Planting Trees on Kansas Prairies

Kansas always has been and always will be essentially a prairie state. But every year brings more convincing proof that her plains need not always remain treeless. Each planting season sees new effort put forth to beautify the Western Kansas homes and divest fhe plains of their traditional bleakness

Progress of Forestry Extension in Iowa

Interest and activity in forestry for Iowa is increasing definitely. A brief summary of last year\u27s forestry extension program appears something as follows

V723 Cas (Nova Cassiopeiae 1995): MERLIN observations from 1996 to 2001

MERLIN observations of the unusually slow nova V723 Cas are presented. Nine epochs of 6-cm data between 1996 and 2001 are mapped, showing the initial expansion and brightening of the radio remnant, the development of structure and the final decline. A radio light curve is presented and fitted by the standard Hubble flow model for radio emission from novae in order to determine the values of various physical parameters for the shell. The model is consistent with the overall development of the radio emission. Assuming a distance of 2.39 (+/-0.38) kpc and a shell temperature of 17000 K, the model yields values for expansion velocity of 414 +/- 0.1 km s^-1 and shell mass of 1.13 +/- 0.04 * 10^-4 Msolar. These values are consistent with those derived from other observations although the ejected masses are rather higher than theoretical predictions. The structure of the shell is resolved by MERLIN and shows that the assumption of spherical symmetry in the standard model is unlikely to be correct.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Properties of Accretion Flows Around Coalescing Supermassive Black Holes

What are the properties of accretion flows in the vicinity of coalescing supermassive black holes (SBHs)? The answer to this question has direct implications for the feasibility of coincident detections of electromagnetic (EM) and gravitational wave (GW) signals from coalescences. Such detections are considered to be the next observational grand challenge that will enable testing general relativity in the strong, nonlinear regime and improve our understanding of evolution and growth of these massive compact objects. In this paper we review the properties of the environment of coalescing binaries in the context of the circumbinary disk and hot, radiatively inefficient accretion flow models and use them to mark the extent of the parameter space spanned by this problem. We report the results from an ongoing, general relativistic, hydrodynamical study of the inspiral and merger of black holes, motivated by the latter scenario. We find that correlated EM+GW oscillations can arise during the inspiral phase followed by the gradual rise and subsequent drop-off in the light curve at the time of coalescence. While there are indications that the latter EM signature is a more robust one, a detection of either signal coincidentally with GWs would be a convincing evidence for an impending SBH binary coalescence. The observability of an EM counterpart in the hot accretion flow scenario depends on the details of a model. In the case of the most massive binaries observable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, upper limits on luminosity imply that they may be identified by EM searches out to z~0.1-1. However, given the radiatively inefficient nature of the gas flow, we speculate that a majority of massive binaries may appear as low luminosity AGN in the local universe.Comment: Revised version accepted to Class. Quantum Grav. for proceedings of 8th LISA Symposium. 15 pages, 3 figures, includes changes suggested in referee report

Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility for time domain astronomy in 2020

The robotic 2m Liverpool Telescope, based on the Canary island of La Palma, has a diverse instrument suite and a strong track record in time domain science, with highlights including early time photometry and spectra of supernovae, measurements of the polarization of gamma-ray burst afterglows, and high cadence light curves of transiting extrasolar planets. In the next decade the time domain will become an increasingly prominent part of the astronomical agenda with new facilities such as LSST, SKA, CTA and Gaia, and promised detections of astrophysical gravitational wave and neutrino sources opening new windows on the transient universe. To capitalise on this exciting new era we intend to build Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility on La Palma dedicated to time domain science. The next generation of survey facilities will discover large numbers of new transient sources, but there will be a pressing need for follow-up observations for scientific exploitation, in particular spectroscopic follow-up. Liverpool Telescope 2 will have a 4-metre aperture, enabling optical/infrared spectroscopy of faint objects. Robotic telescopes are capable of rapid reaction to unpredictable phenomena, and for fast-fading transients like gamma-ray burst afterglows. This rapid reaction enables observations which would be impossible on less agile telescopes of much larger aperture. We intend Liverpool Telescope 2 to have a world-leading response time, with the aim that we will be taking data with a few tens of seconds of receipt of a trigger from a ground- or space-based transient detection facility. We outline here our scientific goals and present the results of our preliminary optical design studies. © (2014) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only

Cystatins as calpain inhibitors: Engineered chicken cystatin- and stefin B-kininogen domain 2 hybrids support a cystatin-like mode of interaction with the catalytic subunit of μ-calpain

Within the cystatin superfamily, only kininogen domain 2 (KD2) is able to inhibit μ- and m-calpain. In an attempt to elucidate the structural requirements of cystatins for calpain inhibition, we constructed recombinant hybrids of human stefin B (an intracellular family 1 cystatin) with KD2 and Delta L110 deletion mutants of chicken cystatin-KD2 hybrids. Substitution of the N-terminal contact region of stefin B by the corresponding KD2 sequence resulted in a calpain inhibitor of K-i = 188 nM. Deletion of L110, which forms a beta -bulge in family 1 and 2 cystatins but is lacking in KD2, improved inhibition of mu -calpain 4- to 8-fold. All engineered cystatins were temporary inhibitors of calpain due to slow substrate-like cleavage of a single peptide bond corresponding to Gly9-Ala10 in chicken cystatin. Biomolecular interaction analysis revealed that, unlike calpastatin, the cystatin-type inhibitors do not bind to the calmodulin-like domain of the small subunit of calpain, and their interaction with the mu -calpain heterodimer is completely prevented by a synthetic peptide comprising subdomain B of calpastatin domain 1. Based on these results we propose that (i) cystatin-type calpain inhibitors interact with the active site of the catalytic domain of calpain in a similar cystatin-like mode as with papain and (ii) the potential for calpain inhibition is due to specific subsites within the papain-binding regions of the general cystatin fold

The circumburst environment of a FRED GRB: study of the prompt emission and X-ray/optical afterglow of GRB 051111

We report a multi-wavelength analysis of the prompt emission and early afterglow of GRB051111 and discuss its properties in the context of current fireball models. The detection of GRB051111 by the Burst Alert Telescope on-board Swift triggered early BVRi' observations with the 2-m robotic Faulkes Telescope North in Hawaii, as well as X-ray observations with the Swift X-Ray Telescope. The prompt gamma-ray emission shows a classical FRED profile. The optical afterglow light curves are fitted with a broken power law, with alpha_1=0.35 to alpha_2=1.35 and a break time around 12 minutes after the GRB. Although contemporaneous X-ray observations were not taken, a power law connection between the gamma-ray tail of the FRED temporal profile and the late XRT flux decay is feasible. Alternatively, if the X-ray afterglow tracks the optical decay, this would represent one of the first GRBs for which the canonical steep-shallow-normal decay typical of early X-ray afterglows has been monitored optically. We present a detailed analysis of the intrinsic extinction, elemental abundances and spectral energy distribution. From the absorption measured in the low X-ray band we find possible evidence for an overabundance of some alpha elements such as oxygen, [O/Zn]=0.7+/-0.3, or, alternatively, for a significant presence of molecular gas. The IR-to-X-ray Spectral Energy Distribution measured at 80 minutes after the burst is consistent with the cooling break lying between the optical and X-ray bands. Extensive modelling of the intrinsic extinction suggests dust with big grains or grey extinction profiles. The early optical break is due either to an energy injection episode or, less probably, to a stratified wind environment for the circumburst medium.Comment: accepted to A&A on Nov. 10 (14 pages, 8 figures

String amplitudes in arbitrary dimensions

We calculate gravitational dressed tachyon correlators in non critcal dimensions. The 2D gravity part of our theory is constrained to constant curvature. Then scaling dimensions of gravitational dressed vertex operators are equal to their bare conformal dimensions. Considering the model as d+2 dimensional critical string we calculate poles of generalized Shapiro-Virasoro amplitudes.Comment: 14 page

Non-perturbative renormalization of quark mass in Nf=2+1 QCD with the Schroedinger functional scheme

We present an evaluation of the quark mass renormalization factor for Nf=2+1 QCD. The Schroedinger functional scheme is employed as the intermediate scheme to carry out non-perturbative running from the low energy region, where renormalization of bare mass is performed on the lattice, to deep in the high energy perturbative region, where the conversion to the renormalization group invariant mass or the MS-bar scheme is safely carried out. For numerical simulations we adopted the Iwasaki gauge action and non-perturbatively improved Wilson fermion action with the clover term. Seven renormalization scales are used to cover from low to high energy regions and three lattice spacings to take the continuum limit at each scale. The regularization independent step scaling function of the quark mass for the Nf=2+1 QCD is obtained in the continuum limit. Renormalization factors for the pseudo scalar density and the axial vector current are also evaluated for the same action and the bare couplings as two recent large scale Nf=2+1 simulations; previous work of the CP-PACS/JLQCD collaboration, which covered the up-down quark mass range heavier than $m_\pi\sim 500$ MeV and that of PACS-CS collaboration for much lighter quark masses down to $m_\pi=155$ MeV. The quark mass renormalization factor is used to renormalize bare PCAC masses in these simulations.Comment: 26 pages, 17 Postscript figures. Two tables are update