Thirty years of vegetation dynamics in the Rospuda fen (NE Poland)

Little is known about the vegetation dynamics of fens, and especially of hydrologically undisturbed examples. We described the vegetation of an undisturbed mesotrophic rich fen (percolation mire) in 2006–2008 and 2016 and compared our results with vegetation records from the 1980s to identify any longer-term changes. Eight vegetation types were distinguished. On the whole, the vegetation of the mire has remained very stable throughout the last 30 years. However, detailed comparisons of permanent plots recorded twice in the last ten years indicated an expansion of shrubs in patches of Sphagnum - small sedge vegetation. There were also several less prominent changes in the abundance of particular species in other mire vegetation types: (1) an increase of sedges, reeds and Calliergonella cuspidata at the expense of rich-fen moss species in communities of brown moss - small sedge; (2) a change in composition of the moss layer in pine - birch fen woodland; (3) an increase of reedbed species and reduced Alnus glutinosa abundance in flooded riparian alder woodland; and (4) a decline of wetland herbs and mosses in alder spring fen woodland at the edges of the valley

Exploring the Trade-offs of Aggregated versus Disaggregated Architectures for Environmental Monitoring in Low-Earth Orbit

Traditionally, government space agencies have developed aggregated systems that co-host multiple capabilities on shared spacecraft buses. However, in response to cost growth and schedule delays on past programs, leaders in the government space community have expressed an interest in disaggregation, or distributing their capabilities across multiple spacecraft. Since their aggregated National Polar-orbiting Operational Satellite System (NPOESS) program was cancelled in 2010, both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) have investigated opportunities to reduce program costs through disaggregation. This paper expands their initial investigation and explores the cost impacts of aggregation and disaggregation across a large trade space of candidate architectures for environmental monitoring in low-Earth orbit. We find that on average, aggregated architectures are less costly than fully disaggregated ones but also find opportunities for cost savings by developing semi-aggregated systems, or systems with one or two satellites per orbital plane. Finally, we investigate several trades that are currently under consideration by NOAA and the DoD and make recommendations for future environmental monitoring systems in low-Earth orbit.Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sandia Corporation Excellence in Engineering Graduate Fellowship)Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technolog

Combinatorics of Open Covers VI: Selectors for Sequences of Dense Sets

We consider the following two selection principles for topological spaces: [Principle 1:] { For each sequence of dense subsets, there is a sequence of points from the space, the n-th point coming from the n-th dense set, such that this set of points is dense in the space; [Principle 2:]{ For each sequence of dense subsets, there is a sequence of finite sets, the n-th a subset of the n-th dense set, such that the union of these finite sets is dense in the space. We show that for separable metric space X one of these principles holds for the space C_p(X) of realvalued continuous functions equipped with the pointwise convergence topology if, and only if, a corresponding principle holds for a special family of open covers of X. An example is given to show that these equivalences do not hold in general for Tychonoff spaces. It is further shown that these two principles give characterizations for two popular cardinal numbers, and that these two principles are intimately related to an infinite game that was studied by Berner and Juhasz

The specificity and patterns of staining in human cells and tissues of p16INK4a antibodies demonstrate variant antigen binding

The validity of the identification and classification of human cancer using antibodies to detect biomarker proteins depends upon antibody specificity. Antibodies that bind to the tumour-suppressor protein p16INK4a are widely used for cancer diagnosis and research. In this study we examined the specificity of four commercially available anti-p16INK4a antibodies in four immunological applications. The antibodies H-156 and JC8 detected the same 16 kDa protein in western blot and immunoprecipitation tests, whereas the antibody F-12 did not detect any protein in western blot analysis or capture a protein that could be recognised by the H-156 antibody. In immunocytochemistry tests, the antibodies JC8 and H-156 detected a predominately cytoplasmic localised antigen, whose signal was depleted in p16INK4a siRNA experiments. F-12, in contrast, detected a predominately nuclear located antigen and there was no noticeable reduction in this signal after siRNA knockdown. Furthermore in immunohistochemistry tests, F-12 generated a different pattern of staining compared to the JC8 and E6H4 antibodies. These results demonstrate that three out of four commercially available p16INK4a antibodies are specific to, and indicate a mainly cytoplasmic localisation for, the p16INK4a protein. The F-12 antibody, which has been widely used in previous studies, gave different results to the other antibodies and did not demonstrate specificity to human p16INK4a. This work emphasizes the importance of the validation of commercial antibodies, aside to the previously reported use, for the full verification of immunoreaction specificity