Interactive Water Quality Data Visualization: Case Study Longhorn Stream Team

Water quality monitoring can provide a real-time indicator as to the health and quality of a precious natural resource yet it is difficult to effectively communicate data and inspire action beyond the scientific arena. An interactive web application was developed using R Shiny to bridge this knowledge gap, visualizing existing data points collected by citizen scientists of the Longhorn Stream Team.Geography and the Environmen

Endolithic microbial model for Martian exobiology: The road to extinction

Martian exobiology is based on the assumption that on early Mars, liquid water was present and that conditions were suitable for the evolution of life. The cause for life to disappear from the surface and the recognizable fingerprints of past microbial activity preserved on Mars are addressed. The Antarctic cryptoendolithic microbial ecosystem as a model for extinction in the deteriorating Martian environment is discussed

No Radial Excitations in Low Energy QCD. I. Diquarks and Classification of Mesons

We propose a new schematic model for mesons in which the building blocks are quarks and flavor-antisymmetric diquarks. The outcome is a new classification of the entire meson spectrum into quark-antiquark and diquark-antidiquark states which does not give rise to a radial quantum number: all mesons which have so far been believed to be radially excited are orbitally excited diquark-antidiquark states; similarly, there are no radially excited baryons. Further, mesons that were previously viewed as "exotic" are no longer exotic as they are now naturally integrated into the classification as diquark-antidiquark states. The classification also leads to the introduction of isorons (iso-hadrons), which are analogs of atomic isotopes, and their magic quantum numbers, which are analogs of the magic numbers of the nuclear shell model. The magic quantum numbers of isorons match the quantum numbers expected for low-lying glueballs in lattice QCD. We observe that interquark forces in mesons behave substantially differently from those in baryons: qualitatively, they are color-magnetic in mesons but color-electrostatic in baryons. We comment on potential models and the hydrogen atom. The implications of our results for confinement, asymptotic freedom, and a new set of relations between two fundamental properties of hadrons - their size and their energy - are discussed in our companion paper [arXiv:0910.2231].Comment: 40 pages, references added, minor revisions, to appear in Eur. Phys. J.

Austrians-in-the-World. Conversations and Debates About Planning And Development

John Friedmann has taught at MIT, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, UCLA, the University of Melbourne, the National University of Taiwan, and is currently an Honorary Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Throughout his life, he has been an advisor to governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Mozambique, and China where he was appointed Honorary Foreign Advisor to the China Academy of Planning and Urban Design

Unification Scale, Proton Decay, And Manifolds Of G_2 Holonomy

Models of particle physics based on manifolds of $G_2$ holonomy are in most respects much more complicated than other string-derived models, but as we show here they do have one simplification: threshold corrections to grand unification are particularly simple. We compute these corrections, getting completely explicit results in some simple cases. We estimate the relation between Newton's constant, the GUT scale, and the value of $\alpha_{GUT}$, and explore the implications for proton decay. In the case of proton decay, there is an interesting mechanism which (relative to four-dimensional SUSY GUT's) enhances the gauge boson contribution to $p\to\pi^0e^+_L$ compared to other modes such as $p\to \pi^0e^+_R$ or $p\to \pi^+\bar\nu_R$. Because of numerical uncertainties, we do not know whether to intepret this as an enhancement of the $p\to \pi^0e^+_L$ mode or a suppression of the others.Comment: 40 p