Gold and palladium as indicators of an extraterrestrial component in the Cetaceous/Tertiary boundary layer at Woodside Creek and Chancet Quarry, Marlborough, New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Earth Sciences at Massey University

It is widely believed that a large meteorite approximately 10 km in diameter impacted Earth at the termination of the Cretaceous Period with cosmic velocity, vaporising itself, along with a greater mass of the terrestrial target rocks into a cloud of hot rock vapour. The vapour cloud condensed into particles of sand to clay size at high altitude before returning to Earth to form a worldwide layer marking the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. Chemical evidence from this boundary layer suggests that the impactor was a chondritic meteorite, enriched in the platinum group elements compared to the Earth's crust. An enrichment of these elements above their background crustal abundances to approximately 0.1 of the chondritic abundance has been observed in a number of Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary layers worldwide. Iridium is the platinum group element traditionally used as an indicator of the extraterrestrial component (ETC) in likely impact layers due to its rarity in the Earth's crust and low detection limits possible using neutron activation analysis methods. Neutron activation analysis is however expensive and requires specialist facilities, this thesis proposes that the elements gold and palladium can also be used to indicate the ETC in the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary layer. Samples from two Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary sites, Woodside Creek and Chancet Quarry, were analysed for gold and palladium using graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry. A strong correlation was found between iridium, gold, and palladium abundances at these sites, with all showing enrichment at precisely the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary in proportion to iridium, indicating a common origin for all three elements. Gold showed almost precisely the expected 0.1 of its chondritic abundance in the clay size fraction at both Woodside Creek and Chancet Quarry (15 ng/g). Palladium showed exactly 0.1 of its chondritic abundance at the Chancet Quarry boundary with 53 ng/g. Gold abundances on the boundary at Woodside Creek (55 ng/g) and Chancet Quarry (44 ng/g) showed excellent agreement with published values as did the palladium result for Woodside Creek (22 ng/g)

War and Medicine at the Canadian War Museum

War and Medicine is the Canadian War Museum’s major summer exhibition. War and Medicine provides an unflinching look at the relationship between medical practice and military operations over the past 150 years. It comprises more than 300 artifacts, images, and works of art from the Museum’s National Collection and 50 lenders in Europe and North America. The exhibition is open until 13 November 2011

Transition stages of Rayleigh–Taylor instability between miscible fluids

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) are presented of three-dimensional, Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) between two incompressible, miscible fluids, with a 3:1 density ratio. Periodic boundary conditions are imposed in the horizontal directions of a rectangular domain, with no-slip top and bottom walls. Solutions are obtained for the Navier–Stokes equations, augmented by a species transport-diffusion equation, with various initial perturbations. The DNS achieved outer-scale Reynolds numbers, based on mixing-zone height and its rate of growth, in excess of 3000. Initial growth is diffusive and independent of the initial perturbations. The onset of nonlinear growth is not predicted by available linear-stability theory. Following the diffusive-growth stage, growth rates are found to depend on the initial perturbations, up to the end of the simulations. Mixing is found to be even more sensitive to initial conditions than growth rates. Taylor microscales and Reynolds numbers are anisotropic throughout the simulations. Improved collapse of many statistics is achieved if the height of the mixing zone, rather than time, is used as the scaling or progress variable. Mixing has dynamical consequences for this flow, since it is driven by the action of the imposed acceleration field on local density differences

Optimal Interleaving on Tori

We study t-interleaving on two-dimensional tori, which is defined by the property that any connected subgraph with t or fewer vertices in the torus is labelled by all distinct integers. It has applications in distributed data storage and burst error correction, and is closely related to Lee metric codes. We say that a torus can be perfectly t-interleaved if its t-interleaving number – the minimum number of distinct integers needed to t-interleave the torus – meets the spherepacking lower bound. We prove the necessary and sufficient conditions for tori that can be perfectly t-interleaved, and present efficient perfect t-interleaving constructions. The most important contribution of this paper is to prove that the t-interleaving numbers of tori large enough in both dimensions, which constitute by far the majority of all existing cases, is at most one more than the sphere-packing lower bound, and to present an optimal and efficient t-interleaving scheme for them. Then we prove some bounds on the t-interleaving numbers for other cases, completing a general picture for the t-interleaving problem on 2-dimensional tori

Optimal Interleaving on Tori

This paper studies $t$-interleaving on two-dimensional tori. Interleaving has applications in distributed data storage and burst error correction, and is closely related to Lee metric codes. A $t$-interleaving of a graph is defined as a vertex coloring in which any connected subgraph of $t$ or fewer vertices has a distinct color at every vertex. We say that a torus can be perfectly t-interleaved if its t-interleaving number (the minimum number of colors needed for a t-interleaving) meets the sphere-packing lower bound, $\lceil t^2/2 \rceil$. We show that a torus is perfectly t-interleavable if and only if its dimensions are both multiples of $\frac{t^2+1}{2}$ (if t is odd) or t (if t is even). The next natural question is how much bigger the t-interleaving number is for those tori that are not perfectly t-interleavable, and the most important contribution of this paper is to find an optimal interleaving for all sufficiently large tori, proving that when a torus is large enough in both dimensions, its t-interleaving number is at most just one more than the sphere-packing lower bound. We also obtain bounds on t-interleaving numbers for the cases where one or both dimensions are not large, thus completing a general characterization of t-interleaving numbers for two-dimensional tori. Each of our upper bounds is accompanied by an efficient t-interleaving scheme that constructively achieves the bound