The soft X-ray pulsar RX J1856.5-3754 is the brightest member of a small class thermally-emitting, radio-silent, isolated neutron stars. Its spectrum almost indistinguishable from blackbody with $kT^\infty\approx 60$ eV, but evidence harder emission above $\sim 1$ keV has been recently found. We report on spectral and timing analysis based large amount data collected by XMM-Newton in 2002--2022...

In May–June 2017 an expedition on board RV Investigator sampled benthic communities along the lower slope and abyss of Australia’s eastern margin from off mid-Tasmania to Coral Sea. Over 200 annelids family Serpulidae collected during voyage were deposited in Australian Museum Sydney. Among them there was a new species poorly known abyssal (3754–4378 m) genus Spirodiscus. Serpulids typically bu...

CYP450AAM [arachidonic acid metabolites of the CYP450 (cytochrome P450) enzyme system] have a range of biological functions. CYP450AAM are involved in the pathogenesis of hypertension, renal function and vascular function, yet their role in stroke has not been clarified. We aimed at determining the levels of circulating CYP450 metabolites in patients with acute ischaemic stroke (<96 h) compared...

During the last couple of years astronomers and astrophysicists have been debating on the fact whether the so called ‘strange stars’ stars made up of strange quark matter, have been discovered with the candidates like SAX J1808.4−3658, 4U 1728−34, RX J1856.5−3754, etc. The main contention has been the estimation of radius of the star for an assumed mass of ∼ 1.4M⊙ and to see whether the point o...

Apparent (radiation) radius of neutron star, R∞, depends on the star gravitational mass in quite a different way than the standard coordinate radius in the Schwarzschild metric, R. We show that, for a broad set of equations of state of dense matter, the lower bound on R∞ at fixed M , R∞,min(M), resulting from the very definition of R∞, is very close to R∞(Mmax) for the configurations with maxim...

We present timing measurements, astrometry, and high-resolution spectra of a number of nearby, thermally emitting, isolated neutron stars. We use these to infer magnetic field strengths and distances, but also encounter a number of puzzles. We discuss three specific ones in detail: (i) For RX J0720.4−3125 and RX J1308.6+2127, the characteristic ages are in excess of 1 Myr, while their temperatu...

Multiwavelength observations of isolated neutron stars as a tool to probe the properties of their surfaces ABSTRACT We show that an analysis of multiwavelength observations of isolated neutron stars based on neutron star atmosphere models can be used not only to evaluate the neutron star effective temperature, but also to determine chemical composition of its surface. To demonstrate how this ne...

AIMS During the global H1N1 influenza A (swine flu) pandemic 2009-2010, swine flu vaccines were expeditiously licensed and a mass vaccination programme for high risk groups, including pregnant women, was introduced in the UK. This pilot active safety surveillance study was performed to establish the feasibility of rapidly monitoring the new swine flu vaccines in large patient numbers receiving ...

An embedding ƒ of a guest graph G, into a host graph H, is a one-to-one mapping from each node i in G to a unique node f (i) in H, andfrom each edge(i,j) in G to a path in H starting at node f (i) and ending at node f '(ƒ). The congestion of f is the maximum number of times any edge of H is used by edges of G. The minimum congestion, over all embeddings, is called the congestion of G into H, an...