665 research outputs found
Magnetic and Mössbauer spectroscopy studies of nanocrystalline iron oxide aerogels
A sol-gel synthesis was used to produce iron oxide aerogels. These nanocrystalline aerogels have a pore-solid structure similar to silica aerogels but are composed entirely of iron oxides. Mössbauer experiments and x-ray diffraction showed that the as-prepared aerogel is an amorphous or poorly crystalline iron oxide, which crystallized as a partially oxidized magnetite during heating in argon. After further heat treatment in air, the nanocrystallites are fully converted to maghemite. The particles are superparamagnetic at high temperatures, but the magnetic properties are strongly influenced by magnetic interactions between the particles at lower temperatures
Snow petrel stomach-oil deposits as a new biological archive of Antarctic sea ice
Where snow petrels forage is predominantly a function of sea ice. They spit stomach oil in defence, and accumulated deposits at nesting sites are providing new opportunities to reconstruct their diet, and, in turn, the sea-ice environment over past millennia
Continuum limit of amorphous elastic bodies: A finite-size study of low frequency harmonic vibrations
The approach of the elastic continuum limit in small amorphous bodies formed
by weakly polydisperse Lennard-Jones beads is investigated in a systematic
finite-size study. We show that classical continuum elasticity breaks down when
the wavelength of the sollicitation is smaller than a characteristic length of
approximately 30 molecular sizes. Due to this surprisingly large effect
ensembles containing up to N=40,000 particles have been required in two
dimensions to yield a convincing match with the classical continuum predictions
for the eigenfrequency spectrum of disk-shaped aggregates and periodic bulk
systems. The existence of an effective length scale \xi is confirmed by the
analysis of the (non-gaussian) noisy part of the low frequency vibrational
eigenmodes. Moreover, we relate it to the {\em non-affine} part of the
displacement fields under imposed elongation and shear. Similar correlations
(vortices) are indeed observed on distances up to \xi~30 particle sizes.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figures, 3 table
High Availability in the Future Internet
With the evolution of the Internet, a huge number of real-
time applications, like Voice over IP, has started to use IP as primary
transmission medium. These services require high availability, which is not
amongst the main features of today’s heterogeneous Internet where fail-
ures occur frequently. Unfortunately, the primary fast resilience scheme
implemented in IP routers, Loop-Free Alternates (LFA), usually does not
provide full protection against failures. Consequently, there has been a
growing interest in LFA-based network optimization methods, aimed at
tuning some aspect of the underlying IP topology to maximize the ratio
of failure cases covered by LFA. The main goal of this chapter is to give a
comprehensive overview of LFA and survey the related LFA network op-
timization methods, pointing out that these optimization tools can turn
LFA into an easy-to-deploy yet highly effective IP fast resilience scheme
Observation of Pseudoscalar and Axial Vector Resonances in pi- p -> K+ K- pi0 n at 18 GeV
A new measurement of the reaction pi- p -> K+ K- pi0 n has been made at a
beam energy of 18 GeV. A partial wave analysis of the K+ K- pi0 system shows
evidence for three pseudoscalar resonances, eta(1295), eta(1416), and
eta(1485), as well as two axial vectors, f1(1285), and f1(1420). Their observed
masses, widths and decay properties are reported. No signal was observed for
C(1480), an IG J{PC} = 1+ 1{--} state previously reported in phi pi0 decay.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figs, to be submitted to Phys. Let
High-contrast imaging constraints on gas giant planet formation - The Herbig Ae/Be star opportunity
Planet formation studies are often focused on solar-type stars, implicitly
considering our Sun as reference point. This approach overlooks, however, that
Herbig Ae/Be stars are in some sense much better targets to study planet
formation processes empirically, with their disks generally being larger,
brighter and simply easier to observe across a large wavelength range. In
addition, massive gas giant planets have been found on wide orbits around early
type stars, triggering the question if these objects did indeed form there and,
if so, by what process. In the following I briefly review what we currently
know about the occurrence rate of planets around intermediate mass stars,
before discussing recent results from Herbig Ae/Be stars in the context of
planet formation. The main emphasis is put on spatially resolved polarized
light images of potentially planet forming disks and how these images - in
combination with other data - can be used to empirically constrain (parts of)
the planet formation process. Of particular interest are two objects, HD100546
and HD169142, where, in addition to intriguing morphological structures in the
disks, direct observational evidence for (very) young planets has been
reported. I conclude with an outlook, what further progress we can expect in
the very near future with the next generation of high-contrast imagers at 8-m
class telescopes and their synergies with ALMA.Comment: Accepted by Astrophysics and Space Science as invited short review in
special issue about Herbig Ae/Be stars; 12 pages incl. 5 figures, 2 tables
and reference
Professionalism, Golf Coaching and a Master of Science Degree: A commentary
As a point of reference I congratulate Simon Jenkins on tackling the issue of professionalism in coaching. As he points out coaching is not a profession, but this does not mean that coaching would not benefit from going through a professionalization process. As things stand I find that the stimulus article unpacks some critically important issues of professionalism, broadly within the context of golf coaching. However, I am not sure enough is made of understanding what professional (golf) coaching actually is nor how the development of a professional golf coach can be facilitated by a Master of Science Degree (M.Sc.). I will focus my commentary on these two issues
SPIRE: a Searchable, Planetary-scale mIcrobiome REsource
Meta'omic data on microbial diversity and function accrue exponentially in public repositories, but derived information is often siloed according to data type, study or sampled microbial environment. Here we present SPIRE, a Searchable Planetary-scale mIcrobiome REsource that integrates various consistently processed metagenome-derived microbial data modalities across habitats, geography and phylogeny. SPIRE encompasses 99Â 146 metagenomic samples from 739 studies covering a wide array of microbial environments and augmented with manually-curated contextual data. Across a total metagenomic assembly of 16 Tbp, SPIRE comprises 35 billion predicted protein sequences and 1.16 million newly constructed metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) of medium or high quality. Beyond mapping to the high-quality genome reference provided by proGenomes3 (http://progenomes.embl.de), these novel MAGs form 92Â 134 novel species-level clusters, the majority of which are unclassified at species level using current tools. SPIRE enables taxonomic profiling of these species clusters via an updated, custom mOTUs database (https://motu-tool.org/) and includes several layers of functional annotation, as well as crosslinks to several (micro-)biological databases. The resource is accessible, searchable and browsable via http://spire.embl.de
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