The Drosophila germ-cell lineage has emerged as a remarkable system for identifying genes required for changes in cell fate from stem cells into more specialized cells. Previous work indicates that bam expression is necessary for cystoblast differentiation; bam mutant germ cells fail to differentiate, but instead proliferate like stem cells. This paper reports that ectopic expression of bam is ...

Bag of Marbles (Bam) is a stem cell differentiation factor in the Drosophila germ line. Here, we demonstrate that Bam has a crucial function in the lymph gland, the tissue that orchestrates the second phase of Drosophila hematopoiesis. In bam mutant larvae, depletion of hematopoietic progenitors is observed, coupled with prodigious production of differentiated hemocytes. Conversely, forced expr...

Bag of Marbles (Bam) is known to function as a positive regulator of hematopoietic progenitor maintenance in the lymph gland blood cell-forming organ during Drosophila hematopoiesis. Here, we demonstrate a key function for Bam in cells of the lymph gland posterior signaling center (PSC), a cellular domain proven to function as a hematopoietic niche. Bam is expressed in PSC cells, and gene loss-...

The feasibility to develop a rapid urban seismic damage detection procedure utilizing satellite radar imagery is investigated. In direct observation of city-wide building loss, remote sensing damage detection techniques have shown merits in rapid damage detection in urban areas. Remote sensing technology has the capability of extracting buildings in urban scenes. Comparing “before” and “after” ...

After an earthquake, the image-based interpretation methods are powerful tools for detection and classification of damaged buildings. A method based on two kinds of image-extracted features comparing stereo pairs of aerial images before and after an earthquake is presented. Comparing preand post event DSMs generated from stereo images could be a solution for detecting the extent of demolished a...

The Rsamtools package provides an interface to BAM files. BAM files are produced by samtools and other software, and represent a flexible format for storing ‘short’ reads aligned to reference genomes. BAM files typically contain sequence and base qualities, and alignment coordinates and quality measures. BAM files are appealing for several reasons. The format is flexible enough to represent rea...

A direct adaptive neurocontroller is proposed to reduce structure response to earth vibrations by actively creating an equal but opposite force to that of the first mode force of the structure. While earthquake forces are generally considered to be unpredictable, the short-term predictions by the proposed neurocontrol architecture significantly reduce structure vibrations. To demonstrate its ge...

On 8th October 2005 an Earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale struck Azad Jammu and Kashmir and the Northern Areas of Pakistan. The psychosocial consequences were in no way less than the massive loss of lives and property and the physical injuries and maladies that followed the disaster. A large number of health carers from across the country and around the world converged to undertake t...