Catastrophic volcanism as a cause of shocked features found at the K/T boundary and in cryptoexplosion structures

The presence of quartz grains containing shock lamellae at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary is viewed by many as the single most compelling evidence of meteoritic or cometary impact because there is no known endogenous mechanism for producing these features. Similarly the presence of shocked quartz, shatter cones, coesite and stishovite at cryptoexplosion structures is comonly taken as conclusive evidence of impact. However, several recent studies have cast doubt on this interpretation. It is argued that basaltic volcanism, although not normally explosive, can under exceptional circumstances produce overpressures sufficiently high to produce shock features. The exceptional circumstances include a high content of volatiles, usually CO2, and no preestablished pathway to the surface. Rapid cooling of the saturated basaltic magma can occur if it underlies a cooler more evolved magma in a chamber. Initial slow cooling and partial exsolution of the volatiles will cause the density of the basaltic magma to become less than that of the overlying magma, leading to overturning and mixing. Gas will escape the magma chamber along planar cracks once the pressure becomes sufficiently high. In the vicinity of the crack tip there is a smallscale deviatoric stress pattern which is thought to be sufficiently high to produce transient cracks along secondary axes in the quartz crystals, causing the planar features. The CO2-rich fluid inclusions which have been found along planar elements of quartz in basement rocks of the Vredefort Dome were likely to have been emplaced by such a process. If the mechanism described is capable of producing shocked features as above, it would require a reassessment of the origin of many cryptoexplosion structures as well as seriously weakening the case for an impact origin of the K/T event

The Ekman-Hartmann layer in MHD Taylor-Couette flow

We study magnetic effects induced by rigidly rotating plates enclosing a cylindrical MHD Taylor-Couette flow at the finite aspect ratio $H/D=10$. The fluid confined between the cylinders is assumed to be liquid metal characterized by small magnetic Prandtl number, the cylinders are perfectly conducting, an axial magnetic field is imposed \Ha \approx 10, the rotation rates correspond to \Rey of order $10^2-10^3$. We show that the end-plates introduce, besides the well known Ekman circulation, similar magnetic effects which arise for infinite, rotating plates, horizontally unbounded by any walls. In particular there exists the Hartmann current which penetrates the fluid, turns into the radial direction and together with the applied magnetic field gives rise to a force. Consequently the flow can be compared with a Taylor-Dean flow driven by an azimuthal pressure gradient. We analyze stability of such flows and show that the currents induced by the plates can give rise to instability for the considered parameters. When designing an MHD Taylor-Couette experiment, a special care must be taken concerning the vertical magnetic boundaries so they do not significantly alter the rotational profile.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures; accepted to PR

Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image

We describe the first method to automatically estimate the 3D pose of the human body as well as its 3D shape from a single unconstrained image. We estimate a full 3D mesh and show that 2D joints alone carry a surprising amount of information about body shape. The problem is challenging because of the complexity of the human body, articulation, occlusion, clothing, lighting, and the inherent ambiguity in inferring 3D from 2D. To solve this, we first use a recently published CNN-based method, DeepCut, to predict (bottom-up) the 2D body joint locations. We then fit (top-down) a recently published statistical body shape model, called SMPL, to the 2D joints. We do so by minimizing an objective function that penalizes the error between the projected 3D model joints and detected 2D joints. Because SMPL captures correlations in human shape across the population, we are able to robustly fit it to very little data. We further leverage the 3D model to prevent solutions that cause interpenetration. We evaluate our method, SMPLify, on the Leeds Sports, HumanEva, and Human3.6M datasets, showing superior pose accuracy with respect to the state of the art.Comment: To appear in ECCV 201

An analysis of confined magnetohydrodynamic vortex flows

Vortex flow analysis of viscous, incompressible, electrically conducting fluid between two plates under applied axial magnetic fiel

An analysis of confined vortex flows

Vortex flow of incompressible fluid between two finite flat plates analysi

Radiography of the Earth's Core and Mantle with Atmospheric Neutrinos

A measurement of the absorption of neutrinos with energies in excess of 10 TeV when traversing the Earth is capable of revealing its density distribution. Unfortunately, the existence of beams with sufficient luminosity for the task has been ruled out by the AMANDA South Pole neutrino telescope. In this letter we point out that, with the advent of second-generation kilometer-scale neutrino detectors, the idea of studying the internal structure of the Earth may be revived using atmospheric neutrinos instead.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX file using RevTEX4, 2 figures and 1 table included. Matches published versio

A Fully Quantum Calculation of Broadening and Shifting Coefficients of the D\u3csub\u3e1\u3c/sub\u3e and D\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e spectral lines of alkali-metal atoms colliding with noble-gas atoms

We use the Baranger model to compute collisional broadening and shift rates for the D1 and D2 spectral lines of M + Ng, where M = K, Rb, Cs and Ng = He, Ne, Ar. Scattering matrix elements are calculated using the channel packet method, and non-adiabatic wavepacket dynamics are determined using the split-operator method together with a unitary transformation between adiabatic and diabatic representations. Scattering phase shift differences are weighted thermally and are integrated over temperatures ranging from 100 K to 800 K. We find that predicted broadening rates compare well with experiment, but shift rates are predicted poorly by this model because they are extremely sensitive to the near-asymptotic behavior of the potential energy surfaces. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd

e-MIR2: a public online inventory of medical informatics resources

Background. Over the last years, the number of available informatics resources in medicine has grown exponentially. While specific inventories of such resources have already begun to be developed for Bioinformatics (BI), comparable inventories are as yet not available for Medical Informatics (MI) field, so that locating and accessing them currently remains a hard and time-consuming task. Description. We have created a repository of MI resources from the scientific literature, providing free access to its contents through a web-based service. Relevant information describing the resources is automatically extracted from manuscripts published in top-ranked MI journals. We used a pattern matching approach to detect the resources? names and their main features. Detected resources are classified according to three different criteria: functionality, resource type and domain. To facilitate these tasks, we have built three different taxonomies by following a novel approach based on folksonomies and social tagging. We adopted the terminology most frequently used by MI researchers in their publications to create the concepts and hierarchical relationships belonging to the taxonomies. The classification algorithm identifies the categories associated to resources and annotates them accordingly. The database is then populated with this data after manual curation and validation. Conclusions. We have created an online repository of MI resources to assist researchers in locating and accessing the most suitable resources to perform specific tasks. The database contained 282 resources at the time of writing. We are continuing to expand the number of available resources by taking into account further publications as well as suggestions from users and resource developers

Children of Prisoners: Their Situation and Role in Long-Term Crime Prevention

Studies suggest that maintaining family ties can help reduce the likelihood of reoffending, and that while parental imprisonment can increase a child’s likelihood to offend, positive responses to the situation can aid the children’s well-being, attitude and attainment. Drawing on findings from the recently completed EU-funded COPING Project on the mental health of children of prisoners, this chapter explores the factors that aid a child’s ability to cope with parental imprisonment and the actions that different stakeholders can take to support them. It identifies some of the mental health impacts at different stages of parental imprisonment, the roles played by non-imprisoned parents/carers and by schools, and suggests options for further clarifying the factors that help and hinder children of prisoners in the short and long term

The freshwater Sponge Ephydatia Fluviatilis harbours diverse pseudomonas species (Gammaproteobacteria, Pseudomonadales) with broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity

Bacteria are believed to play an important role in the fitness and biochemistry of sponges (Porifera). Pseudomonas species (Gammaproteobacteria, Pseudomonadales) are capable of colonizing a broad range of eukaryotic hosts, but knowledge of their diversity and function in freshwater invertebrates is rudimentary. We assessed the diversity, structure and antimicrobial activities of Pseudomonas spp. in the freshwater sponge Ephydatia fluviatilis. Polymerase Chain Reaction - Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE) fingerprints of the global regulator gene gacA revealed distinct structures between sponge-associated and free-living Pseudomonas communities, unveiling previously unsuspected diversity of these assemblages in freshwater. Community structures varied across E. fluviatilis specimens, yet specific gacA phylotypes could be detected by PCR-DGGE in almost all sponge individuals sampled over two consecutive years. By means of whole-genome fingerprinting, 39 distinct genotypes were found within 90 fluorescent Pseudomonas isolates retrieved from E. fluviatilis. High frequency of in vitro antibacterial (49%), antiprotozoan (35%) and anti-oomycetal (32%) activities was found among these isolates, contrasting less-pronounced basidiomycetal (17%) and ascomycetal (8%) antagonism. Culture extracts of highly predation-resistant isolates rapidly caused complete immobility or lysis of cells of the protozoan Colpoda steinii. Isolates tentatively identified as P. jessenii, P. protegens and P. oryzihabitans showed conspicuous inhibitory traits and correspondence with dominant sponge-associated phylotypes registered by cultivation-independent analysis. Our findings suggest that E. fluviatilis hosts both transient and persistent Pseudomonas symbionts displaying antimicrobial activities of potential ecological and biotechnological value.European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the COMPETE (Operational Competitiveness Programme); national funds through FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) [PEst-C/MAR/LA0015/2011]; FCT-funded project [PTDC/BIA-MIC/3865/2012]; Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio