656 research outputs found
Torsion cycles as non-local magnetic sources in non-orientable spaces
Non-orientable spaces can appear to carry net magnetic charge, even in the
absence of magnetic sources. It is shown that this effect can be understood as
a physical manifestation of the existence of torsion cycles of codimension one
in the homology of space.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
Effects of nanoparticles on murine macrophages
Metallic nanoparticles are more and more widely used in an increasing number
of applications. Consequently, they are more and more present in the
environment, and the risk that they may represent for human health must be
evaluated. This requires to increase our knowledge of the cellular responses to
nanoparticles. In this context, macrophages appear as an attractive system.
They play a major role in eliminating foreign matter, e.g. pathogens or
infectious agents, by phagocytosis and inflammatory responses, and are thus
highly likely to react to nanoparticles. We have decided to study their
responses to nanoparticles by a combination of classical and wide-scope
approaches such as proteomics. The long term goal of this study is the better
understanding of the responses of macrophages to nanoparticles, and thus to
help to assess their possible impact on human health. We chose as a model
system bone marrow-derived macrophages and studied the effect of commonly used
nanoparticles such as TiO2 and Cu. Classical responses of macrophage were
characterized and proteomic approaches based on 2D gels of whole cell extracts
were used. Preliminary proteomic data resulting from whole cell extracts showed
different effects for TiO2-NPs and Cu-NPs. Modifications of the expression of
several proteins involved in different pathways such as, for example, signal
transduction, endosome-lysosome pathway, Krebs cycle, oxidative stress response
have been underscored. These first results validate our proteomics approach and
open a new wide field of investigation for NPs impact on macrophagesComment: Nanosafe2010: International Conference on Safe Production and Use of
Nanomaterials 16-18 November 2010, Grenoble, France, Grenoble : France (2010
Polo-like kinase 3 regulates CtIP during DNA double-strand break repair in G1
DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) are repaired by nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) or homologous recombination (HR). The C terminal binding protein–interacting protein (CtIP) is phosphorylated in G2 by cyclin-dependent kinases to initiate resection and promote HR. CtIP also exerts functions during NHEJ, although the mechanism phosphorylating CtIP in G1 is unknown. In this paper, we identify Plk3 (Polo-like kinase 3) as a novel DSB response factor that phosphorylates CtIP in G1 in a damage-inducible manner and impacts on various cellular processes in G1. First, Plk3 and CtIP enhance the formation of ionizing radiation-induced translocations; second, they promote large-scale genomic deletions from restriction enzyme-induced DSBs; third, they are required for resection and repair of complex DSBs; and finally, they regulate alternative NHEJ processes in Ku−/− mutants. We show that mutating CtIP at S327 or T847 to nonphosphorylatable alanine phenocopies Plk3 or CtIP loss. Plk3 binds to CtIP phosphorylated at S327 via its Polo box domains, which is necessary for robust damage-induced CtIP phosphorylation at S327 and subsequent CtIP phosphorylation at T847
Charges and fluxes in Maxwell theory on compact manifolds with boundary
We investigate the charges and fluxes that can occur in higher-order Abelian
gauge theories defined on compact space-time manifolds with boundary. The
boundary is necessary to supply a destination to the electric lines of force
emanating from brane sources, thus allowing non-zero net electric charges, but
it also introduces new types of electric and magnetic flux. The resulting
structure of currents, charges, and fluxes is studied and expressed in the
language of relative homology and de Rham cohomology and the corresponding
abelian groups. These can be organised in terms of a pair of exact sequences
related by the Poincar\'e-Lefschetz isomorphism and by a weaker flip symmetry
exchanging the ends of the sequences. It is shown how all this structure is
brought into play by the imposition of the appropriately generalised Maxwell's
equations. The requirement that these equations be integrable restricts the
world-volume of a permitted brane (assumed closed) to be homologous to a cycle
on the boundary of space-time. All electric charges and magnetic fluxes are
quantised and satisfy the Dirac quantisation condition. But through some
boundary cycles there may be unquantised electric fluxes associated with
quantised magnetic fluxes and so dyonic in nature.Comment: 28 pages, plain Te
The Halo Mass of Optically Luminous Quasars at z ,F≈ ,F1-2 Measured via Gravitational Deflection of the Cosmic Microwave Background
© 2019. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We measure the average deflection of cosmic microwave background photons by quasars at 〈Z〉= 1.7. Our sample is selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to cover the redshift range 0.9 ≤z≤2.2 with absolute i-band magnitudes of M i ≤-24 (K-corrected to z = 2). A stack of nearly 200,000 targets reveals an 8δ detection of Planck's estimate of the lensing convergence toward the quasars. We fit the signal with a model comprising a Navarro-Frenk-White density profile and a two-halo term accounting for correlated large-scale structure, which dominates the observed signal. The best-fitting model is described by an average halo mass log 10 (M h h -1 M)12.6 ±0.2 = and linear bias b=2.7±0.3 at 〈Z 〉= 1.7, in excellent agreement with clustering studies. We also report a hint, at a 90% confidence level, of a correlation between the convergence amplitude and luminosity, indicating that quasars brighter than Mi≲ -26 reside in halos of typical mass M h ≈ 10 13 h -1 M, scaling roughly as M h ∞ L opt 3/4 at M i ≲-24 mag, in good agreement with physically motivated quasar demography models. Although we acknowledge that this luminosity dependence is a marginal result, the observed Mh-L opt relationship could be interpreted as a reflection of the cutoff in the distribution of black hole accretion rates toward high Eddington ratios: the weak trend of Mh with Lopt observed at low luminosity becomes stronger for the most powerful quasars, which tend to be accreting close to the Eddington limit.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Macro-financial linkages and bank behaviour: evidence from the second-round effects of the global financial crisis on East Asia
This paper studies the link between macro-financial variability and bank behaviour, which justifies the second-round effects of the global financial crisis on East Asia. Following Gallego et al. (The impact of the global economic and financial crisis on Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe (CESEE) and Latin America, 2010), the second round effects are defined as the adverse feedback loop from the slumps in economic activities and sharp financial market deterioration, which may influence the financial performance of bank, inter alia via deteriorating credit quality, declining profitability and increasing problems in retaining necessary capitalization. Differentiating itself from other research, this study stresses adjustments in four dimensions of bank performance and behaviour: asset quality, profitability, capital adequacy, and lending behaviour, assuming that any change in a bank-specific characteristic is induced by endogenous adjustments of the others. The empirical results based on partial adjustment models and two-step system GMM estimation show that bank’s adjustment behaviour is subject to the variation in the macro-financial environment and the stress condition in the global financial market. There is no convincing evidence to support the effectiveness of policy rate cut to boots bank lending and to avoid a financial accelerator effect
Dynamical Boson Stars
The idea of stable, localized bundles of energy has strong appeal as a model
for particles. In the 1950s John Wheeler envisioned such bundles as smooth
configurations of electromagnetic energy that he called {\em geons}, but none
were found. Instead, particle-like solutions were found in the late 1960s with
the addition of a scalar field, and these were given the name {\em boson
stars}. Since then, boson stars find use in a wide variety of models as sources
of dark matter, as black hole mimickers, in simple models of binary systems,
and as a tool in finding black holes in higher dimensions with only a single
killing vector. We discuss important varieties of boson stars, their dynamic
properties, and some of their uses, concentrating on recent efforts.Comment: 79 pages, 25 figures, invited review for Living Reviews in
Relativity; major revision in 201
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Mass calibration of optically selected DES clusters using a measurement of CMB-cluster lensing with SPTpol data
We use cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps from the 500 deg2 SPTpol survey to measure the stacked lensing convergence of galaxy clusters from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year-3 redMaPPer (RM) cluster catalog. The lensing signal is extracted through a modified quadratic estimator designed to be unbiased by the thermal Sunyaev-Zel{'}dovich (tSZ) effect. The modified estimator uses a tSZ-free map, constructed from the SPTpol 95 and 150 GHz datasets, to estimate the background CMB gradient. For lensing reconstruction, we employ two versions of the RM catalog: a flux-limited sample containing 4003 clusters and a volume-limited sample with 1741 clusters. We detect lensing at a significance of 8.7 σ (6.7σ) with the flux(volume)-limited sample. By modeling the reconstructed convergence using the Navarro-Frenk-White profile, we find the average lensing masses to be M200m = (1.62 +0.32 −0.25 [stat.] ± 0.04 [sys.]) and (1.28 +0.14 −0.18 [stat.] ±0.03 [sys.])×1014 M⊙for the volume- and flux-limited samples respectively. The systematic error budget is much smaller than the statistical uncertainty and is dominated by the uncertainties in the RM cluster centroids. We use the volume-limited sample to calibrate the normalization of the mass-richness scaling relation, and find a result consistent with the galaxy weak-lensing measurements from DES (Mcclintock et al. 2018)
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A measurement of CMB cluster lensing with SPT and DES year 1 data
Clusters of galaxies gravitationally lens the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, resulting in a distinct imprint in the CMB on arcminute scales. Measurement of this effect offers a promising way to constrain the masses of galaxy clusters, particularly those at high redshift. We use CMB maps from the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ) survey to measure the CMB lensing signal around galaxy clusters identified in optical imaging from first year observations of the Dark Energy Survey. The cluster catalogue used in this analysis contains 3697 members with mean redshift of z¯ = 0.45. We detect lensing of the CMB by the galaxy clusters at 8.1σ significance. Using the measured lensing signal, we constrain the amplitude of the relation between cluster mass and optical richness to roughly 17 per cent precision, finding good agreement with recent constraints obtained with galaxy lensing. The error budget is dominated by statistical noise but includes significant contributions from systematic biases due to the thermal SZ effect and cluster miscentring
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