Experimental study of effects of simulated neutralized solar wind on white-pigment thermal control coatings

Simulated solar wind effects on thermal control coatings for space fligh

Fuel treatment planning: Fragmenting high fuel load areas while maintaining availability and connectivity of faunal habitat

Reducing the fuel load in fire-prone landscapes is aimed at mitigating the risk of catastrophic wildfires but there are ecological consequences. Maintaining habitat for fauna of both sufficient extent and connectivity while fragmenting areas of high fuel loads presents land managers with seemingly contrasting objectives. Faced with this dichotomy, we propose a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model that can optimally schedule fuel treatments to reduce fuel hazards by fragmenting high fuel load regions while considering critical ecological requirements over time and space. The model takes into account both the frequency of fire that vegetation can tolerate and the frequency of fire necessary for fire-dependent species. Our approach also ensures that suitable alternate habitat is available and accessible to fauna affected by a treated area. More importantly, to conserve fauna the model sets a minimum acceptable target for the connectivity of habitat at any time. These factors are all included in the formulation of a model that yields a multi-period spatially-explicit schedule for treatment planning. Our approach is then demonstrated in a series of computational experiments with hypothetical landscapes, a single vegetation type and a group of faunal species with the same habitat requirements. Our experiments show that it is possible to fragment areas of high fuel loads while ensuring sufficient connectivity of habitat over both space and time. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the habitat connectivity constraint is more effective than neighbourhood habitat constraints. This is critical for the conservation of fauna and of special concern for vulnerable or endangered species

An optimisation approach for fuel treatment planning to break the connectivity of high-risk regions

Uncontrolled wildfires can lead to loss of life and property and destruction of natural resources. At the same time, fire plays a vital role in restoring ecological balance in many ecosystems. Fuel management, or treatment planning by way of planned burning, is an important tool used in many countries where fire is a major ecosystem process. In this paper, we propose an approach to reduce the spatial connectivity of fuel hazards while still considering the ecological fire requirements of the ecosystem. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model is formulated in such a way that it breaks the connectivity of high-risk regions as a means to reduce fuel hazards in the landscape. This multi-period model tracks the age of each vegetation type and determines the optimal time and locations to conduct fuel treatments. The minimum and maximum Tolerable Fire Intervals (TFI), which define the ages at which certain vegetation type can be treated for ecological reasons, are taken into account by the model. Examples from previous work that explicitly disconnect contiguous areas of high fuel load have often been limited to using single vegetation types implemented within rectangular grids. We significantly extend such work by including modelling multiple vegetation types implemented within a polygon-based network to achieve a more realistic representation of the landscape. An analysis of the proposed approach was conducted for a fuel treatment area comprising 711 treatment units in the Barwon-Otway district of Victoria, Australia. The solution of the proposed model can be obtained for 20-year fuel treatment planning within a reasonable computation time of eight hours

Monoclonal antibodies against E- and F-type prostaglandins High specificity and sensitivity in conventional radioimmunoassays

AbstractPolyclonal antisera against prostaglandins (PGs) are widely used for the assessment of the biological role of these mediators, but even the most specific contain antibodies against the major metabolites and degradation products of the haptens employed. To overcome this inherent problem we produced monoclonal antibodies (mAs) against PGE2, PGF2α and 6-keto-PGF1α using the somatic cell hybridization technique. The mAs against 6-keto-PGF1α and PGF2α proved to be highly specific, but allowed only for moderate detection limits (1–2 ng) in conventional fluid phase radioimmunoassays (RIAs). One of the mAs against PGE2 permitted a 100-fold improvement in the detection limit while being almost devoid of cross-reactivity with metabolites and other structurally related PGs. These results show that highly specific mAs against PGs can be produced to improve the available RIA technique for PG quantification

Dimethylaminomethylene-α-D-xylo-hept-5-ulofuranurononitrile as building block in the synthesis of 'reversed' C-nucleoside analogues

3-O-Benzyl-6-deoxy-1,2-O-isopropylidene-6-(dimethylaminomethylene) -α-D-xylo-hept-5-ulofuranurononitrile (1) was reacted with amidinium salts, S-methylisothiouronium sulfate, and guanidinium chloride, respectively, in the presence of bases to furnish the 4-(3-O-benzyl-1,2-O-isopropylidene- α-D-xylo-tetrofuranos-4-yl)pyrimidine-5-carbonitriles 2 and the 4-(1,2-O-isopropylidene-α-D-glycero-tetr-3-enofuranos-4-yl) pyrimidine-5-carbonitriles 3, respectively. Treatment of 1 with ethyl 5-aminopyrazole-4-carboxylates yielded the ethyl 7-(3-O-benzyl-1,2-O- isopropylidene-α-D-xylo-tetrofuranos-4-yl)-6-cyanopyrazolo[1,5-a] pyrimidine-3-carboxylates 4 and the ethyl 7-amino-6-(3-O-benzyl-1,2-O- isopropylidene-α-D-xylo-pentofuranuronoyl)pyrazolo[1,5-a] pyrimidine-3-carboxylates 5, respectively. Reaction of 1 with 2-benzimidazolylacetonitrile in the presence of sodium methanolate afforded 1-amino-2-(3-O-benzyl-1,2-O-isopropylidene-α-D-xylo-pentofuranuronoyl) benzo[4,5]imidazo[1,2-a]pyridine-4-carbonitrile (6) and 1-amino-2-(3-deoxy-1,2- O-isopropylidene-α-D-glycero-pent-S-enofuranuronoyl)benzo[4,5]imidazo[1, 2-a]pyridine-4-carbonitrile (7). © 2006 Verlag der Zeitschrift für Naturforschung

Controlling group velocity in rectangular-lattice photonic crystal waveguides

A method for controlling the dispersion and thus group velocity of guided modes in photonic crystal (PC) waveguides using bi- and quasi-periodic lattices is presented. Rectangular lattice photonic crystals are proposed as possible candidates for implementing such control. However, these structures, and generally all bi-periodic lattices, develop undesirable characteristics as the perfect square lattice is perturbed. Thus, quasi-periodic photonic crystals, which have been shown to be promising in selective mode engineering, were examined next. A possible scheme for engineering of a single mode PC waveguide with guiding through the entire bandgap is presented

Emotional Faces Capture Spatial Attention in 5-Year-Old Children

Emotional facial expressions are important social cues that convey salient affective information. Infants, younger children, and adults all appear to orient spatial attention to emotional faces with a particularly strong bias to fearful faces. Yet in young children it is unclear whether or not both happy and fearful faces extract attention. Given that the processing of emotional faces is believed by some to serve an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, attentional biases to both fearful and happy expressions would be expected in younger children. However, the extent to which this ability is present in young children and whether or not this ability is genetically mediated is untested. Therefore, the aims of the current study were to assess the spatial-attentional properties of emotional faces in young children, with a preliminary test of whether this effect was influenced by genetics. Five-year-old twin pairs performed a dot-probe task. The results suggest that children preferentially direct spatial attention to emotional faces, particularly right visual field faces. The results provide support for the notion that the direction of spatial attention to emotional faces serves an evolutionarily adaptive function and may be mediated by genetic mechanisms