Telomere length covaries with personality in wild brown trout

The prevalence of consistent among-individual differences in behaviour, or personality, makes adaptive sense if individuals differ in stable state variables that shift the balance between the costs and benefits of their behavioural decisions. These differences may give rise to both individual differences in, and covariance among, behaviours that influence an individual's exposure to risks. We here study the link between behaviour and a candidate state variable previously overlooked in the study of state-dependent personality variation: telomere length. Telomeres are the protective endcaps of chromosomes and their erosion with age is thought to play a crucial role in regulating organismal senescence and intrinsic lifespan. Following evidence that shorter telomeres may reduce the lifespan of animals in a wide range of taxa, we predict individuals with shorter telomeres to behave more boldly and aggressively. In order to test this, we measured telomere length and behaviour in wild juvenile brown trout (Salmo trutta). We found individuals with shorter fin telomeres to behave consistently more boldly and aggressively under controlled conditions in the laboratory. No such relationship was found with muscle telomere length 3–4 months after the behavioural assays. We suggest that telomere dynamics are an important factor integrating personality traits with other state variables thought to be important in the regulation of behaviour, such as metabolism, disease resistance and growth

Novel Magnet Production Technique Used for an Elliptically Polarizing Undulator

A common problem for elliptically polarizing undulators EPUs is that the magnetic forces give a mechanical deflection in the magnet holder construction when changing the undulator phase. Gluing horizontally and vertically magnetized blocks together can increase the mechanical stability of the magnet holders. The gluing process of pairs of magnetized magnet blocks is time consuming, expensive and difficult to carry out with high positional precision. A novel magnet production technique has been developed where un magnetized pairs of blocks are glued together before magnetization. The large number of parts, the time for assembly, and the cost of the EPU can be reduced with the novel magnet production technique. The novel magnet production method has been used for a 2.6 m long EPU of APPLE II type, which has been built in house at the MAX IV Laboratory. The frame for the EPU is made of cast iron in order to get a small mechanical deformation when changing phase in the inclined mode. The paper includes detailed descriptions of the novel magnet production technique, including measurements of the magnetization, and the new EP

Photopion reactions on deltas preexisting in nuclei

Reactions A(\gamma, pi^+p) are considered to proceed through the formation of pion-proton pairs on delta constituents in nuclei. We develop the nonrelativistic operator for \Delta^{++}(\gamma, pi^+)p process in an arbitrary frame. The calculated cross section for C12(\gamma, \pi^+p) reaction is compared to the existing experimental data.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Broadband distortion modeling in Lyman-α\alpha forest BAO fitting

In recent years, the Lyman-$\alpha$ absorption observed in the spectra of high-redshift quasars has been used as a tracer of large-scale structure by means of the three-dimensional Lyman-$\alpha$ forest auto-correlation function at redshift $z\simeq 2.3$, but the need to fit the quasar continuum in every absorption spectrum introduces a broadband distortion that is difficult to correct and causes a systematic error for measuring any broadband properties. We describe a $k$-space model for this broadband distortion based on a multiplicative correction to the power spectrum of the transmitted flux fraction that suppresses power on scales corresponding to the typical length of a Lyman-$\alpha$ forest spectrum. Implementing the distortion model in fits for the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) peak position in the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest auto-correlation, we find that the fitting method recovers the input values of the linear bias parameter $b_{F}$ and the redshift-space distortion parameter $\beta_{F}$ for mock data sets with a systematic error of less than 0.5\%. Applied to the auto-correlation measured for BOSS Data Release 11, our method improves on the previous treatment of broadband distortions in BAO fitting by providing a better fit to the data using fewer parameters and reducing the statistical errors on $\beta_{F}$ and the combination $b_{F}(1+\beta_{F})$ by more than a factor of seven. The measured values at redshift $z=2.3$ are $\beta_{F}=1.39^{+0.11\ +0.24\ +0.38}_{-0.10\ -0.19\ -0.28}$and$b_{F}(1+\beta_{F})=-0.374^{+0.007\ +0.013\ +0.020}_{-0.007\ -0.014\ -0.022}$(1$\sigma$, 2$\sigma$and 3$\sigma$ statistical errors). Our fitting software and the input files needed to reproduce our main results are publicly available.Comment: 28 pages, 15 figures, matches the published versio

Particle tracking in kaon electroproduction with cathode-charge sampling in multi-wire proportional chambers

Wire chambers are routinely operated as tracking detectors in magnetic spectrometers at high-intensity continuous electron beams. Especially in experiments studying reactions with small cross-sections the reaction yield is limited by the background rate in the chambers. One way to determine the track of a charged particle through a multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC) is the measurement of the charge distribution induced on its cathodes. In practical applications of this read-out method, the algorithm to relate the measured charge distribution to the avalanche position is an important factor for the achievable position resolution and for the track reconstruction efficiency. An algorithm was developed for operating two large-sized MWPCs in a strong background environment with multiple-particle tracks. Resulting efficiencies were determined as a function of the electron beam current and on the signal amplitudes. Because of the different energy-losses of pions, kaons, and protons in the momentum range of the spectrometer the efficiencies depend also on the particle species