60,376 research outputs found
Regulation of tissue crosstalk by skeletal muscle-derived myonectin and other myokines.
The integrated control of animal physiology requires intimate tissue crosstalk, a vital task mediated by circulating humoral factors. As one type of these factors, adipose tissue-derived adipokines have recently garnered attention as important regulators of systemic insulin sensitivity and metabolic homeostasis. However, the realization that skeletal muscle also secretes a variety of biologically and metabolically active polypeptide factors (collectively called myokines) has provided a new conceptual framework to understand the critical role skeletal muscle plays in coordinating whole-body energy balance. Here, we highlight recent progress made in the myokine field and discuss possible roles of myonectin, which we have recently identified as a potential postprandial signal derived from skeletal muscle to integrate metabolic processes in other tissues, such as adipose and liver; one of its roles is to promote fatty acid uptake into cells. Myonectin is also likely an important mediator in inter-tissue crosstalk
Synthesising and utilising complex evidence to inform policy in education and health.
Oslo, Norway, May 19 to 21, 200
Random Feature Maps via a Layered Random Projection (LaRP) Framework for Object Classification
The approximation of nonlinear kernels via linear feature maps has recently
gained interest due to their applications in reducing the training and testing
time of kernel-based learning algorithms. Current random projection methods
avoid the curse of dimensionality by embedding the nonlinear feature space into
a low dimensional Euclidean space to create nonlinear kernels. We introduce a
Layered Random Projection (LaRP) framework, where we model the linear kernels
and nonlinearity separately for increased training efficiency. The proposed
LaRP framework was assessed using the MNIST hand-written digits database and
the COIL-100 object database, and showed notable improvement in object
classification performance relative to other state-of-the-art random projection
methods.Comment: 5 page
Surface roughness influence on the quality factor of high frequency nanoresonators
Surface roughness influences significantly the quality factor of high
frequency nanoresonators for large frequency - relaxation times within the
non-Newtonian regime, where a purely elastic dynamics develops. It is shown
that the influence of sort wavelength roughness, which is expressed by the
roughness exponent H for the case of self-affine roughness, plays significant
role in comparison with the effect of the long wavelength roughness parameters
such as the rms roughness amplitude and the lateral roughness correlation
length. Therefore, the surface morphology can play important role in designing
high-frequency resonators operating within the non-Newtonian regime.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, To appear in J. Appl. Phys. (2008
RAMESES publication standards: realist syntheses
PMCID: PMC3558331This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
Cold-air performance of a 15.41-cm-tip-diameter axial-flow power turbine with variable-area stator designed for a 75-kW automotive gas turbine engine
An experimental evaluation of the aerodynamic performance of the axial flow, variable area stator power turbine stage for the Department of Energy upgraded automotive gas turbine engine was conducted in cold air. The interstage transition duct, the variable area stator, the rotor, and the exit diffuser were included in the evaluation of the turbine stage. The measured total blading efficiency was 0.096 less than the design value of 0.85. Large radial gradients in flow conditions were found at the exit of the interstage duct that adversely affected power turbine performance. Although power turbine efficiency was less than design, the turbine operating line corresponding to the steady state road load power curve was within 0.02 of the maximum available stage efficiency at any given speed
The mystery of the 'Kite' radio source in Abell 2626: insights from new Chandra observations
We present the results of a new Chandra study of the galaxy cluster A2626.
The radio emission of the cluster shows a complex system of four symmetric arcs
without known correlations with the X-ray emission. The mirror symmetry of the
radio arcs toward the center and the presence of two optical cores in the
central galaxy suggested that they may be created by pairs of precessing radio
jets powered by dual AGNs inside the cD galaxy. However, previous observations
failed to observe the second jetted AGN and the spectral trend due to radiative
age along the radio arcs, thus challenging this interpretation. The new Chandra
observation had several scientific objectives, including the search for the
second AGN that would support the jet precession model. We focus here on the
detailed study of the local properties of the thermal and non-thermal emission
in the proximity of the radio arcs, in order to get more insights into their
origin. We performed a standard data reduction of the Chandra dataset deriving
the radial profiles of temperature, density, pressure and cooling time of the
intra-cluster medium. We further analyzed the 2D distribution of the gas
temperature, discovering that the south-western junction of the radio arcs
surrounds the cool core of the cluster. We studied the X-ray SB and spectral
profiles across the junction, finding a cold front spatially coincident with
the radio arcs. This may suggest a connection between the sloshing of the
thermal gas and the nature of the radio filaments, raising new scenarios for
their origin. A possibility is that the radio arcs trace the projection of a
complex surface connecting the sites where electrons are most efficiently
reaccelerated by the turbulence that is generated by the gas sloshing. In this
case, diffuse emission embedded by the arcs and with extremely steep spectrum
should be most visible at very low radio frequencies.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication on A&
X-ray Observations of Parsec-Scale Tails behind Two Middle-Aged Pulsars
Chandra and XMM-Newton resolved extremely long tails behind two middle-aged
pulsars, J1509-5850 and J1740+1000. The tail of PSR J1509-5850 is discernible
up to 5.6' from the pulsar (6.5 pc at a distance of 4 kpc), with a flux of
2*10^{-13} erg s^{-1} cm^{-2} in 0.5-8 keV. The tail spectrum fits an absorbed
power-law (PL) model with the photon index of 2.3\pm0.2, corresponding to the
0.5-8 keV luminosity of 1*10^{33} ergs s^{-1}, for n_H= 2.1*10^{22} cm^{-2}.
The tail of PSR J1740+1000 is firmly detected up to 5' (2 pc at a 1.4 kpc
distance), with a flux of 6*10^{-14} ergs cm^{-2} s^{-1} in 0.4-10 keV. The PL
fit yields photon index of 1.4-1.5 and n_H=1*10^{21} cm^{-2}. The large extent
of the tails suggests that the bulk flow in the tails starts as mildly
relativistic downstream of the termination shock, and then gradually
decelerates. Within the observed extent of the J1509-5850 tail, the average
flow speed exceeds 5,000 km s^{-1}, and the equipartition magnetic field is a
few times 10^{-5} G. For the J1740+1000 tail, the equipartition field is a
factor of a few lower. The harder spectrum of the J1740+1000 tail implies
either less efficient cooling or a harder spectrum of injected electrons. For
the high-latitude PSR J1740+1000, the orientation of the tail on the sky shows
that the pulsar is moving toward the Galactic plane, which means that it was
born from a halo-star progenitor. The comparison between the J1509 and J1740
tails and the X-ray tails of other pulsars shows that the X-ray radiation
efficiency correlates poorly with the pulsar spin-down luminosity or age. The
X-ray efficiencies of the ram-pressure confined pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are
systematically higher than those of PWNe around slowly moving pulsars with
similar spin-down parameters.Comment: 14 pages, 16 figures and 5 table
Perspective on Quark Mass and Mixing Relations
Recent data indicate that , while
seems to be GeV. The relations and suggest that %a plausible clean separation of
the %origin of the quark mixing matrix: the down type sector is responsible for
and , while comes from the up
type sector. Five to six parameters might suffice to account for the ten quark
mass and mixing parameters, resulting in specific power series representations
for the mass matrices. In this picture, seems to be the more sensible
expansion parameter, while is
tied empirically to .Comment: 10 pages, ReVtex, no figure
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