Self-renewal of colony forming units (cfu) in serial bone marrow transplantation experiments

The capacity of stem cells (CFU) for self‐renewal was tested by transplanting normal bone marrow (primary transplantation) and bone marrow which had been subjected to one or two earlier transplantations (secondary and tertiary transplantation) into lethally irradiated syngeneic recipients. It was found that the capacity for self‐renewal is diminished within the first weeks after one or more previous transplantations. This ability of stem cells recovered after a longer interval after the previous transplantation. The time required for this recovery depended upon the number of previous transplantations and amounted to more than 1 or 2 months after one or two transplantations respectively. Shortly after transplantation the CFU/nucleated cell ratio in bone marrow was below normal and its decrease was more pronounced when the bone marrow had been transplanted more often. An increase of the ratio towards normal values was observed in the course of one month after the last transplantation. Measurements of the spleen colony size after transplantation of normal and re‐transplanted bone marrow indicated that CFUs from re‐transplanted marrow gave slightly smaller spleen colonies than those of normal marrow. It is concluded that the decreased self‐renewal of stem cells shortly after previous transplantations is probably not due to a limitation in the number of normal mitoses they can perform, but to a loss of stem cells by transfer to the compartment of differentiating cells. Copyrigh

Geiger-Mode Avalanche Photodiodes in Particle Detection

It is well known that avalanche photodiodes operated in the Geiger mode above the breakdown voltage offer a virtually infinite sensitivity and time accuracy in the picosecond range that can be used for single photon detection. However, their performance in particle detection remains still unexplored. In this contribution, we are going to expose the different steps that we have taken in order to prove the efficiency of Geiger mode avalanche photodiodes in the aforementioned field. In particular, we will present an array of pixels of 1mmx1mm fabricated with a standard CMOS technology for characterization in a test beam.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of LCWS1

Mobilization of haemopoietic stem cells (cfu) into the peripheral blood of the mouse; effects of endotoxin and other compounds

Factors affecting the circulation of haemopoietic stem cells (CFU) in the peripheral blood of mice were investigated. I.v. injection of sublethal doses of endotoxin, trypsin and proteinase appeared to raise the number of CFU per ml blood from about 30–40 to about 300–400 or more within 10 min. The effect was smaller when smaller doses of the substances were injected. After this initial rise the number of circulating cells returned to normal in a few hours. Following endotoxin there was a second rise which started 2–3 days after injection and attained a peak on the 6th–7th day. The first rise is explained as a mobilization of stem cells from their normal microenvironments into the blood stream; the second rise is considered to reflect proliferation of CFUs in the haemopoietic tissues. The spleen seems to be acting as an organ capturing CFUs from the blood and not as a source adding stem cells to the blood. The early mobilization of CFU after endotoxin injection did not coincide with a mobilization of neutrophils. The number of circulating band cells was increased during the first hours. The importance of ‘open sites’in the haemopoietic tissue for capturing CFUs was studied by emptying these sites through a lethal X‐irradiation and injecting normal bone marrow cells. When a greater number of syngeneic bone marrow cells was injected intravenously, the level of circulating CFU in irradiated mice was slightly lower than the level in unirradiated mice during the first hours. Copyrigh

The perception of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries in signed conversation

Speaker transitions in conversation are often brief, with minimal vocal overlap. Signed languages appear to defy this pattern with frequent, long spans of simultaneous signing. But recent evidence suggests that turn boundaries in signed language may only include the content-bearing parts of the turn (from the first stroke to the last), and not all turn-related movement (from first preparation to final retraction). We tested whether signers were able to anticipate “stroke-to-stroke” turn boundaries with only minimal conversational context. We found that, indeed, signers anticipated turn boundaries at the ends of turn-final strokes. Signers often responded early, especially when the turn was long or contained multiple possible end points. Early responses for long turns were especially apparent for interrogatives—long interrogative turns showed much greater anticipation compared to short ones

Inhibited spontaneous emission of quantum dots observed in a 3D photonic band gap

We present time-resolved emission experiments of semiconductor quantum dots in silicon 3D inverse-woodpile photonic band gap crystals. A systematic study is made of crystals with a range of pore radii to tune the band gap relative to the emission frequency. The decay rates averaged over all dipole orientations are inhibited by a factor of 10 in the photonic band gap and enhanced up to 2? outside the gap, in agreement with theory. We discuss the effects of spatial inhomogeneity, nonradiative decay, and transition dipole orientations on the observed inhibition in the band gap.Comment: 5 figures, update author lis

Charge asymmetries of top quarks: a window to new physics at hadron colliders

With the next start of LHC, a huge production of top quarks is expected. There are several models that predict the existence of heavy colored resonances decaying to top quarks in the TeV energy range. A peak in the differential cross section could reveal the existence of such a resonance, but this is experimentally challenging, because it requires selecting data samples where top and antitop quarks are highly boosted. Nonetheless, the production of such resonances might generate a sizable charge asymmetry of top versus antitop quarks. We consider a toy model with general flavour independent couplings of the resonance to quarks, of both vector and axial-vector kind. The charge asymmetry turns out to be a more powerful observable to detect new physics than the differential cross section, because its highest statistical significance is achieved with data samples of top-antitop quark pairs of low invariant masses