Adult Supracristal Ventricular Septal Defect with Aortic Regurgitation: A Case Report

Supracristal Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD) develops Aortic Regurgitation (AR) with the passage of time due to prolapse of the right coronary cusp. It brings clinical attention in early child hood with an incidental continuous murmur, recurrent respiratory tract infection of failure to thrive. This report is about a rare case of 52-year-old female who presented with increased fatiguability since the last six months. Clinical examination revealed the presence of cardiomegaly with holosystolic-diastolic murmur in Left Upper Sternal Border (LUSB). Echocardiography revealed the presence of supracristal VSD with moderate AR without prolapsing aortic leaflet or dilatation of aortic sinus. In view of presence of moderate AR, the patient was advised to be on Angiotensin Receptor Blocker (ARB) with regular follow-up to monitor the progression of AR. Such a late index presentation of supracristal VSD with moderate AR in fifth decade of life has not been described in literature so far. To conclude, nature retards the natural history with bless in disguise.

Cilia density and flow velocity affect alignment of motile cilia from brain cells

In many organs, thousands of microscopic ‘motile cilia’ beat in a coordinated fashion generating fluid flow. Physiologically, these flows are important in both development and homeostasis of ciliated tissues. Combining experiments and simulations, we studied how cilia from brain tissue align their beating direction. We subjected cilia to a broad range of shear stresses, similar to the fluid flow that cilia themselves generate, in a microfluidic setup. In contrast to previous studies, we found that cilia from mouse ependyma respond and align to these physiological shear stress at all maturation stages. Cilia align more easily earlier in maturation, and we correlated this property with the increase in multiciliated cell density during maturation. Our numerical simulations show that cilia in densely packed clusters are hydrodynamically screened from the external flow, in agreement with our experimental observation. Cilia carpets create a hydrodynamic screening that reduces the susceptibility of individual cilia to external flows.

Summary: Alignment of motile cilia in mammalian brains is essential for transport of fluids as described in an in vitro model of the developing brain.

Measurement of the Low-Energy Antideuteron Inelastic Cross Section

In this Letter, we report the first measurement of the inelastic cross section for antideuteron-nucleus interactions at low particle momenta, covering a range of 0.3≤p<4  GeV/c. The measurement is carried out using p-Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon-nucleon pair of sqrt[s_{NN}]=5.02  TeV, recorded with the ALICE detector at the CERN LHC and utilizing the detector material as an absorber for antideuterons and antiprotons. The extracted raw primary antiparticle-to-particle ratios are compared to the results from detailed ALICE simulations based on the geant4 toolkit for the propagation of (anti)particles through the detector material. The analysis of the raw primary (anti)proton spectra serves as a benchmark for this study, since their hadronic interaction cross sections are well constrained experimentally. The first measurement of the inelastic cross section for antideuteron-nucleus interactions averaged over the ALICE detector material with atomic mass numbers ⟨A⟩=17.4 and 31.8 is obtained. The measured inelastic cross section points to a possible excess with respect to the Glauber model parametrization used in geant4 in the lowest momentum interval of 0.3≤p<0.47  GeV/c up to a factor 2.1. This result is relevant for the understanding of antimatter propagation and the contributions to antinuclei production from cosmic ray interactions within the interstellar medium. In addition, the momentum range covered by this measurement is of particular importance to evaluate signal predictions for indirect dark-matter searches.

Drying of citrus grandis (pomelo) fruit juice using block freeze concentration and spray drying

Pomelo fruit juice is concentrated using two different techniques, i.e. block freeze concentration (BFC) and thermal concentration (TC), and both concentrates were spray dried separately to observe the effects of two different concentration techniques on the physicochemical properties of the spray dried powder. BFC juice had comparatively better values of retention of acidity, colour, vitamin C, DPPH● scavenging activity, total phenolic content (TPC), and total sugar content than TC juice. The powder obtained from the combination of BFC and spray drying had better retention of vitamin C (121.17 mg/100 g), colour, and exhibited higher DPPH● scavenging activity than TC spray dried powder. The physical parameters including solubility index, bulk density, and hygroscopicity were significantly higher in BFC spray dried powder. BFC was observed as an efficient concentration technique in comparison to TC as a pretreatment to produce spray dried powder with a better retention of bioactive components and powder flow properties.

Using Uniaxial Stress to Probe the Relationship between Competing Superconducting States in a Cuprate with Spin-stripe Order

We report muon spin rotation and magnetic susceptibility experiments on in-plane stress effects on the static spin-stripe order and superconductivity in the cuprate system La_{2-x}Ba_{x}CuO_{4} with x=0.115. An extremely low uniaxial stress of ∼0.1  GPa induces a substantial decrease in the magnetic volume fraction and a dramatic rise in the onset of 3D superconductivity, from ∼10 to 32 K; however, the onset of at-least-2D superconductivity is much less sensitive to stress. These results show not only that large-volume-fraction spin-stripe order is anticorrelated with 3D superconducting coherence but also that these states are energetically very finely balanced. Moreover, the onset temperatures of 3D superconductivity and spin-stripe order are very similar in the large stress regime. These results strongly suggest a similar pairing mechanism for spin-stripe order and the spatially modulated 2D and uniform 3D superconducting orders, imposing an important constraint on theoretical models.

Probing the Effects of Strong Electromagnetic Fields with Charge-Dependent Directed Flow in Pb-Pb Collisions at the LHC

The first measurement at the LHC of charge-dependent directed flow (v_{1}) relative to the spectator plane is presented for Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt[s_{NN}]=5.02  TeV. Results are reported for charged hadrons and D^{0} mesons for the transverse momentum intervals p_{T}>0.2  GeV/c and 3<p_{T}<6  GeV/c in the 5%-40% and 10%-40% centrality classes, respectively. The difference between the positively and negatively charged hadron v_{1} has a positive slope as a function of pseudorapidity η, dΔv_{1}/dη=[1.68±0.49(stat)±0.41(syst)]×10^{-4}. The same measurement for D^{0} and D[over ¯]^{0} mesons yields a positive value dΔv_{1}/dη=[4.9±1.7(stat)±0.6(syst)]×10^{-1}, which is about 3 orders of magnitude larger than the one of the charged hadrons. These measurements can provide new insights into the effects of the strong electromagnetic field and the initial tilt of matter created in noncentral heavy ion collisions on the dynamics of light (u, d, and s) and heavy (c) quarks. The large difference between the observed Δv_{1} of charged hadrons and D^{0} mesons may reflect different sensitivity of the charm and light quarks to the early time dynamics of a heavy ion collision. These observations challenge some recent theoretical calculations, which predicted a negative and an order of magnitude smaller value of dΔv_{1}/dη for both light flavor and charmed hadrons.