The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy

"The United States is easily deterred by any nuclear armed state, even by the most primitive and diminutive of nuclear arsenals." Bruce G. Blair is the President of the World Security Institute. Chen Yali is the editor in chief of Washington Observer

The Oil Weapon: Myth of China's Vulnerability

The geopolitical canvass on which China plots its strategy for energy security displays a ubiquitous presence of one country: the United States. Chinese energy security planners must reckon with America's ravenous consumption of imported oil, its strategic alliances with other heavy importers of oil in Asia, its overseas military operations in the heart of the world's leading oil producing region, its naval dominion over the world's oil transportation routes, and the global domination of U.S. oil companies or multinational oil companies heavily capitalized by American investment. This is the context in which China pursues its energy security, sometimes blandly described as 'conservation and diversification of supply', which masks the nation's real struggle to satisfy its rapidly growing energy needs without exposing its energy lifelines to external forces that may, intentionally or not, betray China's interests

Search for bursts in air shower data

There have been reports in recent years of the possible observation of bursts in air shower data. If such events are truly of an astrophysical nature then, they represent an important new class of phemonenon since no other bursts have been observed above the MeV level. The spectra of conventional gamma ray bursts are unknown at higher energies but their observed spectra at MeV energies appear generally to exhibit a steepening in the higher MeV range and are thus unlikely to extrapolate to measurable fluxes at air shower energies. An attempt has been made to look for deviations from randomness in the arrival times of air showers above approx. 10 to the 14th power eV with a number of systems and results so far are presented here. This work will be continued for a substantial period of ime with a system capable of recording bursts with multiple events down to a spacing of 4 microns. Earlier data have also been searched for the possible association of air shower events with a glitch of the Vela pulsar

Salinity Reduces the Forage Quality of Forage Kochia: A Halophytic Chenopodiaceae Shrub

Forage kochia (Bassia prostrata [L.] A.J. Scott) is a perennial, halophytic Chenopodiaceae shrub adapted to semiarid rangelands and steppes. It is noted for its ability to produce edible forage in saline environments, but the effect of salinity on its nutritive value has not been determined. Therefore, this study evaluated the dose-response of increasing salinity on the forage quality of forage kochia and Gardner’s saltbush (Atriplex gardneri [Moq.] D. Dietr., a chenopod forage shrub indigenous to the United States). Individual plants were evaluated in hydroponics for 28 days at 0, 150, 300, and 600 mM NaCl. Salt from accumulated ions, minerals, and forage nutritive value were determined using ground shoot samples. Analysis of forage nutritive value is problematic in plants with high salt concentrations, so neutral detergent fiber (NDF) and in vitro true digestibility (IVTD) were also predicted on an ash-corrected dry matter (DM) basis (NDFcorrected and IVTDcorrected). Forage kochia exhibited a dose-response for salt concentration, IVTDcorrected, and crude protein (CP) as salinity increased. Salt concentrations increased to 19% of DM at 600 mM NaCl, which may reduce voluntary intake by ruminants grazing forage kochia. Results indicated that uncorrected IVTD estimates were inflated as forage kochia IVTDcorrected decreased from 65% to 56% with the major change between 300 and 600 mM NaCl. Crude protein did not differ between two forage kochia cultivars but decreased from 26% to 15% between 0 and 600 mM NaCl, whereas Gardner’s saltbush CP decreased by only five percentage points as salinity increased. Nonetheless, despite the greater CP sensitivity to salinity level, forage kochia salt concentration was less and digestibility and metabolizable energy (ME) were greater than Gardner’s saltbush. Overall, salinity reduced the forage quality of forage kochia, though not as dramatically as for Gardner’s saltbush, thus supporting use of forage kochia to improve the forage base of saline rangelands

A unified ML framework for solubility prediction across organic solvents

We report a single machine learning (ML)-based model to predict the solubility of drug/drug-like compounds across 49 organic solvents, extensible to more. By adopting a cross-solvent data structure, we enable the exploitation of valuable relational information between systems. The effect is major, with even a single experimental measurement of a solute in a different solvent being enough to significantly improve predictions on it, and successive ones improving them further. Working with a sparse dataset of only 714 experimental data points spanning 75 solutes and 49 solvents (81% sparsity), a ML-based model with a prediction RMSE of 0.75 log S (g/100 g) for unseen solutes was produced. This compares favourably with conductor-like screening model for real solvents (COSMO-RS), an industry-standard model based on thermodynamic laws, which yielded a prediction RMSE of 0.97 for the same dataset. The error for our method reduced to a mean RMSE of 0.65 when one instance of the solute (in a different solvent) was included in the training data; this iteratively reduced further to 0.60, 0.57 and 0.56 when two, three and four instances were available, respectively. This standard of performance not only meets or exceeds those of alternative ML-based solubility models insofar as they can be compared but reaches the perceived ceiling for solubility prediction models of this type. In parallel, we assess the performance of the model with and without the addition of COSMO-RS output as an additional descriptor. We find that a significant benefit is gained from its addition, indicating that mechanistic methods can bring insight that simple molecular descriptors cannot and should be incorporated into a data-driven prediction of molecular properties where possible

Efficiency and safety of varying the frequency of whole blood donation (INTERVAL): a randomised trial of 45 000 donors

Background: Limits on the frequency of whole blood donation exist primarily to safeguard donor health. However, there is substantial variation across blood services in the maximum frequency of donations allowed. We compared standard practice in the UK with shorter inter-donation intervals used in other countries. Methods: In this parallel group, pragmatic, randomised trial, we recruited whole blood donors aged 18 years or older from 25 centres across England, UK. By use of a computer-based algorithm, men were randomly assigned (1:1:1) to 12-week (standard) versus 10-week versus 8-week inter-donation intervals, and women were randomly assigned (1:1:1) to 16-week (standard) versus 14-week versus 12-week intervals. Participants were not masked to their allocated intervention group. The primary outcome was the number of donations over 2 years. Secondary outcomes related to safety were quality of life, symptoms potentially related to donation, physical activity, cognitive function, haemoglobin and ferritin concentrations, and deferrals because of low haemoglobin. This trial is registered with ISRCTN, number ISRCTN24760606, and is ongoing but no longer recruiting participants. Findings: 45 263 whole blood donors (22 466 men, 22 797 women) were recruited between June 11, 2012, and June 15, 2014. Data were analysed for 45 042 (99·5%) participants. Men were randomly assigned to the 12-week (n=7452) versus 10-week (n=7449) versus 8-week (n=7456) groups; and women to the 16-week (n=7550) versus 14-week (n=7567) versus 12-week (n=7568) groups. In men, compared with the 12-week group, the mean amount of blood collected per donor over 2 years increased by 1·69 units (95% CI 1·59–1·80; approximately 795 mL) in the 8-week group and by 0·79 units (0·69–0·88; approximately 370 mL) in the 10-week group (p<0·0001 for both). In women, compared with the 16-week group, it increased by 0·84 units (95% CI 0·76–0·91; approximately 395 mL) in the 12-week group and by 0·46 units (0·39–0·53; approximately 215 mL) in the 14-week group (p<0·0001 for both). No significant differences were observed in quality of life, physical activity, or cognitive function across randomised groups. However, more frequent donation resulted in more donation-related symptoms (eg, tiredness, breathlessness, feeling faint, dizziness, and restless legs, especially among men [for all listed symptoms]), lower mean haemoglobin and ferritin concentrations, and more deferrals for low haemoglobin (p<0·0001 for each) than those observed in the standard frequency groups. Interpretation: Over 2 years, more frequent donation than is standard practice in the UK collected substantially more blood without having a major effect on donors' quality of life, physical activity, or cognitive function, but resulted in more donation-related symptoms, deferrals, and iron deficiency. Funding: NHS Blood and Transplant, National Institute for Health Research, UK Medical Research Council, and British Heart Foundation

Spontaneous Gender Categorization in Masking and Priming Studies: Key for Distinguishing Jane from John Doe but Not Madonna from Sinatra

Facial recognition is key to social interaction, however with unfamiliar faces only generic information, in the form of facial stereotypes such as gender and age is available. Therefore is generic information more prominent in unfamiliar versus familiar face processing? In order to address the question we tapped into two relatively disparate stages of face processing. At the early stages of encoding, we employed perceptual masking to reveal that only perception of unfamiliar face targets is affected by the gender of the facial masks. At the semantic end; using a priming paradigm, we found that while to-be-ignored unfamiliar faces prime lexical decisions to gender congruent stereotypic words, familiar faces do not. Our findings indicate that gender is a more salient dimension in unfamiliar relative to familiar face processing, both in early perceptual stages as well as later semantic stages of person construal

Quantum state preparation and macroscopic entanglement in gravitational-wave detectors

Long-baseline laser-interferometer gravitational-wave detectors are operating at a factor of 10 (in amplitude) above the standard quantum limit (SQL) within a broad frequency band. Such a low classical noise budget has already allowed the creation of a controlled 2.7 kg macroscopic oscillator with an effective eigenfrequency of 150 Hz and an occupation number of 200. This result, along with the prospect for further improvements, heralds the new possibility of experimentally probing macroscopic quantum mechanics (MQM) - quantum mechanical behavior of objects in the realm of everyday experience - using gravitational-wave detectors. In this paper, we provide the mathematical foundation for the first step of a MQM experiment: the preparation of a macroscopic test mass into a nearly minimum-Heisenberg-limited Gaussian quantum state, which is possible if the interferometer's classical noise beats the SQL in a broad frequency band. Our formalism, based on Wiener filtering, allows a straightforward conversion from the classical noise budget of a laser interferometer, in terms of noise spectra, into the strategy for quantum state preparation, and the quality of the prepared state. Using this formalism, we consider how Gaussian entanglement can be built among two macroscopic test masses, and the performance of the planned Advanced LIGO interferometers in quantum-state preparation

Searching for a Stochastic Background of Gravitational Waves with LIGO

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has performed the fourth science run, S4, with significantly improved interferometer sensitivities with respect to previous runs. Using data acquired during this science run, we place a limit on the amplitude of a stochastic background of gravitational waves. For a frequency independent spectrum, the new limit is $\Omega_{\rm GW} < 6.5 \times 10^{-5}$. This is currently the most sensitive result in the frequency range 51-150 Hz, with a factor of 13 improvement over the previous LIGO result. We discuss complementarity of the new result with other constraints on a stochastic background of gravitational waves, and we investigate implications of the new result for different models of this background.Comment: 37 pages, 16 figure