Amino acids and amino sugars in calcified tissues of portunid crabs

Amino acid and amino sugar in calcified tissues of portunid crab

Comparing the yield of Staphylococcus aureus recovery with static versus agitated broth incubation

Given the lack of standardization of methodologies for microbial recovery from built environments, we sought to compare the yield of Staphylococcus aureus with a broth enrichment method when incubated in agitated versus static conditions. Five unique strains of S. aureus at five different concentrations were cultured to compare direct plating, agitated broth enrichment, and static broth enrichment culture methods. All samples were incubated at 35° in ambient air. The lowest concentration recovered across three replicates and five strains did not differ between culture methods (Fisher’s exact test, p=0.50); notably, recovery of S. aureus was equivalent between static and agitated broth incubation. When broth enrichment was used (both static and agitated), the burden of S. aureus growth was higher (by semiquantitative assessment of 4-quadrant streaking) compared to the direct plating culture method. Optimizing strategies for microbial recovery is essential, particularly in areas of lower biomass, given the paucity of research concerning microbial communities of built environments. The results of this study, in conjunction with other experiments investigating microbiomes of built environments, can help inform protocols for standardizing culturing methods within built environments

A Catalog of MIPSGAL Disk and Ring Sources

We present a catalog of 416 extended, resolved, disk- and ring-like objects as detected in the MIPSGAL 24 micron survey of the Galactic plane. This catalog is the result of a search in the MIPSGAL image data for generally circularly symmetric, extended "bubbles" without prior knowledge or expectation of their physical nature. Most of the objects have no extended counterpart at 8 or 70 micron, with less than 20% detections at each wavelength. For the 54 objects with central point sources, the sources are nearly always seen in all IRAC bands. About 70 objects (16%) have been previously identified, with another 35 listed as IRAS sources. Among the identified objects, those with central sources are mostly listed as emission-line stars, but with other source types including supernova remnants, luminous blue variables, and planetary nebulae. The 57 identified objects (of 362) without central sources are nearly all PNe (~90%).which suggests that a large fraction of the 300+ unidentified objects in this category are also PNe. These identifications suggest that this is primarily a catalog of evolved stars. Also included in the catalog are two filamentary objects that are almost certainly SNRs, and ten unusual compact extended objects discovered in the search. Two of these show remarkable spiral structure at both 8 and 24 micron. These are likely background galaxies previously hidden by the intervening Galactic plane

APOLLO: the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation: Instrument Description and First Detections

A next-generation lunar laser ranging apparatus using the 3.5 m telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in southern New Mexico has begun science operation. APOLLO (the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation) has achieved one-millimeter range precision to the moon which should lead to approximately one-order-of-magnitude improvements in the precision of several tests of fundamental properties of gravity. We briefly motivate the scientific goals, and then give a detailed discussion of the APOLLO instrumentation.Comment: 37 pages; 10 figures; 1 table: accepted for publication in PAS

Anyons and the Bose-Fermi duality in the finite-temperature Thirring model

Solutions to the Thirring model are constructed in the framework of algebraic QFT. It is shown that for all positive temperatures there are fermionic solutions only if the coupling constant is $\lambda=\sqrt{2(2n+1)\pi}, n\in {\bf N}$. These fermions are inequivalent and only for $n=1$ they are canonical fields. In the general case solutions are anyons. Different anyons (which are uncountably many) live in orthogonal spaces and obey dynamical equations (of the type of Heisenberg's "Urgleichung") characterized by the corresponding values of the statistic parameter. Thus statistic parameter turns out to be related to the coupling constant $\lambda$ and the whole Hilbert space becomes non-separable with a different "Urgleichung" satisfied in each of its sectors. This feature certainly cannot be seen by any power expansion in $\lambda$. Moreover, since the latter is tied to the statistic parameter, it is clear that such an expansion is doomed to failure and will never reveal the true structure of the theory. The correlation functions in the temperature state for the canonical dressed fermions are shown by us to coincide with the ones for bare fields, that is in agreement with the uniqueness of the $\tau$-KMS state over the CAR algebra ($\tau$ being the shift automorphism). Also the $\alpha$-anyon two-point function is evaluated and for scalar field it reproduces the result that is known from the literature.Comment: 25 pages, LaTe