It has been claimed for more than a century that atmospheric new particle formation is primarily influenced by the presence of sulfuric acid. However, the activation process of sulfuric acid related clusters into detectable particles is still an unresolved topic. In this study we focus on the PARADE campaign measurements conducted during August/September 2011 at Mt Kleiner Feldberg in central Germany. During this campaign a set of radicals, organic and inorganic compounds and oxidants and aerosol properties were measured or calculated. We compared a range of organic and inorganic nucleation theories, evaluating their ability to simulate measured particle formation rates at 3 nm in diameter (J(3)) for a variety of different conditions. Nucleation mechanisms involving only sulfuric acid tentatively captured the observed noon-time daily maximum in J(3), but displayed an increasing difference to J(3) measurements during the rest of the diurnal cycle. Including large organic radicals, i.e. organic peroxy radicals (RO2) deriving from monoterpenes and their oxidation products, in the nucleation mechanism improved the correlation between observed and simulated J(3). This supports a recently proposed empirical relationship for new particle formation that has been used in global models. However, the best match between theory and measurements for the site of interest was found for an activation process based on large organic peroxy radicals and stabilised Criegee intermediates (sCI). This novel laboratory-derived algorithm simulated the daily pattern and intensity of J(3) observed in the ambient data. In this algorithm organic derived radicals are involved in activation and growth and link the formation rate of smallest aerosol particles with OH during daytime and NO3 during night-time. Because the RO2 lifetime is controlled by HO2 and NO we conclude that peroxy radicals and NO seem to play an important role for ambient radical chemistry not only with respect to oxidation capacity but also for the activation process of new particle formation. This is supposed to have significant impact of atmospheric radical species on aerosol chemistry and should be taken into account when studying the impact of new particles in climate feedback cycles.
BACKGROUND: Numerous genetic risk factors of ischemic stroke (IS) have been reported from both candidate gene and genome-wide strategies with inconsistent results. The objective of this study was to confirm the relationship between 10 previously identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and IS in the Chinese population. METHODS: A family-based study was conducted in a rural area of Beijing, with a total of 227 IS families with 622 participants recruited. Both linkage and association analyses were performed, with all the sibling pairs derived from the 227 families analyzed using the sib-pair test of model-free linkage to assess linkage between SNPs and IS, with association analyses including a family-based association test (FBAT) and generalized estimating equations (GEE). RESULTS: Nonparametric linkage analysis revealed that the rs1800796 polymorphism in the interleukin-6 (IL-6) gene is significantly linked to the small arterial occlusion (SAO) subtype (p=0.022), while the rs7193343 polymorphism in the ZFHX3 gene is linked to IS (p=0.002) under the dominant model. Significant allelic associations were identified between the G allele of rs1800796 and IS (p=0.042) and the SAO subtype (p=0.025) in the FBAT. The GEE method revealed that the G allele of rs1800796 increased IS risk by 1.55-fold (95% 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.01, 2.37; p=0.043) and 2.43-fold (95% CI: 1.32, 4.45; p=0.004) in the SAO subtype in the dominant model, which correlated with the significant associations detected in the FBAT. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we confirmed that the SNP of rs1800796 in the IL-6 gene is related to IS and the SAO subtype using different statistical approaches. These findings could contribute to identifying individuals with a high IS risk.
This paper studies how displaced royal families in the Roman principate speak about their royal ancestry. Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes "Philopappos" and his sister Julia Balbilla, who were descendents of the Orontid dynasty of Commagene in northwestern Syria, are objects of this study. The kingdom of Commagene was twice incorporated into the Roman province of Syria, first upon the death of Antiochos III Epiphanes in 17 CE, then during Vespasian's reign in 72 CE. Philopappos and Balbilla were displaced and eventually integrated into the circle of the Roman senatorial élite. The two siblings are examples of displaced royal families "at work," creating their extraordinary status within the Roman principate through monumental and literary works that claim inheritance to their ancestral past.
This paper will first review relevant scholarship – such as David Braund on client kingship (1984), Joel Allen on hostage and hostage taking in the principate (2006), Paul Burton on Roman foreign relations in the Republic (2011) – to clarify the operating terms of amicitia, fides, and foedus that formed the socio-political context within which Philopappos and Balbilla operated. The second part of the paper will discuss how the visual and inscriptional programme of Philopappos' monument at Athens and Babilla's graffitti poetry on the statue of Memnon in Egyptian Thebes negotiate socio-political contexts. This paper argues thatPhilopappos' monument did not only speak to his extraordinary status as humbled royalty under Rome, but also his belonging to Athens, and how Commagenian royalty and Roman citizenship attributed to his sense of belonging. Similarly, Balbilla was a valued member of Hadrian and Sabina's court specifically because of her conscious pronouncement of her family's royal blood and their piety, which qualities were pronounced in her graffiti poetry. Together, Philopappos and Balbilla marks a change in the nature of client kingship from Trajan onwards, as royal members become valued not for their ability to govern kingdoms, but for their extraordinary status as royal Roman citizens.
Interest point detection is a fundamental approach to feature extraction in computer vision tasks. To handle the scale invariance, interest points usually work on the scale-space representation of an image. In this letter, we propose a novel block-wise scale-space representation to significantly reduce the computational complexity of an interest point detector. Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filtering is applied to implement the block-wise scale-space representation. Extensive comparison experiments have shown the block-wise scale-space representation enables the efficient and effective implementation of an interest point detector in terms of memory and time complexity reduction, as well as promising performance in visual search.