Increasing the Size of a Piece of Popcorn

Popcorn is an extremely popular snack food in the world today. Thermodynamics can be used to analyze how popcorn is produced. By treating the popping mechanism of the corn as a thermodynamic expansion, a method of increasing the volume or size of a kernel of popcorn can be studied. By lowering the pressure surrounding the unpopped kernel, one can use a thermodynamic argument to show that the expanded volume of the kernel when it pops must increase. In this project, a variety of experiments are run to test the validity of this theory. The results show that there is a significant increase in the average kernel size when the pressure of the surroundings is reduced.Comment: Latex document, 14 pages, 4 figures, 1 page of table

P−v{\cal P}-v Criticality in Gauged Supergravities

AdS black holes show richer transition behaviors in extended phase space by assuming the cosmological constant and its conjugate quantity to behave like thermodynamic pressure and thermodynamic volume. We study the extended thermodynamics of charged dilatonic AdS black holes in a class of Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theories that can be embedded in gauged supergravities in various dimensions. We find that the transition behaviors of higher dimensional dilatonic AdS black holes are different from the four dimensional counterparts, and new transition behaviors emerges in higher dimensions. First, there exists standard Van der Waals transition only in a five dimensional dilatonic AdS black hole with two equal charges. Second, there emerge a new phase transition branch in negative pressure region in six and seven dimensional dilatonic black holes with two equal charges. Third, there emerge transition behaviors in higher dimensional black hole with single charge cases, which are absent in four dimensions.Comment: Latex, 18 pages, 8 figures; published versio

The relation between visceral adipose tissue accumulation and biochemical tests in university students.

We evaluated the visceral adipose tissue accumulation in university students in Okayama prefecture, Japan. Fifty-eight Japanese university students (10 men and 48 women, age 18.4 +/- 0.6 years)were enrolled in this study. Fat distribution was evaluated by visceral fat (V) and subcutaneous fat (S) areas measured with computed tomography (CT) scanning at umbilical levels. Anthropometric parameters,i.e., height, weight, waist circumference, hip circumference, and body fat percentage; blood examination; and blood pressure (BP) were also measured. In 58 subjects, the V area was 23.4 +/- 21.0 cm(2) and the S area was 122.5 +/- 57.9 cm(2). V areas were significantly correlated with hepatic enzymes, uric acid, triglyceride, and BP in men, while they were weakly correlated with hepatic enzymes, triglyceride, and high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol in women. Correlation coefficients between V areas and clinical parameters were comparatively higher than those between other body composition parameters,i.e., S areas, weight, body mass index (BMI), body fat percentage, and clinical parameters. The present study suggests that visceral adipose tissue accumulation is important for hepatic enzymes, uric acid, triglyceride, and BP in university students.</p

Quantitative Kinetic Energy Estimated from Disdrometer Signal

The kinetic energy of the rain drops was predicted in a relation between the rain rate and rain quantity, derived directly from the rain drop size distribution (DSD), which had been measured by a disdrometer located in the eastern state of Alagoas-Brazil. The equation in the form of exponential form suppressed the effects of large drops at low rainfall intensity observed at the beginning and end of the rainfall. The kinetic energy of the raindrop was underestimated in almost rain intensity ranges and was considered acceptable by the performance indicators such as coefficient of determination, average absolute error, percent relative error, mean absolute error, root mean square error, Willmott's concordance index and confidence index

Opinion dynamics on directed small-world networks

In this paper, we investigate the self-affirmation effect on formation of public opinion in a directed small-world social network. The system presents a non-equilibrium phase transition from a consensus state to a disordered state with coexistence of opinions. The dynamical behaviors are very sensitive to the density of long-range interactions and the strength of self-affirmation. When the long-range interactions are sparse and individual generally does not insist on his/her opinion, the system will display a continuous phase transition, in the opposite case with high self-affirmation strength and dense long-range interactions, the system does not display a phase transition. Between those two extreme cases, the system undergoes a discontinuous phase transition.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure