Passive immunization during pregnancy for congenital cytomegalovirus infection

BACKGROUND Currently, there is no effective intervention for a primary cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection during pregnancy. METHODS We studied pregnant women with a primary CMV infection. The therapy group comprised women whose amniotic fluid contained either CMV or CMV DNA and who were offered intravenous CMV hyperimmune globulin at a dose of 200 U per kilogram of maternal weight. A prevention group, consisting of women with a recent primary infection before 21 weeks\u27 gestation or who declined amniocentesis, was offered monthly hyperimmune globulin (100 U per kilogram intravenously). RESULTS In the therapy group, 31 women received hyperimmune globulin, only 1 (3 percent) of whom gave birth to an infant with CMV disease (symptomatic at birth and handicapped at two or more years of age), as compared with 7 of 14 women who did not receive hyperimmune globulin (50 percent). Thus, hyperimmune globulin therapy was associated with a significantly lower risk of congenital CMV disease (adjusted odds ratio, 0.02; 95 percent confidence interval, ¡∞ to 0.15; P\u3c0.001). In the prevention group, 37 women received hyperimmune globulin, 6 (16 percent) of whom had infants with congenital CMV infection, as compared with 19 of 47 women (40 percent) who did not receive hyperimmune globulin. Thus, hyperimmune globulin therapy was associated with a significantly lower risk of congenital CMV infection (adjusted odds ratio, 0.32; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.10 to 0.94; P=0.04). Hyperimmune globulin therapy significantly (P\u3c0.001) increased CMV-specific IgG concentrations and avidity and decreased natural killer cells and HLA-DR+ cells and had no adverse effects. CONCLUSIONS Treatment of pregnant women with CMV-specific hyperimmune globulin is safe, and the findings of this nonrandomized study suggest that it may be effective in the treatment and prevention of congenital CMV infection. A controlled trial of this agent may now be appropriate

Surveillance and falsification implications for open source intelligence investigations

© 2015 ACM. Legitimacy of surveillance is crucial to safeguarding validity of OSINT data as a tool for law-enforcement agencies

Characterization of Catalyst Materials for Production of Aerospace Fuels

Due to environmental, economic, and security issues, there is a greater need for cleaner alternative fuels. There will undoubtedly be a shift from crude oil to non-petroleum sources as a feedstock for aviation (and other transportation) fuels. Additionally, efforts are concentrated on reducing costs coupled with fuel production from non-conventional sources. One solution to this issue is Fischer-Tropsch gas-to-liquid technology. Fischer-Tropsch processing of synthesis gas (CO/H2) produces a complex product stream of paraffins, olefins, and oxygenated compounds such as alcohols and aldehydes. The Fisher-Tropsch process can produce a cleaner diesel oil fraction with a high cetane number (typically above 70) without any sulfur or aromatic compounds. This process is most commonly catalyzed by heterogeneous (in this case, silver and platinum) catalysts composed of cobalt supported on alumina or unsupported alloyed iron powders. Physisorption, chemisorptions, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) are described to better understand the potential performance of Fischer-Tropsch cobalt on alumina catalysts promoted with silver and platinum. The overall goal is to preferentially produce C8 to C18 paraffin compounds for use as aerospace fuels. Progress towards this goal will eventually be updated and achieved by a more thorough understanding of the characterization of catalyst materials. This work was supported by NASA s Subsonic Fixed Wing and In-situ Resource Utilization projects

How special are Brightest Group and Cluster Galaxies?

We use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to construct a sample of 625 brightest group and cluster galaxies (BCGs) together with control samples of non-BCGs matched in stellar mass, redshift, and color. We investigate how the systematic properties of BCGs depend on stellar mass and on their privileged location near the cluster center. The groups and clusters that we study are drawn from the C4 catalogue of Miller et al. (2005) but we have developed improved algorithms for identifying the BCG and for measuring the cluster velocity dispersion. Since the SDSS photometric pipeline tends to underestimate the luminosities of large galaxies in dense environments, we have developed a correction for this effect which can be readily applied to the published catalog data. We find that BCGs are larger and have higher velocity dispersions than non-BCGs of the same stellar mass, which implies that BCGs contain a larger fraction of dark matter. In contrast to non-BCGs, the dynamical mass-to-light ratio of BCGs does not vary as a function of galaxy luminosity. Hence BCGs lie on a different fundamental plane than ordinary elliptical galaxies. BCGs also follow a steeper Faber-Jackson relation than non-BCGs, as suggested by models in which BCGs assemble via dissipationless mergers along preferentially radial orbits. We find tentative evidence that this steepening is stronger in more massive clusters. BCGs have similar mean stellar ages and metallicities to non-BCGs of the same mass, but they have somewhat higher alpha/Fe ratios, indicating that star formation may have occurred over a shorter timescale in the BCGs. Finally, we find that BCGs are more likely to host radio-loud active galactic nuclei than other galaxies of the same mass, but are less likely to host an optical AGN. The differences we find are more pronounced for the less massive BCGs.Comment: Replaced with slightly modified version accepted by MNRAS. 28 pages, 25 figures. Version with full resolution figures available at http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~anja/bcgs_avdl.pd

The intermediate-redshift galaxy cluster CL 0048-2942. Stellar populations

We present a detailed study of the cluster CL 0048-2942, located at z~0.64, based on a photometric and spectroscopic catalogue of 54 galaxies in a 5 x 5 square arcmin region centred in that cluster. Of these, 23 galaxies were found to belong to the cluster. Based on this sample, the line-of-sight velocity dispersion of the cluster is approximately 680 +- 140 km/s. We have performed stellar population synthesis in the cluster members as well as in the field galaxies of the sample and found that there are population gradients in the cluster with central galaxies hosting mainly intermediate/old populations whereas galaxies in the cluster outskirts show clearly an increase of younger populations, meaning that star formation is predominantly taking place in the outer regions of the cluster. In a general way, field galaxies seem to host less evolved stellar populations than cluster members. In fact, in terms of ages, young supergiant stars dominate the spectra of field galaxies whereas cluster galaxies display a dominant number of old and intermediate age stars. Following the work of other authors (e.g. Dressler et al. 1999) we have estimated the percentage of K+A galaxies in our sample and found around 13% in the cluster and 10% in the field. These values were estimated through means of a new method, based on stellar population synthesis results, that takes into account all possible absorption features in the spectrum and thus makes optimal use of the data.Comment: Accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics. 24 pages, 10 figures, 10 tables (figures 3, 4, 5 and tables 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 will be available in electronic format only in the A&A published version

Cognitive impairment induced by delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol occurs through heteromers between cannabinoid CB1 and serotonin 5-HT2A receptors

Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive compound of marijuana, induces numerous undesirable effects, including memory impairments, anxiety, and dependence. Conversely, THC also has potentially therapeutic effects, including analgesia, muscle relaxation, and neuroprotection. However, the mechanisms that dissociate these responses are still not known. Using mice lacking the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A, we revealed that the analgesic and amnesic effects of THC are independent of each other: while amnesia induced by THC disappears in the mutant mice, THC can still promote analgesia in these animals. In subsequent molecular studies, we showed that in specific brain regions involved in memory formation, the receptors for THC and the 5-HT2A receptors work together by physically interacting with each other. Experimentally interfering with this interaction prevented the memory deficits induced by THC, but not its analgesic properties. Our results highlight a novel mechanism by which the beneficial analgesic properties of THC can be dissociated from its cognitive side effects

Observing Supermassive Black Holes across cosmic time: from phenomenology to physics

In the last decade, a combination of high sensitivity, high spatial resolution observations and of coordinated multi-wavelength surveys has revolutionized our view of extra-galactic black hole (BH) astrophysics. We now know that supermassive black holes reside in the nuclei of almost every galaxy, grow over cosmological times by accreting matter, interact and merge with each other, and in the process liberate enormous amounts of energy that influence dramatically the evolution of the surrounding gas and stars, providing a powerful self-regulatory mechanism for galaxy formation. The different energetic phenomena associated to growing black holes and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), their cosmological evolution and the observational techniques used to unveil them, are the subject of this chapter. In particular, I will focus my attention on the connection between the theory of high-energy astrophysical processes giving rise to the observed emission in AGN, the observable imprints they leave at different wavelengths, and the methods used to uncover them in a statistically robust way. I will show how such a combined effort of theorists and observers have led us to unveil most of the SMBH growth over a large fraction of the age of the Universe, but that nagging uncertainties remain, preventing us from fully understating the exact role of black holes in the complex process of galaxy and large-scale structure formation, assembly and evolution.Comment: 46 pages, 21 figures. This review article appears as a chapter in the book: "Astrophysical Black Holes", Haardt, F., Gorini, V., Moschella, U and Treves A. (Eds), 2015, Springer International Publishing AG, Cha

Black hole accretion and host galaxies of obscured quasars in XMM-COSMOS

We explore the connection between black hole growth at the center of obscured quasars selected from the XMM-COSMOS survey and the physical properties of their host galaxies. We study a bolometric regime ( 8 x 10^45 erg/s) where several theoretical models invoke major galaxy mergers as the main fueling channel for black hole accretion. We confirm that obscured quasars mainly reside in massive galaxies (Mstar>10^10 Msun) and that the fraction of galaxies hosting such powerful quasars monotonically increases with the stellar mass. We stress the limitation of the use of rest-frame color-magnitude diagrams as a diagnostic tool for studying galaxy evolution and inferring the influence that AGN activity can have on such a process. We instead use the correlation between star-formation rate and stellar mass found for star-forming galaxies to discuss the physical properties of the hosts. We find that at z ~1, ~62% of Type-2 QSOs hosts are actively forming stars and that their rates are comparable to those measured for normal star-forming galaxies. The fraction of star-forming hosts increases with redshift: ~71% at z ~2, and 100% at z ~3. We also find that the the evolution from z ~1 to z ~3 of the specific star-formation rate of the Type-2 QSO hosts is in excellent agreement with that measured for star-forming galaxies. From the morphological analysis, we conclude that most of the objects are bulge-dominated galaxies, and that only a few of them exhibit signs of recent mergers or disks. Finally, bulge-dominated galaxies tend to host Type-2 QSOs with low Eddington ratios (lambda<0.1), while disk-dominated or merging galaxies have at their centers BHs accreting at high Eddington ratios (lambda > 0.1).Comment: Accepted by A&A. 20 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables. A version with higher resolution figures and SED fits of Appendix A is available at http://www.eso.org/~vmainier/QSO2/qso2.pd

Automatic parallelization of irregular and pointer-based computations: perspectives from logic and constraint programming

Irregular computations pose some of the most interesting and challenging problems in automatic parallelization. Irregularity appears in certain kinds of numerical problems and is pervasive in symbolic applications. Such computations often use dynamic data structures which make heavy use of pointers. This complicates all the steps of a parallelizing compiler, from independence detection to task partitioning and placement. In the past decade there has been significant progress in the development of parallelizing compilers for logic programming and, more recently, constraint programming. The typical applications of these paradigms frequently involve irregular computations, which arguably makes the techniques used in these compilers potentially interesting. In this paper we introduce in a tutorial way some of the problems faced by parallelizing compilers for logic and constraint programs. These include the need for inter-procedural pointer aliasing analysis for independence detection and having to manage speculative and irregular computations through task granularity control and dynamic task allocation. We also provide pointers to some of the progress made in these áreas. In the associated talk we demónstrate representatives of several generations of these parallelizing compilers

Evidence for the Rare Decay B -> K*ll and Measurement of the B -> Kll Branching Fraction

We present evidence for the flavor-changing neutral current decay $B\to K^*\ell^+\ell^-$ and a measurement of the branching fraction for the related process $B\to K\ell^+\ell^-$, where $\ell^+\ell^-$ is either an $e^+e^-$ or $\mu^+\mu^-$ pair. These decays are highly suppressed in the Standard Model, and they are sensitive to contributions from new particles in the intermediate state. The data sample comprises $123\times 10^6$ $\Upsilon(4S)\to B\bar{B}$ decays collected with the Babar detector at the PEP-II $e^+e^-$ storage ring. Averaging over $K^{(*)}$ isospin and lepton flavor, we obtain the branching fractions ${\mathcal B}(B\to K\ell^+\ell^-)=(0.65^{+0.14}_{-0.13}\pm 0.04)\times 10^{-6}$ and ${\mathcal B}(B\to K^*\ell^+\ell^-)=(0.88^{+0.33}_{-0.29}\pm 0.10)\times 10^{-6}$, where the uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively. The significance of the $B\to K\ell^+\ell^-$ signal is over $8\sigma$, while for $B\to K^*\ell^+\ell^-$ it is $3.3\sigma$.Comment: 7 pages, 2 postscript figues, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let