7,387 research outputs found
Facial aesthetics: babies prefer attractiveness to symmetry
The visual preferences of human infants for faces that varied in their attractiveness and in their symmetry about the midline were explored. The aim was to establish whether infants' visual preference for attractive faces may be mediated by the vertical symmetry of the face. Chimeric faces, made from photographs of attractive and unattractive female faces, were produced by computer graphics. Babies looked longer at normal and at chimeric attractive faces than at normal and at chimeric unattractive faces. There were no developmental differences between the younger and older infants: all preferred to look at the attractive faces. Infants as young as 4 months showed similarity with adults in the 'aesthetic perception' of attractiveness and this preference was not based on the vertical symmetry of the face
Potential Terrorist Uses of Highway-Borne Hazardous Materials, MTI Report 09-03
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has requested that the Mineta Transportation Institutes National Transportation Security Center of Excellence (MTI NTSCOE) provide any research it has or insights it can provide on the security risks created by the highway transportation of hazardous materials. This request was submitted to MTI/NSTC as a National Transportation Security Center of Excellence. In response, MTI/NTSC reviewed and revised research performed in 2007 and 2008 and assembled a small team of terrorism and emergency-response experts, led by Center Director Brian Michael Jenkins, to report on the risks of terrorists using highway shipments of flammable liquids (e.g., gasoline tankers) to cause casualties anywhere, and ways to reduce those risks. This report has been provided to DHS. The teams first focus was on surface transportation targets, including highway infrastructure, and also public transportation stations. As a full understanding of these materials, and their use against various targets became revealed, the team shifted with urgency to the far more plentiful targets outside of surface transportation where people gather and can be killed or injured. However, the team is concerned to return to the top of the use of these materials against public transit stations and recommends it as a separate subject for urgent research
Plasma-catalyst interaction studied in a single pellet DBD reactor: Dielectric constant effect on plasma dynamics
A novel single dielectric pellet DBD that is designed to facilitate studying the interaction
between plasmas and catalysts is presented. The influence of material dielectric constant on
plasma dynamics across a range of applied voltages is determined through the use of electrical
characterisation combined with videos of the discharge. Different discharge modes in nitrogen
are observed and their behaviour is characterised. A particular focus is given to the phenomenon
known as ‘partial discharging’. This is where incomplete plasma formation occurs between the
electrodes of the reactor, which may have implications for the fair testing of catalysts in packed
bed reactors. Additionally, the occurrence of an ‘almond shaped’ QV plot in the event of pointto-point
discharging in PBRs is explained. This work provides easily implemented analytical
techniques that can be applied to understand the behaviour of plasmas within packed bed DBD
reactors
Jet Trimming
Initial state radiation, multiple interactions, and event pileup can
contaminate jets and degrade event reconstruction. Here we introduce a
procedure, jet trimming, designed to mitigate these sources of contamination in
jets initiated by light partons. This procedure is complimentary to existing
methods developed for boosted heavy particles. We find that jet trimming can
achieve significant improvements in event reconstruction, especially at high
energy/luminosity hadron colliders like the LHC.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables - Minor changes to text/figure
Search for the Elusive Higgs Boson Using Jet Structure at LHC
We consider the production of a light non-standard model Higgs boson of order
100~\GEV with an associated boson at CERN Large Hadron Collider. We focus
on an interesting scenario that, the Higgs boson decays predominately into two
light scalars with mass of few GeV which sequently decay into four
gluons, i.e. . Since is much lighter than the Higgs
boson, it will be highly boosted and its decay products, the two gluons, will
move close to each other, resulting in a single jet for decay in the
detector. By using electromagnetic calorimeter-based and jet substructure
analyses, we show in two cases of different masses that it is quite
promising to extract the signal of Higgs boson out of large QCD background.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
Towards standardisation of the longline CPUE series from the lobster fisheries around Inaccessible, Nightingale and Gough islands
Two CPUE indicies exist for the tristan lobster (Jasus tristani ) fisheries surrounding Inaccessible, Nightingale and Gough islands. Here the nominal indicies are presented, alongside descriptions of how they will be standardised to ensure they each provide a more accurate index of population density
Jet Substructure Without Trees
We present an alternative approach to identifying and characterizing jet
substructure. An angular correlation function is introduced that can be used to
extract angular and mass scales within a jet without reference to a clustering
algorithm. This procedure gives rise to a number of useful jet observables. As
an application, we construct a top quark tagging algorithm that is competitive
with existing methods.Comment: 22 pages, 16 figures, version accepted by JHE
Large hadron collider constraints on some simple Z models for b → sμ+μ− anomalies
We examine current Large Hadron Collider constraints on some simple Z models that significantly improve
on Standard Model fits to b → sμ+μ− transition data. The
models that we consider are the ‘third family baryon number minus second family lepton number’ (B3 − L2) model
and the ‘third family hypercharge’ model and variants. The
constraints are applied on parameter regions of each model
that fit the b → sμ+μ− transition data and come from highmass Drell–Yan di-muons and measurements of Standard
Model processes. This latter set of observables place particularly strong bounds upon the parameter space of the B3 − L2
model when the mass of the Z boson is less than 300 GeV
The mass area of jets
We introduce a new characteristic of jets called mass area. It is defined so
as to measure the susceptibility of the jet's mass to contamination from soft
background. The mass area is a close relative of the recently introduced
catchment area of jets. We define it also in two variants: passive and active.
As a preparatory step, we generalise the results for passive and active areas
of two-particle jets to the case where the two constituent particles have
arbitrary transverse momenta. As a main part of our study, we use the mass area
to analyse a range of modern jet algorithms acting on simple one and
two-particle systems. We find a whole variety of behaviours of passive and
active mass areas depending on the algorithm, relative hardness of particles or
their separation. We also study mass areas of jets from Monte Carlo simulations
as well as give an example of how the concept of mass area can be used to
correct jets for contamination from pileup. Our results show that the
information provided by the mass area can be very useful in a range of
jet-based analyses.Comment: 36 pages, 12 figures; v2: improved quality of two plots, added entry
in acknowledgments, nicer form of formulae in appendix A; v3: added section
with MC study and pileup correction, version accepted by JHE
Prostate cancer radiotherapy: potential applications of metal nanoparticles for imaging and therapy
Prostate cancer (CaP) is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in males. There have been dramatic technical advances in radiotherapy delivery, enabling higher doses of radiotherapy to primary cancer, involved lymph nodes and oligometastases with acceptable normal tissue toxicity. Despite this, many patients relapse following primary radical therapy, and novel treatment approaches are required. Metal nanoparticles are agents that promise to improve diagnostic imaging and image-guided radiotherapy and to selectively enhance radiotherapy effectiveness in CaP. We summarize current radiotherapy treatment approaches for CaP and consider pre-clinical and clinical evidence for metal nanoparticles in this condition
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