University of Warsaw

About: University of Warsaw is a education organization based out in Warsaw, Poland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 20832 authors who have published 56617 publications receiving 1185084 citations. The organization is also known as: Uniwersytet Warszawski & Warsaw University.

Accelerated increase in plant species richness on mountain summits is linked to warming

Abstract: Globally accelerating trends in societal development and human environmental impacts since the mid-twentieth century 1–7 are known as the Great Acceleration and have been discussed as a key indicator of the onset of the Anthropocene epoch 6 . While reports on ecological responses (for example, changes in species range or local extinctions) to the Great Acceleration are multiplying 8, 9 , it is unknown whether such biotic responses are undergoing a similar acceleration over time. This knowledge gap stems from the limited availability of time series data on biodiversity changes across large temporal and geographical extents. Here we use a dataset of repeated plant surveys from 302 mountain summits across Europe, spanning 145 years of observation, to assess the temporal trajectory of mountain biodiversity changes as a globally coherent imprint of the Anthropocene. We find a continent-wide acceleration in the rate of increase in plant species richness, with five times as much species enrichment between 2007 and 2016 as fifty years ago, between 1957 and 1966. This acceleration is strikingly synchronized with accelerated global warming and is not linked to alternative global change drivers. The accelerating increases in species richness on mountain summits across this broad spatial extent demonstrate that acceleration in climate-induced biotic change is occurring even in remote places on Earth, with potentially far-ranging consequences not only for biodiversity, but also for ecosystem functioning and services.

Epigenomic alterations define lethal CIMP-positive ependymomas of infancy

Abstract: Ependymomas are common childhood brain tumours that occur throughout the nervous system, but are most common in the paediatric hindbrain. Current standard therapy comprises surgery and radiation, but not cytotoxic chemotherapy as it does not further increase survival. Whole-genome and whole-exome sequencing of 47 hindbrain ependymomas reveals an extremely low mutation rate, and zero significant recurrent somatic single nucleotide variants. Although devoid of recurrent single nucleotide variants and focal copy number aberrations, poor-prognosis hindbrain ependymomas exhibit a CpG island methylator phenotype. Transcriptional silencing driven by CpG methylation converges exclusively on targets of the Polycomb repressive complex 2 which represses expression of differentiation genes through trimethylation of H3K27. CpG island methylator phenotype-positive hindbrain ependymomas are responsive to clinical drugs that target either DNA or H3K27 methylation both in vitro and in vivo. We conclude that epigenetic modifiers are the first rational therapeutic candidates for this deadly malignancy, which is epigenetically deregulated but genetically bland.

Planck 2015 results - XV. Gravitational lensing

Abstract: We present the most significant measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing potential to date (at a level of 40σ), using temperature and polarization data from the Planck 2015 full-mission release. Using a polarization-only estimator, we detect lensing at a significance of 5σ. We cross-check the accuracy of our measurement using the wide frequency coverage and complementarity of the temperature and polarization measurements. Public products based on this measurement include an estimate of the lensing potential over approximately 70% of the sky, an estimate of the lensing potential power spectrum in bandpowers for the multipole range 40 ≤ L ≤ 400, and an associated likelihood for cosmological parameter constraints. We find good agreement between our measurement of the lensing potential power spectrum and that found in the ΛCDM model that best fits the Planck temperature and polarization power spectra. Using the lensing likelihood alone we obtain a percent-level measurement of the parameter combination σ8Ω0.25m = 0.591 ± 0.021. We combine our determination of the lensing potential with the E-mode polarization, also measured by Planck, to generate an estimate of the lensing B-mode. We show that this lensing B-mode estimate is correlated with the B-modes observed directly by Planck at the expected level and with a statistical significance of 10σ, confirming Planck’s sensitivity to this known sky signal. We also correlate our lensing potential estimate with the large-scale temperature anisotropies, detecting a cross-correlation at the 3σ level, as expected because of dark energy in the concordance ΛCDM model.

GW190412: Observation of a binary-black-hole coalescence with asymmetric masses

Abstract: We report the observation of gravitational waves from a binary-black-hole coalescence during the first two weeks of LIGO’s and Virgo’s third observing run. The signal was recorded on April 12, 2019 at 05∶30∶44 UTC with a network signal-to-noise ratio of 19. The binary is different from observations during the first two observing runs most notably due to its asymmetric masses: a ∼30 M⊙ black hole merged with a ∼8 M⊙ black hole companion. The more massive black hole rotated with a dimensionless spin magnitude between 0.22 and 0.60 (90% probability). Asymmetric systems are predicted to emit gravitational waves with stronger contributions from higher multipoles, and indeed we find strong evidence for gravitational radiation beyond the leading quadrupolar order in the observed signal. A suite of tests performed on GW190412 indicates consistency with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. While the mass ratio of this system differs from all previous detections, we show that it is consistent with the population model of stellar binary black holes inferred from the first two observing runs.

Jet energy scale and resolution in the CMS experiment in pp collisions at 8 TeV

Abstract: Improved jet energy scale corrections, based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb^(-1) collected by the CMS experiment in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, are presented. The corrections as a function of pseudorapidity η and transverse momentum p_T are extracted from data and simulated events combining several channels and methods. They account successively for the effects of pileup, uniformity of the detector response, and residual data-simulation jet energy scale differences. Further corrections, depending on the jet flavor and distance parameter (jet size) R, are also presented. The jet energy resolution is measured in data and simulated events and is studied as a function of pileup, jet size, and jet flavor. Typical jet energy resolutions at the central rapidities are 15–20% at 30 GeV, about 10% at 100 GeV, and 5% at 1 TeV. The studies exploit events with dijet topology, as well as photon+jet, Z+jet and multijet events. Several new techniques are used to account for the various sources of jet energy scale corrections, and a full set of uncertainties, and their correlations, are provided. The final uncertainties on the jet energy scale are below 3% across the phase space considered by most analyses (p_T > 30 GeV and 0|η| 30 GeV is reached, when excluding the jet flavor uncertainties, which are provided separately for different jet flavors. A new benchmark for jet energy scale determination at hadron colliders is achieved with 0.32% uncertainty for jets with p_T of the order of 165–330 GeV, and |η| < 0.8.