Antique stone quarries in Turkey: a case study on tuffs in the Temple of Apollon Smintheus

All types of stones have been used as building stones, depending on their durability, visual harmony with the intended construction and availability. In the Hellenistic period, as in other periods, tuff was preferred as a building stone due to its convenience – it was easy to extract, transport and use for building. In the present study, three ancient quarries that were the possible tuff sources for the Apollon Smintheus Temple in C¸ anakkale are investigated by comparing the durability properties of stones in the temple and in the quarries. These properties are determined using physical and physico-mechanical tests, comparing fresh and artificially weathered samples. Microstructural and elemental correlations were found using optical microscopy, stereomicroscopy, X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, methylene blue adsorption and X-ray fluorescence analyses. The results indicate that temple tuffs and two of three quarries have similar geological engineering and microstructural properties with the strong claim that those two quarries could have been the source of building stone for the temple.Peer reviewe

Photonuclear reactions with Zinc: A case for clinical linacs

The use of bremsstrahlung photons produced by a linac to induce photonuclear reactions is wide spread. However, using a clinical linac to produce the photons is a new concept. We aimed to induce photonuclear reactions on zinc isotopes and measure the subsequent transition energies and half-lives. For this purpose, a bremsstrahlung photon beam of 18 MeV endpoint energy produced by the Philips SLI-25 linac has been used. The subsequent decay has been measured with a well-shielded single HPGe detector. The results obtained for transition energies are in good agreement with the literature data and in many cases surpass these in accuracy. For the half-lives, we are in agreement with the literature data, but do not achieve their precision. The obtained accuracy for the transition energies show what is achievable in an experiment such as ours. We demonstrate the usefulness and benefits of employing clinical linacs for nuclear physics experiments

Bottom Production

We review the prospects for bottom production physics at the LHC.Comment: 74 pages, Latex, 71 figures, to appear in the Report of the ``1999 CERN Workshop on SM physics (and more) at the LHC'', P. Nason, G. Ridolfi, O. Schneider G.F. Tartarelli, P. Vikas (conveners

Measurement of the lepton charge asymmetry in W-boson decays produced in p-pbar collisions

We describe a measurement of the charge asymmetry of leptons from W boson decays in the rapidity range 0 enu, munu events from 110+/-7 pb^{-1}of data collected by the CDF detector during 1992-95. The asymmetry data constrain the ratio of d and u quark momentum distributions in the proton over the x range of 0.006 to 0.34 at Q2 \approx M_W^2. The asymmetry predictions that use parton distribution functions obtained from previously published CDF data in the central rapidity region (0.0<|y_l|<1.1) do not agree with the new data in the large rapidity region (|y_l|>1.1).Comment: 13 pages, 3 tables, 1 figur

Isolation, Characterization and Quantity Determination of Aristolochic Acids, Toxic Compounds in Aristolochia bracteolata L.

Background Aristolochic Acids (AAs) are major components of plants in Aristolochia and have been found to be nephrotoxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic. Herein reported are the isolation, identification and quantity determination methods of Aristolochic Acid-I (AA-I) and Aristolochic Acid-II (AA-II) toxic compounds of Aristolochia bracteolata indigenous to Central Sudan and medicinally used in diverse biological functions including analgesic and diuretic effects, treatment of tumors, malaria and/or fevers. Methods and results AAs mixture was extracted with methanol from the defatted material of Aristolochia bracteolata whole plant at room temperature and was isolated from the aqueous methanol extract by chloroform. Moreover, Silica-gel column chromatography and Preparative Thin Layer Chromatography (PTLC) using chloroform/methanol gradient mixtures were used to isolate AAs mixtures as a yellow crystalline solid. A preliminary detection of AAs was made by Thin Layer Chromatography (silica-gel, chloroform: methanol (6:1)). The Rf value of the acids mixture was 0.43-0.46. The presence of AAs in plant sample was confirmed by High Performance Liquid Chromatography/Ultraviolet (HPLC/UV) analysis using 1% acetic acid and methanol (40:60) as mobile phase and maximum absorption wave length of 250 nm. Quantitative determination of AA-II (49.03 g/kg) and AA-I (12.98 g/kg) was also achieved by HPLC/UV. Recommendation It is recommended that the use of Aristolochia bracteolata as a medicinal plant should be extremely limited or strictly prohibited. The chromatograms obtained in this study can serve as fingerprints to identify AAs in plant samples

Observation of Hadronic W Decays in t-tbar Events with the Collider Detector at Fermilab

We observe hadronic W decays in t-tbar -> W (-> l nu) + >= 4 jet events using a 109 pb-1 data sample of p-pbar collisions at sqrt{s} = 1.8 TeV collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). A peak in the dijet invariant mass distribution is obtained that is consistent with W decay and inconsistent with the background prediction by 3.3 standard deviations. From this peak we measure the W mass to be 77.2 +- 4.6 (stat+syst) GeV/c^2. This result demonstrates the presence of two W bosons in t-tbar candidates in the W (-> l nu) + >= 4 jet channel.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PR

Physiological, Biochemical, and Transcriptional Responses to Single and Combined Abiotic Stress in Stress-Tolerant and Stress-Sensitive Potato Genotypes

Potato production is often constrained by abiotic stresses such as drought and high temperatures which are often present in combination. In the present work, we aimed to identify key mechanisms and processes underlying single and combined abiotic stress tolerance by comparative analysis of tolerant and susceptible cultivars. Physiological data indicated that the cultivars Desiree and Unica were stress tolerant while Agria and Russett Burbank were stress susceptible. Abiotic stress caused a greater reduction of photosynthetic carbon assimilation in the susceptible cultivars which was associated with a lower leaf transpiration rate. Oxidative stress, as estimated by the accumulation of malondialdehyde was not induced by stress treatments in any of the genotypes with the exception of drought stress in Russett Burbank. Stress treatment resulted in increases in ascorbate peroxidase activity in all cultivars except Agria which increased catalase activity in response to stress. Transcript profiling highlighted a decrease in the abundance of transcripts encoding proteins associated with PSII light harvesting complex in stress tolerant cultivars. Furthermore, stress tolerant cultivars accumulated fewer transcripts encoding a type-1 metacaspase implicated in programmed cell death. Stress tolerant cultivars exhibited stronger expression of genes associated with plant growth and development, hormone metabolism and primary and secondary metabolism than stress susceptible cultivars. Metabolite profiling revealed accumulation of proline in all genotypes following drought stress that was partially suppressed in combined heat and drought. On the contrary, the sugar alcohols inositol and mannitol were strongly accumulated under heat and combined heat and drought stress while galactinol was most strongly accumulated under drought. Combined heat and drought also resulted in the accumulation of Valine, isoleucine, and lysine in all genotypes. These data indicate that single and multiple abiotic stress tolerance in potato is associated with a maintenance of CO2 assimilation and protection of PSII by a reduction of light harvesting capacity. The data further suggests that stress tolerant cultivars suppress cell death and maintain growth and development via fine tuning of hormone signaling, and primary and secondary metabolism. This study highlights potential targets for the development of stress tolerant potato cultivars

Optical character recognition on heterogeneous SoC for HD automatic number plate recognition system

Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems are becoming vital for safety and security purposes. Typical ANPR systems are based on three stages: number plate localization (NPL), character segmentation (CS), and optical character recognition (OCR). Recently, high definition (HD) cameras have been used to improve their recognition rates. In this paper, four algorithms are proposed for the OCR stage of a real-time HD ANPR system. The proposed algorithms are based on feature extraction (vector crossing, zoning, combined zoning, and vector crossing) and template matching techniques. All proposed algorithms have been implemented using MATLAB as a proof of concept and the best one has been selected for hardware implementation using a heterogeneous system on chip (SoC) platform. The selected platform is the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC, which consists of an ARM processor and programmable logic. Obtained hardware implementation results have shown that the proposed system can recognize one character in 0.63 ms, with an accuracy of 99.5% while utilizing around 6% of the programmable logic resources. In addition, the use of the heterogenous SoC consumes 36 W which is equivalent to saving around 80% of the energy consumed by the PC used in this work, whereas it is smaller in size by 95%