Great expectations: Specific lexical anticipation influences the processing of spoken language

Background  

Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs) we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-level representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun.     

Muon Content of Extensive Air Showers: Comparison of the Energy Spectra Obtained by the Sydney University Giant Air-Shower Recorder and by the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Sydney University Giant Air-shower Recorder(SUGAR) measured the energy spectrum of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays reconstructed from muon detector reading. Comparison of their spectra SUGAR and Pierre Auger Observatory allows us to reconstruct the empirical dependence of the number of muons in a vertical shower on the primary energy for energies between 1017 and 1018 eV. We compared this dependence with the predictions of hadronic interaction models QGSJET-II-04, EPOS-LHC and SIBYLL-2.3c. In addition, we analyzed the response of the array of muon detectors in order to determine the slope of the muon lateral distribution function. It is important to understand how much the number of muons differs from the predictions of modeling at different distances from the shower axis.     

Microwave heating of ceramic composites

The microwave heating of a ceramic composite is modelled andanalysed. The composite consists of many small ceramic particlesembedded in a ceramic cement. The composite is assumed to bewell insulated, and each particle is assumed to be in imperfectthermal contact with the surrounding cement. Based on thesetwo assumptions an asymptotic theory exploiting the small Biotnumber and small non-dimensional contact conductance is developed.Our asymptotic theory yields a set of nonlinear partial differentialequations which govern the temperature in the composite. Theseare reduced to a set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differentialequations in which the surface area of each particle entersas a parameter. Recent experiments with such composites haveshown that the steady-state temperature of the composite isstrongly dependent upon the radii of the embedded particles.Our model captures this effect. In fact, our analysis showsthat the assumption of imperfect thermal contact between theparticles and the ceramic cement is essential for this trendto be established.     

Chenopodiaceae components: polyoxigenated sesquiterpenes from chenopodium botrys

Several new sesquiterpenes of eudesmane and guaiane types are isolated from the aereal parts of Chenopodium botrys. The structures were assigned by spectroscopic methods and confirmed by partial synthesis.     

Construction of iteration functions for the simultaneous computation of the solutions of equations and algebraic systems

We construct iteration functions for the simultaneous computation of the solutions of a system of equations, with local quadratic convergence: they generalize to the multivariate case the well-known Weierstrass function for polynomials, which is expected to be globally convergent except on a zero-measured set of starting points. We clarify these functions using univariate interpolation. Both for polynomials and algebraic systems with real coefficients, we extend the conjecture of global convergence to the research of real roots or solutions.     

Anomalous atomic hydrogen shock pattern in a supersonic plasma Jet

A two-photon laser-induced fluorescence study on the transport of ground-state atomic hydrogen in a supersonic plasma jet, generated from an Ar-H (2) mixture, reveals an unexpected shock pattern. Whereas both the axial-velocity profile and the temperature profile of hydrogen atoms along the jet centerline can be interpreted in terms of a supersonic expansion of an Ar-H gas mixture, the H-atom density profiles do not satisfy the well established Rankine-Hugoniot relation leading to a nonconservation of the forward flux. The experimental results show that H atoms escape from the supersonic expansion by a diffusion process due to strong density gradients between the core of the jet and its vicinity.