Clouds, shadows, or twilight? Mayfly nymphs recognise the difference

1. We examined the relative changes in light intensity that initiate night-time locomotor activity changes in nymphs of the mayfly, Stenonema modestum (Heptageniidae). Tests were carried out in a laboratory stream to examine the hypothesis that nymphs increase their locomotion in response to the large and sustained reductions in relative light intensity that take place during twilight but not to short-term daytime light fluctuations or a minimum light intensity threshold. Ambient light intensity was reduced over a range of values representative of evening twilight. Light was reduced over the same range of intensities either continuously or in discrete intervals while at the same time nymph activity on unglazed tile substrata was video recorded. 2. Nymphs increased their locomotor activity during darkness in response to large, sustained relative light decreases, but not in response to short-term, interrupted periods of light decrease. Nymphs did not recognise darkness unless an adequate light stimulus, such as large and sustained relative decrease in light intensity, had taken place. 3. We show that nymphs perceive light change over time and respond only after a lengthy period of accumulation of light stimulus. The response is much lengthier than reported for other aquatic organisms and is highly adaptive to heterogeneous stream environments

Khresmoi professional: multilingual, multimodal professional medical search

In this demonstration we present the Khresmoi medical search and access system. The system uses a component based architecture housed in the cloud to support target users medical information needs. This includes web systems, computer applications and mobile applications to support the multilingual and multimodal information needs of three test target groups: the general public, general practitioners (GPs) and radiologists. This demonstration presents the systems for GPs and radiologists providing multilingual text and image based (including 2D and 3D radiology images) search functionality

Relation between surface relaxation and surface force constants in clean and oxygen-covered Ni(001)

FWN – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Supporting collaborative improvement of resources in the Khresmoi health information system

Since medical knowledge relies on both scientific knowledge and real-life experience, the importance of user contributions to improve resources in health systems cannot be underestimated. We present work from the Khresmoi project which aims to develop a multilingual multimodal search and access system for biomedical information and documents. Khresmoi targets three distinct user classes with differing levels of medical knowledge and information requirements, namely: general public, general practitioners, and, as an example of an area of clinical expertise, radiologists. The Khresmoi system will provide these users with valuable (whose quality has been evaluated and approved) and enriched (meta information from biomedical knowledge bases is added) medical information, selected to fit their medical knowledge and their preferred language. The system will include novel collaborative components of the system are designed to provide means for users to contribute to the system’s knowledge by adding or correcting annotations to the documents, as well as a collaborative platform where they will be able to share their own files and both annotate and discuss them

ShARe/CLEF eHealth evaluation lab 2014, task 3: user-centred health information retrieval

This paper presents the results of task 3 of the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2014. This evaluation lab focuses on improving access to medical information on the web. The task objective was to investigate the effect of using additional information such as a related discharge summary and external resources such as medical ontologies on the IR effectiveness, in a monolingual and in a multilingual context. The participants were allowed to submit up to seven runs for each language, one mandatory run using no additional information or external resources, and three each using or not using discharge summaries

Numerical Study Comparing RANS and LES Approaches on a Circulation Control Airfoil

A numerical study over a nominally two-dimensional circulation control airfoil is performed using a large-eddy simulation code and two Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes codes. Different Coanda jet blowing conditions are investigated. In addition to investigating the influence of grid density, a comparison is made between incompressible and compressible flow solvers. The incompressible equations are found to yield negligible differences from the compressible equations up to at least a jet exit Mach number of 0.64. The effects of different turbulence models are also studied. Models that do not account for streamline curvature effects tend to predict jet separation from the Coanda surface too late, and can produce non-physical solutions at high blowing rates. Three different turbulence models that account for streamline curvature are compared with each other and with large eddy simulation solutions. All three models are found to predict the Coanda jet separation location reasonably well, but one of the models predicts specific flow field details near the Coanda surface prior to separation much better than the other two. All Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes computations produce higher circulation than large eddy simulation computations, with different stagnation point location and greater flow acceleration around the nose onto the upper surface. The precise reasons for the higher circulation are not clear, although it is not solely a function of predicting the jet separation location correctly

Chemical Weed and Brush Control Suggestions For Rangeland.

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Sources and contributions of wood smoke during winter in London: Assessing local and regional influences

Determining the contribution of wood smoke to air pollution in large cities such as London is becoming increasingly important due to the changing nature of domestic heating in urban areas. During winter, biomass burning emissions have been identified as a major cause of exceedances of European air quality limits. The aim of this work was to quantify the contribution of biomass burning in London to concentrations of PM2:5 and determine whether local emissions or regional contributions were the main source of biomass smoke. To achieve this, a number of biomass burning chemical tracers were analysed at a site within central London and two sites in surrounding rural areas. Concentrations of levoglucosan, elemental carbon (EC), organic carbon (OC) and KC were generally well correlated across the three sites. At all the sites, biomass burning was found to be a source of OC and EC, with the largest contribution of EC from traffic emissions, while for OC the dominant fraction included contributions from secondary organic aerosols, primary biogenic and cooking sources. Source apportionment of the EC and OC was found to give reasonable estimation of the total carbon from non-fossil and fossil fuel sources based upon comparison with estimates derived from 14C analysis. Aethalometer-derived black carbon data were also apportioned into the contributions frombiomass burning and traffic and showed trends similar to those observed for EC. Mean wood smoke mass at the sites was estimated to range from 0.78 to 1.0 μgm-3 during the campaign in January–February 2012. Measurements on a 160m tower in London suggested a similar ratio of brown to black carbon (reflecting wood burning and traffic respectively) in regional and London air. Peaks in the levoglucosan and KC concentrations were observed to coincide with low ambient temperature, consistent with domestic heating as a major contributing local source in London. Overall, the source of biomass smoke in London was concluded to be a background regional source overlaid by contributions from local domestic burning emissions. This could have implications when considering future emission control strategies during winter and may be the focus of future work in order to better determine the contributing local sources

Direct evidence for Cooper pairing without a spectral gap in a disordered superconductor above Tc

The idea that preformed Cooper pairs could exist in a superconductor at temperatures higher than its zero-resistance critical temperature (T-c) has been explored for unconventional, interfacial, and disordered superconductors, but direct experimental evidence is lacking. We used scanning tunneling noise spectroscopy to show that preformed Cooper pairs exist up to temperatures much higher than T-c in the disordered superconductor titanium nitride by observing an enhancement in the shot noise that is equivalent to a change of the effective charge from one to two electron charges. We further show that the spectroscopic gap fills up rather than closes with increasing temperature. Our results demonstrate the existence of a state above T-c that, much like an ordinary metal, has no (pseudo)gap but carries charge through paired electrons.Quantum Matter and Optic