15,979 research outputs found
Going beyond single figure fertilizer recommendations
Single-figure fertilizer recommendations are useful guidelines but they do not tell a farmer anything about the consequences of applying fertilizer at rates other than those recommended
Navail Spreadsheet
A computer program called NPDECIDE has been developed by the Western Australian Department of Agriculture to assist with decisions relating to the use of phosphorus fertiliser on cereal crops. NPDECIDE functions by estimating the response of the crop to combinations of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers, and by indicating the likely profit from the use of these materials. In order to carry out this task, NPDECIDE must be able to calculate the availability to the growing plants of nitrogen from the fertilisers and from organic material in the soil
Specialization of the rostral prefrontal cortex for distinct analogy processes
Analogical reasoning is central to learning and abstract thinking. It involves using a more familiar situation (source) to make inferences about a less familiar situation (target). According to the predominant cognitive models, analogical reasoning includes 1) generation of structured mental representations and 2) mapping based on structural similarities between them. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to specify the role of rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) in these distinct processes. An experimental paradigm was designed that enabled differentiation between these processes, by temporal separation of the presentation of the source and the target. Within rostral PFC, a lateral subregion was activated by analogy task both during study of the source (before the source could be compared with a target) and when the target appeared. This may suggest that this subregion supports fundamental analogy processes such as generating structured representations of stimuli but is not specific to one particular processing stage. By contrast, a dorsomedial subregion of rostral PFC showed an interaction between task (analogy vs. control) and period (more activated when the target appeared). We propose that this region is involved in comparison or mapping processes. These results add to the growing evidence for functional differentiation between rostral PFC subregions
On Bouncing Brane-Worlds, S-branes and Branonium Cosmology
We present several higher-dimensional spacetimes for which observers living
on 3-branes experience an induced metric which bounces. The classes of examples
include boundary branes on generalised S-brane backgrounds and probe branes in
D-brane/anti D-brane systems. The bounces we consider normally would be
expected to require an energy density which violates the weak energy condition,
and for our co-dimension one examples this is attributable to bulk curvature
terms in the effective Friedmann equation. We examine the features of the
acceleration which provides the bounce, including in some cases the existence
of positive acceleration without event horizons, and we give a geometrical
interpretation for it. We discuss the stability of the solutions from the point
of view of both the brane and the bulk. Some of our examples appear to be
stable from the bulk point of view, suggesting the possible existence of stable
bouncing cosmologies within the brane-world framework.Comment: 35 pages, 7 figures, JHEP style. Title changed and references adde
Coriolis force corrections to g-mode spectrum in 1D MHD model
The corrections to g-mode frequencies caused by the presence of a central
magnetic field and rotation of the Sun are calculated. The calculations are
carried out in the simple one dimensional magnetohydrodynamical model using the
approximations which allow one to find the purely analytical spectra of
magneto-gravity waves beyond the scope of the JWKB approximation and avoid in a
small background magnetic field the appearance of the cusp resonance which
locks a wave within the radiative zone. These analytic results are compared
with the satellite observations of the g-mode frequency shifts which are of the
order one per cent as given in the GOLF experiment at the SoHO board. The main
contribution turns out to be the magnetic frequency shift in the strong
magnetic field which obeys the used approximations. In particular, the fixed
magnetic field strength 700 KG results in the mentioned value of the frequency
shift for the g-mode of the radial order n=-10. The rotational shift due to the
Coriolis force appears to be small and does not exceed a fracton of per cent,
\alpha_\Omega < 0.003.Comment: RevTeX4, 9 pages, 4 eps figures; accepted for publication in
Astronomy Reports (Astronomicheskii Zhurnal
Genetically elevated gamma-glutamyltransferase and Alzheimer’s disease
Observational epidemiological evidence supports a linear and independent association between serum gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT) concentrations and the risk of Alzheimer’ disease (AD). However, the causality of this association has not been previously investigated. We sought to assess the causal nature of this association using a Mendelian randomization (MR) approach. Using inverse-variance weighted MR analysis, we assessed the association between GGT and AD using summary statistics for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-AD associations obtained from the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project of 17,008 individuals with AD and 37,154 controls. We used 26 SNPs significantly associated with GGT in a previous genome-wide association study on liver enzymes as instruments. Sensitivity analyses to account for potential genetic pleiotropy included MR-Egger and weighted median MR.
The odds ratio of AD was 1.09 (95% confidence interval, 0.98 to 1.22; p = 0.10) per one standard deviation genetically elevated GGT based on all 26 SNPs. The results were similar in both MR-Egger and weighted median MR methods. Overall, our findings cannot confirm a strong causal effect of GGT on AD risk. Further MR investigations using individual-level data are warranted to confirm or rule out causality.This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Dr. Setor Kunutsor acknowledges support from the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at the University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Bristol ... Dr. Stephen Burgess is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society (Grant Number 204623/Z/16/Z)
Scaling Solutions to 6D Gauged Chiral Supergravity
We construct explicitly time-dependent exact solutions to the field equations
of 6D gauged chiral supergravity, compactified to 4D in the presence of up to
two 3-branes situated within the extra dimensions. The solutions we find are
scaling solutions, and are plausibly attractors which represent the late-time
evolution of a broad class of initial conditions. By matching their near-brane
boundary conditions to physical brane properties we argue that these solutions
(together with the known maximally-symmetric solutions and a new class of
non-Lorentz-invariant static solutions, which we also present here) describe
the bulk geometry between a pair of 3-branes with non-trivial on-brane
equations of state.Comment: Contribution to the New Journal of Physics focus issue on Dark
Energy; 28 page
The Long-Term Outcomes of Refugees: Tracking the Progress of the East African Asians
Refugees are often perceived as an economic "burden", as the current debate on the European refugee crisis illustrates. But there is little quantitative evidence on the medium-term outcomes of refugees in the UK. We fill this gap by looking at the case of "East African Asians" who arrived as refugees in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We use data from the UK Census to describe their economic outcomes forty years later. We show that their outcomes are at least as good as the population average, with the younger cohort performing better. Refugee status, as distinct from ethnicity or immigrant status, appears to have a positive impact
Extremely narrow spectrum of GRB110920A: further evidence for localised, subphotospheric dissipation
Much evidence points towards that the photosphere in the relativistic outflow
in GRBs plays an important role in shaping the observed MeV spectrum. However,
it is unclear whether the spectrum is fully produced by the photosphere or
whether a substantial part of the spectrum is added by processes far above the
photosphere. Here we make a detailed study of the ray emission from
single pulse GRB110920A which has a spectrum that becomes extremely narrow
towards the end of the burst. We show that the emission can be interpreted as
Comptonisation of thermal photons by cold electrons in an unmagnetised outflow
at an optical depth of . The electrons receive their energy by a
local dissipation occurring close to the saturation radius. The main spectral
component of GRB110920A and its evolution is thus, in this interpretation,
fully explained by the emission from the photosphere including localised
dissipation at high optical depths.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, accepted to MNRA
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