The crack density within a fault's damage zone is thought to vary as seismic rupture is approached, as well as in the postseismic period. Moreover, external stress loads, seasonal or tidal, may also change the crack density in rocks, and all such processes can leave detectable signatures on seismic attenuation. Here we show that attenuation time histories from the San Andreas Fault at Parkfield are affected by seasonal loading cycles, as well as by 1.5-3-year periodic variations of creep rates, consistent with Turner et al.

Numerical resolution of two-stream kinetic models in a strong aggregative setting is considered. To illustrate our approach, we consider a one-dimensional kinetic model for chemotaxis in hydrodynamic scaling and the high field limit of the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system. A difficulty is that, in this aggregative setting, weak solutions of the limiting model blow up in finite time, and therefore the scheme should be able to handle Dirac measures.

Background: Probiotics may prevent the allergic response development due to their antiinflammatory and immunomodulatory effects. The aim of this study is to determine if the prophylactic treatment with a mixture of Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. Lactis BB12 and Enterococcus faecium L3 would reduce symptoms and need for drug use in children with allergic rhinitis (AR). Methods: The study included 250 children aged from 6 to 17 years, affected by AR. Patients were randomly assigned to the intervention group (150) or to the placebo group (100).

Phosphoinositides (PtdIns) control fundamental cell processes, and inherited defects of PtdIns kinases or phosphatases cause severe human diseases, including Lowe syndrome due to mutations in OCRL, which encodes a PtdIns(4,5)P2 5-phosphatase. Here we unveil a lysosomal response to the arrival of autophagosomal cargo in which OCRL plays a key part. We identify mitochondrial DNA and TLR9 as the cargo and the receptor that triggers and mediates, respectively, this response.

A (2+2)-dimensional kinetic equation, directly inspired by the run-and-tumble modeling of chemotaxis dynamics is studied so as to derive a both ''2D well-balanced'' and ''asymptotic-preserving'' numerical approximation. To this end, exact stationary regimes are expressed by means of Laplace transforms of Fourier-Bessel solutions of associated elliptic equations. This yields a scattering S-matrix which permits to formulate a timemarching scheme in the form of a convex combination in kinetic scaling.

We consider a one-dimensional, isentropic, hydrodynamical model for a unipolar semiconductor, with the mobility depending on the electric field. The mobility is related to the momentum relaxation time, and field-dependent mobility models are commonly used to describe the occurrence of saturation velocity, that is, a limit value for the electron mean velocity as the electric field increases. For the steady state system, we prove the existence of smooth solutions in the subsonic case, with a suitable assumption on the mobility function.

A reaction-diffusion system governing the prey-predator interaction with Allee effect on the predators, already introduced by the authors in a previous work is reconsidered with the aim of showing destabilization mechanisms of the biologically meaning equilibrium and detecting some aspects for the eventual oscillatory pattern formation. Extensive numerical simulations, depicting such complex dynamics, are shown. In order to complete the stability analysis of the coexistence equilibrium, a nonlinear stability result is shown.

We numerically study by lattice Boltzmann simulations the rheological properties of an active emulsion made of a suspension of an active polar gel embedded in an isotropic passive background. We find that the hexatic equilibrium configuration of polar droplets is highly sensitive to both active injection and external forcing and may either lead to asymmetric unidirectional states which break top-bottom symmetry or symmetric ones. In this latter case, for large enough activity, the system develops a shear thickening regime at low shear rates.

The properties of semiflexible polymers tethered by one end to an impenetrable wall and exposed to oscillatory shear flow are investigated by mesoscale simulations. A polymer, confined in two dimensions, is described by a linear bead-spring chain, and fluid interactions are incorporated by the Brownian multiparticle collision dynamics approach. At small strain, the polymers follow the applied flow field. However, at high strain, we find a strongly nonlinear response with major conformational changes.

We prove that on a smooth bounded set, the positive least energy solution of the Lane-Emden equation with sublinear power is isolated. As a corollary, we obtain that the first (Formula presented.) eigenvalue of the Dirichlet-Laplacian is not an accumulation point of the (Formula presented.) spectrum, on a smooth bounded set. Our results extend to a suitable class of Lipschitz domains, as well.