Scaling of the turbulence transition threshold in a pipe

We report the results of an experimental investigation of the transition to turbulence in a pipe over approximately an order of magnitude range in the Reynolds number Re. A novel scaling law is uncovered using a systematic experimental procedure which permits contact to be made with modern theoretical thinking. The principal result we uncover is a scaling law which indicates that the amplitude of perturbation required to cause transition scales as O(Re-1).     

The spectrophotometric determination of nitrate in natural waters,with particular reference to sea-water

Nitrate can be reduced to nitrite in good yield by means of hydrazine in alkaline solution; the reaction is promoted by catalytic quantities of copper. The authors have established the optimum conditions for tlie reduction and applied the method to the determination of nitrate in fresh waters and in sea-waters. The nitrite formed is determined by Mellon and Rider's modification of the Griess-Ilosvay procedure. The reduction with hydrazine is carried out in the presence of 0.25 p.p.m. of copper at pH 9.6 in a solution buffered with sodium phenate. It is complete within 24 hours at room temperature. The method will detect ca. 0.3 μg NO₃$\text{N}\text{l}$ and gives a standard deviation of ca. 2% in the range 20-600 μg NO₃-$\text{N}\text{l}$. Up to 60 determinations can be made per 6 hour working period. The interference of nitrite has been investigated. Ammonium salts, urea, and amino acids do not interfere, at the concentrations at which they occur in sea-water.It is preferable to analyse samples immediately after collection, but if this is not possible, they should be filtered, sterilized with 2 p.p.m. of mercuric chloride and stored in glass containers.     

Depth-dependent acoustic features of diving sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) in the Gulf of Mexico

Three-dimensional dive trajectories of three sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico have been obtained by measuring the relative arrival times and bearings of the animals' acoustic multipath reflections, using two elements of a towed hydrophone array deployed at an unknown depth and orientation. Within the first 6-12 min of the start of a dive, the intervals between successive "clicks" of all three whales corresponded closely with the two-way travel time of an acoustic pulse traveling vertically between the animals' position and the ocean bottom. The click spectra contained multiple peaks, including a faint band of energy originally centered near 10 kHz. As the animals descended over 500 m in depth, the center frequency of this band shifted to nearly 15 kHz, but subsequently remained near this value during the rest of the dive. This frequency shift is consistent with that expected from energy scattering from an ensemble of incompressible small-scale air-filled resonators, with diameters on the order of 4 mm. One possible candidate for such an ensemble is proposed to reside in the collapsed frontal sac of the animal. A comparison of the received levels for the bottom and direct multipath arrivals indicates that the whales' acoustic directivity must range between 10-30 dB in the 5-20-kHz region.     

Granular segregation as a critical phenomenon

We present the results of an experimental study of patterned segregation in a horizontally shaken shallow layer of a binary mixture of dry particles. An order parameter for the segregated domains is defined and the effect of the variation of the combined filling fraction, C, of the mixture on the observed pattern formation is systematically studied. We find that there is a critical event associated with the onset of segregation, at C(c)=0.647+/-0.049, which has the characteristics of a continuous phase transition, including critical slowing down.     

Tightly controlled linear hashing without separate overflow storage

A hashing method is presented where the amount of storage required for a file can expand and shrink by very large factors. The performance of this method as measured by lookup time, insertion time and deletion time is very good even when the total storage utilization is as high as 90 percent. The user can completely control the storage utilization between two chosen bounds so that the storage requirement varies linearly with the number of records currently in the file.Unlike previous methods, no separate overflow storage pool is involved and one need not be concerned with expected and worst case requirements for overflow space. Indeed, the absence of requirements for such a separate overflow pool could allow the use of this method with primitive microprocessor operating systems.The choice of hashing functions is discussed and simulation results show great danger in blindly using the popular remainder method.Both an elementary analysis and simulation results are given.This research was supported by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

Supershell structure in alkali metal nanowires

Nanowires are formed by indenting and subsequently retracting two pieces of sodium metal. Their cross section gradually reduces upon retraction and the diameters can be obtained from the conductance. In previous work we have demonstrated that when one constructs a histogram of diameters from large numbers of indentation-retraction cycles such histograms show a periodic pattern of stable nanowire diameters due to shell structure in the conductance modes. Here, we report the observation of a modulation of this periodic pattern, in agreement with predictions of a supershell structure.