Digital Commons Network^™

Dual Inhibition Of Sodium-Mediated Proton And Calcium Efflux Triggers Non-Apoptotic Cell Death In Malignant Gliomas, William Harley, Candace Floyd, Tamara Dunn, Xiao-Dong Zhang, Tsung-Yu Chen, Manu Hegde, Hasan Palandoken, Michael H. Nantz, Leonardo Leon, K.L. Carraway Iii, Bruce Lyeth, Fredric A. Gorin

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Malignant glioma cells maintain an elevated intracellular pH (pH_i) within hypoxic–ischemic tumormicroenvironments through persistent activation of sodium–proton transport (McLean et al., 2000). Amiloride has been reported to selectively kill human malignant glioma cell lines but not primary astrocytes (Hegde et al., 2004). While amiloride reduces pH_i of malignant gliomas by inhibiting isoform 1 of sodium–proton exchange (NHE1), direct acidification was shown to be cytostatic rather than cytotoxic. At cytotoxic concentrations, amiloride has multiple drug targets including inhibition of NHE1 and sodium–calciumexchange. Amiloride's glioma cytotoxicity can be explained, at least in part, by dual inhibition of NHE1 and …

Projection Of Diffraction Patterns For Use In Cold-Neutral-Atom Trapping, Katharina Gillen-Christandl, Glen D. Gillen

Physics

Scalar diffraction theory is combined with beam-propagation techniques to investigate the projection of near-field diffraction patterns to spatial locations away from the aperture for use in optically trapping cold neutral alkali-metal atoms. Calculations show that intensity distributions with localized bright and dark spots usually found within a millimeter of the diffracting aperture can be projected to a region free from optical components such as a cloud of cold atoms within a vacuum chamber. Calculations also predict that the critical properties of the optical dipole atom traps are not only maintained for the projected intensity patterns but also can be manipulated …

Correspondences Of Hypersurfaces In Hyperbolic Poincaré Manifolds And Conformally Invariant Pdes, Vincent Bonini, José M. Espinar, Jie Qing

Mathematics

On a hyperbolic Poincaré manifold, we derive an explicit relationship between the eigenvalues of Weyl-Schouten tensor of a conformal representative of the conformal infinity and the principal curvatures of the level sets of the associated geodesic defining function. This considerably simplifies the arguments and generalizes the results of Gálvez, Mira and the second author. In particular, we obtain the equivalence between Christoffel-type problems for hypersurfaces in a hyperbolic Poincar´e manifold and scalar curvature problems on the conformal infinity.

The Lick Agn Monitoring Project: Alternate Routes To A Broad-Line Region Radius, Jenny E. Greene, Carol E. Hood, Aaron J. Barth, Vardha N. Bennert, Misty C. Benz, Alexei V. Filippenko, Elinor Gates, Matthew A. Malkan, Tommaso Treu, Jonelle L. Walsh, Jong-Hak Woo

Physics

It is now possible to estimate black hole (BH) masses across cosmic time, using broad emission lines in active galaxies. This technique informs our views of how galaxies and their central BHs coevolve. Unfortunately, there are many outstanding uncertainties associated with these "virial" mass estimates. One of these comes from using the accretion luminosity to infer a size for the broad-line region (BLR). Incorporating the new sample of low-luminosity active galaxies from our recent monitoring campaign at Lick Observatory, we recalibrate the radius-luminosity relation with tracers of the accretion luminosity other than the optical continuum. We find that the radius …

Multi-Robot Boundary Tracking With Phase And Workload Balancing, Michael Boardman, Jeremy Edmonds, Kyle Francis, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper discusses the use of a cooperative multiple robot system as applied to distributed tracking and sampling of a boundary edge. Within this system the boundary edge is partitioned into subsegments, each allocated to a particular robot such that workload is balanced across the robots. Also, to minimize the time between sampling local areas of the boundary edge, it may be desirable to minimize the difference between each robots progression (i.e. phase) along its allocated sub segment of the edge. The paper introduces a new distributed controller that handles both workload and phase balancing. Simulation results are used to …

Rf System Models For The Cern Large Hadron Collider With Application To Longitudinal Dynamics, T. Mastorides, C. Rivetta, J.D. Fox, D. Van Winkle, P. Baudrenghien

Physics

The LHC RF station-beam interaction strongly influences the longitudinal beam dynamics, both single bunch and collective effects. Non-linearities and noise generated within the Radio Frequency (RF) accelerating system interact with the beam and contribute to beam motion and longitudinal emittance blowup. Thus, the noise power spectrum of the RF accelerating voltage strongly affects the longitudinal beam distribution. Furthermore, the coupled-bunch instabilities are also directly affected by the RF components and the configuration of the Low Level RF (LLRF) feedback loops. In this work we present a formalism relating the longitudinal beam dynamics with the RF system configurations, an estimation of …

Saving Space And Time Using Index Merging, Lubomir Stanchev, Grant Weddell

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Managing digital information is an integral part of our society. Efficient access to data is supported through the use of indices. Although indices can reduce the cost of answering queries, they have two significant drawbacks: they take additional storage space and their maintenance can become a bottleneck. We address these challenges by introducing search data structures that reduce the need for storing redundant data among indices. Our experimental results with the main-memory version of these data structures show that our approach can reduce by half the storage space and can improve performance, where the highest performance improvement is achieved for …

Solving The Low Dimensional Smoluchowski Equation With A Singular Value Basis Set, Gregory E. Scott, Martin Gruebele

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Reaction kinetics on free energy surfaces with small activation barriers can be computed directly with the Smoluchowski equation. The procedure is computationally expensive even in a few dimensions. We present a propagation method that considerably reduces computational time for a particular class of problems: when the free energy surface suddenly switches by a small amount, and the probability distribution relaxes to a new equilibrium value. This case describes relaxation experiments. To achieve efficient solution, we expand the density matrix in a basis set obtained by singular value decomposition of equilibrium density matrices. Grid size during propagation is reduced from (100–1000) …

Veritas Search For Vhe Gamma-Ray Emission From Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies, V. A. Acciari, T. Arlen, T. Aune, M. Beilicke, W. Benbow, D. Boltuch, S. M. Bradbury, J. H. Buckley, V. Bugaev, K. Byrum, A. Cannon, A. Cesarini, Jodi L. Christiansen, L. Ciupik, W. Cui, R. Dickherber, C. Duke, J. P. Finley, G. Finnegan, A. Furniss, N. Galante, S. Godambe, J. Grube, R. Guenette, G. Gyuk, D. Hanna, J. Holder, C. M. Hui, T. B. Humensky, A. Imran, P. Kaaret, N. Karlsson, M. Kertzman, D. Kieda, A. Konopelko, H. Krawczynski, F. Krennrich, G. Maier, S. Mcarthur, A. Mccann, M. Mccutcheon, P. Moriarty, R. A. Ong, A. N. Otte, D. Pandel, J. S. Perkins, M. Pohl, J. Quinn, K. Ragan, L. C. Reyes, P. T. Reynolds, E. Roache, H. J. Rose, M. Schroedter, G. H. Sembroski, G. D. Senturk, A. W. Smith, D. Steele, S. P. Swordy, G. Tesic, M. Theiling, S. Thibadeau, A. Varlotta, V. V. Vassiliev, S. Vincent, R. G. Wagner, S. P. Wakely, J. E. Ward, T. C. Weekes, A. Weinstein, T. Weisgarber, D. A. Williams, S. Wissel, B. Zitzer

Physics

Indirect dark matter searches with ground-based gamma-ray observatories provide an alternative for identifying the particle nature of dark matter that is complementary to that of direct search or accelerator production experiments. We present the results of observations of the dwarf spheroidal galaxies Draco, Ursa Minor, Bootes 1, and Willman 1 conducted by the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS). These galaxies are nearby dark matter dominated objects located at a typical distance of several tens of kiloparsecs for which there are good measurements of the dark matter density profile from stellar velocity measurements. Since the conventional astrophysical background …

Trends In Soil Science Education And Employment, J. Havlin, N. Balster, S. Chapman, D. Ferris, T. Thompson, T. Smith

Earth and Soil Sciences

During the last several decades, members of the SSSA have discussed several trends related to soil science education, including: (i) declining academic programs and course offerings at land grant universities, (ii) decreased enrollments, and (iii) improved employment opportunities for soil science graduates (SSSA, 2006; Ferris et al., 2010). The SSSA Advocacy/Education Task Force met in 2007 and concluded that quantitative survey information was needed to document trends in soil science academic programs, student enrollment, faculty, and job opportunities for graduates. Suggested survey topics included:

• Has the recognition of soil science as a distinct discipline increased or decreased?
• How has the …

Automated Requirements Traceability: The Study Of Human Analysts, David Cuddeback, Alex Dekhtyar, Jane Huffman Hayes

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The requirements traceability matrix (RTM) supports many software engineering and software verification and validation (V&V) activities such as change impact analysis, reverse engineering, reuse, and regression testing. The generation of RTMs is tedious and error-prone, though, thus RTMs are often not generated or maintained. Automated techniques have been developed to generate candidate RTMs with some success. When using RTMs to support the V&V of mission-or safety-critical systems, however, a human analyst must vet the candidate RTMs. The focus thus becomes the quality of the final RTM. This paper investigate show human analysts perform when vetting candidate RTMs. Specifically, a study …

The Lick Agn Monitoring Project: Velocity-Delay Maps From The Maximum-Entropy Method For Arp 151, Misty C. Bentz, Keith Horne, Aaron J. Barth, Vardha Nicola Bennert, Gabriela Canalizo, Alexei V. Filippenko, Elinor L. Gates, Matthew A. Malkan, Takeo Minezaki, Tommaso Treu, Jong-Hak Woo, Jonelle L. Walsh

Physics

We present velocity-delay maps for optical H I, He I, and He II recombination lines in Arp 151, recovered by fitting a reverberation model to spectrophotometric monitoring data using the maximum-entropy method. H I response is detected over the range 0-15 days, with the response confined within the virial envelope. The Balmer-line maps have similar morphologies but exhibit radial stratification, with progressively longer delays for Hγ to Hβ to Hα. The He I and He II response is confined within 1-2 days. There is a deficit of prompt response in the Balmer-line cores but strong prompt response in the red …

U–Pb Zircon Geochronology And Tectonostratigraphy Of Southern Liverpool Land, East Greenland: Implications For Deformation In The Overriding Plates Of Continental Collisions, Scott M. Johnston, Ebbe H. Hartz, Hannes K. Brueckner, George E. Gehrels

Physics

The East Greenland Caledonides formed in the overriding plate as Baltica was subducted westward beneath Laurentia from 460 to 360 Ma, and offer a unique opportunity to investigate lower crustal deformation in the overriding plates of continental collisions. Field work and new zircon geochronology from gneisses in southern Liverpool Land, exposed in the hinterland ~100 km east of the nearest Caledonian gneisses, define three tectonostratigraphic units that are, from the bottom up, the eclogite+peridotite-bearing Tværdal complex and the granulite-facies Jættedal complex in the footwall of the top-N Gubbedalen shear zone, and the Hurry Inlet granite and associated paragneiss screens in …

Novel Polymer Coupling Chemistry Based Upon Latent Cysteine-Like Residues And Thiazolidine Chemistry, Jospeh S. Carlson, Megan R. Hill, Taiga Young, Philip Costanzo

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Chain end functional polymers were prepared via reversible addition–fragmentation transfer (RAFT) polymerization techniques that were further chain extended with acrylonitrile. Under reducing conditions, latent cysteine-like residues were exposed at the chain ends. A variety of reduction conditions were explored and base polymers were then tethered together via thiazolidine chemistry.

Intelligent Software For Ecological Building Design, Jens G. Pohl, Hisham Assal, Kym J. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Building design is a complex process because of the number of elements and issues involved and the number of relationships that exist among them. Adding sustainability issues to the list increases the complexity of design by an order of magnitude. There is a need for computer assistance to manage the increased complexity of design and to provide intelligent collaboration in formulating acceptable design solutions. Software development technology today offers opportunities to design and build an intelligent software system environment that can serve as a reliable intelligent partner to the human designer.

In this paper the authors discuss the requirements for …

Preconference Proceedings On Advances In Adaptive Planning Capabilities, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

No abstract provided.

A Method To Implement Location Transparency In A Web Service Environment, Xiaoshan Pan, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Location transparency offers some significant benefits in the areas of middleware, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud Computing. However, methods for achieving location transparency in a Web service environment are scarcely presented in the literature. This paper introduces such a method by describing a design and HTTP protocol-based implementation of location transparency. A number of benefits, including support for the creation of a virtual platform and increased mobility, availability and scalability of services, are elaborated. Two significant capabilities -performance-based load balancing and failover -are demonstrated as part of the experimental results.

On The Road To Intelligent Web Applications, Hisham Assal, Kym J. Pohl, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

Increasing access to data sources on the Internet offers expanding opportunities for equipping intelligent applications with the content they require whether broad in scope or rich in detail. Although typically originating within the web in a semi-structured form, with the use of inference-based translation and analysis mechanisms such content can be transformed into useful information and ultimately into actionable knowledge. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a platform for accessing the web as invocable resources and effectively incorporating multiple sources of data and capabilities on the Internet into enterprise applications. Adding inference capabilities to SOA-based applications not only aids in the translation …

Solving The Data Deluge Problem, Jens G. Pohl

Collaborative Agent Design (CAD) Research Center

The paper postulates that the information technology revolution that is commonly referred to as the Information Age is currently in a transition stage between data-processing and knowledge management that should be more aptly referred to as the Data Age. Symptoms of this transition stage are a data deluge problem that is evidenced by the inability of human computer-users to effectively analyze and draw useful conclusions from the overwhelming volume of data that is being collected, the increasing complexity of networked systems, and the acknowledged vulnerability of virtually all existing digital systems to cyber security threats.

The author suggests that the …

Muon-Induced Backgrounds In The Cuoricino Experiment, E. Andreotti, C. Arnaboldi, F.T. Avignone Iii, M. Balata, I. Bandac, M. Barucci, J.W. Beeman, F. Bellini, T. Bloxham, C. Brofferio, A. Bryant, C. Bucci, L. Canonica, S. Capelli, L. Carbone, M. Carrettoni, M. Clemenza, O. Cremonesi, R.J. Creswick, S. Di Domizio, M.J. Dolinski, L. Ejzak, R. Faccini, H.A. Farach, E. Ferri, F. Ferroni, E. Fiorini, L. Foggetta, A. Giachero, L. Gironi, A. Giuliani, P. Gorla, E. Guardincerri, T.D. Gutierrez, E.E. Haller, R. Kadel, K. Kazkaz, S. Kraft, L. Kogler, Yu. G. Kolomensky, C. Maiano, R.H. Maruyama, C. Martinez, M. Martinez, L. Mizouni, S. Morganti, S. Nisi, C. Nones, E.B. Norman, A. Nucciotti, F. Orio, M. Pallavicini, V. Palmieri, L. Pattavina, M. Pavan, M. Pedretti, G. Pessina, S. Pirro, E. Previtali, L. Risegari, C. Rosenfeld, C. Rusconi, C. Salvioni, S. Sangiorgio, D. Schaeffer, N.D. Scielzo, M. Sisti, A.R. Smith, C. Tomei, G. Ventura, M. Vignati

Physics

To better understand the contribution of cosmic ray muons to the CUORICINO background, 10 plastic scintillator detectors were installed at the CUORICINO site and operated during the final 3 months of the experiment. From these measurements, an upper limit of 0.0021 counts/(keV kg yr) (95% CL) was obtained on the cosmic ray-induced background in the neutrinoless double beta decay region of interest. The measurements were also compared to GEANT4 simulations.

Automated Theorem Prover Axiom Management, Ashley T. Holeman, Ewen Denney

STAR Program Research Presentations

Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs), are computer programs that use collections of axioms,which are logical statements assumed to be true, in order to prove conjectures. NASA uses these programs to verify safety and functional requirements in domains like Guidance, Navigation, and Control. There are about 30 axioms on each major topic including the theory of coordinate systems, elementary arithmetic and linear algebra. These axioms have been created over the duration of many projects and combined into a single file. One task is to manage the axioms by arranging them into logical sections, deleting unnecessary ones and rewriting some into a more …

Increasing Cubesat Downlink Capacity With Store-And-Forward Routing And Data Mules, Trevor Koritza, John M. Bellardo

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Pico-satellites have recently gained substantial traction in research and educational communities due to their relatively low cost. The largest factor in keeping the cost down, their small size, also poses their biggest engineering challenge. The tiny, low power radios used to communicate with earth have extremely slow data rates. A typical pico satellite is within communication range of the ground station for approximately 40 minutes per day with a theoretical maximum data rate of 1200 bps. At this speed a high resolution digital photograph can take weeks to download. This paper presents a novel communication protocol that allows a sparse …

On Index Merging For Semantic Web Data, Lubomir Stanchev

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In this paper we explore the properties of description indices that store concept descriptions rather than plain data. Although these novel data structures are beneficial for efficiently answering semantic web queries, expressed in a language such as nRQL or SPARQL-DL, they take extra storage and their maintenance can become a performance bottleneck. In order to alleviate these shortcomings, we introduce a procedure for merging description indices. Experimental results over the LUBM benchmark show that this technique can result in economy of storage space, while the performance is slightly affected for a static workload and is improved for a dynamic workload.

Uncertainty Assessment Of Forest Road Modeling With The Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (Dhsvm), Christopher G. Surfleet, Arne E. Skaugset Iii, Jeffrey J. Mcdonnell

Natural Resources Management and Environmental Sciences

We used a generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation procedure with the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM) for two streamflow and 11 road ditchflow locations. We observed considerable uncertainty in DHSVM simulations of forest road and stream runoff. The accuracy of simulations decreased as the size of the area modeled decreased. For streamflow, 44% of attempted model structures exceeded a 0.5 Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency threshold for a 630 ha catchment; 12% of attempted model structures exceeded a 0.5 Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency threshold for a 55 ha catchment. DHSVM simulations produced behavioral model structures for only six of the 11 road ditchflow sites (ha). …

The Malta Cistern Mapping Project: Underwater Robot Mapping And Localization Within Ancient Tunnel Systems, Cory White, Daniel Hiranandani, Christopher S. Olstad, Keith Buhagiar, Timmy Gambin, Christopher M. Clark

Computer Science and Software Engineering

This paper documents the development of an underwater robot system enabled with several mapping and localization techniques applied to a particular archaeological expedition. The goal of the expedition was to explore and map ancient cisterns located on the islands of Malta and Gozo. The cisterns of interest acted as water storage systems for fortresses, private homes, and churches. Such cisterns often consisted of several connected chambers, still containing water. A sonar-equipped remotely operated vehicle (ROV) was deployed into these cisterns to obtain both video footage and sonar range measurements. Six different mapping and localization techniques were employed, including (1) sonar …

The Lick Agn Monitoring Project: Reverberation Mapping Of Optical Hydrogen And Helium Recombination Lines, Misty C. Bentz, Jonelle L. Walsh, Aaron J. Barth, Yuzuru Yoshii, Jong-Hak Woo, Xiaofeng Wang, Tommaso Treu, Carol E. Thornton, Rachel A. Street, Thea N. Steele, Jeffrey M. Silverman, Frank J.D. Serduke, Yu Sakata, Takeo Minezaki, Matthew A. Malkan, Weidong Li, Nicholas Lee, Kyle D. Hiner, Marton G. Hidas, Jenny E. Greene, Elinor L. Gates, Mohan Ganeshalingam, Alexei V. Filippenko, Gabriela Canalizo, Vardha N. Bennert, Nairn Baliber

Physics

We have recently completed a 64-night spectroscopic monitoring campaign at the Lick Observatory 3 m Shane telescope with the aim of measuring the masses of the black holes in 12 nearby (z < 0.05) Seyfert 1 galaxies with expected masses in the range ~10⁶-10⁷ M _☉ and also the well-studied nearby active galactic nucleus (AGN) NGC 5548. Nine of the objects in the sample (including NGC 5548) showed optical variability of sufficient strength during the monitoring campaign to allow for a time lag to be measured between the continuum fluctuations and the response to these fluctuations in the broad Hβ emission, which we have previously reported. We present …

Hidra: Hierarchical Inter-Domain Routing Architecture, Bryan Clevenger, Daniel Nelson, John M. Bellardo

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The size of the Internet’s forwarding table is growing rapidly, generating concerns about the ability for high performance routing equipment to economically keep pace. The primary contributors to this growth are end site multihoming, traffic engineering, and in the foreseeable future, IPv6 deployment. This paper presents HIDRA, a hierarchal network architecture designed to reduce both the immediate size of the Internet’s forwarding table as well as its growth rate while maximizing compatibility with the existing In ternet architecture. This includes the ability to use exist ing high performance routers, existing routing protocols, and existing number allocation policies. HIDRA is prototyped …

The Lick Agn Monitoring Project: The M Bh-Σ* Relation For Reverberation-Mapped Active Galaxies, Jong-Hak Woo, Tommaso Treu, Aaron J. Barth, Shelley A. Wright, Jonelle L. Walsh, Misty C. Bentz, Paul Martini, Vardha N. Bennert, Gabriela Canalizo, Alexei V. Filippenko, Elinor Gates, Jenny Greene, Weidong Li, Matthew A. Malkan, Daniel Stern, Takeo Minezaki

Physics

To investigate the black hole mass versus stellar velocity dispersion (M _BH-σ_*) relation of active galaxies, we measured the velocity dispersions of a sample of local Seyfert 1 galaxies, for which we have recently determined black hole masses using reverberation mapping. For most objects, stellar velocity dispersions were measured from high signal-to-noise ratio optical spectra centered on the Ca II triplet region (~8500 Å), obtained at the Keck, Palomar, and Lick Observatories. For two objects, in which the Ca II triplet region was contaminated by nuclear emission, the measurement was based on high-quality H-band spectra …

Moderately Thermophilic Magnetotactic Bacteria From Hot Springs In Nevada, Christopher T. Lefevre, Fernanda Abreu, Marian L. Schimdt, Ulysses Lins, Richard B. Frankel, Brian P. Hedlund, Dennis A. Bazylinski

Physics

Populations of a moderately thermophilic magnetotactic bacterium were discovered in Great Boiling Springs, Nevada, ranging from 32 to 63°C. Cells were small, Gram-negative, vibrioid to helicoid in morphology, and biomineralized a chain of bullet-shaped magnetite magnetosomes. Phylogenetically, based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing, the organism belongs to the phylum Nitrospirae.

Lhc Beam Diffusion Dependence On Rf Noise: Models And Measurements, T. Mastoridis, C. Rivetta, J.D. Fox, D. Van Winkle, P. Baudrenghien, A. Butterworth, J. Molendijk

Physics

Radio Frequency (RF) accelerating system noise and non-idealities can have detrimental impact on the LHC performance through longitudinal motion and longitudinal emittance growth. A theoretical formalism has been developed to relate the beam and RF loop dynamics with the bunch length growth [1]. Measurements were conducted at LHC to validate the formalism, determine the performance limiting RF components, and provide the foundation for beam diffusion estimates for higher energies and intensities. A brief summary of these results is presented in this work.