Platyhelminthes are excellent models for the study of stem cell biology, regeneration and the regulation of scale and proportion. In addition, parasitic forms infect millions of people worldwide. Therefore, it is puzzling that they remain relatively unexplored at the molecular level. We present the characterization of similar to3000 non-redundant cDNAs from a clonal line of the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea. The obtained cDNA sequences, homology comparisons and high-throughput whole-mount in situ hybridization data form part of the S. mediterranea database (SmedDb; http://planaria.neuro.utah.edu). Sixty-nine percent of the cDNAs analyzed share similarities with sequences deposited in GenBank and dbEST. The remaining gene transcripts failed to match sequences in other organisms, even though a large number of these (similar to80%) contained putative open reading frames. Taken together, the molecular resources presented in this study, along with the ability of abrogating gene expression in planarians using RNA interference technology, pave the way for a systematic study of the remarkable biological properties displayed by Platyhelminthes.

The MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a dedicated observatory of four 0.7 m robotic telescopes fiber-fed to a KiwiSpec spectrograph. The MINERVA mission is to discover super-Earths in the habitable zones of nearby stars. This can be accomplished with MINERVA's unique combination of high precision and high cadence over long time periods. In this work, we detail changes to the MINERVA facility that have occurred since our previous paper. We then describe MINERVA's robotic control software, the process by which we perform 1D spectral extraction, and our forward modeling Doppler pipeline. In the process of improving our forward modeling procedure, we found that our spectrograph's intrinsic instrumental profile is stable for at least nine months. Because of that, we characterized our instrumental profile with a time-independent, cubic spline function based on the profile in the cross dispersion direction, with which we achieved a radial velocity precision similar to using a conventional "sum-of-Gaussians" instrumental profile: 1.8 m s(-1) over 1.5 months on the RV standard star HD 122064. Therefore, we conclude that the instrumental profile need not be perfectly accurate as long as it is stable. In addition, we observed 51 Peg and our results are consistent with the literature, confirming our spectrograph and Doppler pipeline are producing accurate and precise radial velocities.

Carbonate liquids are an important class of molten salts, not just for industrial applications, but also in geological processes. Carbonates are generally expected to be simple liquids, in terms of ionic interactions between the molecular carbonate anions and metal cations, and therefore relatively structureless compared to more "polymerized" silicate melts. But there is increasing evidence from phase relations, metal solubility, glass spectroscopy and simulations to suggest the emergence of carbonate "networks" at length scales longer than the component molecular anions. The stability of these emergent structures are known to be sensitive to temperature, but are also predicted to be favoured by pressure. This is important as a recent study suggests that subducted surface carbonate may melt near the Earth's transition zone (similar to 44 km), representing a barrier to the deep carbon cycle depending on the buoyancy and viscosity of these liquids. In this study we demonstrate a major advance in our understanding of carbonate liquids by combining simulations and high pressure measurements on a carbonate glass, (K2CO3-MgCO3) to pressures in excess of 40 GPa, far higher than any previous in situ study. We show the clear formation of extended low-dimensional carbonate networks of close CO32- pairs and the emergence of a "three plus one" local coordination environment, producing an unexpected increase in viscosity with pressure. Although carbonate melts may still be buoyant in the lower mantle, an increased viscosity by at least three orders of magnitude will restrict the upward mobility, possibly resulting in entrainment by the down-going slab.

We present a computationally tractable implementation of spectro-perfectionism, a method which minimizes error imparted by spectral extraction. We develop our method in conjunction with a full raw reduction pipeline for the MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA), capable of performing both optimal extraction and spectro-perfectionism. Although spectro-perfectionism remains computationally expensive, our implementation can extract a MINERVA exposure in approximately 30 minutes. We describe our localized extraction procedure and our approach to point-spread function (PSF) fitting. We compare the performance of both extraction methods on a set of 119 exposures on HD 122064, an RV standard star. Both the optimal extraction and spectro-perfectionism pipelines achieve nearly identical RV precision under a six-exposure chronological binning. We discuss the importance of reliable calibration data for PSF fitting and the potential of spectro-perfectionism for future precise radial velocity exoplanet studies.

We present the discovery of KELT-24 b, a massive hot Jupiter orbiting a bright (V = 8.3 mag, K = 7.2 mag) young F-star with a period of 5.6 days. The host star, KELT-24 (HD 93148), has a T-eff = 6509(-49)(+50) K, a mass of M-* = 1.460(-0.059)(+0.055) M-circle dot, a radius of R-* = 1.506 +/- 0.022 R-circle dot, and an age of 0.78(-0.42)(+0.61) Gyr. Its planetary companion (KELT-24 b) has a radius of R-P = 1.272 +/- 0.021 R-J and a mass of M-P = 5.18(-0.22)(+0.21) M-J, and from Doppler tomographic observations, we find that the planet's orbit is well-aligned to its host star's projected spin axis (lambda = 2.6(-3.6)(+5.1)). The young age estimated for KELT-24 suggests that it only recently started to evolve from the zero-age main sequence. KELT-24 is the brightest star known to host a transiting giant planet with a period between 5 and 10 days. Although the circularization timescale is much longer than the age of the system, we do not detect a large eccentricity or significant misalignment that is expected from dynamical migration. The brightness of its host star and its moderate surface gravity make KELT-24b an intriguing target for detailed atmospheric characterization through spectroscopic emission measurements since it would bridge the current literature results that have primarily focused on lower mass hot Jupiters and a few brown dwarfs.

We leverage state-of-the-art machine learning methods and a decade's worth of archival data from Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) to predict observatory image quality (IQ) from environmental conditions and observatory operating parameters. Specifically, we develop accurate and interpretable models of the complex dependence between data features and observed IQ for CFHT's wide-field camera, MegaCam. Our contributions are several-fold. First, we collect, collate, and reprocess several disparate data sets gathered by CFHT scientists. Second, we predict probability distribution functions of IQ and achieve a mean absolute error of similar to 0.07 arcsec for the predicted medians. Third, we explore the data-driven actuation of the 12 dome 'vents' installed in 2013-14 to accelerate the flushing of hot air from the dome. We leverage epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties in conjunction with probabilistic generative modelling to identify candidate vent adjustments that are in-distribution (ID); for the optimal configuration for each ID sample, we predict the reduction in required observing time to achieve a fixed signal-to-noise ratio. On average, the reduction is similar to 12 per cent. Finally, we rank input features by their Shapley values to identify the most predictive variables for each observation. Our long-term goal is to construct reliable and real-time models that can forecast optimal observatory operating parameters to optimize IQ. We can then feed such forecasts into scheduling protocols and predictive maintenance routines. We anticipate that such approaches will become standard in automating observatory operations and maintenance by the time CFHT's successor, the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer, is installed in the next decade.

Water is one of the key limiting factors for the survival and growth of plant species in arid and semi-arid steppe regions. Different plant functional groups (PFGs) based on life-forms differ in their strategies to cope with limited water availability. The foliar carbon isotope discrimination (Delta) value provides an integrated measurement of internal plant physiological and external environmental properties affecting photosynthetic gas exchange over the time interval when the carbon was fixed. In this study, we surveyed the composition and Delta values of various life-forms (shrubs, sub-shrubs, perennial grasses, perennial forbs and annuals) in eight different plant communities along a soil moisture gradient in the Xilin River Basin, Inner Mongolia, China. Our results showed that: (1) life-forms occurred variously in eight steppe communities with different soil moisture status; (2) in wetter habitats, forbs were more abundant and accounted for the majority of aboveground biomass, whereas grasses became more important in drier habitats. Shrubs and sub-shrubs increased with decreasing soil water availability and their relative biomass rapidly increased in degraded steppe and sand dune communities. (3) The numerical order of the mean Delta values of life-forms is as follows: perennial grasses (15.86 parts per thousand) < shrubs (16.10 parts per thousand) < perennial forbs (16.45 parts per thousand) = annuals (16.41 parts per thousand) < sub-shrubs (17.55 parts per thousand), reflecting their differences in water use efficiencies. The significant differences in the Delta values among these life-forms suggested that life-form-based PFGs not only represent a morphological classification of these plants, but could also represent a functional group integrating different physiological processes such as water use strategies, which may partially explain the differences in PFG composition and competitive ability of co-existing species along environmental gradients in the Xilin River Basin.

Brassinosteroid and gibberellin promote many similar developmental responses in plants; however, their relationship remains unclear. Here we show that BR and GA act interdependently through a direct interaction between the BR-activated BZR1 and GA-inactivated DELLA transcription regulators. GA promotion of cell elongation required BR signalling, where as BR or active BZR1 suppressed the GA-defcient dwarf phenotype. DELLAs directly interacted with BZR1 and inhibited BZR1-DNA binding both in vitro and in vivo. Genome-wide analysis defined a BZR1-dependent GA-regulated transcriptome, which is enriched with light-regulated genes and genes involved in cell wall synthesis and photosynthesis/chloroplast function. GA promotion of hypocotyl elongation requires both BZR1 and the phytochrome-interacting factors (PIFs), as well as their common downstream targets encoding the PRE-family helix-loop-helix factors. The results demonstrate that GA releases DELLA-mediated inhibition of BZR1, and that the DELLA-BZR1-PIF4 interaction defines a core transcription module that mediates coordinated growth regulation by GA, BR and light signals.