TEDI: the TripleSpec Exoplanet Discovery Instrument

The TEDI (TripleSpec - Exoplanet Discovery Instrument) will be the first instrument fielded specifically for finding low-mass stellar companions. The instrument is a near infra-red interferometric spectrometer used as a radial velocimeter. TEDI joins Externally Dispersed Interferometery (EDI) with an efficient, medium-resolution, near IR (0.9 - 2.4 micron) echelle spectrometer, TripleSpec, at the Palomar 200" telescope. We describe the instrument and its radial velocimetry demonstration program to observe cool stars.Comment: 6 Pages, To Appear in SPIE Volume 6693, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets II

The winter floods of 2015/2016 in the UK - a review

A remarkably persistent and exceptionally mild cyclonic episode beginning in early-November 2015 and lasting around fourteen weeks brought severe, extensive and protracted flooding which impacted most damagingly on northern Britain, Northern Ireland and parts of Wales. Many existing rainfall and seasonal temperature records were eclipsed during this period and, most notably, maximum recorded river flows were exceeded over a substantial proportion of the country. At the national scale, previous maximum daily and monthly outflows were clearly eclipsed and four relatively discrete episodes of extreme runoff can be recognised. In many areas, the magnitude, persistence and repetitive nature of the flooding had major adverse impacts on communities, infrastructure, agriculture and a host of other sectors of the economy. The extent and duration of the flooding has very few close parallels in the historical record and, overall, it was a hydrometeorological episode which ranks alongside the 1975/1976 drought and 1947 floods as the most extreme broad-scale events captured in observational records during the last 100 years at least. The truly exceptional runoff patterns experienced in 1947 and 1976 had a major impact on flood and drought management strategies but occurred before the exacerbating impact of climate change was generally recognised. The 2015/2016 flooding, together with the impact of other protracted flood events in the 21st century thus far, has underlined the need to adapt engineering design and flood management strategies to accommodate the recent extension in the range of recorded runoff variability

Surface Chemistry of Perfluoropolyethers and Hydrogenated Analogs: Are Studies of Model Compounds Useful?

We have studied adsorption, desorption, and decomposition of ethers on Ru(001), an atomically-smooth metal surface. We have compared diethers with monoethers, and fluorinated ethers with hydrogenated ethers. The number of ether linkages does not strongly influence adsorption bond strength, nor the extent of decomposition. Fluorination does weaken the adsorption bond strength and prevents decomposition. These studies suggest that the surface properties of monomeric ethers can be used to predict properties of oligomeric, and perhaps even polymeric, ethers

Two stages of parafoveal processing during reading: Evidence from a display change detection task

We used a display change detection paradigm (Slattery, Angele, & Rayner Human Perception and Performance, 37, 1924–1938 2011) to investigate whether display change detection uses orthographic regularity and whether detection is affected by the processing difficulty of the word preceding the boundary that triggers the display change. Subjects were significantly more sensitive to display changes when the change was from a nonwordlike preview than when the change was from a wordlike preview, but the preview benefit effect on the target word was not affected by whether the preview was wordlike or nonwordlike. Additionally, we did not find any influence of preboundary word frequency on display change detection performance. Our results suggest that display change detection and lexical processing do not use the same cognitive mechanisms. We propose that parafoveal processing takes place in two stages: an early, orthography-based, preattentional stage, and a late, attention-dependent lexical access stage

Results from the centers for disease control and prevention's predict the 2013-2014 Influenza Season Challenge

Background: Early insights into the timing of the start, peak, and intensity of the influenza season could be useful in planning influenza prevention and control activities. To encourage development and innovation in influenza forecasting, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) organized a challenge to predict the 2013-14 Unites States influenza season. Methods: Challenge contestants were asked to forecast the start, peak, and intensity of the 2013-2014 influenza season at the national level and at any or all Health and Human Services (HHS) region level(s). The challenge ran from December 1, 2013-March 27, 2014; contestants were required to submit 9 biweekly forecasts at the national level to be eligible. The selection of the winner was based on expert evaluation of the methodology used to make the prediction and the accuracy of the prediction as judged against the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet). Results: Nine teams submitted 13 forecasts for all required milestones. The first forecast was due on December 2, 2013; 3/13 forecasts received correctly predicted the start of the influenza season within one week, 1/13 predicted the peak within 1 week, 3/13 predicted the peak ILINet percentage within 1 %, and 4/13 predicted the season duration within 1 week. For the prediction due on December 19, 2013, the number of forecasts that correctly forecasted the peak week increased to 2/13, the peak percentage to 6/13, and the duration of the season to 6/13. As the season progressed, the forecasts became more stable and were closer to the season milestones. Conclusion: Forecasting has become technically feasible, but further efforts are needed to improve forecast accuracy so that policy makers can reliably use these predictions. CDC and challenge contestants plan to build upon the methods developed during this contest to improve the accuracy of influenza forecasts. © 2016 The Author(s)

Stereoselective Metal-Free Reduction of Chiral Imines in Batch and Flow Mode: A Convenient Strategy for the Synthesis of Chiral Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients

he convenient, metal-free reduction of imines that contain an inexpensive and removable chiral auxiliary allowed for the synthesis of the immediate precursors of chiral active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). This protocol was carried out under batch and flow conditions to give the correspoding prod- ucts in high yields with almost complete stereocontrol. In the presence of trichlorosilane, an inexpensive and nontoxic reduc- ing agent, and an achiral Lewis base such as N,N-dimethyl- Introduction The pharmaceutical industry is gradually progressing towards enantiopure formulations. Most newly introduced drugs are chiral, and it is expected that approximately 95 % of pharma- ceutical drugs will be chiral by 2020. [1] In this context, chiral amines are considered a class of paramount importance, be- cause they are found in a plethora of compounds such as those of pharmaceutical interest as well as those developed for agro- chemicals, fragrances, and fine chemicals. [2] The reduction of the C=N group is one of the most widely used approaches to synthesize chiral amines, and over the last ten years, successful catalytic enantioselective methods based on both metal-pro- moted [3] and organocatalyzed [4] strategies have been devel- oped. When an industrial synthesis of a chiral pharmaceutical prod- uct must be planned, however, issues such as the chemical effi- ciency and robustness of the procedure, its general applicabil- ity, and economic considerations become crucially important. For these reasons, the applications of many chiral catalytic sys- tems are often not feasible, and the use of inexpensive and readily available chiral auxiliaries becomes an attractive and economic alternative. This also holds true for the synthesis of [a] Dipartimento di Chimica, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy E-mail: [email protected] http://users2.unimi.it/Benagliagroup [b] Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Molecolari ISTM-CNR, Via Golgi 19, 20133 Milano, Italy [c] Department of Chemistry and Chemistry Center of Évora, University of Évora, Rua Romão Ramalho, 59, 7000 Évora, Portugal Supporting information and ORCID(s) from the author(s) for this article are available on the WWW under http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejoc.201601268. Eur. J. Org. Chem. 2017, 39–44 © 2017 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim39 formamide, the formal syntheses of Rivastgmine, calcimimetic NPS R-568, and a Rho kinases inhibitor were successfully accom- plished. For the first time, both the diastereoselective imine re- duction and the auxiliary removal were efficiently performed in a micro- or mesoreactor under continuous-flow conditions, which paved the way towards the development of a practical process for the syntheses of industrially relevant, biologically active, enantiopure N-alkylamine

Temperature Mapping of Nitrogen-Doped Niobium Superconducting Radiofrequency Cavities

It was recently shown that diffusing nitrogen on the inner surface of superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities at high temperature can improve the quality factor of the niobium cavity. However, a reduction of the quench field is also typically found. To better understand the location of rf losses and quench, we used a thermometry system to map the temperature of the outer surface of ingot Nb cavities after nitrogen doping and electropolishing. Surface temperature of the cavities was recorded while increasing the rf power and also during the quenching. The results of thermal mapping showed no precursor heating on the cavities and quenching to be ignited near the equator where the surface magnetic field is maximum. Hot-spots at the equator area during multipacting were also detected by thermal mapping

What is the role of the film viewer? The effects of narrative comprehension and viewing task on gaze control in film

Film is ubiquitous, but the processes that guide viewers' attention while viewing film narratives are poorly understood. In fact, many film theorists and practitioners disagree on whether the film stimulus (bottom-up) or the viewer (top-down) is more important in determining how we watch movies. Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye movements and comprehension, and scene perception studies have shown strong effects of viewing tasks on eye movements, but such idiosyncratic top-down control of gaze in film would be anathema to the universal control mainstream filmmakers typically aim for. Thus, in two experiments we tested whether the eye movements and comprehension relationship similarly held in a classic film example, the famous opening scene of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (Welles & Zugsmith, Touch of Evil, 1958). Comprehension differences were compared with more volitionally controlled task-based effects on eye movements. To investigate the effects of comprehension on eye movements during film viewing, we manipulated viewers' comprehension by starting participants at different points in a film, and then tracked their eyes. Overall, the manipulation created large differences in comprehension, but only produced modest differences in eye movements. To amplify top-down effects on eye movements, a task manipulation was designed to prioritize peripheral scene features: a map task. This task manipulation created large differences in eye movements when compared to participants freely viewing the clip for comprehension. Thus, to allow for strong, volitional top-down control of eye movements in film, task manipulations need to make features that are important to narrative comprehension irrelevant to the viewing task. The evidence provided by this experimental case study suggests that filmmakers' belief in their ability to create systematic gaze behavior across viewers is confirmed, but that this does not indicate universally similar comprehension of the film narrative

Island lists of West Indian amphibians and reptiles

In collaboration with experts most familiar with specific areas within the West Indies, we set out to generate new island-by-island lists. Our reasons for doing so are fivefold: Since 1977, (1) we have found the (now outdated) island list by MacLean et al. to be a useful tool; (2) a great deal of new information on the distribution of amphibians and reptiles on West Indian islands has accumulated; (3) many new species of West Indian frogs and reptiles have been described; (4) several extirpations (or possible extinctions) have occurred; and (5) a number of species (mostly from the U.S.) have been introduced to West Indian islands and might ultimately have a deleterious impact on the native herpetofauna

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts