The Simons Observatory: Cryogenic half wave plate rotation mechanism for the small aperture telescopes.

We present the requirements, design, and evaluation of the cryogenic continuously rotating half-wave plate (CHWP) for the Simons Observatory (SO). SO is a cosmic microwave background polarization experiment at Parque Astronómico de Atacama in northern Chile that covers a wide range of angular scales using both small (⌀0.42 m) and large (⌀6 m) aperture telescopes.

Intrinsic dichroism in amorphous and crystalline solids with helical light.

Amorphous solids do not exhibit long-range order due to the disordered arrangement of atoms. They lack translational and rotational symmetry on a macroscopic scale and are therefore isotropic. As a result, differential absorption of polarized light, called dichroism, is not known to exist in amorphous solids.

Widespread dysregulation of mRNA splicing implicates RNA processing in the development and progression of Huntington's disease.

Background: In Huntington's disease (HD), a CAG repeat expansion mutation in the Huntingtin (HTT) gene drives a gain-of-function toxicity that disrupts mRNA processing. Although dysregulation of gene splicing has been shown in human HD post-mortem brain tissue, post-mortem analyses are likely confounded by cell type composition changes in late-stage HD, limiting the ability to identify dysregulation related to early pathogenesis.

Methods: To investigate gene splicing changes in early HD, we performed alternative splicing analyses coupled with a proteogenomics approach to identify early CAG length-associated splicing changes in an established isogenic HD cell model.

Helical dichroism in enantiomeric solutions.

A novel chiroptical sensing technique was recently introduced that utilized the helical phase of the structured light as a chiral reagent instead of polarization of light to differentiate enantiopure chiral liquids. The unique advantage of this non-resonant, nonlinear technique is that the chiral signal can be scaled and tuned. In this paper, we extend this technique to enantiopure powders of alanine and camphor by dissolving them in solvents of varying concentrations.