COSMIC-2 Precise Orbit Determination

We present initial results for post-processed GNSS orbit and clock estimation for the FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 (Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate) constellation. The six COSMIC-2 satellites launched on June 25, 2019 into a 24 deg inclination, ~725 km circular orbit. The primary Tri-GNSS Radio-occultation Receiver System (TGRS) payload tracks GPS and GLONASS signals on two upward looking precise orbit determination (POD) antennas. We evaluate three GPS and GPS+GLONASS POD solutions applied at the COSMIC Data Analysis and Archive Center using the Bernese GNSS Software. The obtained results are very consistent for the six satellites. Orbit precision estimates are below the 10 cm and 0.1 mm/s 3D position and velocity requirements, respectively. A test case applying carrier phase ambiguity resolution indicates this technique may support the generation of more precise orbits in the future

Tracing Genetic Exchange and Biogeography of Cryptococcus neoformans var. grubii at the Global Population Level

Cryptococcus neoformans var. grubii is the causative agent of cryptococcal meningitis, a significant source of mortality in immunocompromised individuals, typically human immunodeficiency virus/AIDS patients from developing countries. Despite the worldwide emergence of this ubiquitous infection, little is known about the global molecular epidemiology of this fungal pathogen. Here we sequence the genomes of 188 diverse isolates and characterize the major subdivisions, their relative diversity, and the level of genetic exchange between them. While most isolates of C. neoformans var. grubii belong to one of three major lineages (VNI, VNII, and VNB), some haploid isolates show hybrid ancestry including some that appear to have recently interbred, based on the detection of large blocks of each ancestry across each chromosome. Many isolates display evidence of aneuploidy, which was detected for all chromosomes. In diploid isolates of C. neoformans var. grubii (serotype AA) and of hybrids with C. neoformans var. neoformans (serotype AD) such aneuploidies have resulted in loss of heterozygosity, where a chromosomal region is represented by the genotype of only one parental isolate. Phylogenetic and population genomic analyses of isolates from Brazil reveal that the previously “African” VNB lineage occurs naturally in the South American environment. This suggests migration of the VNB lineage between Africa and South America prior to its diversification, supported by finding ancestral recombination events between isolates from different lineages and regions. The results provide evidence of substantial population structure, with all lineages showing multi-continental distributions; demonstrating the highly dispersive nature of this pathogen

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Illustrative examples of GNSS PRO studies

Talk delivered in 1st PAZ Polarimetric Radio Occultations User Workshop in Barcelona, Spain, 23 April 202045 minute review of the novel applications of GNSS Polarimetric Radio Occultation

Inhibition of acid sphingomyelinase increases regulatory T cells in humans

Genetic deficiency for acid sphingomyelinase or its pharmacological inhibition has been shown to increase Foxp3$^+$ regulatory T-cell frequencies among CD4$^+$ T cells in mice. We now investigated whether pharmacological targeting of the acid sphingomyelinase, which catalyzes the cleavage of sphingomyelin to ceramide and phosphorylcholine, also allows to manipulate relative CD4$^+$ Foxp3$^+$ regulatory T-cell frequencies in humans. Pharmacological acid sphingomyelinase inhibition with antidepressants like sertraline, but not those without an inhibitory effect on acid sphingomyelinase activity like citalopram, increased the frequency of Foxp3$^+$ regulatory T cell among human CD4$^+$ T cells in vitro. In an observational prospective clinical study with patients suffering from major depression, we observed that acid sphingomyelinase-inhibiting antidepressants induced a stronger relative increase in the frequency of CD4$^+$ Foxp3$^+$ regulatory T cells in peripheral blood than acid sphingomyelinase-non- or weakly inhibiting antidepressants. This was particularly true for CD45RA$^-$ CD25$^{high}$ effector CD4$^+$ Foxp3$^+$ regulatory T cells. Mechanistically, our data indicate that the positive effect of acid sphingomyelinase inhibition on CD4$^+$ Foxp3$^+$ regulatory T cells required CD28 co-stimulation, suggesting that enhanced CD28 co-stimulation was the driver of the observed increase in the frequency of Foxp3+ regulatory T cells among human CD4$^+$ T cells. In summary, the widely induced pharmacological inhibition of acid sphingomyelinase activity in patients leads to an increase in Foxp3+ regulatory T-cell frequencies among CD4$^+$ T cells in humans both in vivo and in vitro

Universal Dependencies 2.8.1

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008). Version 2.8.1 fixes a bug in 2.8 where a portion of the Dutch Alpino treebank was accidentally omitted

Universal Dependencies 2.7

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008)