Variations in slow slip moment rate associated with rapid tremor reversals in Cascadia

During large slow slip events, tremor sometimes propagates in the reverse along-strike direction for a few hours, at speeds 10 to 40 times faster than the forward propagation. We examine the aseismic slip that underlies this rapidly propagating tremor. We use PBO (Plate Boundary Observatory) borehole strainmeter data to search for variations in the slow slip moment rate during 35 rapid tremor reversals (RTRs) that occurred beneath Vancouver Island. The strain records reveal that, on average, the strain rate increases by about 100% ( math formula) during RTRs. Given the Green's functions expected for slip in the RTR locations, these strain rate increases imply 50 to 130% increases in the aseismic moment rate. The median moment released per RTR is between 8 and 21% of the daily slow slip moment, equivalent to that of a MW 5.0 to 5.1 earthquake. By combining the RTR moments with the spatial extents suggested by tremor, we estimate that a typical RTR has peak slip of roughly one-sixth of the peak slip in the main slow slip event, near-front slip rate of a few to ten times the main front slip rate, stress drop around half the main event stress drop, and strain energy release rate around one-tenth that of the main front. Our observations support a picture of RTRs as aseismic subevents with high slip rates but modest strain energy release. RTRs appear to contribute to but not dominate the overall slow slip moment, though they may accommodate most of the slip in certain locations

Analyzing the 3D Printed Material Tango Plus FLX930 for Using in Self-Folding Structure

Self-folding is the ability of the structure to fold and/or unfold without human intervention or any application of external manipulation. It is known that the structure of folding object consists of two essential parts. These parts are the faces and the creases. In this paper, it is assumed that the faces could be built by using solid materials, and the crease lines can be built using soft material which provides a high bent ability. Furthermore, these two materials should be combined built without using any connections between them. Fortunately, the 3D printer provides this capability. It can print two types of different materials at the same time for the same structure. Therefore, a 3D printer is chosen to fabricate a folding structure using two types of material. These types are the Vero for solid faces and Tango plus FLX930 for the soft creases lines. The soft material at hinge part (creases lines) subjected to the load directly when the structure folds. It should have a clear view of the mechanical properties of this material. Therefore, several mechanical tests for Tango FLX930 material are operated to calculate its mechanical properties and find the force that required to fold it

Effective Field Theory and Finite Density Systems

This review gives an overview of effective field theory (EFT) as applied at finite density, with a focus on nuclear many-body systems. Uniform systems with short-range interactions illustrate the ingredients and virtues of many-body EFT and then the varied frontiers of EFT for finite nuclei and nuclear matter are surveyed.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figure

HyperLoom: A platform for defining and executing scientific pipelines in distributed environments

Real-world scientific applications often encompass end-to-end data processing pipelines composed of a large number of interconnected computational tasks of various granularity. We introduce HyperLoom, an open source platform for defining and executing such pipelines in distributed environments and providing a Python interface for defining tasks. HyperLoom is a self-contained system that does not use an external scheduler for the actual execution of the task. We have successfully employed HyperLoom for executing chemogenomics pipelines used in pharmaceutic industry for novel drug discovery.6

Psychosocial interventions to improve mental health in adults with vision impairment: systematic review and meta-analysis

Purpose To systematically assess the literature on psychosocial interventions to improve mental health (i.e. depression, anxiety, mental fatigue, loneliness, psychological stress and psychological well-being) in visually impaired adults (≥18 years). Methods The databases Medline, Embase and Psychinfo were searched for relevant studies, which were categorised into randomised controlled trials (RCTs), non-RCTs and before and after comparisons (BA). The Cochrane Collaboration Risk of Bias Tool was used to assess study quality. Standardised mean differences (SMD) were calculated to quantitatively summarise the outcomes of the RCTs and non-RCTs in a meta-analysis. Meta-regression was used to explore sources of heterogeneity in the data. Results The search identified 27 papers (published between 1981 and 2015), describing the outcomes of 22 different studies (14 RCTs, four non-RCTs, and four BAs). Pooled analyses showed that interventions significantly reduced depressive symptoms (SMD −0.30, 95% confidence interval (CI) −0.60 to −0.01), while effects on anxiety symptoms, mental fatigue, psychological stress and psychological well-being were non-significant. Meta-regression analyses showed homogeneity in effect sizes across a range of intervention, population, and study characteristics. Only a higher age of participants was associated with less effective results on depressive symptoms (b = 0.03, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.05), psychological stress (b = 0.07, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.13) and psychological well-being (b = −0.03, 95% CI −0.05 to 0.01). However, after removing a clear outlier the overall effect on depressive symptoms and the influence of age on depressive symptoms and psychological stress were no longer significant, while the influence of age on psychological well-being remained. Conclusions There is currently only limited evidence for the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions in the field of low vision. More well-designed trials are needed with specific attention for interventions tailored to the needs of elderly patients

Macrophage migration inhibitory factor expression in male and female ethanol-fed rats

Macrophage migration inhibitory factory (MIF) regulates macrophage accumulation at sites of injury and can promote the inflammatory response. We studied MIF expression in the intragastric feeding rat model for alcoholic liver injury. Male and age-matched female rats were fed ethanol or dextrose with fish oil. Two groups of male rats were fed medium-chain triglycerides with ethanol or dextrose. Analysis of liver histopathology, lipid peroxidation, endotoxin, mRNA, and immunohistochemistry for MIF, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interferon-γ (IFN-γ) were carried out. Male and female rats fed fish oil and ethanol showed necroinflammatory liver injury and had the highest expression of MIF, TNF-α, and IFN-γ in the liver. Decreased levels of MIF protein were seen in rats with higher endotoxin levels, suggesting that preformed MIF is released into the circulation. MIF is an important mediator of the inflammatory response in alcoholic liver disease and a potential therapeutic target.published_or_final_versio

Non Abelian Geometrical Tachyon

We investigate the dynamics of a pair of coincident D5 branes in the background of $k$ NS5 branes. It has been proposed by Kutasov that the system with a single probing D-brane moving radially in this background is dual to the tachyonic DBI action for a non-BPS Dp brane. We extend this proposal to the non-abelian case and find that the duality still holds provided one promotes the radial direction to a matrix valued field associated with a non-abelian geometric tachyon and a particular parametrization for the transverse scalar fields is chosen. The equations of motion of a pair of coincident D5 branes moving in the NS5 background are determined. Analytic and numerical solutions for the pair are found in certain simplified cases in which the U(2) symmetry is broken to $U(1) \times U(1)$ corresponding to a small transverse separation of the pair. For certain range of parameters these solutions describe periodic motion of the centre of mass of the pair 'bouncing off' a finite sized throat whose minimum size is limited by the D5 branes separation.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, PdfLatex: references added.accepted for publication in JHE

Assessing the Health Impact of Water Quality Interventions in Low-Income Settings: Concerns Associated with Blinded Trials and the Need for Objective Outcomes.

BACKGROUND: A dramatic disparity between the results of blinded versus open trial designs has raised questions about the effectiveness of water quality interventions and other environmental interventions to prevent diarrhea, a leading killer of young children in low-income countries. OBJECTIVES: We summarize the results of blinded versus open trials of water quality interventions, describe evidence from a recent placebo-controlled trial in India suggesting that control households were put at risk from their participation, and suggest alternatives to blinded trials that could resolve continued uncertainty about the magnitude of the protective effect of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) interventions without presenting ethical questions. DISCUSSION: Concerns about reporting bias in open trial designs continue to cause uncertainty about the effectiveness of WASH interventions. However, evidence suggests that despite instructions to the contrary, placebos may encourage control group participants in blinded trials to cease practicing traditional water treatment practices in the mistaken belief that they are protected by an active intervention. Although objective outcomes such as pathogen incrimination, seroconversion, biomarkers, and anthropometry can be helpful, these are often costly, nonspecific, and unsuitable for evaluating programmatic interventions. CONCLUSIONS: Unless researchers can be assured that a placebo will not cause those in a control group to change their behavior in a manner that increases their risk, it is incumbent on researchers to use alternatives. Validated objective measures are needed for assessing the health impact of WASH interventions that are reliable, affordable, and suitable both for research and program evaluation. CITATION: Clasen T, Boisson S. 2016. Assessing the health impact of water quality interventions in low-income settings: concerns associated with blinded trials and the need for objective outcomes. Environ Health Perspect 124:886-889; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1510532

Industry-scale application and evaluation of deep learning for drug target prediction

Artificial intelligence (AI) is undergoing a revolution thanks to the breakthroughs of machine learning algorithms in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and generative modelling. Recent works on publicly available pharmaceutical data showed that AI methods are highly promising for Drug Target prediction. However, the quality of public data might be different than that of industry data due to different labs reporting measurements, different measurement techniques, fewer samples and less diverse and specialized assays. As part of a European funded project (ExCAPE), that brought together expertise from pharmaceutical industry, machine learning, and high-performance computing, we investigated how well machine learning models obtained from public data can be transferred to internal pharmaceutical industry data. Our results show that machine learning models trained on public data can indeed maintain their predictive power to a large degree when applied to industry data. Moreover, we observed that deep learning derived machine learning models outperformed comparable models, which were trained by other machine learning algorithms, when applied to internal pharmaceutical company datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale study evaluating the potential of machine learning and especially deep learning directly at the level of industry-scale settings and moreover investigating the transferability of publicly learned target prediction models towards industrial bioactivity prediction pipelines.Web of Science121art. no. 2

Convective intensification of magnetic fields in the quiet Sun

Kilogauss-strength magnetic fields are often observed in intergranular lanes at the photosphere in the quiet Sun. Such fields are stronger than the equipartition field B_e, corresponding to a magnetic energy density that matches the kinetic energy density of photospheric convection, and comparable with the field B_p that exerts a magnetic pressure equal to the ambient gas pressure. We present an idealised numerical model of three-dimensional compressible magnetoconvection at the photosphere, for a range of values of the magnetic Reynolds number. In the absence of a magnetic field, the convection is highly supercritical and is characterised by a pattern of vigorous, time-dependent, “granular” motions. When a weak magnetic field is imposed upon the convection, magnetic flux is swept into the convective downflows where it forms localised concentrations. Unless this process is significantly inhibited by magnetic diffusion, the resulting fields are often much greater than B_e, and the high magnetic pressure in these flux elements leads to their being partially evacuated. Some of these flux elements contain ultra-intense magnetic fields that are significantly greater than B_p. Such fields are contained by a combination of the thermal pressure of the gas and the dynamic pressure of the convective motion, and they are constantly evolving. These ultra-intense fields develop owing to nonlinear interactions between magnetic fields and convection; they cannot be explained in terms of “convective collapse” within a thin flux tube that remains in overall pressure equilibrium with its surroundings