Systemic infections with Nocardia species continue to be a serious threat to immunosuppressed hosts. Diagnosis of these infections can be difficult despite their known tendency for cerebral and subcutaneous involvement. We describe a patient who presented with nonspecific constitutional symptoms and was found to have subcutaneous and cerebral abscesses due to Nocardia farcinica. In addition, a ...

Actinomycetoma is a chronic granulomatous infection, with Nocardia species being one of the infecting pathogens. Infections caused by N. otitidiscaviarum are relatively rare compared with those caused by other Nocardia species. Conventional methods for the diagnosis of nocardiosis based on phenotypic characterization of the strains (e.g., morphology, histopathology) are relatively time consumin...

The conversions of vanillic acid and O-benzylvanillic acid to vanillin were examined by using whole cells and enzyme preparations of Nocardia sp. strain NRRL 5646. With growing cultures, vanillic acid was decarboxylated (69% yield) to guaiacol and reduced (11% yield) to vanillyl alcohol. In resting Nocardia cells in buffer, 4-O-benzylvanillic acid was converted to the corresponding alcohol prod...

Although ordinary chondrite (OC) meteorites dominate observed falls, the identification of near-Earth and main-belt asteroid sources has remained elusive. Telescopic measurements of 35 near-Earth asteroids ( approximately3 kilometers in diameter) revealed six that have visible wavelength spectra similar to laboratory spectra of OC meteorites. Near-Earth asteroids were found to have spectral pro...

We present simulations on the asteroid photometric data that will be provided by the PanSTARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System). The simulations were performed using realistic shape and light-scattering models, random orientation of spin axes, and rotation periods in the range 2–24 h. We show that physical models of asteroids can be reconstructed from this data with some l...

In this note we compare the frequencies of the motion of the Trojan asteroids in the Restricted Three-Body Problem (RTBP), the Elliptic Restricted Three-Body Problem (ERTBP) and the Outer Solar System (OSS) model. The RTBP and ERTBP are well-known academic models for the motion of these asteroids, and the OSS is the standard model used for realistic simulations. Our results are based on a syste...

A new type of carbonaceous chondrite, the Tagish Lake meteorite, exhibits a reflectance spectrum similar to spectra observed from the D-type asteroids, which are relatively abundant in the outer solar system beyond the main asteroid belt and have been inferred to be more primitive than any known meteorite. Until the Tagish Lake fall, these asteroids had no analog in the meteorite collections. T...

The well-investigated size-frequency distributions (SFD) for lunar craters can be used to estimate the SFD for projectiles that formed craters both on terrestrial planets and on asteroids. Our results suggest these distributions may have been relative stable over the past 4 G.y. The derived projectile SFD is found to have a shape that is similar to the SFD of main-belt asteroids as compared wit...

Infrared observations (0.8–2.5 m) of 42 asteroids in the X complex are presented. Previous studies of these asteroids and their taxonomic classes are summarized using both the Tholen and the Bus-Binzel taxonomic systems. With this study we seek to extend our compositional information about X-complex asteroids in order to refine our knowledge of the geologic structure of the asteroid regions. Ou...