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At least 1,369 records · Page 76

Aerodynamic heat transfer to a hypersonic research aircraft model /X-24C/ at Mach 6

The paper reports on results of heat-transfer tests conducted on a 1/29-scale model of the X-24C-12I hypersonic research aircraft configuration in a Mach 6 tunnel at a Reynolds number of thirteen million using the phase-change heat transfer technique. Sequences of phase-change heat transfer pattern photographs are presented showing windward side and leeward side heating processes. Theoretical predictions of dimensionless heat transfer coefficients along a data line on lower fuselage and on fuselage side bracket the experimental values. A turbulent heating theory gives good agreement with data when shifted to a new virtual origin.

Lawing, P. L.↗

Considerations to achieve directionality for gamma ray lasers

A method of alignment of nuclei for a gamma ray laser and a means of achieving preferential emission of radiation along the crystal axis are studied. Atomic alignment was achieved by materials researchers who made composite structures composed of needle-like single crystals all with the same orientation and all pointing in the same direction contained in a matrix of cobalt or nickel. The proposed method of preferential emission of radiation along the aligned needles is to have a symmetric field gradient at the nucleus and a sequence of excited levels of spin and parity 2(+) and 0(+). The proposed scheme reduces the density of excited states required for lasing and reduces the linewidth due to inhomogenous broadening. Mossbauer absorption experiments intended to test these ideas are outlined.

Jha, S.↗

Next-generation space manipulator

In 1977, the Protoflight Manipulator Arm (PFMA) was designed and built. It is one of two space qualified manipulators. A new conceptual design for the next generation manipulator of space applications is presented. The next generation manipulator and the PFMA are described in detail. Their differences could have a major influence on the construction, testing, and performance of a space arm. Assessed in detail are these technologies and their effect on the design. Servicing is an important goal of robotics in space. Parameters such as environment, type of task, time sequence, and dexterity will affect the arm and its ability to accomplish its mission. Requirements such as these are important considerations in the design of the next generation space arm.

Brunson, P.↗

Application and use of spinal immobilization devices in zero-gravity flight

A KC-135 parabolic flight was performed for the purpose of evaluation of spinal immobilization techniques in microgravity. The flight followed the standard 40 parabola profile with four NASA/KRUG experimenters involved. One performed as coordinator/recorder, one as test subject, and two as the Crew Medical Officers (CMO). The flight was to evaluate the application of spinal immobilization devices and techniques in microgravity as are performed during initial stabilization or patient transport scenarios. The sequence of detail for examination of the following objectives included: attempted cervical spine immobilization with all free floating, the patient restrained to the floor, various hand positioning techniques; c-collar placement; Kendrick Extrication Device (KED) application with various restraints for patient and CMO; patient immobilization and transport using the KED; patient transported on KED and spine board. Observations for each task are included. Major conclusions and issues are also included.

Krupa, Debra T.↗

TRL-6 for JWST Wavefront Sensing and Control

NASA's Technology Readiness Level (TRL)-6 is documented for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Wavefront Sensing and Control (WFSC) subsystem. The WFSC subsystem is needed to align the Optical Telescope Element (OTE) after all deployments have occurred, and achieves that requirement through a robust commissioning sequence consisting of unique commissioning algorithms, all of which are part of the WFSC algorithm suite. This paper identifies the technology need, algorithm heritage, describes the finished TRL-6 design platform, and summarizes the TRL-6 test results and compliance. Additionally, the performance requirements needed to satisfy JWST science goals as well as the criterion that relate to the TRL-6 Testbed Telescope (TBT) performance requirements are discussed

Feinberg, Lee↗

Statistical Analysis of CFD Solutions From the Fifth AIAA Drag Prediction Workshop

A graphical framework is used for statistical analysis of the results from an extensive N-version test of a collection of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics codes. The solutions were obtained by code developers and users from North America, Europe, Asia, and South America using a common grid sequence and multiple turbulence models for the June 2012 fifth Drag Prediction Workshop sponsored by the AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Technical Committee. The aerodynamic configuration for this workshop was the Common Research Model subsonic transport wing-body previously used for the 4th Drag Prediction Workshop. This work continues the statistical analysis begun in the earlier workshops and compares the results from the grid convergence study of the most recent workshop with previous workshops.

Statistical analysis↗

Design and Development of the MSL Descent Stage Propulsion System

On August 5, 2012, The Mars Science Laboratory mission successfully landed the largest interplanetary rover ever built, Curiosity, on the surface of Mars. The Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) phase of this mission was by far the most complex landing ever attempted on a planetary body. The Descent Stage Propulsion System played an integral and critical role during Curiosity's EDL. The Descent Stage Propulsion System was a one of a kind hydrazine propulsion system designed specifically for the EDL phase of the MSL mission. It was designed, built, and tested at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the design and development of the MSL Descent Stage Propulsion System. Driving requirements, system design, component selection, operational sequence of the system at Mars, new developments, and key challenges will be discussed.

Weiss, Jeffrey M.↗

Efficacy and Delivery of Novel FAST Agents for Coronaviruses

We proposed to test and develop advanced delivery for novel agents from our collaborators Facile Accelerated Specific Therapeutics (FAST) platform to reduce coronavirus replication. Sachi Bioworks Inc., Prof. Anushree Chatterjee, and Prof. Prashant Nagpal at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a bioinformatics and synthesis pipeline to produce sequence specific theranostic agents (agents that can be therapies and/or diagnostics) that are inherently transported into the cytoplasm of mammalian host cells and sequence-specifically interfere in nucleic acid replication. The agent comprises a small nanoparticle (2-5 nm) chosen for ideal cellular transport and/or imaging conjugated to a short, synthetic DNA analog oligomer designed for binding to one or more target viral sequences. The sequence specific binding of the FAST agent to its target prevents nucleic acid replication due to its high affinity binding. While the small nanoparticle facilitates delivery in vitro, we plan to package the FAST agents into a larger nanoparticle (80-300 nm) for future in vivo delivery applications. Our team at Sandia has expertise encapsulating biomolecules including protein, DNA, and RNA into solid lipid nanoparticles (LNP) and lipid coated mesoporous silica nanoparticles (LC-MSN) and shown successful delivery in mouse models to multiple tissues. Our team focused on formulation parameters for FAST agents into lipid nanoparticles (LNP) and lipid coated mesoporous silica nanoparticles (LC-MSN) for enhanced delivery and/or efficacy and in vivo translation. We used lipid formulas that have been shown in literature to facility in vitro and more importantly, in vivo delivery. In our work discussed below, we successfully demonstrate loading and release of FAST agents on silica core and stable LC-MSN in a reasonable size range for in vivo testing.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Evolutionary Analyses of Gene Expression Divergence in Panicum hallii : Exploring Constitutive and Plastic Responses Using Reciprocal Transplants

Abstract The evolution of gene expression is thought to be an important mechanism of local adaptation and ecological speciation. Gene expression divergence occurs through the evolution of cis- polymorphisms and through more widespread effects driven by trans-regulatory factors. Here, we explore expression and sequence divergence in a large sample of Panicum hallii accessions encompassing the species range using a reciprocal transplantation experiment. We observed widespread genotype and transplant site drivers of expression divergence, with a limited number of genes exhibiting genotype-by-site interactions. We used a modified FST–QST outlier approach (QPC analysis) to detect local adaptation. We identified 514 genes with constitutive expression divergence above and beyond the levels expected under neutral processes. However, no plastic expression responses met our multiple testing correction as QPC outliers. Constitutive QPC outlier genes were involved in a number of developmental processes and responses to abiotic environments. Leveraging earlier expression quantitative trait loci results, we found a strong enrichment of expression divergence, including for QPC outliers, in genes previously identified with cis and cis–environment interactions but found no patterns related to trans-factors. Population genetic analyses detected elevated sequence divergence of promoters and coding sequence of constitutive expression outliers but little evidence for positive selection on these proteins. Our results are consistent with a hypothesis of cis-regulatory divergence as a primary driver of expression divergence in P. hallii.

3′ TagSeq↗

Predicting transcriptional responses to cold stress across plant species

Although genome-sequence assemblies are available for a growing number of plant species, gene-expression responses to stimuli have been cataloged for only a subset of these species. Many genes show altered transcription patterns in response to abiotic stresses. However, orthologous genes in related species often exhibit different responses to a given stress. Accordingly, data on the regulation of gene expression in one species are not reliable predictors of orthologous gene responses in a related species. Here, we trained a supervised classification model to identify genes that transcriptionally respond to cold stress. A model trained with only features calculated directly from genome assemblies exhibited only modest decreases in performance relative to models trained by using genomic, chromatin, and evolution/diversity features. Models trained with data from one species successfully predicted which genes would respond to cold stress in other related species. Cross-species predictions remained accurate when training was performed in cold-sensitive species and predictions were performed in cold-tolerant species and vice versa. Models trained with data on gene expression in multiple species provided at least equivalent performance to models trained and tested in a single species and outperformed single-species models in cross-species prediction. These results suggest that classifiers trained on stress data from well-studied species may suffice for predicting gene-expression patterns in related, less-studied species with sequenced genomes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Impact of genotype‐calling methodologies on genome‐wide association and genomic prediction in polyploids

Abstract Discovery and analysis of genetic variants underlying agriculturally important traits are key to molecular breeding of crops. Reduced representation approaches have provided cost‐efficient genotyping using next‐generation sequencing. However, accurate genotype calling from next‐generation sequencing data is challenging, particularly in polyploid species due to their genome complexity. Recently developed Bayesian statistical methods implemented in available software packages, polyRAD, EBG, and updog, incorporate error rates and population parameters to accurately estimate allelic dosage across any ploidy. We used empirical and simulated data to evaluate the three Bayesian algorithms and demonstrated their impact on the power of genome‐wide association study (GWAS) analysis and the accuracy of genomic prediction. We further incorporated uncertainty in allelic dosage estimation by testing continuous genotype calls and comparing their performance to discrete genotypes in GWAS and genomic prediction. We tested the genotype‐calling methods using data from two autotetraploid species, Miscanthus sacchariflorus and Vaccinium corymbosum , and performed GWAS and genomic prediction. In the empirical study, the tested Bayesian genotype‐calling algorithms differed in their downstream effects on GWAS and genomic prediction, with some showing advantages over others. Through subsequent simulation studies, we observed that at low read depth, polyRAD was advantageous in its effect on GWAS power and limit of false positives. Additionally, we found that continuous genotypes increased the accuracy of genomic prediction, by reducing genotyping error, particularly at low sequencing depth. Our results indicate that by using the Bayesian algorithm implemented in polyRAD and continuous genotypes, we can accurately and cost‐efficiently implement GWAS and genomic prediction in polyploid crops.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Two-sample discrimination of Poisson means

This paper presents a statistical test for detecting significant differences between two random count accumulations. The null hypothesis is that the two samples share a common random arrival process with a mean count proportional to each sample's exposure. The model represents the partition of N total events into two counts, A and B, as a sequence of N independent Bernoulli trials whose partition fraction, f, is determined by the ratio of the exposures of A and B. The detection of a significant difference is claimed when the background (null) hypothesis is rejected, which occurs when the observed sample falls in a critical region of (A, B) space. The critical region depends on f and the desired significance level, alpha. The model correctly takes into account the fluctuations in both the signals and the background data, including the important case of small numbers of counts in the signal, the background, or both. The significance can be exactly determined from the cumulative binomial distribution, which in turn can be inverted to determine the critical A(B) or B(A) contour. This paper gives efficient implementations of these tests, based on lookup tables. Applications include the detection of clustering of astronomical objects, the detection of faint emission or absorption lines in photon-limited spectroscopy, the detection of faint emitters or absorbers in photon-limited imaging, and dosimetry.

Lampton, M.↗

Ultraconserved enhancer function does not require perfect sequence conservation

Ultraconserved enhancer sequences show perfect conservation between human and rodent genomes, suggesting that their functions are highly sensitive to mutation. However, current models of enhancer function do not sufficiently explain this extreme evolutionary constraint. We subjected 23 ultraconserved enhancers to different levels of mutagenesis, collectively introducing 1,547 mutations, and examined their activities in transgenic mouse reporter assays. Overall, we find that the regulatory properties of ultraconserved enhancers are robust to mutation. Upon mutagenesis, nearly all (19/23, 83%) still functioned as enhancers at one developmental stage, as did most of those tested again later in development (5/9, 56%). Replacement of endogenous enhancers with mutated alleles in mice corroborated results of transgenic assays, including the functional resilience of ultraconserved enhancers to mutation. Furthermore, our findings show that the currently known activities of ultraconserved enhancers do not necessarily require the perfect conservation observed in evolution and suggest that additional regulatory or other functions contribute to their sequence constraint.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Using case-level context to classify cancer pathology reports

Individual electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical reports are often part of a larger sequence—for example, a single patient may generate multiple reports over the trajectory of a disease. In applications such as cancer pathology reports, it is necessary not only to extract information from individual reports, but also to capture aggregate information regarding the entire cancer case based off case-level context from all reports in the sequence. In this paper, we introduce a simple modular add-on for capturing case-level context that is designed to be compatible with most existing deep learning architectures for text classification on individual reports. We test our approach on a corpus of 431,433 cancer pathology reports, and we show that incorporating case-level context significantly boosts classification accuracy across six classification tasks—site, subsite, laterality, histology, behavior, and grade. We expect that with minimal modifications, our add-on can be applied towards a wide range of other clinical text-based tasks.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

A TDM link with channel coding and digital voice.

The features of a TDM (time-division multiplexed) link model are described. A PCM telemetry sequence was coded for error correction and multiplexed with a digitized voice channel. An all-digital implementation of a variable-slope delta modulation algorithm was used to digitize the voice channel. The results of extensive testing are reported. The measured coding gain and the system performance over a Gaussian channel are compared with theoretical predictions and computer simulations. Word intelligibility scores are reported as a measure of voice channel performance.

Jones, M. W.↗

Instability of g-mode oscillations in white dwarf stars

A white dwarf model with M = 6 solar masses, Te = 12,000 K, and L = 1.2 x 10 to the 31st erg/sec provided by Cox has been tested for linear stability of radial oscillations. The radial mode instability first reported for this model by Cox, et al. (1979) has been confirmed. The growth rates obtained are comparable to the rates found by Cox. A sequence of l = 2 g-modes has also been found to be unstable. The e-folding times range from around 10 to the 11th periods for a 137 second mode (1 radial node) to less than 100 periods for a 629 second mode (17 nodes). It is likely that the latter rate is too high because the eigenfunction has been forced to vanish at the non-zero inner radius of the model, at which the Brunt-Vaisala frequency is barely less than the mode frequency.

Keeley, D. A.↗

Sarnoff JND Vision Model for Flat-Panel Design

This document describes adaptation of the basic Sarnoff JND Vision Model created in response to the NASA/ARPA need for a general-purpose model to predict the perceived image quality attained by flat-panel displays. The JND model predicts the perceptual ratings that humans will assign to a degraded color-image sequence relative to its nondegraded counterpart. Substantial flexibility is incorporated into this version of the model so it may be used to model displays at the sub-pixel and sub-frame level. To model a display (e.g., an LCD), the input-image data can be sampled at many times the pixel resolution and at many times the digital frame rate. The first stage of the model downsamples each sequence in time and in space to physiologically reasonable rates, but with minimum interpolative artifacts and aliasing. Luma and chroma parts of the model generate (through multi-resolution pyramid representation) a map of differences-between test and reference called the JND map, from which a summary rating predictor is derived. The latest model extensions have done well in calibration against psychophysical data and against image-rating data given a CRT-based front-end. THe software was delivered to NASA Ames and is being integrated with LCD display models at that facility,

Brill, Michael H.↗

Capillary Pressure Balance with Repeated Head-Up Tilt in Humans

We measured blood density (BD). plasma density (PD) and hematocrit (Ht) during repeated 70 deg head-up tilt (HUT) consisting of a pre-drink period with two supine (P and P3) and two HUT (P2 and P4) phases of 45 min each. At the end of P4 test subjects (N=8) drank 10 ml/kg body weight of isotonic (290 mOsm/kg) sodium chloride (ISO) or hypotonic (<10 mOsm/kg) unsweetened us (HYP), or nothing (control: CON). The following periods continued the supine (P5, P7) / upright (P6) sequence. Mass density of plasma and whole blood using a "mechanical oscillation" technique were measured from ear lobe blood. Tilting altered (p<0.001) BD, PD, and Ht in all consecutive Phases. BD and PD were different (p<0.05) between CON. HYP. and ISO Phases 6 and 7. The computed mass density of fluid (FD). which moved between intra. and extravascular compartments. averaged 1008 g/l and was the same in any conditions. In the non-drink treatment (P3, P5, P7), supine PV steadly decreased when compared to P1. Tilt-induced PV shifts ranged from 9.7 to 16.7% when compared to PV du. ring the respective previous Phases. After drinking, PV increased above CON values at the end of Phase 7 by 12.9% with ISO, and by 6.6% with HYP. Progressive hemoconcentration. occurred during non-drink supine; isotonic saline ingestion increased supine PV a control level but did not stop or reverse the decrease of upright hemoconcentration. Upright density values were not slowed with repeated upright tilting; decreased fluid loss occurred in consecutive upright periods. Upright capillary pressure balance was achieved with diminished plasma volume loss during repeated tilting.

Hinghofer-Szalkay, H. G.↗