Photoacoustic Spectroscopy For Depth-profile Analysis And Herbicide Monitoring In Leaves

Depth profiles of double-layer biological samples obtained by photoacoustic spectroscopy were studied using the two-signal phase-resolved method. The application of the method was demonstrated by singling out the spectra of the cuticle and the pigment layers of a leaf, and the pericarps and the endosperm layers of a corn kernel. The use of the method for monitoring temporal changes occurring in a leaf under the action of a herbicide was also investigated.112111487149

Oral Melanoacanthoma And Oral Melanotic Macule: A Report Of 8 Cases, Review Of The Literature, And Immunohistochemical Analysis

Oral melanoacanthoma (MA) is a rare, benign pigmented lesion, similar to cutaneous MA, characterized by hyperplasia of spinous keratinocytes and dendritic melanocytes. The pathogenesis of oral MA remains uncertain, although its clinical behavior is suggestive of a reactive origin. The most common intraoral sites are the buccal mucosa, lip, palate and gingiva. The average age of presentation is 28 years, mainly in blacks, with a strong female predilection. The oral melanotic macule (MM) is a small, well-circumscribed brown-to-black macule that occurs on the lips and mucous membranes. The etiology is not clear and it may represent a physiologic or reactive process. The average age of presentation is 43 years, with a female predilection. A biopsy is recommended to distinguish these lesions from each other and from other oral melanocytic lesions. We depict four cases each of oral MA and MM, affecting Caucasian and Latin American mestizo patients. The clinicopathological features of these cases reflect its ample spectrum, and to the best of our knowledge, it is the first example of oral MA affecting a Caucasian boy reported in the English literature. Therefore oral MA and MM should be considered in the differential diagnosis of pigmented lesions in the oral mucosa in these populations. © Medicina Oral.125E374E379Mishima, Y., Pinkus, H., Benign mixed tumor of melanocytes and malpighian cells. Melanoacanthoma: Its relationship to Bloch's benign non-nevoid melanoepithelioma (1960) Arch Dermatol, 81, pp. 539-550Buchner, A., Merrell, P.W., Carpenter, W.M., Relative frequency of solitary melanocytic lesions of the oral mucosa (2004) J Oral Pathol Med, 33, pp. 550-557Wright, J.M., Binnie, W.H., Byrd, D.L., Dunsworth, A.R., Intraoral melanoacanthomas (1983) J Periodontol, 54, pp. 107-111Buchner, A., Merrell, P., Hanson, L., Leider, A., Melanocytic hyperplasia of the oral mucosa (1991) Oral Surg, Oral Med Oral Pathol, 71, pp. 58-62Wright, J.M., Intraoral melanoacanthoma: A reactive melanocytic hyperplasia. Case report (1988) J Periodontol, 59, pp. 53-55Tomich, C., Zunt, S.L., Melanoacanthosis (melanoacanthoma) of the oral mucosa (1990) J Dermatol Surg Oncol, 16, pp. 231-236Contreras, E., Carlos, R., Oral melanoacanthosis (melanoachantoma): Report of a case and review of the literature (2005) Med Oral Patol Oral Cir Bucal, 10 (1), pp. 11-12,9-11Fornatora, M.L., Reich, R.F., Haber, S., Solomon, F., Freedman, P.D., Oral melanoacanthomas: A report of 10 cases, review of the literature, and immunohistochemical analysis for HMB-45 reactivity (2003) Am J Dermatopathol, 25, pp. 12-15Matsuoka, L.Y., Glasser, S., Barsky, S., Melanoacanthoma of the lip (1979) Arch Dermatol, 115, pp. 1116-1117Goode, R.K., Crawford, B.E., Callihan, M.D., Neville, B.W., Oral melanoacanthoma. Review of the literature and report of ten cases (1983) Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol, 56, pp. 622-628Scheneider, L.C., Mesa, M.L., Haber, S.M., Melanoacanthoma of the oral mucosa (1981) Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol, 52, pp. 284-287Fatahzadeh, M., Sirois, D.A., Multiple intraoral melanoacanthomas: A case report with unusual findings (2002) Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol Endod, 94, pp. 54-56Ho, K.K., Dervan, P., O'Loughlin, S., Powell, F.C., Labial melanotic macule: A clinical, histopathologic, and ultrastructural study (1993) J Am Acad of Dermatol, 28, pp. 33-39Sexton, F.M., Maize, J.C., Melanotic macules and melanoacanthomas of the lip. A comparative study with census of the basal melanocyte population (1987) Am J Dermatopathol, 9, pp. 438-444Horlick, H.P., Walther, R.R., Zegarelli, D.J., Silvers, D.N., Eliezri, Y.D., Mucosal melanotic macule, reactive type: A simulation of melanoma (1988) J Am Acad Dermatol, 19, pp. 786-791Buchner, A., Hansen, L.S., Pigmented nevi of the oral mucosa: A clinicopathologic study of 32 new cases and review of 75 cases from the literature: Part I. A clinicopathologic study of 32 new cases (1979) Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol, 48, pp. 131-142Barker, B.F., Carpenter, W.M., Daniels, T.E., Kahn, M.A., Leider, A.S., Lozada-Nur, F., (1997) Oral mucosal melanomas: The WESTOP Banff workshop proceedings, 83, pp. 672-679. , Western Society of Teachers of Oral Pathology. Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol EndodBarrett, A.W., Raja, A.M., The immunohistochemical identification of human oral mucosal melanocytes (1997) Arch Oral Biol, 42, pp. 77-8

Rings and bars: unmasking secular evolution of galaxies

Secular evolution gradually shapes galaxies by internal processes, in contrast to early cosmological evolution which is more rapid. An important driver of secular evolution is the flow of gas from the disk into the central regions, often under the influence of a bar. In this paper, we review several new observational results on bars and nuclear rings in galaxies. They show that these components are intimately linked to each other, and to the properties of their host galaxy. We briefly discuss how upcoming observations, e.g., imaging from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G), will lead to significant further advances in this area of research.Comment: Invited review at "Galaxies and their Masks", celebrating Ken Freeman's 70-th birthday, Sossusvlei, Namibia, April 2010. To be published by Springer, New York, editors D.L. Block, K.C. Freeman, & I. Puerari; minor change

The exposure of the hybrid detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Pierre Auger Observatory is a detector for ultra-high energy cosmic rays. It consists of a surface array to measure secondary particles at ground level and a fluorescence detector to measure the development of air showers in the atmosphere above the array. The "hybrid" detection mode combines the information from the two subsystems. We describe the determination of the hybrid exposure for events observed by the fluorescence telescopes in coincidence with at least one water-Cherenkov detector of the surface array. A detailed knowledge of the time dependence of the detection operations is crucial for an accurate evaluation of the exposure. We discuss the relevance of monitoring data collected during operations, such as the status of the fluorescence detector, background light and atmospheric conditions, that are used in both simulation and reconstruction.Comment: Paper accepted by Astroparticle Physic

Evidence for a mixed mass composition at the `ankle' in the cosmic-ray spectrum

We report a first measurement for ultra-high energy cosmic rays of the correlation between the depth of shower maximum and the signal in the water Cherenkov stations of air-showers registered simultaneously by the fluorescence and the surface detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory. Such a correlation measurement is a unique feature of a hybrid air-shower observatory with sensitivity to both the electromagnetic and muonic components. It allows an accurate determination of the spread of primary masses in the cosmic-ray flux. Up till now, constraints on the spread of primary masses have been dominated by systematic uncertainties. The present correlation measurement is not affected by systematics in the measurement of the depth of shower maximum or the signal in the water Cherenkov stations. The analysis relies on general characteristics of air showers and is thus robust also with respect to uncertainties in hadronic event generators. The observed correlation in the energy range around the `ankle' at $\lg(E/{\rm eV})=18.5-19.0$ differs significantly from expectations for pure primary cosmic-ray compositions. A light composition made up of proton and helium only is equally inconsistent with observations. The data are explained well by a mixed composition including nuclei with mass $A > 4$. Scenarios such as the proton dip model, with almost pure compositions, are thus disfavoured as the sole explanation of the ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray flux at Earth.Comment: Published version. Added journal reference and DOI. Added Report Numbe

Gene expression changes and community turnover differentially shape the global ocean metatranscriptome

Ocean microbial communities strongly influence the biogeochemistry, food webs, and climate of our planet. Despite recent advances in understanding their taxonomic and genomic compositions, little is known about how their transcriptomes vary globally. Here, we present a dataset of 187 metatranscriptomes and 370 metagenomes from 126 globally distributed sampling stations and establish a resource of 47 million genes to study community-level transcriptomes across depth layers from pole-to-pole. We examine gene expression changes and community turnover as the underlying mechanisms shaping community transcriptomes along these axes of environmental variation and show how their individual contributions differ for multiple biogeochemically relevant processes. Furthermore, we find the relative contribution of gene expression changes to be significantly lower in polar than in non-polar waters and hypothesize that in polar regions, alterations in community activity in response to ocean warming will be driven more strongly by changes in organismal composition than by gene regulatory mechanisms

Search for a W' boson decaying to a bottom quark and a top quark in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

Results are presented from a search for a W' boson using a dataset corresponding to 5.0 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity collected during 2011 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The W' boson is modeled as a heavy W boson, but different scenarios for the couplings to fermions are considered, involving both left-handed and right-handed chiral projections of the fermions, as well as an arbitrary mixture of the two. The search is performed in the decay channel W' to t b, leading to a final state signature with a single lepton (e, mu), missing transverse energy, and jets, at least one of which is tagged as a b-jet. A W' boson that couples to fermions with the same coupling constant as the W, but to the right-handed rather than left-handed chiral projections, is excluded for masses below 1.85 TeV at the 95% confidence level. For the first time using LHC data, constraints on the W' gauge coupling for a set of left- and right-handed coupling combinations have been placed. These results represent a significant improvement over previously published limits.Comment: Submitted to Physics Letters B. Replaced with version publishe