The transition of ground-based space environmental effects testing to the space environment

The goal of the space flight program at the Center for Commercial Development of Space (CCDS)--Materials for Space Structures is to provide environmentally stable structural materials to support the continued humanization and commercialization of the space frontier. Information on environmental stability will be obtained through space exposure, evaluation, documentation, and subsequent return to the supplier of the candidate material for internal investigation. This program provides engineering and scientific service to space systems development firms and also exposes CCDS development candidate materials to space environments representative of in-flight conditions. The maintenance of a technological edge in space for NASA suggests the immediate search for space materials that maintain their structural integrity and remain environmentally stable. The materials being considered for long-lived space structures are complex, high strength/weight ratio composites. In order for these new candidate materials to qualify for use in space structures, they must undergo strenuous testing to determine their reliability and stability when subjected to the space environment. Ultraviolet radiation, atomic oxygen, debris/micrometeoroids, charged particles radiation, and thermal fatigue all influence the design of space structural materials. The investigation of these environmental interactions is the key purpose of this center. Some of the topics discussed with respect to the above information include: the Space Transportation System, mission planning, spaceborne experiments, and space flight payloads

A Supersymmetry Model of Leptons

If supersymmetry (SUSY) is not for stabilizing the electroweak energy scale, what is it used for in particle physics? We propose that it is for flavor problems. A cyclic family symmetry is introduced. Under the family symmetry, only the $\tau$-lepton is massive due to the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the Higgs field. This symmetry is broken by a sneutrino VEV which results in the muon mass. The comparatively large sneutrino VEV does not result in a large neutrino mass due to requiring heavy gauginos. SUSY breaks at a high scale $\sim 10^{13}$ GeV. The electroweak energy scale is unnaturally small. No additional global symmetry, like the R-parity, is imposed. Other aspects of the model are discussed.Comment: 10 pages, no figure, revtex

Isolation of Persister Cells of <i>Bacillus subtilis</i> and Determination of Their Susceptibility to Antimicrobial Peptides

Persister cells are growth-arrested subpopulations that can survive possible fatal environments and revert to wild types after stress removal. Clinically, persistent pathogens play a key role in antibiotic therapy failure, as well as chronic, recurrent, and antibiotic-resilient infections. In general, molecular and physiological research on persister cells formation and compounds against persister cells are much desired. In this study, we firstly demonstrated that the spore forming Gram-positive model organism Bacillus subtilis can be used to generate persister cells during exposure to antimicrobial compounds. Interestingly, instead of exhibiting a unified antibiotic tolerance profile, different number of persister cells and spores were quantified in various stress conditions. qPCR results also indicated that differential stress responses are related to persister formation in various environmental conditions. We propose, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, an effective method to isolate B. subtilis persister cells from a population using fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS), which makes analyzing persister populations feasible. Finally, we show that alpha-helical cationic antimicrobial peptides SAAP-148 and TC-19, derived from human cathelicidin LL-37 and human thrombocidin-1, respectively, have high efficiency against both B. subtilis vegetative cells and persisters, causing membrane permeability and fluidity alteration. In addition, we confirm that in contrast to persister cells, dormant B. subtilis spores are not susceptible to the antimicrobial peptides