We report the sequence and analysis of the 814-megabase genome of the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus purpuratus , a model for developmental and systems biology. The sequencing strategy combined whole-genome shotgun and bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) sequences. This use of BAC clones, aided by a pooling strategy, overcame difficulties associated with high heterozygosity of the genome. The genome encodes about 23,300 genes, including many previously thought to be vertebrate innovations or known only outside the deuterostomes. This echinoderm genome provides an evolutionary outgroup for the chordates and yields insights into the evolution of deuterostomes.
We present the results of a systematic search for candidate quiescent galaxies in the distant universe in 11 JWST fields with publicly available observations collected during the first 3 months of operations and covering an effective sky area of ∼145 arcmin 2 . We homogeneously reduce the new JWST data and combine them with existing observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. We select a robust sample of ∼80 candidate quiescent and quenching galaxies at 3 < z < 5 using two methods: (1) based on their rest-frame UVJ colors, and (2) a novel quantitative approach based on Gaussian mixture modeling of the near-UV − U , U − V , and V − J rest-frame color space, which is more sensitive to recently quenched objects. We measure comoving number densities of massive ( M⋆ ≥ 10 10.6M⊙ ) quiescent galaxies consistent with previous estimates relying on ground-based observations, after homogenizing the results in the literature with our mass and redshift intervals. However, we find significant field-to-field variations of the number densities up to a factor of 2–3, highlighting the effect of cosmic variance and suggesting the presence of overdensities of red quiescent galaxies at z > 3, as could be expected for highly clustered massive systems. Importantly, JWST enables the robust identification of quenching/quiescent galaxy candidates at lower masses and higher redshifts than before, challenging standard formation scenarios. All data products, including the literature compilation, are made publicly available.
Life expectancy has gradually grown over the last century. This has deeply affected healthcare costs, since the growth of an aging population is correlated to the increasing burden of chronic diseases. This represents the interesting challenge of how to manage patients with chronic diseases in order to improve health care budgets. Effective primary prevention could represent a promising route. To this end, precision, together with personalized medicine, are useful instruments in order to investigate pathological processes before the appearance of clinical symptoms and to guide physicians to choose a targeted therapy to manage the patient. Cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases represent suitable models for taking full advantage of precision medicine technologies applied to all stages of disease development. The availability of high technology incorporating artificial intelligence and advancement progress made in the field of biomedical research have been substantial to understand how genes, epigenetic modifications, aging, nutrition, drugs, microbiome and other environmental factors can impact health and chronic disorders. The aim of the present review is to address how precision and personalized medicine can bring greater clarity to the clinical and biological complexity of these types of disorders associated with high mortality, involving tremendous health care costs, by describing in detail the methods that can be applied. This might offer precious tools for preventive strategies and possible clues on the evolution of the disease and could help in predicting morbidity, mortality and detecting chronic disease indicators much earlier in the disease course. This, of course, will have a major effect on both improving the quality of care and quality of life of the patients and reducing time efforts and healthcare costs.
11 August 2021 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
There is a large consensus that gas in high-z galaxies is highly turbulent, because of a combination of stellar feedback processes and gravitational instabilities driven by mergers and gas accretion. In this paper, we present the analysis of a sample of five Dusty Star Forming Galaxies (DSFGs) at 4 ≲ z ≲ 5. Taking advantage of the magnifying power of strong gravitational lensing, we quantified their kinematic and dynamical properties from ALMA observations of their [C ii] emission line. We combined the dynamical measurements obtained for these galaxies with those obtained from previous studies to build the largest sample of z ∼ 4.5 galaxies with high-quality data and sub-kpc spatial resolutions, so far. We found that all galaxies in the sample are dynamically cold, with rotation-to-random motion ratios, V/σ, between 7 and 15. The relation between their velocity dispersions and their star formation rates indicates that stellar feedback is sufficient to sustain the turbulence within these galaxies and no further mechanisms are needed. In addition, we performed a rotation curve decomposition to infer the relative contribution of the baryonic (gas, stars) and dark matter components to the total gravitational potentials. This analysis allowed us to compare the structural properties of the studied DSFGs with those of their descendants, the local early type galaxies. In particular, we found that five out of six galaxies of the sample show the dynamical signature of a bulge, indicating that the spheroidal component is already in place at z ∼ 4.5.
This paper examines the need for large-scale, sustainable changes, and the effects of citizens' active participation and design co-operating to realise such changes. Section 1, starting from Pelle Ehn's last contribution, deals with participatory design and how it can be extended from the traditional idea of participation as the integration of users in projects, to the concept of participation as the interaction of active groups of citizens with open and articulated processes in the direction of socio-technical changes. Section 2 introduces the idea of planning by projects strategy and presents five design projects. Section 3 discusses how participatory design can be extended to give a rationale for these large-scale projects and what designers did in practice: triggered citizens’ interest, aligned their motivations and empowered their capabilities. The idea emerging from this discussion is that when participatory design is intended as an approach aiming at broad and complex transformation processes its traditional notion must integrate the concept of social innovation (first step) and evolve towards the idea of an open process where a multiplicity of small, diverse, participated initiatives (or local projects) interact (second step) to achieve a larger vision.