Sand Transport Studies in Monterey Bay, California: Annual Report, Part 5, 1973

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A lunar base reference mission for the phased implementation of bioregenerative life support system components

Previous design efforts of a cost effective and reliable regenerative life support system (RLSS) provided the foundation for the characterization of organisms or 'biological processors' in engineering terms and a methodology was developed for their integration into an engineered ecological LSS in order to minimize the mass flow imbalances between consumers and producers. These techniques for the design and the evaluation of bioregenerative LSS have now been integrated into a lunar base reference mission, emphasizing the phased implementation of components of such a BLSS. In parallel, a designers handbook was compiled from knowledge and experience gained during past design projects to aid in the design and planning of future space missions requiring advanced RLSS technologies. The lunar base reference mission addresses in particular the phased implementation and integration of BLS parts and includes the resulting infrastructure burdens and needs such as mass, power, volume, and structural requirements of the LSS. Also, operational aspects such as manpower requirements and the possible need and application of 'robotics' were addressed

Liposomal daunorubicin as treatment for Kaposi’s sarcoma

Anthracycline compounds including daunorubicin are the foundation of many modern chemotherapeutic regimens. However, the side-effects of these compounds can be severe, leading to alopecia, nausea, immune deficiency, and cardiotoxicity. For immunocompromised patients with aggressive Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), these complications often preclude the completion of appropriate chemotherapeutic regimens. This review focuses on the development and efficacy of liposomal daunorubicin (DaunoXome®; DNX) carriers for the treatment of KS. Encouragingly, DNX demonstrated increased in vivo stability and specificity. As a result, KS patients benefit from higher cumulative chemotherapeutic doses without significant cardiotoxicity. Tumor response to DNX treatment surpasses that of non-encapsulated daunorubicin and is similar to that observed with conventional multi-drug therapies such as ABV (doxorubicin, bleomycin, vincristine). Moreover, some reports indicate the patient quality of life during therapy may improve with DNX treatment. Although the development of DNX represents a significant advance in KS therapy, recent data suggest that additional modification of the liposomal carrier to include pegylation or target specific antibodies may further increase daunorubicin efficacy in the future

Automated Model Reduction for Complex Systems exhibiting Metastability

We present a novel method for the identification of the most important metastable states of a system with complicated dynamical behavior from time series information. The novel approach represents the effective dynamics of the full system by a Markov jump process between metastable states and the dynamics within each of these metastable states by rather simple stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Its algorithmic realization exploits the concept of hidden Markov models with output behavior given by SDEs. The numerical effort of the method is linear in the length of the given time series and quadratic in terms of the number of metastable states. The performance of the resulting method is illustrated by numerical tests and by application to molecular dynamics time series of a trialanine molecule

The mean magnetic field of the sun: Observations at Stanford

A solar telescope was built at Stanford University to study the organization and evolution of large-scale solar magnetic fields and velocities. The observations are made using a Babcock-type magnetograph which is connected to a 22.9 m vertical Littrow spectrograph. Sun-as-a-star integrated light measurements of the mean solar magnetic field were made daily since May 1975. The typical mean field magnitude is about 0.15 gauss with typical measurement error less than 0.05 gauss. The mean field polarity pattern is essentially identical to the interplanetary magnetic field sector structure (seen near the earth with a 4 day lag). The differences in the observed structures can be understood in terms of a warped current sheet model