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The Anderson-Hynes technique has been the treatment of choice for primary ureteropelvic junction obstruction in children. Laparoscopic approach has shown similar outcomes to open, with advantages of shorter hospital stay and less pain. We reviewed the experience of 11 geographically diverse, tertiary pediatric urology institutions focusing on the outcomes and complications of laparoscopic pyeloplasty.A descriptive, retrospective study was conducted evaluating patients undergoing Anderson-Hynes dismembered laparoscopic pyeloplasty. Centers from four different continents participated. Demographic data, perioperative management, results, and complications are described.Over a 9-year period, 744 laparoscopic pyeloplasties were performed in 743 patients. Mean follow-up was 31 months (6-120m). Mean age at surgery was 82 months (1 w-19 y). Median operative time was 177 min. An internal stent was placed in 648 patients (87%). A catheter was placed for bladder drainage in 702 patients (94%). Conversion to open pyeloplasty was necessary in seven patients. Average length of hospital stay was 2.8 days. Mean time of analgesic requirement was 3.2 days. Complications, according to Clavien-Dindo classification, were observed in 56 patients (7.5%); 10 (1%) were Clavien-Dindo IIIb. Treatment failure occurred in 35 cases with 30 requiring redo pyeloplasty (4%) and 5 cases requiring nephrectomy (0.6%).We have described the laparoscopic pyeloplasty experience of institutions with diverse cultural and economic backgrounds. They had very similar outcomes, in agreement with previously published data. Based on these findings, we conclude that laparoscopic pyeloplasty is safe and successful in diverse geographics areas of the world.

We introduce a new software package for modeling the point-spread function (PSF) of astronomical images, called Piff (PSFs In the Full FOV), which we apply to the first three years (known as Y3) of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) data. We describe the relevant details about the algorithms used by Piff to model the PSF, including how the PSF model varies across the field of view (FOV). Diagnostic results show that the systematic errors from the PSF modeling are very small over the range of scales that are important for the DES Y3 weak lensing analysis. In particular, the systematic errors from the PSF modeling are significantly smaller than the corresponding results from the DES year one (Y1) analysis. We also briefly describe some planned improvements to Piff that we expect to further reduce the modeling errors in future analyses., Comment: 19 pages, accepted/published by MNRAS. See https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/des-year-3-cosmology-results-papers/ for the full DES Y3 cosmology release

This paper evaluates the technical and economic performance, as well as the direct/indirect CO2 emissions of the CO2 Purification Unit (CPU) for cement plants equipped with oxyfuel-based CO2 capture. Two configurations, targeting two different outlet CO2 specifications (‘moderate’ 95% purity and ‘high’ 99.9% purity) are designed, modelled and optimized in order to minimize the incremental clinker production cost for different values of the carbon tax. Mass and energy balances are simulated with Aspen Plus, while the operating conditions are numerically optimized with Matlab. Results show that moderate purity can be achieved with an increased cost of clinker of 16.3 €/tclk (CO2 recovery 99.3%), while the base high purity configuration leads to a 19.3 €/tclk increase (CO2 recovery 96.1%). Sensitivity analyses are carried out on design parameters (fuel and air infiltrations in the oxyfuel calciner line) and exogenous factors (carbon tax, CO2 intensity of electricity). Air infiltration rate has the highest impact on the incremental cost of clinker (increased by 25% when air leakage grows from 0 to 10%) and on the selection of optimal operational conditions. Off-design analyses aimed at assessing the impact of air infiltration changing over time highlight the relevance of designing the CPU for the scenario with air infiltrations, while selecting reasonable temperature differences (e.g. 5K) to avoid operability issues in the cold box heat exchanger. For the base case CPU, the cost of clinker increases by 3 €/tclk when moving from zero to 10% air infiltration

Aim: Verify the presence of inorganic nanoparticle entities in brain tissue samples from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)/sudden intrauterine unexplained death syndrome (SIUDS) cases. The presence of inorganic debris could be a cofactor that compromises proper brain tissue functionality. Materials & methods: A novel autopsy approach that consists of neuropathological analysis procedures combined with energy dispersive spectroscopy/field emission gun environmental scanning electron microscopy investigations was implemented on 10 SIDS/SIUDS cases, whereas control samples were obtained from 10 cases of fetal/infant death from known cause. Results: Developmental abnormalities of the brain were associated with the presence of foreign bodies. Although nanoparticles were present as well in control samples, they were not associated with histological brain anomalies, as was the case in SIDS/SIUDS. Conclusion: Inorganic particles present in brain tissues demonstrate their ability to cross the hemato–encephalic barrier and to interact with tissues and cells in an unknown yet pathological fashion. This gives a rationale to consider them as cofactors of lethality.

DES Collaboration: N. MacCrann et al., As the statistical power of galaxy weak lensing reaches per cent level precision, large, realistic, and robust simulations are required to calibrate observational systematics, especially given the increased importance of object blending as survey depths increase. To capture the coupled effects of blending in both shear and photometric redshift calibration, we define the effective redshift distribution for lensing, nγ(z), and describe how to estimate it using image simulations. We use an extensive suite of tailored image simulations to characterize the performance of the shear estimation pipeline applied to the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3 data set. We describe the multiband, multi-epoch simulations, and demonstrate their high level of realism through comparisons to the real DES data. We isolate the effects that generate shear calibration biases by running variations on our fiducial simulation, and find that blending-related effects are the dominant contribution to the mean multiplicative bias of approximately −2 per cent ⁠. By generating simulations with input shear signals that vary with redshift, we calibrate biases in our estimation of the effective redshift distribution, and demonstrate the importance of this approach when blending is present. We provide corrected effective redshift distributions that incorporate statistical and systematic uncertainties, ready for use in DES Year 3 weak lensing analyses., Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, NFS’s NOIRLab, the University of Nottingham, The Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory at NSF’s NOIRLab (NOIRLab Prop. ID 2012B-0001; PI: J. Frieman), which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. NM acknowledges support from a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 851274). MRB is supported by DOE grant DE-AC02-06CH11357. This work was supported by the Department of Energy, Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515 and as part of the Panofsky Fellowship awarded to DG. MJ is partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy grant DE-SC0007901 and funds from the University of Pennsylvania. AC acknowledges support from NASA grant 15-WFIRST15-0008. RR, IH, and SB acknowledge support from the European Research Council in the form of a Consolidator Grant with number 681431. IH also acknowledges support from the Beecroft Trust. We gratefully acknowledge the computing resources provided on Bebop, a high-performance computing cluster operated by the Laboratory Computing Resource Center at Argonne National Laboratory, and the RHIC Atlas Computing Facility, operated by Brookhaven National Laboratory. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

We perform a cosmic shear analysis in harmonic space using the first year of data collected by the Dark Energy Survey (DES-Y1). We measure the cosmic weak lensing shear power spectra using the Metacalibration catalogue and perform a likelihood analysis within the framework of CosmoSIS. We set scale cuts based on baryonic effects contamination and model redshift and shear calibration uncertainties as well as intrinsic alignments. We adopt as fiducial covariance matrix an analytical computation accounting for the mask geometry in the Gaussian term, including non-Gaussian contributions. A suite of 1200 lognormal simulations is used to validate the harmonic space pipeline and the covariance matrix. We perform a series of stress tests to gauge the robustness of the harmonic space analysis. Finally, we use the DES-Y1 pipeline in configuration space to perform a similar likelihood analysis and compare both results, demonstrating their compatibility in estimating the cosmological parameters $S_8$, $\sigma_8$ and $\Omega_m$. The methods implemented and validated in this paper will allow us to perform a consistent harmonic space analysis in the upcoming DES data., Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures. This version matches the published one

DES collaboration: et al., The DMASS sample is a photometric sample from the DES Year 1 data set designed to replicate the properties of the CMASS sample from BOSS, in support of a joint analysis of DES and BOSS beyond the small overlapping area. In this paper, we present the measurement of galaxy–galaxy lensing using the DMASS sample as gravitational lenses in the DES Y1 imaging data. We test a number of potential systematics that can bias the galaxy–galaxy lensing signal, including those from shear estimation, photometric redshifts, and observing conditions. After careful systematic tests, we obtain a highly significant detection of the galaxy–galaxy lensing signal, with total S/N = 25.7. With the measured signal, we assess the feasibility of using DMASS as gravitational lenses equivalent to CMASS, by estimating the galaxy-matter cross-correlation coefficient rcc. By jointly fitting the galaxy–galaxy lensing measurement with the galaxy clustering measurement from CMASS, we obtain rcc=1.09+0.12−0.11 for the scale cut of 4h−1Mpc and rcc=1.06+0.13−0.12 for 12h−1Mpc in fixed cosmology. By adding the angular galaxy clustering of DMASS, we obtain rcc = 1.06 ± 0.10 for the scale cut of 4h−1Mpc and rcc = 1.03 ± 0.11 for 12h−1Mpc⁠. The resulting values of rcc indicate that the lensing signal of DMASS is statistically consistent with the one that would have been measured if CMASS had populated the DES region within the given statistical uncertainty. The measurement of galaxy–galaxy lensing presented in this paper will serve as part of the data vector for the forthcoming cosmology analysis in preparation., AC acknowledges support from NASA grant 15-WFIRST15-0008. During the preparation of this paper, C.H. was supported by the Simons Foundation, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, NFS’s NOIRLab, the University of Nottingham, The Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory at NSF’s NOIRLab (NOIRLab Prop. ID 2012B-0001; PI: J. Frieman), which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org/. SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University. This work used resources at the Owens Cluster at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC 1987) and the Duke Compute Cluster (DCC) at Duke University.

Despite the crucial roles of lipids in metabolism, we are still at the early stages of comprehensively annotating lipid species and their genetic basis. Mass spectrometry-based discovery lipidomics offers the potential to globally survey lipids and their relative abundances in various biological samples. To discover the genetics of lipid features obtained through high-resolution liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, we analysed liver and plasma from 384 diversity outbred mice, and quantified 3,283 molecular features. These features were mapped to 5,622 lipid quantitative trait loci and compiled into a public web resource termed LipidGenie. The data are cross-referenced to the human genome and offer a bridge between genetic associations in humans and mice. Harnessing this resource, we used genome-lipid association data as an additional aid to identify a number of lipids, for example gangliosides through their association with B4galnt1, and found evidence for a group of sex-specific phosphatidylcholines through their shared locus. Finally, LipidGenie's ability to query either mass or gene-centric terms suggests acyl-chain-specific functions for proteins of the ABHD family.

We present a simulated cosmology analysis using the second and third moments of the weak lensing mass (convergence) maps. The second moment, or variances, of the convergence as a function of smoothing scale contains information similar to standard shear two-point statistics. The third moment, or the skewness, contains additional non-Gaussian information. The analysis is geared towards the third year (Y3) data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), but the methodology can be applied to other weak lensing data sets. We present the formalism for obtaining the convergence maps from the measured shear and for obtaining the second and third moments of these maps given partial sky coverage. We estimate the covariance matrix from a large suite of numerical simulations. We test our pipeline through a simulated likelihood analyses varying 5 cosmological parameters and 10 nuisance parameters and identify the scales where systematic or modelling uncertainties are not expected to affect the cosmological analysis. Our simulated likelihood analysis shows that the combination of second and third moments provides a 1.5 per cent constraint on S8 σ8(ωm/0.3)0.5 for DES Year 3 data. This is 20 per cent better than an analysis using a simulated DES Y3 shear two-point statistics, owing to the non-Gaussian information captured by the inclusion of higher order statistics. This paper validates our methodology for constraining cosmology with DES Year 3 data, which will be presented in a subsequent paper., Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundac¸ao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo ˜ a Pesquisa do ` Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient´ıfico e Tecnologico and the Minist ´ erio da Ci ´ encia, Tecnologia ˆ e Inovac¸ao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collabo- ˜ rating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y ´ Tecnologicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College ´ London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Z ¨ urich, Fermi ¨ National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, the Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the ` Institut de F´ısica d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat M¨ unchen, and the ¨ associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2015- 71825, ESP2015-66861, FPA2015-68048, SEV-2016-0588, SEV2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union 7th Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciencia e Tecnologia (INCT) e-Universe (CNPq grant ˆ 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics.

The molecular bases of how host genetic variation impact gut microbiome remain largely unknown. Here, we used a genetically diverse mouse population and systems genetics strategies to identify interactions between molecular phenotypes, including microbial functions, intestinal transcripts and cecal lipids that influence microbe-host dynamics. Quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis identified genomic regions associated with variations in bacterial taxa, bacterial functions, including motility, sporulation and lipopolysaccharide production, and levels of bacterial- and host-derived lipids. We found overlapping QTL for the abundance of Akkermansia muciniphila and cecal levels of ornithine lipids (OL). Follow-up studies revealed that A. muciniphila is a major source of these lipids in the gut, provided evidence that OL have immunomodulatory effects and identified intestinal transcripts co-regulated with these traits. Collectively, these results suggest that OL are key players in A. muciniphila-host interactions and support the role of host genetics as a determinant of responses to gut microbes.

Background Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the seventh most common neoplasm in high-income countries. New clinical pathways have been developed to deal with this tumor, which include costly drugs that pose an economic threat to the sustainability of healthcare services. This study provides an estimate of the direct costs of care for patients with RCC by stage of disease (early vs advanced) at diagnosis, and disease management phase along the pathway recommended by local and international guidelines. Methods Considering the clinical pathway for RCC adopted in the Veneto region (north-east Italy) and the latest guidelines, we developed a very detailed “whole-disease” model that covers the probabilities of all potentially necessary diagnostic and therapeutic action involved in the management of RCC. Based on the cost of each procedure according to the Veneto Regional Authority's official reimbursement tariffs, we estimated the total and average per-patient costs by stage of disease (early or advanced) and phase of its management. Results In the first year after diagnosis, the mean expected cost of a patient with RCC is €12,991 if it is localized or locally-advanced, and reaches €40,586 if it is advanced. For early disease, the main cost is incurred by surgery, whereas medical therapy (first and second line) and supportive care become increasingly important for metastatic disease. Conclusions It is crucially important to examine the direct costs of care for RCC, and to predict the burden on healthcare services of new oncological therapies and treatments, as the findings could be useful for policy-makers planning the allocation of resources. Key messages An estimation of the direct costs of renal cell carcinoma, and in general for cancer, appears fundamental to predict the burden of new oncological therapies and treatments on healthcare services. Our model could represent a useful tool for policy-makers in the optimization of resources allocation, especially in a time of budget constraints.

A small-scale 10 ton per day methanol (MeOH) synthesis plant, from CO2 and hydrogen, is designed and simulated with Aspen Plus and a techno-economic analysis is conducted. The e-fuel (MeOH) is produced in a conventional fixed bed reactor featuring an innovative Cu/Zn/Al/Zr catalyst, converting biogenic CO2 from a biogas upgrading plant with H2 produced by a grid powered PEM electrolyzer. The process is thermally autonomous as a result of heat integration and combustion of purged unconverted reactants. A sensitivity analysis is carried out in order to evaluate and compare the impact of the different technical (purge fraction, Gas Hourly Space Velocity and Pressure of the methanol synthesis) and economic parameters (Capital Charge Factor, electricity and H2 cost) on the Levelized Cost Of Methanol (LCOM). Results show that, although the energy efficiency is greater (47.4 % electricity to methanol conversion) in the scenario with “self-sufficiency” in which all the net heat required by the process is provided by off-gas streams, the case with the highest profitability is the one with maximum methanol yield and, therefore, minimum purge and non-zero thermal energy import (provided by a biogas boiler). The best case scenario features a LCOM equal to 1,361 €/tonMeOH, with a GHSV of 7,500 h−1 and synthesis reactor operating at 70 bar, 250 °C. H2 production cost is the key variable and shall be reduced from the base case value of 5.8 €/kgH2 to 1.6 €/kgH2 in order to make the CO2 to methanol plant competitive with a MeOH market price of 550 €/tonMeOH; synthesis reactor operating conditions have more limited impact from a cost perspective, except for the purge fraction that shall be optimized to maximize the amount of MeOH produced.

This paper presents new experimental results for the Vapor – Liquid Equilibria of binary mixtures of R1234yf and propane at 277 and 313 K. The newly collected data are then used, in combination with other existing data retrieved from the literature, to calibrate the Peng-Robinson Equation of State with suitable accuracy for domestic vapour compression heat pump cycles simulations. After calibration, the Equation of State is applied to numerical simulations, in Aspen Plus, aimed at finding the optimal refrigerant composition, among ternary mixtures containing R1234yf, propane and R32. Results identify a Pareto curve where the optimal mixtures (with flammability lower or equal to A2L and GWP < 500) are represented in terms of two contrasting objectives: COP and the volumetric heating effect. Ternary mixtures containing propane and R1234yf respectively in the range 0÷12%mass and 18÷30%mass are Pareto optimal: the mixture with the best COP (2.7% lower than R410A one) is the binary pair R32 = 70% + R1234yf = 30%, a composition very close to the one of the commercial refrigerant R454B. On the other hand, the mixture with the largest volumetric effect (6.5% higher than R410A one) is the ternary blend R32 = 70% + R1234yf = 18% + propane = 12%. This study confirms that is quite challenging to find R410A replacements featuring at the same time reasonable heating capacity and a COP not lower than R410A one.

BackgroundData on the relationship between peritoneal dialysis (PD), BMD and aortic calcifications (AOC) are lacking.Objectivesto study the relationship between the degree of AOC and DXA and Radiofrequency Echographic Multi-Spectrometry (REMS) acquisitions.MethodsConsecutive patients referring to the PD our clinic were enrolled. Lumbar spine (LS) and proximal femur REMS scans were performed, and LS (anteroposterior and laterolateral) and proximal femur DXA scans were performed as well. The degree of AOC was assessed through the semiquantitative score described by Kauppila et al, and applied to the laterolateral LS DXA scans. To test for correlations between different variables, we used the Pearson’s correlation for continuous variables and Spearman’s rho for discrete variables. Multiple regression analysis was performed to adjust for age and body mass index (BMI) the correlation between BMD and the CKD duration. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants (protocol 1483CESC).Results41 total patients were enrolled (29 males, 19 females). Median disease duration of CKD [IQR]: 132 months [48-140]. 15% had vertebral fractures at the DXA Vertebral Fracture Assessment (VFA). The median calcification score [IQR] was 2 [0-6] (min-max 0-20).We found a statistically significant positive correlation of moderate strength between the total calcification score and the difference between the DXA AP T-score and the DXA LL T-score at the LS (pFigure 1.scatter plot reporting the relationship between the difference between the AP and LL T-scores and the aortic calcifications score.After adjustment for confounders, we found a significant negative between the LS and femoral neck BMD measured through REMS and CKD duration (Table 1). The same correlation was not significant then BMD was assessed with DXA.Table 1.multiple linear regression analysis for REMS T-score at each site after adjustment for age and BMI. BMI, body mass index; β, standardised coefficient.REMS lumbar spine T-scoreβpCKD duration (months)-0.2280.035Age (years)-0.511BMI (kg/m2)0.566REMS femoral neck T-scoreβpCKD duration (months)-0.2100.04Age (years)-0.612BMI (kg/m2)0.484REMS total hip T-scoreβpCKD duration (months)-0.1530.219Age (years)-0.523BMI (kg/m2)0.560ConclusionOur study confirmed that the overestimation of DXA BMD assessed with the anteroposterior scan is indeed influenced by AOC. Furthermore, our data suggest that REMS might be an interesting tool for the investigation of bone changes in CKD.Disclosure of InterestsAngelo Fassio: None declared, Stefano Andreola: None declared, Davide Gatti Speakers bureau: Amgen, Celgene Eli-Lilly, MSD-Italia, Organon, UCB, Paid instructor for: Amgen, Celgene Eli-Lilly, MSD-Italia, Organon, UCB, Matteo Gatti: None declared, Giovanni Gambaro Speakers bureau: Vitor Pharma, Ombretta Viapiana: None declared, Valeri Messina: None declared, Giulia Zanetti: None declared, Francesca Pistillo: None declared, Maurizio Rossini Speakers bureau: Abiogen, Amgen, Abbvie, BMS, Celgene, Eli-Lilly, Galapagos, Grunenthal, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi, Sandoz, Theramex, UCB., Giovanni Adami: None declared

BackgroundA strong predictor for the development of alcohol use disorders (AUDs) is altered sensitivity to the intoxicating effects of alcohol. Individual differences in the initial sensitivity to alcohol are controlled in part by genetic factors. Mice offer a powerful tool for elucidating the genetic basis of behavioral and physiological traits relevant to AUDs; but conventional experimental crosses have only been able to identify large chromosomal regions rather than specific genes. Genetically diverse, highly recombinant mouse populations allow for the opportunity to observe a wider range of phenotypic variation, offer greater mapping precision, and thus increase the potential for efficient gene identification.MethodsWe have taken advantage of the Diversity Outbred (DO) mouse population to identify and precisely map quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with ethanol sensitivity. We phenotyped 798 male J:DO mice for three measures of ethanol sensitivity: ataxia, hypothermia, and loss of the righting response. We used high density MEGAMuga and GIGAMuga arrays to obtain genotypes ranging from 77,808 – 143,259 SNPs. In addition, we performed RNA sequencing in striatum to map expression QTLs and to identify gene expression-trait correlations.ResultsWe then applied a systems genetic strategy to identify narrow QTLs and construct the network of correlations that exist between DNA sequence, gene expression values and ethanol-related phenotypes to prioritize our list of positional candidate genes.ConclusionsOur results can be used to identify alleles that contribute to AUDs in humans, elucidate causative biological mechanisms, or assist in the development of novel therapeutic interventions.

Malone antegrade continence enemas (MACE) provide a conduit in which the patient can achieve improved continence, be clean of stool, and gain independence in maintaining bowel function. The Mini-ACE® is a low-profile balloon button that is used to facilitate the administration of antegrade enemas. We sought to describe our practice and short-term outcomes.This work is a retrospective review of the Mini-ACE® appendicostomy button from April 2019 to March 2021, with follow-up concluding in October 2021. Patient demographics, colorectal diagnoses, and outcomes were examined.Forty-three patients underwent Mini-ACE® placement; 22 (51%) were male. The average age at Mini-ACE® insertion was 9.2 years (range 3-20 years). The most common diagnoses were functional constipation in 19 (44%), anorectal malformation in 15 (35%), and Hirschsprung disease in 3 (7%), spinal differences 3 (7%). There were no intra-operative complications, but 5 (12%) required prolapse resection. The median length of stay was two days (IQR 1, 4). Patients achieved self-catheterization at 4.5 [3,7] months from MACE creation, with 38 children (88%) reporting excellent success in remaining clean of stool.The Mini-ACE® appears to be a safe and low-profile option for antegrade continence enema access. Further research is needed directly comparing complications and patient satisfaction rates between different MACE devices and overall quality of life.Level IV.

Objectives: Evaluate clinical outcome, recurrence, morbidity, and cost associated with laparoscopic surgical ligation versus percutaneous embolization of adolescent varicocele. We hypothesize that ...

Lemos, P. et al., Quantifying tensions – inconsistencies amongst measurements of cosmological parameters by different experiments – has emerged as a crucial part of modern cosmological data analysis. Statistically significant tensions between two experiments or cosmological probes may indicate new physics extending beyond the standard cosmological model and need to be promptly identified. We apply several tension estimators proposed in the literature to the dark energy survey (DES) large-scale structure measurement and Planck cosmic microwave background data. We first evaluate the responsiveness of these metrics to an input tension artificially introduced between the two, using synthetic DES data. We then apply the metrics to the comparison of Planck and actual DES Year 1 data. We find that the parameter differences, Eigentension, and Suspiciousness metrics all yield similar results on both simulated and real data, while the Bayes ratio is inconsistent with the rest due to its dependence on the prior volume. Using these metrics, we calculate the tension between DES Year 1 3 × 2pt and Planck, finding the surveys to be in ∼2.3σ tension under the ΔCDM paradigm. This suite of metrics provides a toolset for robustly testing tensions in the DES Year 3 data and beyond., The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the Centres de Recerca de Catalunya (CERCA) program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics.

To, C. et al. (DES Collaboration), We present the first joint analysis of cluster abundances and auto or cross-correlations of three cosmic tracer fields: galaxy density, weak gravitational lensing shear, and cluster density split by optical richness. From a joint analysis (4×2pt+N) of cluster abundances, three cluster cross-correlations, and the auto correlations of the galaxy density measured from the first year data of the Dark Energy Survey, we obtain ωm=0.305-0.038+0.055 and σ8=0.783-0.054+0.064. This result is consistent with constraints from the DES-Y1 galaxy clustering and weak lensing two-point correlation functions for the flat νΛCDM model. Consequently, we combine cluster abundances and all two-point correlations from across all three cosmic tracer fields (6×2pt+N) and find improved constraints on cosmological parameters as well as on the cluster observable-mass scaling relation. This analysis is an important advance in both optical cluster cosmology and multiprobe analyses of upcoming wide imaging surveys., This Letter has gone through internal review by the DES Collaboration. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy contract to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, under Contract No. DE-AC02- 76SF00515 (C. H., D. G., R. W.) including a Panofsky Fellowship awarded to D. G. E. K. is supported by the Department of Energy Grant No. DE-SC0020247. E. R. is supported by DOE Grants No. DE-SC0015975 and No. DE-SC0009913, and by NSF Grant No. 2009401. E. R. also acknowledges funding from the Cottrell Scholar program of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. H. W. is supported by NSF Grant No. AST-1516997. Some of the computing for this project was performed on the Sherlock cluster at Stanford. We would like to thank KIPAC, Stanford University, and the Stanford Research Computing Center for providing computational resources and support that contributed to these research results. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the DOE and NSF(USA), MEC/MICINN/ MINECO(Spain), STFC(UK), HEFCE(UK). NCSA (UIUC), KICP(U. Chicago), CCAPP(Ohio State), MIFPA(Texas A&M), CNPQ, FAPERJ, FINEP (Brazil), DFG(Germany), and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne Lab, UC Santa Cruz, University of Cambridge, CIEMAT-Madrid, University of Chicago, University College London, DES-Brazil Consortium, University of Edinburgh, ETH Zürich, Fermilab, University of Illinois, ICE (IEEC-CSIC), IFAE Barcelona, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, LMU München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, University of Michigan, NFS’s NOIRLab, University of Nottingham, Ohio State University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Lab, Stanford University, University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory at NSFs NOIRLab (NOIRLab Prop. ID 2012B-0001; PI: J. Frieman), which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES Data Management System is supported by the NSF under Grants No. AST-1138766 and No. AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under Grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018- 102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. I. F. A. E. is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC Grant Agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq Grant No. 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics.

Genetic susceptibility to type 2 diabetes is primarily due to β cell dysfunction. However, a genetic study to directly interrogate β cell function ex vivo has never been previously performed. We isolated 233,447 islets from 483 Diversity Outbred (DO) mice maintained on a Western-style diet, and measured insulin secretion in response to a variety of secretagogues. Insulin secretion from DO islets ranged greater than 1000-fold even though none of the mice were diabetic. The insulin secretory response to each secretagogue had a unique genetic architecture; some of the loci were specific for one condition, whereas others overlapped. Human loci that are syntenic to many of the insulin secretion quantitative trait loci (QTL) from mice are associated with diabetes-related SNPs in human genome-wide association studies. We report on 3 genes, Ptpn18, Hunk, and Zfp148, where the phenotype predictions from the genetic screen were fulfilled in our studies of transgenic mouse models. These 3 genes encode a nonreceptor type protein tyrosine phosphatase, a serine/threonine protein kinase, and a Krϋppel-type zinc-finger transcription factor, respectively. Our results demonstrate that genetic variation in insulin secretion that can lead to type 2 diabetes is discoverable in nondiabetic individuals.

BackgroundRadiofrequency echographic multi-spectrometry (REMS) is a novel ultrasound-based technique that has shown good reliability in the assessment of bone mineral density (BMD).ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to compare the performance of the REMS BMD assessment with dual-energy X-rays absorptiometry (DXA) in a cohort of patients affected by end-stage renal disease undergoing peritoneal dialysis (PD).MethodsConsecutive patients referring to the PD clinic of our hospital were enrolled. Lumbar spine and proximal femur REMS scans were performed, and lumbar spine (anteroposterior and laterolateral) and proximal femur DXA scans were performed as well. Clinical data were extracted from medical records. The risk assessment outputs of two fracture risk algorithms (FRAX and DeFRA), calculated upon the worst BMD obtained from either technique were compared as well. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) with post hoc analysis (Bonferroni) and a two-sided Student’s t-test were used to estimate the absolute differences between groups.Written informed consent was obtained from all participants included (protocol 1483 CESC).Results41 total patients were enrolled (Table 1). No significant differences were documented between the BMD T-scores measured through DXA or REMS at the proximal femur. At the lumbar spine, the DXA laterolateral T-score was not significantly different from that of REMS, while the DXA anteroposterior T-score was significantly higher than both the anteroposterior DXA and the REMS measurements (Figure 1, panel A and B). When either DXA or REMS was adopted, no significant difference in the fracture risk estimate was found for both algorithms (Figure 1, panel C and D).Table 1.anthropometrics, clinical and biochemical characteristics of the enrolled sample. CKD, chronic kidney disease; PTH, parathyroid hormone; ALP, alkaline phosphatase; IQR, interquartile range; VFA, vertebral fracture assessment.Sample size (M)41 (29)Age (y)Median [IQR]62 [52-73]Height (cm)Median [IQR]170 [165-176]Body weight (Kg)Median [IQR]74 [61-83]Body mass index (Kg/m2)Median [IQR]25 [22-27.8]Disease duration – CKD (months)Median [IQR]132 [48-140]Dialysis duration (months)Median [IQR]10 [3-24]S-calcium (mg/dL)Median [IQR]9.1 [8.6-9.4]S-phosphorous (mg/dL)Median [IQR]5.4 [4.6-6.4]PTH (pg/mL)Median [IQR]31.4 [22.8-46.8]25OH Vitamin D (nmol/L)Median [IQR]53 [36-72]Patients with morphometric fractures (VFA)15%Patients with femoral fractures2.4%Total n° of morphometric fractures12Figure 1.comparison of the mean T-scores (error bars represent 95%CI) measured with DXA and REMS at the lumbar spine (panel A), and at the femur (panel B). Comparison between the DeFRA DXA and REMS-derived outputs (panel C) and FRAX DXA and REMS-derived outputs (panel D) raw and after correction for TBS. DeFRA, FRAX-derived risk assessment tool; FRAX, Fracture Risk Assessment tool; AP, anteroposterior; LL, latero-lateral; TH, total hip; FN, femoral neck; TBS, trabecular bone score.ConclusionOur data showed a good agreement, in a real-life PD setting, between the DXA and REMS-derived BMDs and in the consequent fracture risk assessment obtained with the FRAX or DeFRA tools.Disclosure of InterestsAngelo Fassio: None declared, Stefano Andreola: None declared, Davide Gatti Paid instructor for: Amgen, Celgene Eli-Lilly, MSD-Italia, Organon, UCB., Consultant of: Amgen, Celgene Eli-Lilly, MSD-Italia, Organon, UCB., Matteo Gatti: None declared, Giovanni Gambaro Speakers bureau: Vifor Pharma, Maurizio Rossini Speakers bureau: Abiogen, Amgen, Abbvie, BMS, Celgene, Eli-Lilly, Galapagos, Grunenthal, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi, Sandoz, Theramex, UCB., Ombretta Viapiana: None declared, Giulia Zanetti: None declared, Francesca Pistillo: None declared, Valeri Messina: None declared, Giovanni Adami: None declared

BackgroundThe effects of cholecalciferol supplementation on the regulation of inflammatory cytokines are still unclear.ObjectivesThis is a preliminary analysis on exploratory outcomes the DIBA/11 RCT [1,2] and aimed to compare the effects on serum inflammatory cytokines of three different regimes of cholecalciferol supplementation in vitamin D-deficient subjects.MethodsWe evaluated, in healthy subjects affected by vitamin D deficiency (defined as 25OHDSerum TNFα, interleukin-6 (IL6), interleukin-17 (IL17) and interleukin-10 (IL10) were dosed at baseline, Day 28, 53, 84 and 112. This study was approved by the institutional research committee (protocol identification: DIBA/11,EudraCT Number:2017-000194-36). Supported by Abiogen Pharma, Italy).ResultsA total of 75 subjects were randomized to receive one supplementation regimen. The descriptive of the sample at baseline and relative cytokines levels at the various observation points are reported in Table 1. The absolute changes of IL6, IL17 and IL10 are depicted in Figure 1. No significant differences were found among the three groups. TNFα was undetectable at baseline and at any time point.Table 1.anthropometrics and laboratory parameters at baseline (mean values ± standard deviation)ParameterAll patients (N=75)Daily 10.000 Ui(N = 25)Weekly 50.000 Ui(n = 25)Biweekly 100.000 Ui(N = 25)p-value (ANOVA)M:F31:4412:137:1812:13NSAge (years)34.1 ± 10.230.2 ± 9.936.7 ± 8.735.4 ± 11.00.059Body Weight (kg)66.7 ± 12.465.8 ± 13.267.8 ± 10.866.6 ± 13.7NSBMI23.1 ± 2.622.55 ± 2.723.8 ± 2.222.8 ± 2.7NSBaseline 25OHD (ng/mL)13.5 ± 3.714.6 ± 3.912.8 ± 313.5 ± 4.1NSBaseline IL-6 (pg/mL)1.3 ± 1.20.9 ± 0.61.4 ± 1.61.6 ± 1.3NSBaseline IL-17 (pg/mL)0.4 ± 1.80.7 ± 30.2 ± 1.10.2 ± 0.7NSBaseline IL-10 (pg/mL)0.9 ± 0.90.8 ± 0.71.2 ± 1.20.8 ± 0.7NSFigure 1.absolute changes of IL17, IL6 and IL10. *pConclusionIn the overall cohort we found slight decreases in serum IL6 and IL17 serum levels. No differences were found among groups.References[1]Fassio A, Adami G, Rossini M, et al. Pharmacokinetics of Oral Cholecalciferol in Healthy Subjects with Vitamin D Deficiency: A Randomized Open-Label Study. Nutrients. 2020;12(6).[2]Fassio A, Gatti D, Rossini M, et al. Pharmacodynamics of Oral Cholecalciferol in Healthy Individuals with Vitamin D Deficiency: A Randomized Open-Label Study. Nutrients. 2021;13(7):2293.Disclosure of InterestsAngelo Fassio: None declared, Davide Gatti Speakers bureau: Amgen, Celgene Eli-Lilly, MSD-Italia, Organon, UCB., Paid instructor for: Amgen, Celgene Eli-Lilly, MSD-Italia, Organon, UCB., Matteo Gatti: None declared, Maurizio Rossini Speakers bureau: Abiogen, Amgen, Abbvie, BMS, Celgene, Eli-Lilly, Galapagos, Grunenthal, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi, Sandoz, Theramex, UCB., Eugenia Bertoldo: None declared, Giovanni Adami: None declared

BackgroundBiomarker discovery for pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) may be accelerated by modeling human genotypic diversity and phenotypic responses toMycobacterium tuberculosis(Mtb). To meet these objectives, we use the Diversity Outbred (DO) mouse population and apply novel classifiers to identify informative biomarkers from multidimensional data sets.MethodTo identify biomarkers, we infected DO mice with aerosolizedMtbconfirmed a human-like spectrum of phenotypes, examined gene expression, and inflammatory and immune mediators in the lungs. We measured 11 proteins in 453Mtb-infected and 29 non-infected mice. We have searched all combinations of six classification algorithms and 239 biomarker subsets and independently validated the selected classifiers. Finally, we selected two mouse lung biomarkers to test as candidate biomarkers of active TB, measuring their diagnostic performance in human sera acquired from the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics.FindingsDO mice discovered two translationally relevant biomarkers, CXCL1 and MMP8 that accurately diagnosed active TB in humans with > 90% sensitivity and specificity compared to controls. We identified them through the two classifiers that accurately diagnosed supersusceptible DO mice with early-onset TB: Logistic Regression using MMP8 as a single biomarker, and Gradient Tree Boosting using a panel of 4 biomarkers (CXCL1, CXCL2, TNF, IL-10).InterpretationThis work confirms that the DO population models human responses and can accelerate discovery of translationally relevant TB biomarkers.FundingSupport was provided by NIH R21 AI115038; NIH R01 HL145411; NIH UL1-TR001430; and the American Lung Association Biomedical Research Grant RG-349504.

Shin, T., et al., We present measurements of the radial profiles of the mass and galaxy number density around Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ)-selected clusters using both weak lensing and galaxy counts. The clusters are selected from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 5 and the galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data set. With signal-to-noise ratio of 62 (45) for galaxy (weak lensing) profiles over scales of about 0.2–20 h Mpc, these are the highest precision measurements for SZ-selected clusters to date. Because SZ selection closely approximates mass selection, these measurements enable several tests of theoretical models of the mass and light distribution around clusters. Our main findings are: (1) The splashback feature is detected at a consistent location in both the mass and galaxy profiles and its location is consistent with predictions of cold dark matter N-body simulations. (2) The full mass profile is also consistent with the simulations. (3) The shapes of the galaxy and lensing profiles are remarkably similar for our sample over the entire range of scales, from well inside the cluster halo to the quasilinear regime. We measure the dependence of the profile shapes on the galaxy sample, redshift, and cluster mass. We extend the Diemer & Kravtsov model for the cluster profiles to the linear regime using perturbation theory and show that it provides a good match to the measured profiles. We also compare the measured profiles to predictions of the standard halo model and simulations that include hydrodynamics. Applications of these results to cluster mass estimation, cosmology, and astrophysics are discussed., The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant no. 465376/2014-2).

Recent cosmic shear studies have reported discrepancies of up to $1\sigma$ on the parameter ${S_{8}=\sigma_{8}\sqrt{\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3}}$ between the analysis of shear power spectra and two-point correlation functions, derived from the same shear catalogs. It is not a priori clear whether the measured discrepancies are consistent with statistical fluctuations. In this paper, we investigate this issue in the context of the forthcoming analyses from the third year data of the Dark Energy Survey (DES-Y3). We analyze DES-Y3 mock catalogs from Gaussian simulations with a fast and accurate importance sampling pipeline. We show that the methodology for determining matching scale cuts in harmonic and real space is the key factor that contributes to the scatter between constraints derived from the two statistics. We compare the published scales cuts of the KiDS, Subaru-HSC and DES surveys, and find that the correlation coefficients of posterior means range from over 80% for our proposed cuts, down to 10% for cuts used in the literature. We then study the interaction between scale cuts and systematic uncertainties arising from multiple sources: non-linear power spectrum, baryonic feedback, intrinsic alignments, uncertainties in the point-spread function, and redshift distributions. We find that, given DES-Y3 characteristics and proposed cuts, these uncertainties affect the two statistics similarly; the differential biases are below a third of the statistical uncertainty, with the largest biases arising from intrinsic alignment and baryonic feedback. While this work is aimed at DES-Y3, the tools developed can be applied to Stage-IV surveys where statistical errors will be much smaller., Comment: Matches version accepted in MNRAS. 22 pages, 15 figures. Comments welcome!

Doux, C., et al. DES Collaboration, Beyond ΛCDM, physics or systematic errors may cause subsets of a cosmological data set to appear inconsistent when analysed assuming ΛCDM. We present an application of internal consistency tests to measurements from the Dark Energy Survey Year 1 (DES Y1) joint probes analysis. Our analysis relies on computing the posterior predictive distribution (PPD) for these data under the assumption of ΛCDM. We find that the DES Y1 data have an acceptable goodness of fit to ΛCDM, with a probability of finding a worse fit by random chance of p = 0.046. Using numerical PPD tests, supplemented by graphical checks, we show that most of the data vector appears completely consistent with expectations, although we observe a small tension between large- and small-scale measurements. A small part (roughly 1.5 per cent) of the data vector shows an unusually large departure from expectations; excluding this part of the data has negligible impact on cosmological constraints, but does significantly improve the p-value to 0.10. The methodology developed here will be applied to test the consistency of DES Year 3 joint probes data sets., Based, in part, on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory at NSF’s NOIRLab (NOIRLab Prop. ID 2012B-0001; PI: J. Frieman), which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under contract no. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics.

DES Collaboration: et al., The DES-CMASS sample (DMASS) is designed to optimally combine the weak lensing measurements from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and redshift-space distortions (RSD) probed by the CMASS galaxy sample from the Baryonic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of adopting DMASS as the equivalent of CMASS for a joint analysis of DES and BOSS in the framework of modified gravity. We utilize the angular clustering of the DMASS galaxies, cosmic shear of the DES METACALIBRATION sources, and cross-correlation of the two as data vectors. By jointly fitting the combination of the data with the RSD measurements from the CMASS sample and Planck data, we obtain the constraints on modified gravity parameters μ0=−0.37+0.47−0.45 and Σ0=0.078+0.078−0.082⁠. Our constraints of modified gravity with DMASS are tighter than those with the DES Year 1 REDMAGIC sample with the same external data sets by 29 per cent for μ0 and 21 per cent for Σ0, and comparable to the published results of the DES Year 1 modified gravity analysis despite this work using fewer external data sets. This improvement is mainly because the galaxy bias parameter is shared and more tightly constrained by both CMASS and DMASS, effectively breaking the degeneracy between the galaxy bias and other cosmological parameters. Such an approach to optimally combine photometric and spectroscopic surveys using a photometric sample equivalent to a spectroscopic sample can be applied to combining future surveys having a limited overlap such as DESI and LSST., AC acknowledges support from NASA grant no. 15-WFIRST15-0008. During the preparation of this paper, C.H. was supported by the Simons Foundation, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant no. 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

Jeffrey, N., et al. DES Collaboration, We present reconstructed convergence maps, mass maps, from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) third year (Y3) weak gravitational lensing data set. The mass maps are weighted projections of the density field (primarily dark matter) in the foreground of the observed galaxies. We use four reconstruction methods, each is a maximum a posteriori estimate with a different model for the prior probability of the map: Kaiser–Squires, null B-mode prior, Gaussian prior, and a sparsity prior. All methods are implemented on the celestial sphere to accommodate the large sky coverage of the DES Y3 data. We compare the methods using realistic ΛCDM simulations with mock data that are closely matched to the DES Y3 data. We quantify the performance of the methods at the map level and then apply the reconstruction methods to the DES Y3 data, performing tests for systematic error effects. The maps are compared with optical foreground cosmic-web structures and are used to evaluate the lensing signal from cosmic-void profiles. The recovered dark matter map covers the largest sky fraction of any galaxy weak lensing map to date., The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This paper has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. NJ has been supported by funding from l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. OL and NJ acknowledge support from a European Research Council Advanced Grant TESTDE (FP7/291329) and STFC Consolidated Grants ST/M001334/1 and ST/R000476/1. AK has been supported by a Juan de la Cierva fellowship from MINECO with project number IJC2018-037730-I, and funding for this project was also available in part through SEV-2015-0548 and AYA2017-89891-P. Cosmic voids computational work has been performed on the UK SCIAMA High Performance Computing cluster supported by the ICG, SEPNet, and the University of Portsmouth.

A. Leauthaud et al., Lensing without borders is a cross-survey collaboration created to assess the consistency of galaxy–galaxy lensing signals (ΔΣ) across different data sets and to carry out end-to-end tests of systematic errors. We perform a blind comparison of the amplitude of ΔΣ using lens samples from BOSS and six independent lensing surveys. We find good agreement between empirically estimated and reported systematic errors which agree to better than 2.3σ in four lens bins and three radial ranges. For lenses with zL > 0.43 and considering statistical errors, we detect a 3–4σ correlation between lensing amplitude and survey depth. This correlation could arise from the increasing impact at higher redshift of unrecognized galaxy blends on shear calibration and imperfections in photometric redshift calibration. At zL > 0.54, amplitudes may additionally correlate with foreground stellar density. The amplitude of these trends is within survey-defined systematic error budgets that are designed to include known shear and redshift calibration uncertainty. Using a fully empirical and conservative method, we do not find evidence for large unknown systematics. Systematic errors greater than 15 per cent (25 per cent) ruled out in three lens bins at 68 per cent (95 per cent) confidence at z < 0.54. Differences with respect to predictions based on clustering are observed to be at the 20–30 per cent level. Our results therefore suggest that lensing systematics alone are unlikely to fully explain the ‘lensing is low’ effect at z < 0.54. This analysis demonstrates the power of cross-survey comparisons and provides a promising path for identifying and reducing systematics in future lensing analyses., We acknowledge use of the lux supercomputer at UC Santa Cruz, funded by NSF MRI grant AST 1828315. This material is based on work supported by the U.D Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics under Award Number DE-SC0019301. AL acknowledges support from the David and Lucille Packard foundation, and from the Alfred.P Sloan foundation. CH acknowledges support from the European Research Council under grant number 647112, and support from the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the framework of the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award endowed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. KK acknowledges support from the Royal Society and Imperial College. HH is supported by a Heisenberg grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Hi 1495/5-1), as well as an ERC Consolidator Grant (no. 770935). AHW is supported by an European Research Council Consolidator Grant (no. 770935). Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy; the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Higher Education Funding Council for England; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago; the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University; the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University; Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos; Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência; Tecnologia e Inovação; the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory; the University of California at Santa Cruz; the University of Cambridge; Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas; Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid; the University of Chicago; University College London; the DES-Brazil Consortium; the University of Edinburgh; the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Institut de Ciències de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC); the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe; the University of Michigan; NFS’s NOIRLab; the University of Nottingham; The Ohio State University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Portsmouth; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Stanford University; the University of Sussex; Texas A&M University; and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory at NSF’s NOIRLab (NOIRLab Prop. ID 2012B-0001; PI: J. Frieman), which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. The Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) collaboration includes the astronomical communities of Japan and Taiwan, and Princeton University. The HSC instrumentation and software were developed by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), the University of Tokyo, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK), the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan (ASIAA), and Princeton University. Funding was contributed by the FIRST program from the Japanese Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), the Toray Science Foundation, NAOJ, Kavli IPMU, KEK, ASIAA, and Princeton University. This paper makes use of software developed for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. We thank the LSST Project for making their code available as free software at http://dm.lsst.org This paper is based [in part] on data collected at the Subaru Telescope and retrieved from the HSC data archive system, which is operated by Subaru Telescope and Astronomy Data Center (ADC) at NAOJ. Data analysis was in part carried out with the cooperation of Center for Computational Astrophysics (CfCA), NAOJ. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant no. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Based on observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under programme IDs 177.A-3016, 177.A-3017, 177.A-3018, and 179.A-2004, and on data products produced by the KiDS consortium. The KiDS production team acknowledges support from: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, ERC, NOVA, and NWO-M grants; Target; the University of Padova, and the University Federico II (Naples). This work was supported by the Department of Energy, Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515 and as a part of the Panofsky Fellowship awarded to DG. MM is partially funded by FAPERJ, CNPq, and CONICET. BM acknowledges support from the Brazilian funding agency FAPERJ.

Multi-parent populations (MPPs), genetically segregating model systems derived from two or more inbred founder strains, are widely used in biomedical and agricultural research. Gene expression profiling by direct RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is commonly applied to MPPs to investigate gene expression regulation and to identify candidate genes. In genetically diverse populations, including most MPPs, quantification of gene expression is improved when the RNA-Seq reads are aligned to individualized transcriptomes that incorporate known polymorphic loci. However, the process of constructing and analyzing individual genomes can be computationally demanding and error prone. We propose a new approach, genome reconstruction by RNA-Seq (GBRS), that relies on simultaneous alignment of RNA-Seq reads to the founder strain transcriptomes. GBRS can reconstruct the diploid genome of each individual and quantify both total and allele-specific gene expression. We demonstrate that GBRS performs as well as methods that rely on high-density genotyping arrays to reconstruct the founder haplotype mosaic of MPP individuals. Using GBRS in addition to other genotyping methods provides quality control for detecting sample mix-ups and improves power to detect expression quantitative trait loci.GBRSsoftware is freely available athttps://github.com/churchill-lab/gbrs.