ACCESS: Design and Sub-System Performance

Establishing improved spectrophotometric standards is important for a broad range of missions and is relevant to many astrophysical problems. ACCESS, "Absolute Color Calibration Experiment for Standard Stars", is a series of rocket-borne sub-orbital missions and ground-based experiments designed to enable improvements in the precision of the astrophysical flux scale through the transfer of absolute laboratory detector standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to a network of stellar standards with a calibration accuracy of 1% and a spectral resolving power of 500 across the 0.35 -1.7 micrometer bandpass

Technical Note: Method to correlate whole‐specimen histopathology of radical prostatectomy with diagnostic MR imaging

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134778/1/mp1016.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134778/2/mp1016_am.pd

Serendipity and the SDSS: Discovery of the Largest Known Planetary Nebula on the Sky

Investigation of spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey reveals the presence of a region of ionized gas of >2 degrees diameter centered approximately at alpha = 10^h 37^m delta = -00^o 18' (J2000) (Galactic coordinates l=248, b=+48). [OIII] 4959,5007 emission is particularly strong and emission from H-alpha and [NII] 6548,6583 is also detectable over a substantial area on the sky. The combination of emission line ratios, the close to zero heliocentric radial velocity and the morphology of the structure are consistent with an identification as a very nearby planetary nebula. The proximity of the hot, DO white dwarf PG1034+001 further strengthens this interpretation. The object is: i) the largest planetary nebula on the sky, ii) certainly closer than any planetary nebula other than Sh 2--216, iii) the first to be unambiguously associated with a DO white dwarf. A parallax distance for PG1034+001 would establish whether the structure is in fact the closest, and one of the physically largest, planetary nebula known.Comment: 12 pages including 4 figures. ApJ Letters in pres

Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) Restricts Hematopoietic Stem Cell Activity

Polycomb group proteins are transcriptional repressors that play a central role in the establishment and maintenance of gene expression patterns during development. Using mice with an N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU)-induced mutation in Suppressor of Zeste 12 (Suz12), a core component of Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2), we show here that loss of Suz12 function enhances hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) activity. In addition to these effects on a wild-type genetic background, mutations in Suz12 are sufficient to ameliorate the stem cell defect and thrombocytopenia present in mice that lack the thrombopoietin receptor (c-Mpl). To investigate the molecular targets of the PRC2 complex in the HSC compartment, we examined changes in global patterns of gene expression in cells deficient in Suz12. We identified a distinct set of genes that are regulated by Suz12 in hematopoietic cells, including eight genes that appear to be highly responsive to PRC2 function within this compartment. These data suggest that PRC2 is required to maintain a specific gene expression pattern in hematopoiesis that is indispensable to normal stem cell function

Notch Ankyrin Repeat Domain Variation Influences Leukemogenesis and Myc Transactivation

, cell-based and structural analyses to compare the abilities of activated Notch1-4 to support T cell development, induce T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoma (T-ALL), and maintain T-ALL cell growth and survival., a direct Notch target that has an important role in Notch-associated T-ALL.We conclude that the leukemogenic potentials of Notch receptors vary, and that this functional difference stems in part from divergence among the highly conserved ankyrin repeats, which influence the transactivation of specific target genes involved in leukemogenesis

The Ariel payload electrical and electronic architecture: a summary of the current design and implementation status

Ariel is the M4 mission of the ESA’s Cosmic Vision Program 2015-2025, whose aim is to characterize by lowresolution transit spectroscopy the atmospheres of over one thousand warm and hot exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. It has been selected by ESA in March 2018 and adopted in November 2020 to be flown, then, in 2029. It is the first survey mission dedicated to measuring the chemical composition and thermal structures of the atmospheres of hundreds of transiting exoplanets, in order to enable planetary science far beyond the boundaries of the Solar System. The Payload (P/L) is based on a cold section (PLM – Payload Module) working at cryogenic temperatures and a warm section, located within the Spacecraft (S/C) Service Vehicle Module (SVM) and hosting five warm units operated at ambient temperature (253-313 K). The P/L and its electrical, electronic and data handling architecture has been designed and optimized to perform transit spectroscopy from space during primary and secondary planetary eclipses in order to achieve a large set of unbiased observations to shed light and fully understand the nature of exoplanets atmospheres, retrieving information about planets interior and determining the key factors affecting the formation and evolution of planetary systems

Humanity's Last Exam

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 3,000 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts