2,154 research outputs found
Chromosomal aberrations in a natural population of chironomus tentans exposed to chronic low-level environmental radiation
The salivary gland chromosomes of Chironomus tentans larvae collected from White Oak Creek, an area contaminated by radioactive waste from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and from six uncontaminated areas were examined for chromosomal aberrations. White Oak Creek populations were exposed to absorbed doses as high as 230 rads per year or about 1000 times background. Chromosomal maps were constructed to make a general comparison of the banding pattern of the salivary chromosomes of the C. tentans in the East Tennessee area with those of Canada and Europe. These maps were used as a reference in scoring aberrations. Fifteen different chromosomal aberrations were found in 365 larvae taken from the irradiated population as compared with five different aberrations observed in 356 larvae from six control populations, but the mean number of aberrations per larva did not differ in any of the populations. The quantitative amount of heterozygosity was essentially the same in the irradiated and the control population, but there were three times the variety of chromosomal aberrations found in the irradiated area. From this evidence it was concluded that chronic low-level irradiation from radioactive waste was increasing the variability of chromosomal aberrations without significantly increasing the frequency. It was also concluded that chromosomal polymorphism can be maintained in a natural population without superiority of the heterozygous individuals. (C.H.
A Search for Dark Matter Annihilation with the Whipple 10m Telescope
We present observations of the dwarf galaxies Draco and Ursa Minor, the local
group galaxies M32 and M33, and the globular cluster M15 conducted with the
Whipple 10m gamma-ray telescope to search for the gamma-ray signature of
self-annihilating weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) which may
constitute astrophysical dark matter (DM). We review the motivations for
selecting these sources based on their unique astrophysical environments and
report the results of the data analysis which produced upper limits on excess
rate of gamma rays for each source. We consider models for the DM distribution
in each source based on the available observational constraints and discuss
possible scenarios for the enhancement of the gamma-ray luminosity. Limits on
the thermally averaged product of the total self-annihilation cross section and
velocity of the WIMP, , are derived using conservative estimates for
the magnitude of the astrophysical contribution to the gamma-ray flux. Although
these limits do not constrain predictions from the currently favored
theoretical models of supersymmetry (SUSY), future observations with VERITAS
will probe a larger region of the WIMP parameter phase space, and
WIMP particle mass (m_\chi).Comment: 33 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical
Journa
Fermilab E791
Fermilab E791, a very high statistics charm particle experiment, recently
completed its data taking at Fermilab's Tagged Photon Laboratory. Over 20
billion events were recorded through a loose transverse energy trigger and
written to 8mm tape in the the 1991-92 fixed target run at Fermilab. This
unprecedented data sample containing charm is being analysed on many-thousand
MIP RISC computing farms set up at sites in the collaboration. A glimpse of the
data taking and analysis effort is presented. We also show some preliminary
results for common charm decay modes. Our present analysis indicates a very
rich yield of over 200K reconstructed charm decays.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, LaTe
Measurement of the Ds Lifetime
We report the results of a precise measurement of the Ds meson lifetime based
on 1662 +/- 56 fully reconstructed Ds -> phi pi decays, from the charm
hadroproduction experiment E791 at Fermilab. Using an unbinned maximum
likelihood fit, we measure the Ds lifetime to be 0.518 +/- 0.014 +/- 0.007 ps.
The ratio of the measured Ds lifetime to the world average D0 lifetime is 1.25
+/- 0.04. This result differs from unity by six standard deviations, indicating
significantly different lifetimes for the Ds and the D0.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 2 table. LaTe
Search for the Flavor-Changing Neutral-Current Decays and
We report the results of a search for the flavor-changing neutral-current
decays and in
data from Fermilab charm hadroproduction experiment E791. No signal above
background is found, and we obtain upper limits on branching fractions,
and
, at the 90\% confidence
level.Comment: nine pages with figures; compressed, uuencoded postscrip
Branching Fractions for D0 -> K+K- and D0 -> pi+pi-, and a Search for CP Violation in D0 Decays
Using the large hadroproduced charm sample collected in experiment E791 at
Fermilab, we have measured ratios of branching fractions for the two-body
singly-Cabibbo-suppressed charged decays of the D0:
(D0 -> KK)/(D0 -> Kpi) = 0.109 +- 0.003 +- 0.003,
(D0 -> pipi)/(D0 -> Kpi) = 0.040 +- 0.002 +- 0.003, and
(D0 -> KK)/(D0 -> pipi) = 2.75 +- 0.15 +- 0.16. We have looked for
differences in the decay rates of D0 and D0bar to the CP eigenstates K+K- and
pi+pi-, and have measured the CP asymmetry parameters
A_CP(K+K-) = -0.010 +- 0.049 +- 0.012 and
A_CP(pi+pi-) = -0.049 +- 0.078 +- 0.030, both consistent with zero.Comment: 10 Postscript pages, including 2 figures. Submitted to Phys. Lett.
Goal-recognition-based adaptive brain-computer interface for navigating immersive robotic systems
© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd. Objective. This work proposes principled strategies for self-adaptations in EEG-based Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) as a way out of the bandwidth bottleneck resulting from the considerable mismatch between the low-bandwidth interface and the bandwidth-hungry application, and a way to enable fluent and intuitive interaction in embodiment systems. The main focus is laid upon inferring the hidden target goals of users while navigating in a remote environment as a basis for possible adaptations. Approach. To reason about possible user goals, a general user-agnostic Bayesian update rule is devised to be recursively applied upon the arrival of evidences, i.e. user input and user gaze. Experiments were conducted with healthy subjects within robotic embodiment settings to evaluate the proposed method. These experiments varied along three factors: the type of the robot/environment (simulated and physical), the type of the interface (keyboard or BCI), and the way goal recognition (GR) is used to guide a simple shared control (SC) driving scheme. Main results. Our results show that the proposed GR algorithm is able to track and infer the hidden user goals with relatively high precision and recall. Further, the realized SC driving scheme benefits from the output of the GR system and is able to reduce the user effort needed to accomplish the assigned tasks. Despite the fact that the BCI requires higher effort compared to the keyboard conditions, most subjects were able to complete the assigned tasks, and the proposed GR system is additionally shown able to handle the uncertainty in user input during SSVEP-based interaction. The SC application of the belief vector indicates that the benefits of the GR module are more pronounced for BCIs, compared to the keyboard interface. Significance. Being based on intuitive heuristics that model the behavior of the general population during the execution of navigation tasks, the proposed GR method can be used without prior tuning for the individual users. The proposed methods can be easily integrated in devising more advanced SC schemes and/or strategies for automatic BCI self-adaptations
Direct measurement of the pion valence quark momentum distribution, the pion light-cone wave function squared
We present the first direct measurements of the pion valence quark momentum
distribution which is related to the square of the pion light-cone wave
function. The measurements were carried out using data on diffractive
dissociation of 500 GeV/c into di-jets from a platinum target at
Fermilab experiment E791. The results show that the light-cone
asymptotic wave function, which was developed using perturbative QCD methods,
describes the data well for or more. We also
measured the transverse momentum distribution of the diffractive di-jets.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
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