Initial Observations by the GOLD Mission Eastes, R. W.; McClintock, W. E.; Burns, A. G. ...
Journal of geophysical research. Space physics,
July 2020, Volume:
125, Issue:
7
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The NASA Global‐scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission has flown an ultraviolet‐imaging spectrograph on SES‐14, a communications satellite in geostationary orbit at 47.5°W longitude. ...That instrument observes the Earth's far ultraviolet (FUV) airglow at ~134–162 nm using two identical channels. The observations performed include limb scans, stellar occultations, and images of the sunlit and nightside disk from 6:10 to 00:40 universal time each day. Initial analyses reveal interesting and unexpected results as well as the potential for further studies of the Earth's thermosphere‐ionosphere system and its responses to solar‐geomagnetic forcing and atmospheric dynamics. Thermospheric composition ratios for major constituents, O and N2, temperatures near 160 km, and exospheric temperatures are retrieved from the daytime observations. Molecular oxygen (O2) densities are measured using stellar occultations. At night, emission from radiative recombination in the ionospheric F region is used to quantify ionospheric density variations in the equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA). Regions of depleted F region electron density are frequently evident, even during the current solar minimum. These depletions are caused by the “plasma fountain effect” and are associated with the instabilities, scintillations, or “spread F” seen in other types of observations, and GOLD makes unique observations for their study.
Plain Language Summary
The NASA Global‐scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission has flown a dual‐channel, ultraviolet‐imaging spectrograph on SES‐14, a communications satellite in geostationary orbit at 47.5°W longitude. That instrument observes the Earth's far ultraviolet (FUV) airglow at ~134–162 nm. The observations performed include images of the Earth's sunlit and nightside disk, limb scans, and stellar occultations, from 6:10 to 00:40 universal time each day. Initial analyses reveal interesting and unexpected results as well as the potential for further studies of the Earth's thermosphere‐ionosphere system and its responses to solar‐geomagnetic forcing and atmospheric dynamics. Thermospheric temperatures and composition ratios for major constituents, O and N2, near 160‐km altitude and exospheric temperatures are retrieved from the daytime observations. Molecular oxygen (O2) densities are measured using stellar occultations. At night, emission from radiative recombination in the ionospheric F region is used to quantify ionospheric density variations in the equatorial ionization anomaly (EIA). Regions of depleted F region electron density are frequently evident in the EIA, even during the current solar minimum.
Key Points
GOLD makes global‐scale, synoptic measurements of the temperature, composition, and densities in the thermosphere‐ionosphere system
Most measurements by the GOLD instrument are made in one of four modes
The observations are providing new and surprising insights into the characteristics and behavior of the thermosphere and ionosphere
Salt marshes often undergo rapid changes in lateral extent, the causes of which lack common explanation. We combine hydrological, sedimentological, and climatological data with analysis of historical ...maps and photographs to show that long‐term patterns of lateral marsh change can be explained by large‐scale variation in sediment supply and its wave‐driven transport. Over 150 years, northern marshes in Great Britain expanded while most southern marshes eroded. The cause for this pattern was a north to south reduction in sediment flux and fetch‐driven wave sediment resuspension and transport. Our study provides long‐term and large‐scale evidence that sediment supply is a critical regulator of lateral marsh dynamics. Current global declines in sediment flux to the coast are likely to diminish the resilience of salt marshes and other sedimentary ecosystems to sea level rise. Managing sediment supply is not common place but may be critical to mitigating coastal impacts from climate change.
Plain Language Summary
Salt marshes are valuable ecosystems for human societies and are especially vulnerable to losses caused by human activity and climate change. Little is known about how the size of marshes has changed in response to disturbance over large‐ and long‐term scales. We used historical maps and aerial photographs to capture 150 years of change in marsh area extent in 25 estuaries and ca. 100 marshes across Great Britain. We then related the rates of marsh change to existing data on hydrology, biology, climate, sediment supply, and other variables, to find out which elements best explained patterns of erosion and expansion for the period between 1967 and 2016. We found a shift from long‐term marsh erosion in the southeast to long‐term marsh expansion in the northwest of Great Britain. This pattern was explained by a south‐to‐north gradient of increasing sediment flux into marshes and wave fetch lengths which helps transport sediment onto marshes. Our study demonstrates how sediment supply should be monitored and managed to preserve salt marsh extent into the future.
Key Points
Sea level rise alone does not explain marsh lateral changes over the past 150 years
Sediment flux is by far the strongest indicator of long‐term lateral changes in salt marsh extent
Small increases in fetch length may boost marsh expansion through stimulating wind‐driven sediment transport onto marshes
Abstract
In this work, we present 8523 pairs of
R
-band optical photometry observations for the quasar 3C 454.3 made during the period of 2006 October–2018 February on the 70 cm meniscus telescope at ...Abastumani Observatory, Georgia, to study its intraday variabilities (IDVs) and long-term variations, and we have come to the following results. (1) We detected 10 outbursts, a Δ
R
= 3.825 mag variation, and some IDVs. The IDV timescales are from 4.1 to 285 minutes, with the corresponding variability amplitude being
A
= 2.9%–43.67%. The amplitude increases with IDV timescale. (2) The largest variation over a 1 day timescale is Δ
R
= 1.38 mag. (3) The IDV timescales suggest that the emission sizes are from 8.9 × 10
13
cm to 6.20 × 10
15
cm, and the magnetic field strengths are
B
= 0.18–0.79 G. (4) Period analysis results show three possible long-term periods,
p
= 3.04 ± 0.02 yr,
p
= 1.66 ± 0.06 yr, and
p
= 1.20 ± 0.03 yr in the optical light curve. We adopted the accretion disk models and the lighthouse models to period
p
= 3.04 ± 0.02 yr: in the accretion disk models, the binary black holes have masses
M
= 1.17 × 10
9
M
⊙
; in the lighthouse models, we used two boosted jet flux densities to fit the observational light curve. (5) WWZ analysis gives some short-period (high-frequency) signals associated with strong bursts (JD 2,454,302 and JD 2,454,521) with variable frequencies and lasting for the entire observation time span (11.3 yr).
Abstract
Variability is a typical observation feature of Fermi blazars, which sometimes shows quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO). In this work, we obtain 5 day binned light curves (with a time coverage ...of ∼12.9 yr) for S5 1044+71, based on Fermi-LAT data; apply five different methods—Date-compensated Discrete Fourier Transform, Jurkevich, Lomb–Scargle Periodogram, a Fortran 90 program, and the Weighted Wavelet Z-transform—to the
γ
-ray light curve; and find a possible QPO of 3.06 ± 0.43 yr at the significance level of ∼3.6
σ
. A binary black hole model, including an accretion model and a dual-jet model, is used to explain this quasi-periodic variability. We also estimate the Doppler factors and the apparent velocity for the two jet components. We speculate that this
γ
-ray quasi-periodic modulation suggests the presence of a binary supermassive black hole in S5 1044+71.
The origins of spin lifetimes in quantum systems is a matter of importance in several areas of quantum information. Spectrally mapping spin relaxation processes provides insight into their origin and ...motivates methods to mitigate them. In this paper, we map nuclear relaxation in a prototypical system of Formula: see text nuclei in diamond coupled to Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centers over a wide field range (1 mT-7 T). Nuclear hyperpolarization through optically pumped NV electrons allows signal measurement savings exceeding million-fold over conventional methods. Through a systematic study with varying substitutional electron (P1 center) and Formula: see text concentrations, we identify the operational relaxation channels for the nuclei at different fields as well as the dominant role played by Formula: see text coupling to the interacting P1 electronic spin bath. These results motivate quantum control techniques for dissipation engineering to boost spin lifetimes in diamond, with applications including engineered quantum memories and hyperpolarized Formula: see text imaging.
ABSTRACT
Using the Eight MIxer Receiver (EMIR) instrument on the Institut de RadioAstronomie Millimétrique (IRAM) 30-m telescope, we conducted a spectroscopic redshift search of seven zphot ∼ 4 ...submillimetre bright galaxies selected from the Herschel Bright Sources sample with fluxes at 500 μm greater than 80 mJy. For four sources, we obtained spectroscopic redshifts between 3.4 < z < 4.1 through the detection of multiple CO-spectral lines with J ≥ 3. Later, we detected low-J transitions for two of these sources with the Green Bank Telescope including the CO(1–0) transition. For the remaining three sources, more data are needed to determine the spectroscopic redshift unambiguously. The measured CO luminosities and line widths suggest that all these sources are gravitationally lensed. These observations demonstrate that the 2 mm window is indispensable to confirm robust spectroscopic redshifts for z < 4 sources. Finally, we present an efficient graphical method to correctly identify spectroscopic redshifts.
Cystic fibrosis (CF) transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) is expressed in the epithelial cells of a wide range of organs/tissues from which most cancers are derived. Although accumulating ...reports have indicated the association of cancer incidence with genetic variations in CFTR gene, the exact role of CFTR in cancer development and the possible underlying mechanism have not been elucidated. Here, we report that CFTR expression is significantly decreased in both prostate cancer cell lines and human prostate cancer tissue samples. Overexpression of CFTR in prostate cancer cell lines suppresses tumor progression (cell growth, adhesion and migration), whereas knockdown of CFTR leads to enhanced malignancies both in vitro and in vivo. In addition, we demonstrate that CFTR knockdown-enhanced cell proliferation, cell invasion and migration are significantly reversed by antibodies against either urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) or uPA receptor (uPAR), which are known to be involved in various malignant traits of cancer development. More interestingly, overexpression of CFTR suppresses uPA by upregulating the recently described tumor suppressor microRNA-193b (miR-193b), and overexpression of pre-miR-193b significantly reverses CFTR knockdown-enhanced malignant phenotype and abrogates elevated uPA activity in prostate cancer cell line. Finally, we show that CFTR gene transfer results in significant tumor repression in prostate cancer xenografts in vivo. Taken together, the present study has demonstrated a previously undefined tumor-suppressing role of CFTR and its involvement in regulation of miR-193b in prostate cancer development.
Hypersensitivity to asparaginase is common, but the differential diagnosis can be challenging and the diagnostic utility of antibody tests is unclear. We studied allergic reactions and serum ...antibodies to E. coli asparaginase (Elspar) in 410 children treated on St. Jude Total XV protocol for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Of 169 patients (41.2%) with clinical allergy, 147 (87.0%) were positive for anti-Elspar antibody. Of 241 patients without allergy, 89 (36.9%) had detectable antibody. Allergies (P=0.0002) and antibodies (P=6.6 × 10(-6)) were higher among patients treated on the low-risk arm than among those treated on the standard/high-risk arm. Among those positive for antibody, the antibody titers were higher in those who developed allergy than in those who did not (P<1 × 10(-15)). Antibody measures at week 7 of continuation therapy had a sensitivity of 87-88% and a specificity of 68-69% for predicting or confirming clinical reactions. The level of antibodies was inversely associated with serum asparaginase activity (P=7.0 × 10(-6)). High antibody levels were associated with a lower risk of osteonecrosis (odds ratio=0.83; 95% confidence interval, 0.78-0.89; P=0.007). Antibodies were related to clinical allergy and to low systemic exposure to asparaginase, leading to lower risk of some adverse effects of therapy.
The sustainability of social–ecological systems within river deltas globally is in question as rapid development and environmental change trigger “negative” or “positive” tipping points depending on ...actors’ perspectives, e.g. regime shift from abundant sediment deposition to sediment shortage, agricultural sustainability to agricultural collapse or shift from rural to urban land use. Using a systematic review of the literature, we show how cascading effects across anthropogenic, ecological, and geophysical processes have triggered numerous tipping points in the governance, hydrological, and land-use management of the world’s river deltas. Crossing tipping points had both positive and negative effects that generally enhanced economic development to the detriment of the environment. Assessment of deltas that featured prominently in the review revealed how outcomes of tipping points can inform the long-term trajectory of deltas towards sustainability or collapse. Management of key drivers at the delta scale can trigger positive tipping points to place social–ecological systems on a pathway towards sustainable development.
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•γ-Tocopherol suppresses oxidation of Trp-containing LO in Met form.•γ-Tocopherol facilitate oxidation and decomposition of Trp-containing LO in MetO form.•Ring structure of ...Trp-containing LOs rupture as they were further oxidized.
Linusorbs (LOs), significantly influence oil quality and sensory properties of flaxseed oil. Trp-containing LOs exhibit distinct oxidative behavior when γ-tocopherol (γ-T) is present. Polar fractions of crude flaxseed oil were stripped via silica absorption, and reintroduced (LO and γ-T) separately into the oil matrix to investigate their interaction during storage. Compared with crude oil, LOs account for 18.49% reduction of p-anisidine value, while LOs with γ-T contributed to most of the endogenous antioxidant effect in crude oil. γ-T was found to suppress oxidation of Trp-containing LO at early stage (Met form), while facilitate oxidation while at their mid-stage (MetO form, Methionine sulfoxide). In vitro oxidation shows that CLD more likely cleaved into peptide fragments, while few products retain intact ring structures. LC-MS/MS analysis and silicon simulation revealed proximity between MetO and Trp residues, facilitating inter- or intra-molecular reactions and ring structure rupture. Remarkably, the presence of γ-T facilitate these phenomena.
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