Isotope variations in white-tailed kites from various habitats in California: possible limitations in assessing prey utilization and population dynamics

White-tailed kite (Elanus leucurus) populations in the 1930s were close to extirpation in the United States. But by the 1940s, an upward trend towards recovery was apparent and continued to their current stable population levels. These dramatic fluctuations in kite numbers may have been related to changes in rodent prey populations due to the conversion of native habitats to agriculture. To address this question, we evaluated the use of stable isotope analysis in determining if a shift in diet could be isotopically differentiated in current and historic kite populations. We first compared delta13C, delta15N, and delta34S values from present-day kite flight feathers and prey fur samples from four locations in California. The total ranges of isotope values for kite and their rodent prey were similar within each site. Carbon isotope values ranged from -27.1 to -22.2 per thousand in Arcata, -26.1 to -16.9 per thousand in Davis, -27.0 to -15.0 per thousand in Cosumnes, and -28.2 to -11.6 per thousand in Santa Barbara. Nitrogen isotope values ranged from 3.2 to 15.7 per thousand in Arcata, 2.8 to 12.7 per thousand in Davis, 4.0 to 15.7 per thousand in Cosumnes, and 1.7 to 20.0 per thousand in Santa Barbara. Sulfur isotope values ranged from -7.8 to 12.4 per thousand in Arcata, -1.1 to 9.2 per thousand in Davis, 0.7 to 10.9 per thousand in Cosumnes, and -8.6 to 15.6 per thousand in Santa Barbara. Carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotope values at each site reflect typical trophic enrichments due to physiological processes. At each site, delta13C and delta15N values reflected the influence of a predominantly C3 or a mixed C3/C4 plant community. Sulfur isotope values reflect the influence of predominant marine or terrestrial sulfur sources at each site. However, variability in isotope values may limit the usefulness of such analyses for addressing prey utilization and population dynamics.     

Thermodynamic phase noise in fibre interferometers

Phase noise due to thermodynamic fluctuations in the optical path length is evaluated in this paper for basic fibre interferometers. In Mach-Zehnder and Michelson interferometers, where the temperature phase fluctuation (TPF) is that intrinsic to the fibre, this noise has been reported to be comparable to shot noise and a possible limit to sensor sensitivity in practical cases. We show that in Sagnac interferometers, used in fibre gyro and in Faraday current sensors, the TPF noise is decreased with respect to that intrinsic to the fiber because propagation in the same optical path leads to a correlation of the phase fluctuations. In addition, we show that in Fabry-Perot and ring resonators, as multiple reflections increase the effective path length, TPF noise is enhanced and can be dominant over shot noise even for moderate fibre lengths.     

Growing Partnership Asia-Oceania: Initiative by AOFSRR

No matter the location, it is particularly important to achieve sustainable and efficient access to a synchrotron radiation (SR) facility in order for there to be rapid progress in science and technology. Asia-Oceania is now a vibrant and thriving area in terms of making feasible a broad expansion of access to SR facility services and laying the foundation for more competitive industrial science and future economic growth to which SR science can contribute. Recently, SR facilities have started to pop up, one after another, in the Asia-Oceania region. To enhance global cooperation for SR research in this region, the AOFSRR (Asia-Oceania Forum for Synchrotron Radiation Research) was established by Australia, China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Japan in 2006. The objective of the AOFSRR is to organize a general framework of collaboration for the development of science and technology of mutual benefit to advancing the research goals and promoting comprehensive cooperation in synchrotron radiation research in the Asia-Oceania region.     

Sono-oxidative desulfurization of fuels using heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysts: A comprehensive review

Recently, environmental pollution has increased significantly due to petroleum-based fuels widely used in vehicles. This environmental pollution is mainly due to the acidic SO₂ gas generated by the combustion of fuels and emitted into the atmosphere. SO₂ gas causes not only acid rain but also corrosion of metal parts of engines in vehicles. In addition, it functions as a catalyst poison in catalytic converters in exhaust system. Due to these damages, strict regulations have been introduced to reduce the amount of sulfur in fuels. As of 2005, the permissible amount of sulfur in diesel fuels in Europe and America has been limited to 10 and 15 ppm by weight, respectively.Due to the decreasing oil reserves in the world, high viscosity petroleums containing high sulfur and heavier fractions (i.e., low-quality oils) are increasing, thus making desulfurization difficult and leading to high costly process. Since time and economic loss are very important today, these two terms have to be reduced to a minimum. Recently, ultrasound wave in ODS shown as an alternative to HDS is utilized to further increase desulfurization in shorter times. Ultrasound wave locally creates high temperatures and high pressures (hot-spot theory) in liquid, causing the desulfurization reaction to accelerate further.In this review, the advantages and difficulties of oxidative desulfurization, the economics of ultrasound-assisted oxidative desulfurization are summarized and recommendations for improving the process are presented.     

Quantitative evaluation of the lung cancer deaths attributable to residential radon: A simple method and results for all the 21 Italian Regions

Pooled analyses of epidemiological case--control studies on lung cancer and residential radon have shown that radon exposure in dwellings increases lung cancer risk, and that the increase is statistically significant also for prolonged exposures to low-medium level of radon concentration, i.e. levels commonly found in many dwellings. In this paper, a simple method to evaluate the health burden due to the presence of radon in homes (i.e. the number of lung cancer deaths attributable to radon exposure in dwellings) was presented. This method is based on the following parameters: i) the excess relative risk per unit of exposure evaluated in case-control studies; ii) the average radon concentration that can be considered representative of population exposure in dwellings; iii) the total number of lung cancer deaths occurring each year. Moreover, the interaction between radon and cigarette smoking is needed to be taken into account: in fact, although most of the persons are non-smokers, most of the lung cancer deaths attributed to radon are actually due to the multiplicative effect of radon and cigarette smoking. To show this effect, the number of radon related lung cancer deaths estimated to occur among current, former and never smokers was calculated separately for males and females, taking into account the relative risk of lung cancer for the different smoking categories and the prevalence of smoking habits. The methodology described in this work was applied to all the 21 Italian Regions in order to illustrate it. The overall fraction of lung cancer deaths attributable to radon in Italy is about 10%, with values in individual Regions ranging from 4% to 16%. The greater part of the lung cancers attributable to radon is estimated to occur among current smokers for both males and females (72% and 60%, respectively, at national level). This is due to the synergistic effects of radon and cigarette smoking, which should therefore be taken into account in policies aimed to reduce the health burden from radon.     

Surface modification of silicon with single ion irradiation

In order to solve the issues in Si nanoelectronics such as fluctuation in the device functions and poor reliability of devices due to relative increase in mass transport in nm size structures and to yield novel functions by rather taking advantage of the nm size, we need to understand the phenomena peculiar to nm size structures. Based on the fact that a practical method to fabricate nm structures in terms of throughput, process time, and cost is to combine modification of solid surfaces with energetic particles (especially with single ions) and subsequent chemical processing in solutions, we describe single ion irradiation effects as a tool to modify solid surfaces in nm scale, a method for nm scale in-situ observation of solid surfaces, and some examples of the acquired knowledge.     

一种新时域交替隐式差分算法在散射问题中的应用

提出一种新时域交替隐式有限差分(ADI-FDTD)算法格式. 传统ADI-FDTD算法的 场量步进方程涉及周围若干网格的较多场量，导致两个区域的步进方程处理较困难：一个是 邻近完全匹配层(PML)和散射场交界区，另一个是邻近连接边界区. 特别是后者，考虑入射 波影响需对场量所在区域判断，根据不同情况对原有方程进行修正，一维和二维散射问题 相对简单，可三维问题修正式有数十种之多而几乎无法完成. 本方法基于分裂场形式的ADI- FDTD技术，使得散射场区和PML吸收层区的表达形式完全一致，从而忽略两者差别.另 关键词： 时域交替隐式有限差分算法 电磁散射     

Attenuation of ultrasound in homogenates of bovine skeletal muscle and other tissues

The attenuation of ultrasound in homogenates of bovine skeletal muscle and suspensions of myofibrils was measured over the frequency range 1.5-7 MHz, and found to be proportional to protein concentration in both. In the homogenates it varied with frequency and temperature in a similar way to the attenuation in post rigor muscle tissue; myofibrils showed a higher frequency dependence. The attenuation in homogenates of bovine muscle, liver and kidney and in suspensions of myofibrils was measured over the pH range 3.5-13, and each showed a peak at about pH 11.5. This was thought to be due to a proton transfer process between NH3+ groups on the tissue proteins and OH- ions in the suspending fluid. A substantial peak at about pH 5 in the muscle and myofibril suspensions was not observed in homogenates of liver and kidney and was thought to be due to components of muscle that are absent from the other tissues. Myofibrils suspended in percoll solution of density 1.05 g cm-3, chosen to match approximately the density of the myofibrils, showed a slightly lower attenuation over the pH range 5-7, but a pH dependence similar to that of the myofibrils suspended in saline. The difference in the attenuations may be interpreted as the viscous component of the attenuation due to relative motion between the myofibril and its surrounding saline. The peak at pH 5 did not, however, appear to be due to the viscous loss mechanism peaking due to maximum shrinkage (and therefore maximum density) of the myofibril near this pH.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

A study of the dynamic impact behaviour of IN 718 and ATI 718Plus® superalloys

The dynamic impact response of IN 718 and ATI 718Plus®, in both the solution heat treated and age-hardened conditions, were investigated at different deformation temperatures and strain rates using a direct impact Hopkinson pressure bar. Analyses of the results provide a vital but previously not reported information that the ATI 718Plus® offers a higher resistance to damage during high strain rate ballistic impact deformation compared to the most widely used Iron-nickel based superalloy, Inconel 718. ATI 718Plus® showed higher strain hardening and strain rate sensitivity, in both heat treatment conditions, than IN 718. The difference in the deformation behaviour of both alloys, in the annealed condition, is attributable to the compositional modification in ATI 718Plus® which has been reported to lower its stacking fault energy and increases the tendency for deformation twinning. However, in the age-hardened condition, the difference is believed to be related to the disparity in the operative strengthening mechanism, of the precipitates present in both alloys. Furthermore, a higher susceptibility to strain location and the formation of adiabatic shear band, in aged IN 718, is attributable to the stronger temperature-softening characteristics observed in the alloy and to the limited strain hardening tendency under dynamic impact loading.     

Analyzing and correcting spectrometer temperature sensitivity

Stability and reproducibility of the spectrometer are fundamental to the success of many modern NMR experiments. Variation in room temperature is a particularly important source of instability, in part because it can cause coherent artifacts in NMR spectra. Small changes in room temperature lead to corresponding changes in the phases, amplitudes, and frequencies of NMR signals. These can lead in turn to apparently random spectral artifacts such as t(1)-noise in two-dimensional (2D) NMR and to the incomplete cancellation of signals in difference spectra, but also, importantly, to F(1) satellite signals in 2D spectra. These "parallel diagonals" arise from the use of air conditioning, which typically forces room temperature to oscillate within a fixed band. Work to identify, quantify, and suppress sources of temperature sensitivity in a modern 300-MHz spectrometer has led to a greater than 10-fold improvement in the signal-to-artifact ratio.     

Science, Technology, and the Niels Bohr Institute in Occupied Denmark

I argue that research in the basic sciences during the German occupation of Denmark, which began on April 9, 1940, suffered considerably, while research and development in technology enjoyed improved conditions as Danish industry moved toward the requirements of the German wartime economy. Several organizations were created to further Danish–German scientific and cultural collaboration or to manifest Danish cultural identity. The staff of the Danish Technical College and the number of their publications remained largely constant although no papers appeared in British or American journals after 1941. Danish universities massively resisted collaboration and maintained an illusion of “business as usual.” At the Niels Bohr Institute, laboratory equipment continued to be constructed and developed and scientists continued to publish in Danish and other Scandinavian journals, although they were increasingly isolated owing to their inability to obtain foreign scientific journals and to correspond with foreign scientists. The Niels Bohr Institute was occupied from December 6, 1943, to February 3, 1944, a surprisingly short period, owing, I argue, to strategic compromises in following incompatible orders from the German army, security police, and civilian administration. Finally, I offer an interpretation of Niels Bohr’s vehemently negative reaction to Werner Heisenberg in their meeting in Copenhagen in September 1941.     

Sex differences in human cardiovascular responses to external excitation

Summary The purpose of this study was to investigate the sex particularities in human cardiovascular responses to different external influences using the traditional physiological approach and non-traditional methods of dynamical systems theory. Measurements were taken in 21 healthy women and 15 men exposed to noise stress, passive coping, and in 35 women and 25 men exposed to double mental arithmetic stress, active coping. Results showed that, firstly, cardiovascular reactivity in men and women was determined by the type of stress. Thus, in a majority of humans heart rate did not change during noise but increased during mental stress, blood pressure decreased during noise but increased during mental stress. Secondly, results demonstrated the significant sex differences in the basal and stress cardiovascular activity. So, the women showing the greater basal and stress heart rate displayed the hypotensive responses to passive coping more often and the hypertensive responses to active coping less often than men. Thirdly, the changes in normalized entropy of the electrocardiogram signal, reflecting the changes in heart physiological variability, also depended on the sex of subjects and the nature of stress. During noise normalized entropy increased in a majority of women but decreased in a majority of men. Mental stress caused both decreases and increases in normalized entropy in men and women. But the increases in normalized entropy during stress and especially during recovery were greater in women than in men. Normalized entropy was demonstrated to be a more sensitive marker of sex and individual differences in cardiovascular responses to stress than heart rate and blood pressure. Results suggest that the lower blood pressure reactions and the greater increases in normalized entropy,i.e. in physiological heart variability, may partly result in higher cardiovascular stress resistance in women relative to men. Paper presented at the International Workshop ?Fluctuations in Physics and Biology: Stochastic Resonance, Signal Processing and Related Phenomena?, Elba, 5–10 June 1994.     

Writing the Biography of Hans Bethe: Contextual History and Paul Forman1

Some facets of the life of Hans Bethe after World War II are presented to illustrate how Paul Forman’s works, and in particular his various theses—on mathematics and physics in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, on physics in the immediate post-World War II period, and on postmodernity—have influenced my biography of Bethe. Some aspects of the history of post-World War II quantum field theory, of solid state/condensed matter physics, and of the development of neoliberalism—the commitment to the belief that the market knows best, to free trade, to enhanced privatization, and to a drastic reduction of the government’s role in regulating the economy—are reviewed in order to make some observations regarding certain “top-down” views in solid state physics in postmodernity, the economic and cultural condition of many Western societies since the 1980s, the decade in which many historians assume modernity to have ended.     

Some insights on the recent spate of accidents in Indian Railways

Indian Railways (IR), the largest rail passenger carrier in the world, has experienced 11 major accidents due to derailment or collision between trains in the year 2010, leading to several human casualties and large-scale disruptions in traffic. Alarmingly, 8 of these 11 accidents have occurred within a specific geographical region known as the Indo-Gangetic plain. In order to identify the general causes of such frequent accidents, and the specific factors leading to repeated accidents in a particular region, we systematically collect and analyze data of IR traffic over the last two decades. We find that there has been an unbalanced growth in IR traffic in the Indo-Gangetic plain over the last two decades, and consequently most of the high-traffic rail-routes presently lie in this region. However, construction of new tracks and train-routes has been nominal compared to the increase in traffic, leading to frequent congestion and over-utilization of existing tracks. Modeling the traffic-flow using computer simulations, we also show that if all trains were to travel in accordance with the IR schedule, the present infrastructure would be insufficient to handle the resultant traffic-flow in some of the high-traffic routes. Hence this study reflects some of the inherent problems in the scheduling of trains and evolution of IR, and also identifies several regions where traffic is likely to exceed safe limits.     

Saxophonists tune vocal tract resonances in advanced performance techniques

The acoustical impedance spectrum was measured in the mouths of saxophonists while they played. During bugling and while playing in the very high or altissimo range, experienced players tune a strong, but relatively broad, peak in the tract impedance to select which peak in the bore impedance will determine the note. Less experienced players are unable to produce resonances with impedance peaks comparable in magnitude to those of the bore and consequently are unable to play these notes. Experienced players can also tune their tracts to select which combinations of notes are played simultaneously in multiphonics or chords, and to produce pitch bending, a technique in which notes are produced at frequencies far from those of the peak of impedance of the instrument bore. However, in normal playing in the standard range, there is no consistent tuning of the tract resonances. The playing frequency, in all cases, lies close to the peak in the impedance of the reed in parallel with the series combination of the impedances measured in the mouth and the instrument bore on either side of the reed (ZMouth+ZBore)∥ZReed.     

Magnetic resonance imaging of microstructure transition in stainless steel

Magnetic resonance images are prone to artifacts caused by metallic objects. Such artifacts may not only hamper image interpretation, but also have been shown to provide information about the magnetic properties of the substances involved. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of MRI to detect, localize and characterize changes in magnetic properties that may occur when certain alloys have been exposed to a thermomechanical stress. For this purpose, stainless steel 304 L wires were drawn to induce a change from paramagnetic austenitic into ferromagnetic martensitic microstructure. The changes in magnetic behavior were quantified by analyzing the geometric distortion in spin echo and the geometric distortion and intravoxel dephasing in gradient echo images at 0.5, 1.5 and 3 T. The results of both imaging strategies were in agreement and in accordance with independent measurements with a vibrating sample magnetometer. Drawing wire to 2% of its cross-sectional area was found to increase the volume fraction of the ferromagnetic martensite from 0.3% to 80% and to enhance the magnetization up to two or three orders of magnitude. The results demonstrate the potential of MRI to locate and quantify stress-induced changes in the magnetic properties of alloys in a completely noninvasive and nondestructive way.     

An international perspective on radiological threats and the need for retrospective biological dosimetry of acute radiation overexposures

The widespread use of ionizing radiation sources (machine-generated or from the decay of radioactive materials) across many disciplines including medicine, industry, and academia, has led to hundreds of instances in which one or more persons received an acute radiation overexposure. Successful medical diagnosis and management of these victims rested in part on a rapid, accurate determination of absorbed dose, which in many cases must be retrospective, due to the paucity of useful dosimetry data. This has led to the development of a number of biological dosimetry techniques to determine absorb dose retrospectively. The frequency of these accidental overexposures, however, has failed to serve as the impetus for the development of a cadre of experts in this field and an expansion in the number and availability of centers to perform the more sophisticated analysis necessary to accurately determine absorbed dose. Meanwhile, the world has seen an increase in the number of lethal terrorist events with time and there is realistic concern that the perpetrators of these events strongly desire to employ the specter of acute radiation overexposure in the future to induce mass panic in their target population. To that end, if any of these organizations achieves success, the existing capacity for rapid, accurate retrospective determination of absorbed dose may be overwhelmed, resulting in sub-optimal outcomes for the victims of such an event and potential mismanagement of medical resources designated for their care. This paper reviews existing techniques for retrospective biological dosimetry and diagnosis in relation to past experiences with overexposures, explores potential malevolent overexposure scenarios, and examines the need for public authorities to enhance national capabilities in light of the growing risk of an incident that will result in multiple acute radiation overexposures.     

Vowel errors in noise and in reverberation by hearing-impaired listeners

The effects of noise and reverberation on the identification of monophthongs and diphthongs were evaluated for ten subjects with moderate sensorineural hearing losses. Stimuli were 15 English vowels spoken in a /b-t/ context, in a carrier sentence. The original tape was recorded without reverberation, in a quiet condition. This test tape was degraded either by recording in a room with reverberation time of 1.2 s, or by adding a babble of 12 voices at a speech-to-noise ratio of 0 dB. Both types of degradation caused statistically significant reductions of mean identification scores as compared to the quiet condition. Although the mean identification scores for the noise and reverberant conditions were not significantly different, the patterns of errors for these two conditions were different. Errors for monophthongs in reverberation but not in noise seemed to be related to an overestimation of vowel duration, and there was a tendency to weight the formant frequencies differently in the reverberation and quiet conditions. Errors for monophthongs in noise seemed to be related to spectral proximity of formant frequencies for confused pairs. For the diphthongs in both noise and reverberation, there was a tendency to judge a diphthong as the beginning monophthong. This may have been due to temporal smearing in the reverberation condition, and to a higher masked threshold for changing compared to stationary formant frequencies in the noise condition.     

Higher-Order Interference in Extensions of Quantum Theory

Quantum interference, manifest in the two slit experiment, lies at the heart of several quantum computational speed-ups and provides a striking example of a quantum phenomenon with no classical counterpart. An intriguing feature of quantum interference arises in a variant of the standard two slit experiment, in which there are three, rather than two, slits. The interference pattern in this set-up can be written in terms of the two and one slit patterns obtained by blocking one, or more, of the slits. This is in stark contrast with the standard two slit experiment, where the interference pattern cannot be written as a sum of the one slit patterns. This was first noted by Rafael Sorkin, who raised the question of why quantum theory only exhibits irreducible interference in the two slit experiment. One approach to this problem is to compare the predictions of quantum theory to those of operationally-defined ‘foil’ theories, in the hope of determining whether theories that do exhibit higher-order interference suffer from pathological—or at least undesirable—features. In this paper two proposed extensions of quantum theory are considered: the theory of Density Cubes proposed by Daki?, Paterek and Brukner, which has been shown to exhibit irreducible interference in the three slit set-up, and the Quartic Quantum Theory of ?yczkowski. The theory of Density Cubes will be shown to provide an advantage over quantum theory in a certain computational task and to posses a well-defined mechanism which leads to the emergence of quantum theory—analogous to the emergence of classical physics from quantum theory via decoherence. Despite this, the axioms used to define Density Cubes will be shown to be insufficient to uniquely characterise the theory. In comparison, Quartic Quantum Theory is a well-defined theory and we demonstrate that it exhibits irreducible interference to all orders. This feature of ?yczkowski’s theory is argued not to be a genuine phenomenon, but to arise from an ambiguity in the current definition of higher-order interference in operationally-defined theories. Thus, to begin to understand why quantum theory is limited to a certain kind of interference, a new definition of higher-order interference is needed that is applicable to, and makes good operational sense in, arbitrary operationally-defined theories.     

Echolocation range of captive and free-ranging baiji (Lipotes vexillifer), finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides), and bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus).

The interclick intervals of captive dolphins are known to be longer than the two-way transit time between the dolphin and a target. In the present study, the interclick intervals of free-ranging baiji, finless porpoises, and bottlenose dolphins in the wild and in captivity were compared. The click intervals in open waters ranged up to 100-200 ms, whereas the click intervals in captivity were in the order of 4-28 ms. Echolocation of free-ranging dolphins appears to adapt to various distance in navigation or ranging, sometimes up to 140 m. Additionally, the difference of waveform characteristics of clicks between species was recognized in the frequency of maximum energy and the click duration.