Boron content of Lake Ulubat sediment: A key to interpret the morphological history of NW Anatolia, Turkey

Freshwater Lake Ulubat (c. 1.5 m deep and c. 138 km2) receives sediment from a 10.414 km2 area in the seismically active Susurluk Drainage Basin (SDB) of NW Turkey. The B and trace element contents of the lake infill seem to be a link between the fresh landforms of the SDB and the lacustrine sediment. Deposition in Lake Ulubat has been 1.60 cm.a-1 for the last 50 a according to radionucleides; however the sedimentation rate over the last millennium was 0.37 cm.a-1 based on 14C dating. The B content of the lacustrine infill displays a slight increase at 0.50 m and a drastic increase at 4 m depth occurring c. 31 a and c. 1070 a ago respectively. Probably the topmost change corresponds to the start of open mining in the SDB and the second one to the natural trenching of borate ore-deposits. These dates also show indirectly a 1.4 cm.a-1 erosion rate during the last millennium as the borate beds were trenched up to 15 m. By extrapolation, it is possible to establish that the formation of some of the present morphological features of the southern Marmara region, especially river incision, began in the late Pleistocene, and developed especially over the last 75 ka

Wind control on the accumulation of heavy metals in sediment of Lake Ulubat, Anatolia, Turkey

Freshwater Lake Ulubat (zmean = 1.5-2.0 m and Area = ~138 km2), NW Anatolia, Turkey was filled in by fine-to-medium-grain silts during the late Holocene. Deposition in Lake Ulubat has been 1.6 cm yr-1 for the last 50 years, but the sedimentation rate over the last ~1,600 years was lower (0.37 mm yr-1). The organic matter and carbonate contents of the infill show cyclic changes that reflect environmental fluctuations. The silt-dominated lithology and the vertically uniform heavy metal distributions are probably due to wind-controlled sedimentation in the lake. Heterogeneous mud, derived from a large, mountainous drainage basin, is deposited in the lake mostly during summer, June to October, when conditions are hot and calm. Winter months are stormier and sediments are re-suspended due to the shallow water depth and the effect of waves on the lake bottom. It is likely that re-suspended sediments, particularly fine-grained particles, together with the heavy metals, are transported out of the lake via the outlet, especially during periods of high lake level. This resuspension and removal process probably caused the lake sediments to become silt-dominated and depleted in heavy metals. The role of broad shallow lakes in sequestering sediments and heavy metals can be described more accurately when wind data are considered. Such information may also be helpful for land-use planning in downstream areas

Temporal variations of the fractal properties of seismicity in the western part of the north Anatolian fault zone: possible artifacts due to improvements in station coverage

International audienceSeismically-active fault zones are complex natural systems exhibiting scale-invariant or fractal correlation between earthquakes in space and time, and a power-law scaling of fault length or earthquake source dimension consistent with the exponent b of the Gutenberg-Richter frequency-magnitude relation. The fractal dimension of seismicity is a measure of the degree of both the heterogeneity of the process (whether fixed or self-generated) and the clustering of seismic activity. Temporal variations of the b-value and the two-point fractal (correlation) dimension Dc have been related to the preparation process for natural earthquakes and rock fracture in the laboratory These statistical scaling properties of seismicity may therefore have the potential at least to be sensitive short- term predictors of major earthquakes. The North Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ) is a seismicallyactive dextral strike slip fault zone which forms the northern boundary of the westward moving Anatolian plate. It is splayed into three branches at about 31oE and continues westward toward the northern Aegean sea. In this study, we investigate the temporal variation of Dc and the Gutenberg-Richter b-value for seismicity in the western part of the NAFZ (including the northern Aegean sea) for earthquakes of Ms > 4.5 occurring in the period between 1900 and 1992. b ranges from 0.6-1.6 and Dc from 0.6 to 1.4. The b-value is found to be weakly negatively correlated with Dc (r=-0.56). However the (log of) event rate N is positively correlated with b, with a similar degree of statistical significance (r=0.42), and negatively correlated with Dc (r=-0.48). Since N increases dramatically with improved station coverage since 1970, the observed negative correlation between b and Dc is therefore more likely to be due to this effect than any underlying physical process in this case. We present this as an example of how man-made artefacts of recording can have similar statistical effects to underlying processes

Vision-based single-stroke character recognition for wearable computing

Wearable computing offers advantages but making data entry easy remains a challenge. A new approach for data entry using a head-mounted digital camera to record characters drawn by hand gestures or by a pointer is introduced. In addition, each character is drawn as a single, isolated stroke using a Graffiti-like alphabet. As such, the resulting character recognition system has potential for application in mobile communication and computing devices

The CODATwins Project : The Current Status and Recent Findings of COllaborative Project of Development of Anthropometrical Measures in Twins

The COllaborative project of Development of Anthropometrical measures in Twins (CODATwins) project is a large international collaborative effort to analyze individual-level phenotype data from twins in multiple cohorts from different environments. The main objective is to study factors that modify genetic and environmental variation of height, body mass index (BMI, kg/m(2)) and size at birth, and additionally to address other research questions such as long-term consequences of birth size. The project started in 2013 and is open to all twin projects in the world having height and weight measures on twins with information on zygosity. Thus far, 54 twin projects from 24 countries have provided individual-level data. The CODATwins database includes 489,981 twin individuals (228,635 complete twin pairs). Since many twin cohorts have collected longitudinal data, there is a total of 1,049,785 height and weight observations. For many cohorts, we also have information on birth weight and length, own smoking behavior and own or parental education. We found that the heritability estimates of height and BMI systematically changed from infancy to old age. Remarkably, only minor differences in the heritability estimates were found across cultural-geographic regions, measurement time and birth cohort for height and BMI. In addition to genetic epidemiological studies, we looked at associations of height and BMI with education, birth weight and smoking status. Within-family analyses examined differences within same-sex and opposite-sex dizygotic twins in birth size and later development. The CODATwins project demonstrates the feasibility and value of international collaboration to address gene-by-exposure interactions that require large sample sizes and address the effects of different exposures across time, geographical regions and socioeconomic status.Peer reviewe

Studies of new Higgs boson interactions through nonresonant HH production in the b¯bγγ fnal state in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search for nonresonant Higgs boson pair production in the b ¯bγγ fnal state is performed using 140 fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. This analysis supersedes and expands upon the previous nonresonant ATLAS results in this fnal state based on the same data sample. The analysis strategy is optimised to probe anomalous values not only of the Higgs (H) boson self-coupling modifer κλ but also of the quartic HHV V (V = W, Z) coupling modifer κ2V . No signifcant excess above the expected background from Standard Model processes is observed. An observed upper limit µHH < 4.0 is set at 95% confdence level on the Higgs boson pair production cross-section normalised to its Standard Model prediction. The 95% confdence intervals for the coupling modifers are −1.4 < κλ < 6.9 and −0.5 < κ2V < 2.7, assuming all other Higgs boson couplings except the one under study are fxed to the Standard Model predictions. The results are interpreted in the Standard Model efective feld theory and Higgs efective feld theory frameworks in terms of constraints on the couplings of anomalous Higgs boson (self-)interactions

Measurement of the energy asymmetry in tt¯ j production at 13 TeV with the ATLAS experiment and interpretation in the SMEFT framework

A measurement of the energy asymmetry in jet-associated top-quark pair production is presented using 139fb-1 of data collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider during pp collisions at s=13TeV. The observable measures the different probability of top and antitop quarks to have the higher energy as a function of the jet scattering angle with respect to the beam axis. The energy asymmetry is measured in the semileptonic tt¯ decay channel, and the hadronically decaying top quark must have transverse momentum above 350GeV. The results are corrected for detector effects to particle level in three bins of the scattering angle of the associated jet. The measurement agrees with the SM prediction at next-to-leading-order accuracy in quantum chromodynamics in all three bins. In the bin with the largest expected asymmetry, where the jet is emitted perpendicular to the beam, the energy asymmetry is measured to be - 0.043 ± 0.020 , in agreement with the SM prediction of - 0.037 ± 0.003. Interpreting this result in the framework of the Standard Model effective field theory (SMEFT), it is shown that the energy asymmetry is sensitive to the top-quark chirality in four-quark operators and is therefore a valuable new observable in global SMEFT fits

Measurement of the energy response of the ATLAS calorimeter to charged pions from W±→ τ±(→ π±ντ) ντ events in Run 2 data

The energy response of the ATLAS calorimeter is measured for single charged pions with transverse momentum in the range 10 < pT< 300 GeV. The measurement is performed using 139 fb - 1 of LHC proton–proton collision data at s=13 TeV taken in Run 2 by the ATLAS detector. Charged pions originating from τ-lepton decays are used to provide a sample of high-pT isolated particles, where the composition is known, to test an energy regime that has not previously been probed by in situ single-particle measurements. The calorimeter response to single-pions is observed to be overestimated by ∼ 2 % across a large part of the pT spectrum in the central region and underestimated by ∼ 4 % in the endcaps in the ATLAS simulation. The uncertainties in the measurements are ≲ 1 % for 15 < pT< 185 GeV in the central region. To investigate the source of the discrepancies, the width of the distribution of the ratio of calorimeter energy to track momentum, the energies per layer and response in the hadronic calorimeter are also compared between data and simulation