Problems and strategy of the first flight to the comets

Substantiation is given for the urgency of using space equipment to study comets in order to work out the basic problem of the origin and evolution of the solar system. The potentialities and advantages of selecting ballistically-accessible objects among the newly discovered comets are shown (as a preliminary study). The technique of early detection of such objects is discussed

On the Question of Polygonality and Irregularities of the Shape of Certain Craters on the Moon

Evaluation of moon crater polygonality, and irregular shape

RGS4 is arginylated and degraded by the N-end rule pathway in vitro

The N-end rule relates the in vivo half-life of a protein to the identity of its N-terminal residue. We used an expression-cloning screen to search for mouse proteins that are degraded by the ubiquitin/proteasome-dependent N-end rule pathway in a reticulocyte lysate. One substrate thus identified was RGS4, a member of the RGS family of GTPase-activating proteins that down-regulate specific G proteins. A determinant of the RGS4 degradation signal (degron) was located at the N terminus of RGS4, because converting cysteine 2 to either glycine, alanine, or valine completely stabilized RGS4. Radiochemical sequencing indicated that the N-terminal methionine of the lysate-produced RGS4 was replaced with arginine. Since N-terminal arginine is a destabilizing residue not encoded by RGS4 mRNA, we conclude that the degron of RGS4 is generated through the removal of N-terminal methionine and enzymatic arginylation of the resulting N-terminal cysteine. RGS16, another member of the RGS family, was also found to be an N-end rule substrate. RGS4 that was transiently expressed in mouse L cells was short-lived in these cells. However, the targeting of RGS4 for degradation in this in vivo setting involved primarily another degron, because N-terminal variants of RGS4 that were stable in reticulocyte lysate remained unstable in L cells

Penetrators (penetrating sondes) and new possibilities for study of the planets

The fields of possible use of penetrators in space research are considered. A survey of the condition of development and plans for use of penetrators abroad is presented and an analysis is given of the significance of scientific problems when probing planets

Base pair opening and bubble transport in a DNA double helix induced by a protein molecule in a viscous medium

We study the nonlinear dynamics of a protein-DNA molecular system by treating DNA as a set of two coupled linear chains and protein in the form of a single linear chain sliding along the DNA at the physiological temperature in a viscous medium. The nonlinear dynamics of the above molecular system in general is governed by a perturbed nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation. In the non-viscous limit, the equation reduces to the completely integrable nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger (NLS) equation which admits N-soliton solutions. The soliton excitations of the DNA bases make localized base pair opening and travel along the DNA chain in the form of a bubble. This may represent the bubble generated during the transcription process when an RNA-polymerase binds to a promoter site in the DNA double helical chain. The perturbed NLS equation is solved using a perturbation theory by treating the viscous effect due to surrounding as a weak perturbation and the results show that the viscosity of the solvent in the surrounding damps out the amplitude of the soliton.Comment: 4. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Atomic States Entanglement in Carbon Nanotubes

The entanglement of two atoms (ions) doped into a carbon nanotube has been investigated theoretically. Based on the photon Green function formalism for quantizing electromagnetic field in the presence of carbon nanotubes, small-diameter metallic nanotubes are shown to result in a high degree of the two-qubit atomic entanglement for long times due to the strong atom-field coupling.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure