neurokinin 1 receptor are densely innervated by peptidergic primary afferent nociceptors and more sparsely by low-threshold myelinated afferents. However, we know little about their input from other glutamatergic neurons. Here we show that these cells receive numerous contacts from nonprimary boutons that express the vesicular glutamate transporter 2 (VGLUT2), and form asymmetrical synapses on their dendrites and cell bodies. These synapses are significantly smaller than those formed by peptidergic afferents, but provide a substantial proportion of the glutamatergic synapses that the cells receive (over a third of those in laminae I–II and half of those in deeper laminae). Surprisingly, although the dynorphin precursor preprodynorphin (PPD) was only present in 4–7% of VGLUT2 boutons in laminae I–IV, it was found in 58% of the VGLUT2 boutons that contacted these cells. This indicates a highly selective targeting of the lamina III projection cells by glutamatergic neurons that express PPD, and these are likely to correspond to local neurons (interneurons and possibly projection cells). Since many PPD-expressing dorsal horn neurons respond to noxious stimulation, this suggests that the lamina III projection cells receive powerful monosynaptic and polysynaptic nociceptive input. Excitatory interneurons in the dorsal horn have been shown to possess IA currents, which limit their excitability and can underlie a form of activity-dependent intrinsic plasticity. It is therefore likely that polysynaptic inputs to the lamina III projection neurons are recruited during the development of chronic pain states
Censoring Distances Based on Labeled Cortical Distance Maps in Cortical Morphometry
Shape differences are manifested in cortical structures due to
neuropsychiatric disorders. Such differences can be measured by labeled
cortical distance mapping (LCDM) which characterizes the morphometry of the
laminar cortical mantle of cortical structures. LCDM data consist of signed
distances of gray matter (GM) voxels with respect to GM/white matter (WM)
surface. Volumes and descriptive measures (such as means and variances) for
each subject and the pooled distances provide the morphometric differences
between diagnostic groups, but they do not reveal all the morphometric
information contained in LCDM distances. To extract more information from LCDM
data, censoring of the distances is introduced. For censoring of LCDM
distances, the range of LCDM distances is partitioned at a fixed increment
size; and at each censoring step, and distances not exceeding the censoring
distance are kept. Censored LCDM distances inherit the advantages of the pooled
distances. Furthermore, the analysis of censored distances provides information
about the location of morphometric differences which cannot be obtained from
the pooled distances. However, at each step, the censored distances aggregate,
which might confound the results. The influence of data aggregation is
investigated with an extensive Monte Carlo simulation analysis and it is
demonstrated that this influence is negligible. As an illustrative example, GM
of ventral medial prefrontal cortices (VMPFCs) of subjects with major
depressive disorder (MDD), subjects at high risk (HR) of MDD, and healthy
control (Ctrl) subjects are used. A significant reduction in laminar thickness
of the VMPFC and perhaps shrinkage in MDD and HR subjects is observed when
compared to Ctrl subjects. The methodology is also applicable to LCDM-based
morphometric measures of other cortical structures affected by disease.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figure
Detection of viruses in clinical samples by use of metagenomic sequencing and targeted sequence capture
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An Apparent Relation between ELM Occurrence Times and the Prior Evolution of Divertor Flux Loop Measurements in JET
Gravitational Instability in Radiation Pressure Dominated Backgrounds
I consider the physics of gravitational instabilities in the presence of
dynamically important radiation pressure and gray radiative diffusion, governed
by a constant opacity, kappa. For any non-zero radiation diffusion rate on an
optically-thick scale, the medium is unstable unless the classical gas-only
isothermal Jeans criterion is satisfied. When diffusion is "slow," although the
dynamical Jeans instability is stabilized by radiation pressure on scales
smaller than the adiabatic Jeans length, on these same spatial scales the
medium is unstable to a diffusive mode. In this regime, neglecting gas
pressure, the characteristic timescale for growth is independent of spatial
scale and given by (3 kappa c_s^2)/(4 pi G c), where c_s is the adiabatic sound
speed. This timescale is that required for a fluid parcel to radiate away its
thermal energy content at the Eddington limit, the Kelvin-Helmholz timescale
for a radiation pressure supported self-gravitating object. In the limit of
"rapid" diffusion, radiation does nothing to suppress the Jeans instability and
the medium is dynamically unstable unless the gas-only Jeans criterion is
satisfied. I connect with treatments of Silk damping in the early universe. I
discuss several applications, including photons diffusing in regions of extreme
star formation (starburst galaxies & pc-scale AGN disks), and the diffusion of
cosmic rays in normal galaxies and galaxy clusters. The former (particularly,
starbursts) are "rapidly" diffusing and thus cannot be supported against
dynamical instability in the linear regime by radiation pressure alone. The
latter are more nearly "slowly" diffusing. I speculate that the turbulence in
starbursts may be driven by the dynamical coupling between the radiation field
and the self-gravitating gas, perhaps mediated by magnetic fields. (Abridged)Comment: 15 pages; accepted to Ap
Effect of Hardwood Vessels on Longitudinal Moisture Diffusion
The hypothesis that the longitudinal moisture content profile follows the shape of the sorption isotherm under steady-state diffusion condition was confirmed. This phenomenon was explained in terms of the unrestricted flow of water vapor from the lumen of one vessel element to the lumen of the next vessel element. Despite the assumed high vapor transport efficiency of the vessels, other cell types were believed to contribute substantially to longitudinal moisture movement. The diffusion coefficients of three different hardwood species were found to vary with moisture content
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