3,694 research outputs found
A Study for Mars Manned Exploration
Over the last five decades there have been numerous studies devoted to developing, launching and conducting a manned mission to Mars by both Russian and U.S. organizations. These studies have proposed various crew sizes, mission length, propulsion systems, habitation modules, and scientific goals. As a first step towards establishing an international partnership approach to a Mars mission, the most recent Russian concepts are explored and then compared to NASA's latest Mars reference mission
The coevolution of toxin and antitoxin genes drives the dynamics of bacterial addiction complexes and intragenomic conflict
Bacterial genomes commonly contain âaddictionâ gene complexes that code for both a toxin and a corresponding antitoxin. As long as both genes are expressed, cells carrying the complex can remain healthy. However, loss of the complex (including segregational loss in daughter cells) can entail death of the cell. We develop a theoretical model to explore a number of evolutionary puzzles posed by toxinâantitoxin (TA) population biology. We first extend earlier results demonstrating that TA complexes can spread on plasmids, as an adaptation to plasmid competition in spatially structured environments, and highlight the role of kin selection. We then considered the emergence of TA complexes on plasmids from previously unlinked toxin and antitoxin genes. We find that one of these traits must offer at least initially a direct advantage in some but not all environments encountered by the evolving plasmid population. Finally, our study predicts non-transitive ârock-paper-scissorsâ dynamics to be a feature of intragenomic conflict mediated by TA complexes. Intragenomic conflict could be sufficient to select deleterious genes on chromosomes and helps to explain the previously perplexing observation that many TA genes are found on bacterial chromosomes
Synergy and Group Size in Microbial Cooperation
Microbes produce many molecules that are important for their growth and development, and the consumption of these secretions by nonproducers has recently become an important paradigm in microbial social evolution. Though the production of these public goods molecules has been studied intensely, little is known of how the benefits accrued and costs incurred depend on the quantity of public good molecules produced. We focus here on the relationship between the shape of the benefit curve and cellular density with a model assuming three types of benefit functions: diminishing, accelerating, and sigmoidal (accelerating then diminishing). We classify the latter two as being synergistic and argue that sigmoidal curves are common in microbial systems. Synergistic benefit curves interact with group sizes to give very different expected evolutionary dynamics. In particular, we show that whether or not and to what extent microbes evolve to produce public goods depends strongly on group size. We show that synergy can create an âevolutionary trapâ which can stymie the establishment and maintenance of cooperation. By allowing density dependent regulation of production (quorum sensing), we show how this trap may be avoided. We discuss the implications of our results for experimental design
Arm-length stabilisation for interferometric gravitational-wave detectors using frequency-doubled auxiliary lasers
Residual motion of the arm cavity mirrors is expected to prove one of the
principal impediments to systematic lock acquisition in advanced
gravitational-wave interferometers. We present a technique which overcomes this
problem by employing auxiliary lasers at twice the fundamental measurement
frequency to pre-stabilise the arm cavities' lengths. Applying this approach,
we reduce the apparent length noise of a 1.3 m long, independently suspended
Fabry-Perot cavity to 30 pm rms and successfully transfer longitudinal control
of the system from the auxiliary laser to the measurement laser
Community detection in temporal multilayer networks, with an application to correlation networks
Networks are a convenient way to represent complex systems of interacting
entities. Many networks contain "communities" of nodes that are more densely
connected to each other than to nodes in the rest of the network. In this
paper, we investigate the detection of communities in temporal networks
represented as multilayer networks. As a focal example, we study time-dependent
financial-asset correlation networks. We first argue that the use of the
"modularity" quality function---which is defined by comparing edge weights in
an observed network to expected edge weights in a "null network"---is
application-dependent. We differentiate between "null networks" and "null
models" in our discussion of modularity maximization, and we highlight that the
same null network can correspond to different null models. We then investigate
a multilayer modularity-maximization problem to identify communities in
temporal networks. Our multilayer analysis only depends on the form of the
maximization problem and not on the specific quality function that one chooses.
We introduce a diagnostic to measure \emph{persistence} of community structure
in a multilayer network partition. We prove several results that describe how
the multilayer maximization problem measures a trade-off between static
community structure within layers and larger values of persistence across
layers. We also discuss some computational issues that the popular "Louvain"
heuristic faces with temporal multilayer networks and suggest ways to mitigate
them.Comment: 42 pages, many figures, final accepted version before typesettin
A new species of treehopper in the genus Cladonota StÄl (Hemiptera: Membracidae: Membracinae: Hypsoprorini) from Costa Rica, with preliminary observations of its behaviour and natural history
England, Sam J., Flynn, Dawn J., Robert, Daniel (2020): A new species of treehopper in the genus Cladonota StÄl (Hemiptera: Membracidae Membracinae: Hypsoprorini) from Costa Rica, with preliminary observations of its behaviour and natural history. Zootaxa 4750 (4): 596-598, DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4750.4.1
The Mirage of Triangular Arbitrage in the Spot Foreign Exchange Market
We investigate triangular arbitrage within the spot foreign exchange market
using high-frequency executable prices. We show that triangular arbitrage
opportunities do exist, but that most have short durations and small
magnitudes. We find intra-day variations in the number and length of arbitrage
opportunities, with larger numbers of opportunities with shorter mean durations
occurring during more liquid hours. We demonstrate further that the number of
arbitrage opportunities has decreased in recent years, implying a corresponding
increase in pricing efficiency. Using trading simulations, we show that a
trader would need to beat other market participants to an unfeasibly large
proportion of arbitrage prices to profit from triangular arbitrage over a
prolonged period of time. Our results suggest that the foreign exchange market
is internally self-consistent and provide a limited verification of market
efficiency
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