Exciton-polaritons in semiconductor microcavities form a highly nonlinear platform to study a variety of effects interfacing optical, condensed matter, quantum and statistical physics. We show that ...the complex polariton patterns generated by picosecond pulses in microcavity wire waveguides can be understood as the Cherenkov radiation emitted by bright polariton solitons, which is enabled by the unique microcavity polariton dispersion, which has momentum intervals with positive and negative group velocities. Unlike in optical fibres and semiconductor waveguides, we observe that the microcavity wire Cherenkov radiation is predominantly emitted with negative group velocity and therefore propagates backwards relative to the propagation direction of the emitting soliton. We have developed a theory of the microcavity wire polariton solitons and of their Cherenkov radiation and conducted a series of experiments, where we have measured polariton-soliton pulse compression, pulse breaking and emission of the backward Cherenkov radiation.
Long sediment cores recovered from the deep portions of Lake Titicaca are used to reconstruct the precipitation history of tropical South America for the past 25,000 years. Lake Titicaca was a deep, ...fresh, and continuously overflowing lake during the last glacial stage, from before 25,000 to 15,000 calibrated years before the present (cal yr B.P.), signifying that during the last glacial maximum (LGM), the Altiplano of Bolivia and Peru and much of the Amazon basin were wetter than today. The LGM in this part of the Andes is dated at 21,000 cal yr B.P., approximately coincident with the global LGM. Maximum aridity and lowest lake level occurred in the early and middle Holocene (8000 to 5500 cal yr B.P.) during a time of low summer insolation. Today, rising levels of Lake Titicaca and wet conditions in Amazonia are correlated with anomalously cold sea-surface temperatures in the northern equatorial Atlantic. Likewise, during the deglacial and Holocene periods, there were several millennial-scale wet phases on the Altiplano and in Amazonia that coincided with anomalously cold periods in the equatorial and high-latitude North Atlantic, such as the Younger Dryas.
We present high-resolution infrared (2–18 μm) images of the archetypal periodic dust-making Wolf–Rayet binary system WR 140 (HD 193793) taken between 2001 and 2005, and multi-colour (J–19.5) ...photometry observed between 1989 and 2001. The images resolve the dust cloud formed by WR 140 in 2001, allowing us to track its expansion and cooling, while the photometry allows tracking the average temperature and total mass of the dust. The combination of the two data sets constrains the optical properties of the dust, and suggests that they differ from those of the dust made by the WC9 dust-makers, including the classical ‘pinwheel’, WR 104. The photometry of individual dust emission features shows them to be significantly redder in (nbL′–3.99), but bluer in (7.9–12.5), than the binary, as expected from the spectra of heated dust and the stellar wind of a Wolf–Rayet star. The most persistent dust features, two concentrations at the ends of a ‘bar’ of emission to the south of the star, were observed to move with constant proper motions of 324 ± 8 and 243 ± 7 mas yr−1. Longer wavelength (4.68 and 12.5 μm) images show dust emission from the corresponding features from the previous (1993) periastron passage and dust formation episode, showing that the dust expanded freely in a low-density void for over a decade, with dust features repeating from one cycle to the next. A third persistent dust concentration to the east of the binary (the ‘arm’) was found to have a proper motion ∼320 mas yr−1, and a dust mass about one-quarter that of the ‘bar’. Extrapolation of the motions of the concentrations back to the binary suggests that the eastern ‘arm’ began expansion four to five months earlier than those in the southern ‘bar’, consistent with the projected rotation of the binary axis and wind-collision region (WCR) on the sky. A comparison of model dust images and the observations constrains the intervals when the WCR was producing sufficiently compressed wind for dust nucleation in the WCR, and suggests that the distribution of this material was not uniform about the axis of the WCR, but more abundant in the following edge in the orbital plane.
Research has evolved on aerobic granular sludge (AGS) process, but still there are very few studies on the treatment of excess AGS sludge, with almost none considering its aerobic digestion. Here ...therefore, the aerobic digestibility of typical AGS sludge was assessed. Granules were produced from acetate-based synthetic wastewater (WW) and were subjected to aerobic digestion for 64 d. The stabilization process was monitored over time through physical-chemical parameters, oxygen uptake rates (OUR) and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The microbial analyses revealed that the cultivated granules were dominated by slow-growing bacteria, mainly ordinary heterotrophic organisms with potential for polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) aerobic storage (PHA-OHOs), polyphosphate and glycogen accumulating organisms (PAOs and GAOs), fermentative anaerobes and nitrifiers (AOB and NOB). Differential abundance analysis of the bacterial data (before versus after digestion) discriminated between the most vulnerable microbiome genera and those most resistant to aerobic digestion. Furthermore, modeling of the stabilization process determined that the endogenous decay rate constant (bH) for the heterotrophs present in the granules was notably low; bH = 0.05 d−1 (average), four times less than for common activated sludge (AS), which is rated at 0.2 d−1. For first time, the research reveals another important feature of AGS sludge, i.e. the slow-decaying character of its bacteria (along with their known slow-growing character). This results in slower stabilization, need of bigger digesters and reconsideration of the specific OUR limits in biosolids regulations (SOUR limit of 1.5 mg/gTSS.h), for waste AGS compared to conventional waste AS. The study suggests that aerobic digestion of waste AGS (fully-granulated) could differ from that of conventional AS. Future work is needed on aerobic digestibility of real AGS sludges from municipal and industrial WWs, compared to synthetic WWs.
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•This is among earliest available researches assessing the aerobic digestion of AGS.•Improved solids sampling, respirometry, modeling and 16S rRNA analyses were used.•A model derived from ASM1allowed fitting the VSS and OUR data of AGS digestion.•Decay rate of biomass in AGS is notably lower than in traditional activated sludge.•Slow decay impacts the digester size and SOUR limits in biosolids regulations.
Introduction: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) therapy has led to a paradigm shift in cancer drug development and in the clinical evaluation of approaches to combination cancer treatment. ...Dysregulation of the immune system by ICI therapy may also elicit autoimmune phenomena and consequently manifest clinically as immune-related adverse events (irAEs) including neurological irAEs. Areas Covered: The purpose of this review is to explore the role of autoantibodies in the diagnosis and prediction of neurological irAEs and to evaluate their pathogenicity. We searched Pubmed and Embase for neurological irAEs and associated autoantibodies and found 28 patients with central and peripheral neurological irAEs. Of these patients, up to 40% had encephalitis, 34.4% with myasthenia gravis and 22% of patients with peripheral neuropathy and Guillain-Barre Syndrome had autoantibodies. Expert Opinion: Overall, our survey suggested a causal relationship between neurological irAEs and autoantibodies. Detection of autoantibodies may help to diagnose neurological irAEs and inform their clinical management.
Abstract
Our understanding of the climatic teleconnections that drove ice-age cycles has been limited by a paucity of well-dated tropical records of glaciation that span several glacial–interglacial ...intervals. Glacial deposits offer discrete snapshots of glacier extent but cannot provide the continuous records required for detailed interhemispheric comparisons. By contrast, lakes located within glaciated catchments can provide continuous archives of upstream glacial activity, but few such records extend beyond the last glacial cycle. Here a piston core from Lake Junín in the uppermost Amazon basin provides the first, to our knowledge, continuous, independently dated archive of tropical glaciation spanning 700,000 years. We find that tropical glaciers tracked changes in global ice volume and followed a clear approximately 100,000-year periodicity. An enhancement in the extent of tropical Andean glaciers relative to global ice volume occurred between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago, during sustained intervals of regionally elevated hydrologic balance that modified the regular approximately 23,000-year pacing of monsoon-driven precipitation. Millennial-scale variations in the extent of tropical Andean glaciers during the last glacial cycle were driven by variations in regional monsoon strength that were linked to temperature perturbations in Greenland ice cores
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; these interhemispheric connections may have existed during previous glacial cycles.
The precise environmental mechanisms controlling
Quaternary glacial cycles remain ambiguous. To address this problem, it is
critical to better comprehend the drivers of spatio-temporal variability in
...ice-sheet evolution by establishing reliable chronologies of former
outlet-glacier advances. When spanning multiple glacial cycles, such
chronologies have the capacity to contribute to knowledge on the topic of
interhemispheric phasing of glaciations and climate events. In southern
Argentina, reconstructions of this kind are achievable, as Quaternary
expansions of the Patagonian Ice Sheet have emplaced a well-preserved
geomorphological record covering several glacial cycles. Moreover, robust
ice-sheet reconstructions from Patagonia are powerful barometers of former
climate change, as Patagonian glaciers are influenced by the Southern
Westerly Winds and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current coupled to them. It is essential to better constrain former shifts
in these circulation mechanisms as they
may have played a critical role in pacing regional and possibly global
Quaternary climate change. Here, we present a new set of cosmogenic
10Be and 26Al exposure ages from pre-Last Glacial Cycle moraine
boulder, glaciofluvial outwash cobble, and bedrock samples. This dataset
constitutes the first direct chronology dating pre-Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) glacier advances in
northern Patagonia and completes our effort to date the entire preserved
moraine record of the Río Corcovado valley system (43∘ S,
71∘ W). We find that the outermost margins of the study site depict at
least three distinct pre-Last Glacial Cycle stadials occurring around
290–270, 270–245, and 130–150 ka. Combined with the local LGM
chronology, we discover that a minimum of four distinct Pleistocene stadials
occurred during Marine Isotope Stages 8, 6, and 2 in northern
Patagonia. Evidence for Marine Isotope Stage 4 and 3 deposits were
not found at the study site. This may illustrate former longitudinal and
latitudinal asynchronies in the Patagonian Ice Sheet mass balance during these
Marine Isotope Stages. We find that the most extensive middle-to-late Pleistocene
expansions of the Patagonian Ice Sheet appear to be out of phase with local
summer insolation intensity but synchronous with orbitally controlled
periods of longer and colder winters. Our findings thus enable the exploration of
the potential roles of seasonality and seasonal duration in driving the southern
mid-latitude ice-sheet mass balance, and they facilitate novel
glacio-geomorphological interpretations for the study region. They also
provide empirical constraints on former ice-sheet extent and dynamics that
are essential for calibrating numerical ice-sheet and glacial isostatic
adjustment models.
We study the effect of photonic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in micropillar lattices on the topological edge states of a one-dimensional chain with a zigzag geometry, corresponding to the ...Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model equipped with an additional internal degree of freedom. The system combines the strong hopping anisotropy of the p-type pillar modes with the large TE-TM splitting in Bragg microcavities. By resolving the photoluminescence emission in energy and polarization we probe the effects of the resulting SOC on the spatial and spectral properties of the edge modes. We find that the edge modes feature a fine structure of states that penetrate by different amounts into the bulk of the chain, depending on the strength of the SOC terms present, thereby opening a route to manipulation of the topological states in the system.
Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene mutations and increased copy numbers are considered as predictors of response to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (EGFR-TKI) in non-small-cell lung cancer ...(NSCLC). Lung cancer diagnosis is often based on cytology alone. However, almost all published data on EGFR gene analyses were obtained from biopsies. This study tested the feasibility of EGFR gene analyses on cytological specimens. Eighty-four cytological specimens from NSCLCs were prospectively analysed for EGFR gene mutation in exons 18-21 and EGFR gene copy numbers were evaluated by fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH). A FISH-positive result was defined according to the criteria by Cappuzzo et al established for biopsies of NSCLCs. Fluorescence in situ hybridisation results of cytological specimens were compared to the FISH results on matching biopsies (n=33). Initial diagnosis of NSCLC was solely based on cytology in 37 out of 84 (44.0%) patients. Out of 80 NSCLCs, 6 (7.5%) showed EGFR gene mutations. Out of 67 cancers, 45 (67.2%) were FISH positive on cytological specimens. Comparison of FISH showed a FISH-positive result in 21 out of 33 (63.6%) cytological specimens but in only 8 out of 33 (24.2%) matched biopsies. Epidermal growth factor receptor gene analyses are well applicable to cytological specimens. The high FISH-positive rate of NSCLC on cytological specimens contrasts with the low rate on biopsies when previously suggested criteria are used. New criteria for a positive EGFR FISH status to predict response to therapy with EGFR-TKI need to be defined for cytological specimens.
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