Responding to Media Inquiries about Earthquake Triggering Interactions

Author(s):  
Fang Fan ◽  
Lingling Ye ◽  
Hiroo Kanamori ◽  
Thorne Lay

Abstract In the aftermath of a significant earthquake, seismologists are frequently asked questions by the media and public regarding possible interactions with recent prior events, including events at great distances away, along with prospects of larger events yet to come, both locally and remotely. For regions with substantial earthquake catalogs that provide information on the regional Gutenberg–Richter magnitude–frequency relationship, Omori temporal aftershock statistical behavior, and aftershock productivity parameters, probabilistic responses can be provided for likelihood of nearby future events of larger magnitude, as well as expected behavior of the overall aftershock sequence. However, such procedures generally involve uncertain extrapolations of parameterized equations to infrequent large events and do not provide answers to inquiries about long-range interactions, either retrospectively for interaction with prior remote large events or prospectively for interaction with future remote large events. Dynamic triggering that may be involved in such long-range interactions occurs, often with significant temporal delay, but is not well understood, making it difficult to respond to related inquiries. One approach to addressing such inquiries is to provide retrospective or prospective occurrence histories for large earthquakes based on global catalogs; while not providing quantitative understanding of any physical interaction, experience-based guidance on the (typically very low) chances of causal interactions can inform public understanding of likelihood of specific scenarios they are commonly very interested in.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lingling Ye ◽  
Hiroo Kanamori ◽  
Thorne Lay

<p>In the aftermath of a significant earthquake, seismologists are frequently asked questions by the media and public regarding possible interactions with recent prior events, including events at great distances away, along with prospects of larger events yet to come, both locally or remotely.  For regions with substantial earthquake catalogs that provide information on the regional Gutenberg-Richter magnitude-frequency relationship, Omori temporal aftershock statistical behavior, and aftershock productivity parameters, probabilistic responses can be provided for likelihood of nearby future events of larger magnitude (as well as expected behavior of the overall aftershock sequence). However, such procedures do not provide answers to inquiries about long-range interactions, either retrospectively for interaction with prior remote large events or prospectively for interaction with future remote large events. Dynamic triggering that may be involved in such long-range interactions occurs, often with significant temporal delay, but is not well-understood, making it difficult to respond to related inquiries. One approach to addressing such inquiries is to provide retrospective or prospective occurrence histories for large earthquakes based on global catalogs; while not providing quantitative understanding of any physical interaction, experience-based guidance on the (typically very low) chances of causal interactions can inform public understanding of likelihood of specific scenarios they are commonly very interested in.</p>


1997 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 2669-2678 ◽  
Author(s):  
H J McBride ◽  
R M Brazas ◽  
Y Yu ◽  
K Nasmyth ◽  
D J Stillman

The SWI5 gene encodes a zinc finger DNA-binding protein required for the transcriptional activation of the yeast HO gene. There are two Swi5p binding sites in the HO promoter, site A at -1800 and site B at -1300. Swi5p binding at site B has been investigated in some detail, and we have shown that Swi5p binds site B in a mutually cooperative fashion with Pho2p, a homeodomain protein. In this report, we demonstrate that Swi5p and Pho2p bind cooperatively to both sites A and B but that there are differences in binding to these two promoter sites. It has been shown previously that point mutations in either Swi5p binding site only modestly reduce HO expression in a PHO2 strain. We show that these mutant promoters are completely inactive in a pho2 mutant. We have created stronger point mutations at the two Swi5p binding sites within the HO promoter, and we show that the two binding sites, separated by 500 bp, are both absolutely required for HO expression, independent of PHO2. These results create an apparent dilemma, as the strong mutations at the Swi5p binding sites show that both binding sites are required for HO expression, but the earlier binding site mutations allow Swi5p to activate HO, but only in the presence of Pho2p. To explain these results, a model is proposed in which physical interaction between Swi5p proteins bound to these two sites separated by 500 bp is required for activation of the HO promoter. Experimental evidence is presented that supports the model. In addition, through deletion analysis we have identified a region near the amino terminus of Swi5p that is required for PHO2-independent activation of HO, suggesting that this region mediates the long-range interactions between Swi5p molecules bound at the distant sites.


Author(s):  
Ting XIE ◽  
Andrea Orbán ◽  
Xiaodong Xing ◽  
Eliane Luc-Koenig ◽  
Romain Vexiau ◽  
...  

Abstract Ultracold temperatures in dilute quantum gases opened the way to an exquisite control of matter at the quantum level. Here we focus on the control of ultracold atomic collisions using a laser to engineer their interactions at large interatomic distances. We show that the entrance channel of two colliding ultracold atoms can be coupled to a repulsive collisional channel by the laser light so that the overall interaction between the two atoms becomes repulsive: this prevents them to come close together and to undergo inelastic processes, thus protecting the atomic gases from unwanted losses. We illustrate such an optical shielding mechanism with 39K and 133Cs atoms colliding at ultracold temperature (<1 microkelvin). The process is described in the framework of the dressed-state picture and we then solve the resulting stationary coupled Schrödinger equations. The role of spontaneous emission and photoinduced inelastic scattering is also investigated as possible limitations of the shielding efficiency. We predict an almost complete suppression of inelastic collisions over a broad range of Rabi frequencies and detunings from the 39K D2 line of the optical shielding laser, both within the [0, 200 MHz] interval. We found that the polarization of the shielding laser has a minor influence on this efficiency. This proposal could easily be formulated for other bialkali-metal pairs as their long-range interaction are all very similar to each other.


Author(s):  
Alexandra Makarova

The religious communication is the most ancient of human communication types. The pragmatic linguistics as well as rhetoric shows a special attitude to this special type of discourse. Today the Internet text with its unlimited abilities is being in the focus of linguists’ attention. That is why the orthodox journalists are covering not only print media but also the Internet that helps to widen the sphere of influence on the people’s minds and souls. The analyses show that the media context of the Orthodox sites (such as The Orthodox people laugh and etc.) includes humorous publications that prove the necessity of studying peculiarities of religious communication and humorous texts in orthodox sites. The integrative approach including content analyses, discourse and linguistic cultural methods helps the author to come to a conclusion that orthodox media texts are distinguished by intertextuality, hypertextuality, creolism, and the authors want to influence the addressee in the most effective way. To define the communicative task, the missionary function should be taken into account which is peculiar to the religious discourse.


Biomolecules ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 371
Author(s):  
Koua

The Mn4CaO5 cluster site in the oxygen-evolving complex (OEC) of photosystem II (PSII) undergoes structural perturbations, such as those induced by Ca2+/Sr2+ exchanges or Ca/Mn removal. These changes have been known to induce long-range positive shifts (between +30 and +150 mV) in the redox potential of the primary quinone electron acceptor plastoquinone A (QA), which is located 40 Å from the OEC. To further investigate these effects, we reanalyzed the crystal structure of Sr-PSII resolved at 2.1 Å and compared it with the native Ca-PSII resolved at 1.9 Å. Here, we focus on the acceptor site and report the possible long-range interactions between the donor, Mn4Ca(Sr)O5 cluster, and acceptor sites.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Metzner ◽  
F. Hörsch ◽  
C. Mark ◽  
T. Czerwinski ◽  
A. Winterl ◽  
...  

AbstractChemotaxis enables cells to systematically approach distant targets that emit a diffusible guiding substance. However, the visual observation of an encounter between a cell and a target does not necessarily indicate the presence of a chemotactic approach mechanism, as even a blindly migrating cell can come across a target by chance. To distinguish between the chemotactic approach and blind migration, we present an objective method that is based on the analysis of time-lapse recorded cell migration trajectories: For each movement step of a cell relative to the position of a potential target, we compute a p value that quantifies the likelihood of the movement direction under the null-hypothesis of blind migration. The resulting distribution of p values, pooled over all recorded cell trajectories, is then compared to an ensemble of reference distributions in which the positions of targets are randomized. First, we validate our method with simulated data, demonstrating that it reliably detects the presence or absence of remote cell-cell interactions. In a second step, we apply the method to data from three-dimensional collagen gels, interspersed with highly migratory natural killer (NK) cells that were derived from two different human donors. We find for one of the donors an attractive interaction between the NK cells, pointing to a cooperative behavior of these immune cells. When adding nearly stationary K562 tumor cells to the system, we find a repulsive interaction between K562 and NK cells for one of the donors. By contrast, we find attractive interactions between NK cells and an IL-15-secreting variant of K562 tumor cells. We therefore speculate that NK cells find wild-type tumor cells only by chance, but are programmed to leave a target quickly after a close encounter. We provide a freely available Python implementation of our p value method that can serve as a general tool for detecting long-range interactions in collective systems of self-driven agents.


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