Dissolved organic carbon trends resulting from changes in atmospheric deposition chemistry

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain recent, widespread increases in concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in the surface waters of glaciated landscapes across eastern North America and northern and central Europe. Some invoke anthropogenic forcing through mechanisms related to climate change, nitrogen deposition or changes in land use, and by implication suggest that current concentrations and fluxes are without precedent. All of these hypotheses imply that DOC levels will continue to rise, with unpredictable consequences for the global carbon cycle. Alternatively, it has been proposed that DOC concentrations are returning toward pre-industrial levels as a result of a gradual decline in the sulphate content of atmospheric deposition. Here we show, through the assessment of time series data from 522 remote lakes and streams in North America and northern Europe, that rising trends in DOC between 1990 and 2004 can be concisely explained by a simple model based solely on changes in deposition chemistry and catchment acid-sensitivity. We demonstrate that DOC concentrations have increased in proportion to the rates at which atmospherically deposited anthropogenic sulphur and sea salt have declined. We conclude that acid deposition to these ecosystems has been partially buffered by changes in organic acidity and that the rise in DOC is integral to recovery from acidification. Over recent decades, deposition-driven increases in organic matter solubility may have increased the export of DOC to the oceans, a potentially important component of regional carbon balances. The increase in DOC concentrations in these regions appears unrelated to other climatic factors.     

Acceleration of the rotation of asteroid 1862 Apollo by radiation torques

The anisotropic reflection and thermal re-emission of sunlight from an asteroid's surface acts as a propulsion engine. The net propulsion force (Yarkovsky effect) changes the orbital dynamics of the body at a rate that depends on its physical properties; for irregularly shaped bodies, the propulsion causes a net torque (the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack or YORP effect) that can change the object's rotation period and the direction of its rotation axis. The Yarkovsky effect has been observed directly, and there is also indirect evidence of its role in the orbital evolution of asteroids over long time intervals. So far, however, only indirect evidence exists for the YORP effect through the clustering of the directions of rotation axes in asteroid families. Here we report a change in the rotation rate of the asteroid 1862 Apollo, which is best explained by the YORP mechanism. The change is fairly large and clearly visible in photometric lightcurves, amounting to one extra rotation cycle in just 40 years even though Apollo's size is well over one kilometre. This confirms the prediction that the YORP effect plays a significant part in the dynamical evolution of asteroids.     

Disruption of oxygen homeostasis underlies congenital Chuvash polycythemia

Chuvash polycythemia is an autosomal recessive disorder that is endemic to the mid-Volga River region. We previously mapped the locus associated with Chuvash polycythemia to chromosome 3p25. The gene associated with von Hippel-Lindau syndrome, VHL, maps to this region, and homozygosity with respect to a C-->T missense mutation in VHL, causing an arginine-to-tryptophan change at amino-acid residue 200 (Arg200Trp), was identified in all individuals affected with Chuvash polycythemia. The protein VHL modulates the ubiquitination and subsequent destruction of hypoxia-inducible factor 1, subunit alpha (HIF1alpha). Our data indicate that the Arg200Trp substitution impairs the interaction of VHL with HIF1alpha, reducing the rate of degradation of HIF1alpha and resulting in increased expression of downstream target genes including EPO (encoding erythropoietin), SLC2A1 (also known as GLUT1, encoding solute carrier family 2 (facilitated glucose transporter), member 1), TF (encoding transferrin), TFRC (encoding transferrin receptor (p90, CD71)) and VEGF (encoding vascular endothelial growth factor).     

Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 protects from severe acute lung failure

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), the most severe form of acute lung injury, is a devastating clinical syndrome with a high mortality rate (30-60%) (refs 1-3). Predisposing factors for ARDS are diverse and include sepsis, aspiration, pneumonias and infections with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus. At present, there are no effective drugs for improving the clinical outcome of ARDS. Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and ACE2 are homologues with different key functions in the renin-angiotensin system. ACE cleaves angiotensin I to generate angiotensin II, whereas ACE2 inactivates angiotensin II and is a negative regulator of the system. ACE2 has also recently been identified as a potential SARS virus receptor and is expressed in lungs. Here we report that ACE2 and the angiotensin II type 2 receptor (AT2) protect mice from severe acute lung injury induced by acid aspiration or sepsis. However, other components of the renin-angiotensin system, including ACE, angiotensin II and the angiotensin II type 1a receptor (AT1a), promote disease pathogenesis, induce lung oedemas and impair lung function. We show that mice deficient for Ace show markedly improved disease, and also that recombinant ACE2 can protect mice from severe acute lung injury. Our data identify a critical function for ACE2 in acute lung injury, pointing to a possible therapy for a syndrome affecting millions of people worldwide every year.     

GaAlAs/GaAs平面波导串联矩形谐振腔滤波器的研究

A study has been made on the essence of optimal uncorrelated discriminant vectors. A whitening transform has been constructed by means of the eigen decomposition of the population scatter matrix, which makes the population scatter matrix be an identity matrix in the transformed sample space no matter whether the population scatter matrix is singular or not. Thus, the optimal discriminant vectors solved by the conventional linear discriminant analysis (LDA) methods are statistically uncorrelated. The research indicates that the essence of the statistically uncorrelated discriminant transform is the whitening transform plus conventional linear discriminant transform. The distinguished characteristics of the proposed method is that the obtained optimal discriminant vectors are not only orthogonal but also statistically uneorrelated. The proposed method is applicable to all the problems of algebraic feature extraction. The numerical experiments on several facial databases show the effectiveness of the proposed method.