302 research outputs found
Road Ditch Spraying can Contaminate Shallow Ground Water
Herbicides are the most often detected pesticides in shallow aquifers in eastern South Dakota. Since most of the people in this part of the state obtain drinking water from these shallow aquifers, there is increasing concern for aquifer water purity. In the Oakwood Lakes-Poinsett project area, Lasso was the herbicide most often detected in the aquifer, followed by 2,4-D. Tordon 22k (picloram) was second to Lasso in 1991 data from Turner County and Bowdle aquifer studies. The road ditch over the aquifer is one of the most sensitive environments to ground water pollution. This is particularly true for naturally shallow soils with only 1 to 3 feet of soil over the gravel aquifer material. In the process of building up the road, an average of 1 foot of soil is taken from the road ditch. This leaves the ditch with O to 2 feet of soil over the gravel. Thus, these road ditches are extremely sensitive to the leaching of herbicides into ground water
The extraction of nuclear sea quark distribution and energy loss effect in Drell-Yan experiment
The next-to-leading order and leading order analysis are performed on the
differential cross section ratio from Drell-Yan process. It is found that the
effect of next-to-leading order corrections can be negligible on the
differential cross section ratios as a function of the quark momentum fraction
in the beam proton and the target nuclei for the current Fermilab and future
lower beam proton energy. The nuclear Drell-Yan reaction is an ideal tool to
study the energy loss of the fast quark moving through cold nuclei. In the
leading order analysis, the theoretical results with quark energy loss are in
good agreement with the Fermilab E866 experimental data on the Drell-Yan
differential cross section ratios as a function of the momentum fraction of the
target parton. It is shown that the quark energy loss effect has significant
impact on the Drell-Yan differential cross section ratios. The nuclear
Drell-Yan experiment at current Fermilab and future lower energy proton beam
can not provide us with more information on the nuclear sea quark distribution.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
Finite reduction and Morse index estimates for mechanical systems
A simple version of exact finite dimensional reduction for the variational
setting of mechanical systems is presented. It is worked out by means of a
thorough global version of the implicit function theorem for monotone
operators. Moreover, the Hessian of the reduced function preserves all the
relevant information of the original one, by Schur's complement, which
spontaneously appears in this context. Finally, the results are
straightforwardly extended to the case of a Dirichlet problem on a bounded
domain.Comment: 13 pages; v2: minor changes, to appear in Nonlinear Differential
Equations and Application
Hyperons analogous to the \Lambda(1405)
The low mass of the hyperon with , which is
higher than the ground state mass by 290 MeV, is difficult to
understand in quark models. We analyze the hyperon spectrum in the bound state
approach of the Skyrme model that successfully describes both the
and the . This model predicts that several
hyperon resonances of the same spin but with opposite parity form parity
doublets that have a mass difference of around 300 MeV, which is indeed
realized in the observed hyperon spectrum. Furthermore, the existence of the
and the of is predicted by this model.
Comments on the baryons and heavy quark baryons are made as well.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented at the Fifth Asia-Pacific Conference on
Few-Body Problems in Physics 2011 (APFB2011), Aug. 22-26, 2011, Seoul, Kore
Dragon-kings: mechanisms, statistical methods and empirical evidence
This introductory article presents the special Discussion and Debate volume
"From black swans to dragon-kings, is there life beyond power laws?" published
in Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics in May 2012. We summarize and put in
perspective the contributions into three main themes: (i) mechanisms for
dragon-kings, (ii) detection of dragon-kings and statistical tests and (iii)
empirical evidence in a large variety of natural and social systems. Overall,
we are pleased to witness significant advances both in the introduction and
clarification of underlying mechanisms and in the development of novel
efficient tests that demonstrate clear evidence for the presence of
dragon-kings in many systems. However, this positive view should be balanced by
the fact that this remains a very delicate and difficult field, if only due to
the scarcity of data as well as the extraordinary important implications with
respect to hazard assessment, risk control and predictability.Comment: 20 page
The theta^+ baryon in soliton models: large Nc QCD and the validity of rigid-rotor quantization
A light collective theta+ baryon state (with strangeness +1) was predicted
via rigid-rotor collective quantization of SU(3) chiral soliton models. This
paper explores the validity of this treatment. A number of rather general
analyses suggest that predictions of exotic baryon properties based on this
approximation do not follow from large Nc QCD. These include an analysis of the
baryon's width, a comparison of the predictions with general large Nc
consistency conditions of the Gervais-Sakita-Dashen-Manohar type; an
application of the technique to QCD in the limit where the quarks are heavy; a
comparison of this method with the vibration approach of Callan and Klebanov;
and the 1/Nc scaling of the excitation energy. It is suggested that the origin
of the problem lies in an implicit assumption in the that the collective motion
is orthogonal to vibrational motion. While true for non-exotic motion, the
Wess-Zumino term induces mixing at leading order between collective and
vibrational motion with exotic quantum numbers. This suggests that successful
phenomenological predictions of theta+ properties based on rigid-rotor
quantization were accidental.Comment: 19 pages; A shorter more readable versio
Multi-ethnic GWAS and fine-mapping of glycaemic traits identify novel loci in the PAGE Study
Aims/hypothesis: Type 2 diabetes is a growing global public health challenge. Investigating quantitative traits, including fasting glucose, fasting insulin and HbA1c, that serve as early markers of type 2 diabetes progression may lead to a deeper understanding of the genetic aetiology of type 2 diabetes development. Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified over 500 loci associated with type 2 diabetes, glycaemic traits and insulin-related traits. However, most of these findings were based only on populations of European ancestry. To address this research gap, we examined the genetic basis of fasting glucose, fasting insulin and HbA1c in participants of the diverse Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study. Methods: We conducted a GWAS of fasting glucose (n = 52,267), fasting insulin (n = 48,395) and HbA1c (n = 23,357) in participants without diabetes from the diverse PAGE Study (23% self-reported African American, 46% Hispanic/Latino, 40% European, 4% Asian, 3% Native Hawaiian, 0.8% Native American), performing transethnic and population-specific GWAS meta-analyses, followed by fine-mapping to identify and characterise novel loci and independent secondary signals in known loci. Results: Four novel associations were identified (p < 5 × 10−9), including three loci associated with fasting insulin, and a novel, low-frequency African American-specific locus associated with fasting glucose. Additionally, seven secondary signals were identified, including novel independent secondary signals for fasting glucose at the known GCK locus and for fasting insulin at the known PPP1R3B locus in transethnic meta-analysis. Conclusions/interpretation: Our findings provide new insights into the genetic architecture of glycaemic traits and highlight the continued importance of conducting genetic studies in diverse populations. Data availability: Full summary statistics from each of the population-specific and transethnic results are available at NHGRI-EBI GWAS catalog (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/downloads/summary-statistics)
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