One of the stranger planetary rings is Saturn's narrow, clumpy F ring, lying just outside the main rings, in a region disturbed by chaotic orbital dynamics. We show that the F ring has a stable "true core" that dominates its mass and is confined into discontinuous short arcs of particles larger than a few millimeters in radius. The more obvious micron-size particles seen in images, outlining and obscuring the true core, contribute only a small fraction of its mass.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChromosome imbalance (aneuploidy) is the major cause of pregnancy loss and congenital disorders in humans. Analyses of small biopsies from human embryos suggest that aneuploidy commonly originates during early divisions, resulting in mosaicism. However, the developmental potential of mosaic embryos remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article summarises and contextualises the accumulated basic and clinical data on the ERA test and addresses specific comments and opinions presented by the opponent as part of an invited debate. Progress in medicine depends on new technologies and concepts that translate to practice to solve long-standing problems. In a key example, combining RNA sequencing data (transcriptomics) with artificial intelligence (AI) led to a clinical revolution in personalising disease diagnosis and fostered the concept of precision medicine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSaturn's main rings are composed of >95% water ice, and the nature of the remaining few percent has remained unclear. The Cassini spacecraft's traversals between Saturn and its innermost D ring allowed its cosmic dust analyzer (CDA) to collect material released from the main rings and to characterize the ring material infall into Saturn. We report the direct in situ detection of material from Saturn's dense rings by the CDA impact mass spectrometer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft made close-up measurements of Saturn's ionosphere and upper atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s that suggested a chemical interaction between the rings and atmosphere. Exploring this interaction provides information on ring composition and the influence on Saturn's atmosphere from infalling material. The Cassini Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer sampled in situ the region between the D ring and Saturn during the spacecraft's Grand Finale phase.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe solar system formed from interstellar dust and gas in a molecular cloud. Astronomical observations show that typical interstellar dust consists of amorphous (-) silicate and organic carbon. Bona fide physical samples for laboratory studies would yield unprecedented insight about solar system formation, but they were largely destroyed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTurbulent flows preferentially concentrate inertial particles depending on their stopping time or Stokes number, which can lead to significant spatial variations in the particle concentration. Cascade models are one way to describe this process in statistical terms. Here, we use a direct numerical simulation (DNS) dataset of homogeneous, isotropic turbulence to determine probability distribution functions (PDFs) for cascade multipliers, which determine the ratio by which a property is partitioned into subvolumes as an eddy is envisioned to decay into smaller eddies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe discuss different ways to convert observed, apparent particle size distributions from 2D sections (thin sections, SEM maps on planar surfaces, .) into true 3D particle size distributions. We give a simple, flexible and practical method to do this, show which of these techniques gives the most faithful conversions, and provide (online) short computer codes to calculate both 2D-3D recoveries and simulations of 2D observations by random sectioning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRemote observations of the surfaces of airless planetary objects are fundamental to inferring the physical structure and compositional makeup of the surface material. A number of forward models have been developed to reproduce the photometric behavior of these surfaces, based on specific, assumed structural properties such as macroscopic roughness and associated shadowing. Most work of this type is applied to geometric albedos, which are affected by complicated effects near zero phase angle that represent only a tiny fraction of the net energy reflected by the object.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report observations of dusty clouds in Saturn's rings, which we interpret as resulting from impacts onto the rings that occurred between 1 and 50 hours before the clouds were observed. The largest of these clouds was observed twice; its brightness and cant angle evolved in a manner consistent with this hypothesis. Several arguments suggest that these clouds cannot be due to the primary impact of one solid meteoroid onto the rings, but rather are due to the impact of a compact stream of Saturn-orbiting material derived from previous breakup of a meteoroid.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecombinant antigen-binding fragments (Fabs) are currently on the market and in development for the treatment of ophthalmologic indications. Recently, Quality by Design (QbD) initiatives have been implemented that emphasize understanding the relationship between quality attributes of the product and their impact on safety and efficacy. In particular, changes in product quality once the protein is administered to the patient are of particular interest.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) is a valuable alternative to fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) for preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) because it allows full karyotype analysis. However, this approach requires the cryopreservation of biopsied embryos until results are available. The aim of this study is to reduce the hybridization period of CGH, in order to make this short-CGH technique suitable for PGS of Day-3 embryos, avoiding the cryopreservation step.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe review our understanding of Saturn's rings after nearly 6 years of observations by the Cassini spacecraft. Saturn's rings are composed mostly of water ice but also contain an undetermined reddish contaminant. The rings exhibit a range of structure across many spatial scales; some of this involves the interplay of the fluid nature and the self-gravity of innumerable orbiting centimeter- to meter-sized particles, and the effects of several peripheral and embedded moonlets, but much remains unexplained.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Infertility is a natural mechanism of selection intended to prevent the delivery of a child with malformations or mental retardation. Male infertility is closely related to chromosomal abnormalities. This study was focused on the analysis of meiotic segregation involving a Robertsonian translocation, 45,XY,der(13;13) [56]/45,XY,der(13;14) [44] and the evaluation of possible interchromosomal effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of this work is to analyze, using the comparative genomic hybridization technique, the frequencies and the mechanisms involved in the production of aneuploidy events in donor oocytes. The results showed that 32.1% of them were aneuploid, with 51.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys
May 2007
A cascade model is described based on multiplier distributions determined from three-dimensional (3D) direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent particle laden flows, which include two-way coupling between the phases at global mass loadings equal to unity. The governing Eulerian equations are solved using psuedospectral methods on up to 512(3) computional grid points. DNS results for particle concentration and enstrophy at Taylor microscale Reynolds numbers in the range 34-170 were used to directly determine multiplier distributions on spatial scales three times the Kolmogorov length scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChondrules are millimetre-sized spherules (mostly silicate) that dominate the texture of primitive meteorites. Their formation mechanism is debated, but their sheer abundance suggests that the mechanism was both energetic and ubiquitous in the early inner Solar System. The processes suggested--such as shock waves, solar flares or nebula lightning--operate on different length scales that have been hard to relate directly to chondrule properties.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdsorption and desorption properties of atrazine and some of its metabolites, hydroxyatrazine (AT-OH), deethylatrazine (DEA), and deisopropylatrazine (DIA), were studied with a clay-rich soil sample (clay content of 53%). A part of this soil was treated with humic acid (Soil-HA) to assess the influence of this important component of natural organic matter on adsorption and desorption processes. This study was performed using the batch approach with 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev E Stat Phys Plasmas Fluids Relat Interdiscip Topics
August 1999
Direct numerical simulations of particle concentrations in fully developed three-dimensional turbulence were carried out in order to study the nonuniform structure of the particle density field. Three steady-state turbulent fluid fields with Taylor microscale Reynolds numbers (Re(lambda)) of 40, 80, and 140 were generated by solving the Navier-Stokes equations with pseudospectral methods. Large-scale forcing was used to drive the turbulence and maintain temporal stationarity.
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