V-like formations in flocks of artificial birds

We consider flocks of artificial birds and study the emergence of V-like formations during flight. We introduce a small set of fully distributed positioning rules to guide the birds' movements and demonstrate, by means of simulations, that they tend to lead to stabilization into several of the well-known V-like formations that have been observed in nature. We also provide quantitative indicators that we believe are closely related to achieving V-like formations, and study their behavior over a large set of independent simulations

Bouncing solutions in Rastall's theory with a barotropic fluid

Rastall's theory is a modification of Einstein's theory of gravity where the covariant divergence of the stress-energy tensor is no more vanishing, but proportional to the gradient of the Ricci scalar. The motivation of this theory is to investigate a possible non-minimal coupling of the matter fields to geometry which, being proportional to the curvature scalar, may represent an effective description of quantum gravity effects. Non-conservation of the stress-energy tensor, via Bianchi identities, implies new field equations which have been recently used in a cosmological context, leading to some interesting results. In this paper we adopt Rastall's theory to reproduce some features of the effective Friedmann's equation emerging from loop quantum cosmology. We determine a class of bouncing cosmological solutions and comment about the possibility of employing these models as effective descriptions of the full quantum theory.Comment: Latex file, 14 pages, 1 figure in eps format. Typos corrected, one reference added. Published versio

Viscous Cosmology

We discuss the possibility to implement a viscous cosmological model, attributing to the dark matter component a behaviour described by bulk viscosity. Since bulk viscosity implies negative pressure, this rises the possibility to unify the dark sector. At the same time, the presence of dissipative effects may alleviate the so called small scale problems in the $\Lambda$CDM model. While the unified viscous description for the dark sector does not lead to consistent results, the non-linear behaviour indeed improves the situation with respect to the standard cosmological model.Comment: Latex file, 7 pages, 6 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the XIIth International Conference on Gravitation, Astrophysics and Cosmology, June 28-July 5, 2015, PFUR, Moscow, Russi

Interações entre o sexo do bezerro e outros fatores ambientais para pesos do nascimento aos 24 meses em bovinos da raça Charolesa.

Interações entre o sexo do bezerro e outros fatores ambientais para pesos do nascimento aos 24 meses em bovinos da raça Charolesa

GHASP: an Hα\alpha kinematic survey of spiral galaxies - X. Surface photometry, decompositions and the Tully-Fisher relation in the Rc-band

We present Rc-band surface photometry for 170 of the 203 galaxies in GHASP, Gassendi H-Alpha survey of SPirals, a sample of late-type galaxies for which high-resolution Fabry-Perot H{\alpha} maps have previously been obtained. Our data set is constructed by new Rc-band observations taken at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP), supplemented with Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) archival data, obtained with the purpose of deriving homogeneous photometric profiles and parameters. Our results include Rc-band surface brightness profiles for 170 galaxies and $ugriz$ profiles for 108 of these objects. We catalogue several parameters of general interest for further reference, such as total magnitude, effective radius and isophotal parameters -- magnitude, position angle, ellipticity and inclination. We also perform a structural decomposition of the surface brightness profiles using a multi-component method in order to separate disks from bulges and bars, and to observe the main scaling relations involving luminosities, sizes and maximum velocities. We determine the Rc-band Tully Fisher relation using maximum velocities derived solely from H$\alpha$ rotation curves for a sample of 80 galaxies, resulting in a slope of $-8.1 \pm 0.5$, zero point of $-3.0 \pm 1.0$ and an estimated intrinsic scatter of $0.28 \pm 0.07$. We note that, different from the TF-relation in the near-infrared derived for the same sample, no change in the slope of the relation is seen at the low-mass end (for galaxies with $V_{max} < 125$ km/s). We suggest that this different behaviour of the Tully Fisher relation (with the optical relation being described by a single power-law while the near-infrared by two) may be caused by differences in the stellar mass to light ratio for galaxies with $V_{max} < 125$ km/s.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figure