No abstract

No abstract

The use of engineered plants as biosensors has made elegant strides in the past decades, providing keen insights into the health of plants in general and particularly in the nature and cellular location of stress responses. However, most of the analytical procedures involve laboratory examination of the biosensor plants. With the advent of the green fluorescence protein (GFP) as a biosensor molecule, it became at least theoretically possible for analyses of gene expression to occur telemetrically, with the gene expression information of the plant delivered to the investigator over large distances simply as properly processed fluorescence images. Spaceflight and other extraterrestrial environments provide unique challenges to plant life, challenges that often require changes at the gene expression level to accommodate adaptation and survival. Having previously deployed transgenic plant biosensors to evaluate responses to orbital spaceflight, we wished to develop the plants and especially the imaging devices required to conduct such experiments robotically, without operator intervention, within extraterrestrial environments. This requires the development of an autonomous and remotely operated plant GFP imaging system and concomitant development of the communications infrastructure to manage dataflow from the imaging device. Here we report the results of deploying a prototype GFP imaging system within the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse (ACMG) an autonomously operated greenhouse located within the Haughton Mars Project in the Canadian High Arctic. Results both demonstrate the applicability of the fundamental GFP biosensor technology and highlight the difficulties in collecting and managing telemetric data from challenging deployment environments.

Higher plants are an integral part of strategies for sustained human presence in space. Space-based greenhouses have the potential to provide closed-loop recycling of oxygen, water and food. Plant monitoring systems with the capacity to remotely observe the condition of crops in real-time within these systems would permit operators to take immediate action to ensure optimum system yield and reliability. One such plant health monitoring technique involves the use of reporter genes driving fluorescent proteins as biological sensors of plant stress. In 2006 an initial prototype green fluorescent protein imager system was deployed at the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse located in the Canadian High Arctic. This prototype demonstrated the advantageous of this biosensor technology and underscored the challenges in collecting and managing telemetric data from exigent environments. We present here the design and deployment of a second prototype imaging system deployed within and connected to the infrastructure of the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse. This is the first imager to run autonomously for one year in the un-crewed greenhouse with command and control conducted through the greenhouse satellite control system. Images were saved locally in high resolution and sent telemetrically in low resolution. Imager hardware is described, including the custom designed LED growth light and fluorescent excitation light boards, filters, data acquisition and control system, and basic sensing and environmental control. Several critical lessons learned related to the hardware of small plant growth payloads are also elaborated.

We consider a parabolic-like systems of differential equations involving geometrical quantities to examine uniformization theorems for two-and three-dimensional closed orientable manifolds. We find that in the two-dimensional case there is a simple gauge theoretic flow for a connection built from a Riemannian structure, and that the convergence of the flow to the fixed points is consistent with the Poincare Uniformization Theorem. We construct a similar system for the three-dimensional case. Here the connection is built from a Riemannian geometry, an SO(3) connection and two other 1-form fields which take their values in the SO(3) algebra. The flat connections include the eight homogeneous geometries relevant to the three-dimensional uniformization theorem conjectured by W. Thurston. The fixed points of the flow include, besides the flat connections (and their local deformations), non-flat solutions of the Yang-Mills equations. These latter "instanton" configurations may be relevant to the fact that generic 3-manifolds do not admit one of the homogeneous geometries, but may be decomposed into "simple 3-manifolds" which do.

The Kuchař canonical transformation for vacuum geometrodynamics in the presence of cylindrical symmetry is applied to a general non-vacuum case. The resulting constraints are highly nonlinear and non-local in the momenta conjugate to the Kuchař embedding variables. However, it is demonstrated that the constraints can be solved for these momenta and thus the dynamics of cylindrically symmetric models can be cast in a form suitable for the construction of a hypertime functional Schrödinger equation.

Introduction:Rapid innovations and improvements in communication technologies have opened many new channels for health education and delivery, as well as disaster management. Theme 2 examined the role and applicability of these technologies to Disaster Medicine and Management and the various issues involved in their use.Methods:Details of the methods used are provided in the introductory paper. The chairs moderated all presentations and produced a summary that was presented to an assembly of all of the delegates. The chairs then presided over a workshop that resulted in the generation of a set Action Plans that then were reported to the collective group of all delegates.Results:Main points developed during the presentations and discussion included harnessing convergence, seeking interoperability, building partnerships and making it appropriate. This group identified four Principles of Action underlying its plan: (1) investigate possibilities, (2) identify stake-holders, (3) invite participation, and (4) involve discussants in activities.Discussion:Action plans were categorized into three areas that included “thinking globally, acting regionally”, forming a telehealth advisory group, and increasing corporate partnerships.Conclusions:Technology is opening many opportunities that have applications in disaster management. To optimize benefits, goals and standards must be agreed upon and implemented.

No abstract