So far in this course we have dealt entirely with the evolution of characters that are controlled by simple Mendelian inheritance at a single locus. There are notes on the course website about gametic disequilibrium and how allele frequencies change at two loci simultaneously, but we didn’t discuss them. In every example we’ve considered we’ve imagined that we could understand something about evolution by examining the evolution of a single gene. That’s the domain of classical population genetics. For the next few weeks we’re going to be exploring a field that’s actually older than classical population genetics, although the approach we’ll be taking to it involves the use of population genetic machinery. If you know a little about the history of evolutionary biology, you may know that after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 there was a heated debate between the “biometricians” (e.g., Galton and Pearson) and the “Mendelians” (e.g., de Vries, Correns, Bateson, and Morgan). Biometricians asserted that the really important variation in evolution didn’t follow Mendelian rules. Height, weight, skin color, and similar traits seemed to

Human biochemical genetics

The hidden-charm pentaquark and tetraquark states

The industrial activities of the last century have caused massive increases in human exposure to heavy metals. Mercury, lead, chromium, cadmium, and arsenic have been the most common heavy metals that induced human poisonings. Here, we reviewed the mechanistic action of these heavy metals according to the available animal and human studies. Acute or chronic poisonings may occur following exposure through water, air, and food. Bioaccumulation of these heavy metals leads to a diversity of toxic effects on a variety of body tissues and organs. Heavy metals disrupt cellular events including growth, proliferation, differentiation, damage-repairing processes, and apoptosis. Comparison of the mechanisms of action reveals similar pathways for these metals to induce toxicity including ROS generation, weakening of the antioxidant defense, enzyme inactivation, and oxidative stress. On the other hand, some of them have selective binding to specific macromolecules. The interaction of lead with aminolevulinic acid dehydratase and ferrochelatase is within this context. Reactions of other heavy metals with certain proteins were discussed as well. Some toxic metals including chromium, cadmium, and arsenic cause genomic instability. Defects in DNA repair following the induction of oxidative stress and DNA damage by the three metals have been considered as the cause of their carcinogenicity. Even with the current knowledge of hazards of heavy metals, the incidence of poisoning remains considerable and requires preventive and effective treatment. The application of chelation therapy for the management of metal poisoning could be another aspect of heavy metals to be reviewed in the future.

/pdf/toxic-mechanisms-of-five-heavy-metals-mercury-lead-chromium-u6u84aso6p.pdf

Toxic Mechanisms of Five Heavy Metals: Mercury, Lead, Chromium, Cadmium, and Arsenic.

Exact interior and exterior solutions to Einstein's field equations are derived for vacuum strings. The exterior solution for a uniform density vacuum string corresponds to a conical space while the interior solution is that of a spherical cap. For Mu equals 0-1/4 the external metric is ds-squared = -dt-squared + dr-squared + (1-4 Mu)-squared r-squared dphi-squared + dz-squared, where Mu is the mass per unit length in the string in Planck masses per Planck length. A maximum mass per unit length for a string is 6.73 x 10 to the 27th g/cm. It is shown that strings cause temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background and produce equal brightness double QSO images separated by up to several minutes of arc. Formulae for lensing probabilities, image splittings, and time delays are derived for strings in a realistic cosmological setting. String searches using ST, the VLA, and the COBE satellite are discussed.

Gravitational Lensing Effects of Vacuum Strings: Exact Solutions

The detection of gravitational waves from mergers of tens of Solar mass black hole binaries has led to a surge in interest in primordial black holes (PBHs) as a dark matter candidate. We aim to provide a (relatively) concise overview of the status of PBHs as a dark matter candidate, circa Summer 2020. First we review the formation of PBHs in the early Universe, focussing mainly on PBHs formed via the collapse of large density perturbations generated by inflation. Then we review the various current and future constraints on the present day abundance of PBHs. We conclude with a discussion of the key open questions in this field.

/pdf/primordial-black-holes-as-a-dark-matter-candidate-1s3m3v6ps3.pdf

Primordial black holes as a dark matter candidate

A wiper device for vehicles is disclosed. The wiper device (1) for vehicles according to the present invention provides compatible standardized parts, such that the wiper device can be applied to various kinds of drive arms having different shapes and sizes. Therefore, the degree of freedom in design for the standardization of products can be increased, thus markedly reducing the production costs. Furthermore, thanks to the standardization of products, the present invention can be easily adapted for mass production. Hence, there are industrial effects in that products can be economically produced, distributed and spread.

Automobile wiper-blade

Mobile user devices, such as smart phones have become the most popular high-end mobile devices far beyond just cellular communication devices. They will continue evolving toward being palm-top computers with the rapid development of wireless communications and platform technologies. This paper introduces our development of a semantic reasoner called MiRE4OWL to be installed onto the resource-limited mobile user devices to accommodate context-aware ubiquitous computing services. It is a data-log and rule-based inference engine which performs semantic reasoning operations over the application semantics represented in OWL-DL. The mobile rule engine that underlies MiRE4OWL achieves light-weight design to meet the resource constraints of the mobile devices and yet achieves better expressiveness than existing engines. The performance evaluation showed that the intended functionality and resource efficiency have been fulfilled.

MiRE4OWL: Mobile Rule Engine for OWL

This paper proposes a new gravitational lensing method that can probe the lightest possible primordial black hole dark matter. The scheme relies on measuring brightness differences in a gamma-ray burst as identified by spatially separated detectors.

https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013113

Gamma-ray burst lensing parallax: Closing the primordial black hole dark matter mass window

The axion-gravity Chern-Simons coupling is well motivated but is relatively weakly constrained, partly due to difficult measurements of gravity. We study the sensitivity of LIGO measurements of chirping gravitational waves (GWs) on such coupling. When the frequency of the propagating GW matches with that of the coherent oscillation of axion dark matter field, the decay of axions into gravitons can be stimulated, resonantly enhancing the GW. Such a resonance peak can be detected at LIGO as a deviation from the chirping waveform. Since all observed GWs will undergo similar resonant enhancement from the Milky Way (MW) axion halo, LIGO $\mathrm{O}1+\mathrm{O}2$ observations can potentially provide the strongest constraint on the coupling, at least for the axion mass ${m}_{a}=5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}13}\ensuremath{-}5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}12}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$. Along the course, we also emphasize the relevance of the finite coherence of axion fields and the ansatz separating forward and backward propagations of GWs. As a result, the parity violation of the Chern-Simons coupling is not observable from chirping GWs.

Constraining the gravitational coupling of axion dark matter at LIGO

The primordial black hole (PBH) comprising full dark matter (DM) abundance is currently allowed if its mass lies between $10^{-16}M_{\odot} \lesssim M \lesssim 10^{-11} M_{\odot}$. This lightest mass range is hard to be probed by ongoing gravitational lensing observations. In this paper, we advocate that an old idea of the lensing parallax of Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), observed simultaneously by spatially separated detectors, can probe the unconstrained mass range; and that of nearby stars can probe a heavier mass range. In addition to various good properties of GRBs, astrophysical separations achievable around us --- $r_\oplus \text{--}$ AU --- is just large enough to resolve the GRB lensing by lightest PBH DM.

Taehun Kim

Papers

Automobile wiper-blade

MiRE4OWL: Mobile Rule Engine for OWL

Gamma-ray burst lensing parallax: Closing the primordial black hole dark matter mass window

Constraining the gravitational coupling of axion dark matter at LIGO

GRB Lensing Parallax: Closing Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter Mass Gap