272 research outputs found
Dual-wavelength domain wall solitons in a fiber ring laser
We report on the experimental observation of a new type of dark soliton in a
fiber laser made of all normal group velocity dispersion fibers. It was shown
that the soliton is formed due to the cross coupling between two different
wavelength laser beams and has the characteristic of separating the two
different wavelength laser emissions. Moreover, we show experimentally that the
dual-wavelength dark solitons have a much lower pump threshold than that of the
nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation dark solitons formed in the same laser.Comment: 19 page
Generation of Arbitrary Frequency Chirps with a Fiber-Based Phase Modulator and Self-Injection-Locked Diode Laser
We present a novel technique for producing pulses of laser light whose
frequency is arbitrarily chirped. The output from a diode laser is sent through
a fiber-optical delay line containing a fiber-based electro-optical phase
modulator. Upon emerging from the fiber, the phase-modulated pulse is used to
injection-lock the laser and the process is repeated. Large phase modulations
are realized by multiple passes through the loop while the high optical power
is maintained by self-injection-locking after each pass. Arbitrary chirps are
produced by driving the modulator with an arbitrary waveform generator
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Safety Evaluation Report: Development of Improved Composite Pressure Vessels for Hydrogen Storage, Lincoln Composites, Lincoln, NE, May 25, 2010
Lincoln Composites operates a facility for designing, testing, and manufacturing composite pressure vessels. Lincoln Composites also has a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-funded project to develop composite tanks for high-pressure hydrogen storage. The initial stage of this project involves testing the permeation of high-pressure hydrogen through polymer liners. The company recently moved and is constructing a dedicated research/testing laboratory at their new location. In the meantime, permeation tests are being performed in a corner of a large manufacturing facility. The safety review team visited the Lincoln Composites site on May 25, 2010. The project team presented an overview of the company and project and took the safety review team on a tour of the facility. The safety review team saw the entire process of winding a carbon fiber/resin tank on a liner, installing the boss and valves, and curing and painting the tank. The review team also saw the new laboratory that is being built for the DOE project and the temporary arrangement for the hydrogen permeation tests
PAMELA, DAMA, INTEGRAL and Signatures of Metastable Excited WIMPs
Models of dark matter with ~ GeV scale force mediators provide attractive
explanations of many high energy anomalies, including PAMELA, ATIC, and the
WMAP haze. At the same time, by exploiting the ~ MeV scale excited states that
are automatically present in such theories, these models naturally explain the
DAMA/LIBRA and INTEGRAL signals through the inelastic dark matter (iDM) and
exciting dark matter (XDM) scenarios, respectively. Interestingly, with only
weak kinetic mixing to hypercharge to mediate decays, the lifetime of excited
states with delta < 2 m_e is longer than the age of the universe. The
fractional relic abundance of these excited states depends on the temperature
of kinetic decoupling, but can be appreciable. There could easily be other
mechanisms for rapid decay, but the consequences of such long-lived states are
intriguing. We find that CDMS constrains the fractional relic population of
~100 keV states to be <~ 10^-2, for a 1 TeV WIMP with sigma_n = 10^-40 cm^2.
Upcoming searches at CDMS, as well as xenon, silicon, and argon targets, can
push this limit significantly lower. We also consider the possibility that the
DAMA excitation occurs from a metastable state into the XDM state, which decays
via e+e- emission, which allows lighter states to explain the INTEGRAL signal
due to the small kinetic energies required. Such models yield dramatic signals
from down-scattering, with spectra peaking at high energies, sometimes as high
as ~1 MeV, well outside the usual search windows. Such signals would be visible
at future Ar and Si experiments, and may be visible at Ge and Xe experiments.
We also consider other XDM models involving ~ 500 keV metastable states, and
find they can allow lighter WIMPs to explain INTEGRAL as well.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure
Unveiling Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae Promoters: Sequence Definition and Genomic Distribution
Several Mycoplasma species have had their genome completely sequenced, including four strains of the swine pathogen Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae. Nevertheless, little is known about the nucleotide sequences that control transcriptional initiation in these microorganisms. Therefore, with the objective of investigating the promoter sequences of M. hyopneumoniae, 23 transcriptional start sites (TSSs) of distinct genes were mapped. A pattern that resembles the σ70 promoter −10 element was found upstream of the TSSs. However, no −35 element was distinguished. Instead, an AT-rich periodic signal was identified. About half of the experimentally defined promoters contained the motif 5′-TRTGn-3′, which was identical to the −16 element usually found in Gram-positive bacteria. The defined promoters were utilized to build position-specific scoring matrices in order to scan putative promoters upstream of all coding sequences (CDSs) in the M. hyopneumoniae genome. Two hundred and one signals were found associated with 169 CDSs. Most of these sequences were located within 100 nucleotides of the start codons. This study has shown that the number of promoter-like sequences in the M. hyopneumoniae genome is more frequent than expected by chance, indicating that most of the sequences detected are probably biologically functional
Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae Transcription Unit Organization: Genome Survey and Prediction
Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae is associated with swine respiratory diseases. Although gene organization and regulation are well known in many prokaryotic organisms, knowledge on mycoplasma is limited. This study performed a comparative analysis of three strains of M. hyopneumoniae (7448, J and 232), with a focus on genome organization and gene comparison for open read frame (ORF) cluster (OC) identification. An in silico analysis of gene organization demonstrated 117 OCs and 34 single ORFs in M. hyopneumoniae 7448 and J, while 116 OCs and 36 single ORFs were identified in M. hyopneumoniae 232. Genomic comparison revealed high synteny and conservation of gene order between the OCs defined for 7448 and J strains as well as for 7448 and 232 strains. Twenty-one OCs were chosen and experimentally confirmed by reverse transcription–PCR from M. hyopneumoniae 7448 genome, validating our prediction. A subset of the ORFs within an OC could be independently transcribed due to the presence of internal promoters. Our results suggest that transcription occurs in ‘run-on’ from an upstream promoter in M. hyopneumoniae, thus forming large ORF clusters (from 2 to 29 ORFs in the same orientation) and indicating a complex transcriptional organization
CLEAR: Paschen- Star Formation Rates and Dust Attenuation of Low Redshift Galaxies
We use \Pab\ (1282~nm) observations from the Hubble Space Telescope (\HST)
G141 grism to study the star-formation and dust attenuation properties of a
sample of 29 low-redshift () galaxies in the CANDELS Ly
Emission at Reionization (CLEAR) survey. We first compare the nebular
attenuation from \Pab/\Ha with the stellar attenuation inferred from the
spectral energy distribution, finding that the galaxies in our sample are
consistent with an average ratio of the continuum attenuation to the nebular
gas of 0.44, but with a large amount of excess scatter beyond the observational
uncertainties. Much of this scatter is linked to a large variation between the
nebular dust attenuation as measured by (space-based) \Pab to (ground-based)
\Ha to that from (ground-based) \Ha/\Hb. This implies there are important
differences between attenuation measured from grism-based / wide-aperture
\Pab fluxes and the ground-based / slit-measured Balmer decrement. We next
compare star-formation rates (SFRs) from \Pab to those from dust-corrected
UV. We perform a survival analysis to infer a census of \Pab\ emission implied
by both detections and non-detections. We find evidence that galaxies with
lower stellar mass have more scatter in their ratio of \Pab\ to
attenuation-corrected UV SFRs. When considering our \Pab\ detection limits,
this observation supports the idea that lower mass galaxies experience
"burstier" star-formation histories. Together, these results show that \Pab\ is
a valuable tracer of a galaxy's SFR, probing different timescales of
star-formation and potentially revealing star-formation that is otherwise
missed by UV and optical tracers.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, 2 table
BMQ
BMQ: Boston Medical Quarterly was published from 1950-1966 by the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Memorial Hospitals
Modular and cultural factors in biological understanding: an experimental approach to the cognitive basis of science
What follows is a discussion of three sets of experimental results that deal with various aspects of universal biological understanding among American and Maya children and adults. The first set of experiments shows that by the age of four-to-five years (the earliest age tested in this regard) urban American and Yukatek Maya children employ a concept of innate species potential, or underlying essence, as an inferential framework for understanding the affiliation of an organism to a biological species, and for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms in the face of uncertainty. The second set of experiments shows that the youngest Maya children do not have an anthropocentric understanding of the biological world. Children do not initially need to reason about non-human living kinds by analogy to human kinds. The third set of results show that the same taxonomic rank is cognitively preferred for biological induction in two diverse populations: people raised in the Mid-western USA and Itza' Maya of the Lowland Meso-american rainforest. This is the generic species the level of oak and robin. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures prefer species-like groups in making inferences about the biological world, although Americans have relatively little actual knowledge or experience at this level. The implication from these experiments is that folk biology may well represent an evolutionary design: universal taxonomic structures, centred on essence-based generic species, are arguably routine products of our ‘habits of mind,' which may be in part naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent ‘habits of the world.' The science of biology is built upon these domain-specific cognitive universals: folk biology sets initial cognitive constraints on the development of any possible macro-biological theory, including the initial development of evolutionary theory. Nevertheless, the conditions of relevance under which science operates diverge from those pertinent to folk biology. For natural science, the motivating idea is to understand nature as it is ‘in itself,' independently of the human observer (as far as possible). From this standpoint, the species-concept, like taxonomy and teleology, may arguably be allowed to survive in science as a regulative principle that enables the mind to readily establish stable contact with the surrounding environment, rather than as an epistemic concept that guides the search for truth
Epileptogenic but MRI-normal perituberal tissue in Tuberous Sclerosis Complex contains tuber-specific abnormalities
Introduction: Recent evidence has implicated perituberal, MRI-normal brain tissue as a possible source of seizures in tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). Data on aberrant structural features in this area that may predispose to the
initiation or progression of seizures are very limited. We used immunohistochemistry and confocal microscopy to compare epileptogenic, perituberal, MRI-normal tissue with cortical tubers. Results: In every sample of epileptogenic, perituberal tissue, we found many abnormal cell types, including giant cells and cytomegalic neurons. The majority of giant cells were surrounded by morphologically abnormal astrocytes with long
processes typical of interlaminar astrocytes. Perituberal giant cells and astrocytes together formed characteristic “microtubers”. A parallel analysis of tubers showed that many contained astrocytes with features of both protoplasmic and gliotic cells. Conclusions: Microtubers represent a novel pathognomonic finding in TSC and may represent an elementary unit of
cortical tubers. Microtubers and cytomegalic neurons in perituberal parenchyma may serve as the source of seizures in TSC and provide potential targets for therapeutic and surgical interventions in TSC
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