Genetic differentiation in Scottish populations of the pine beauty moth Panolis flammea (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

Pine beauty moth, Panolis flammea (Denis & Schiffermüller), is a recent but persistent pest of lodgepole pine plantations in Scotland, but exists naturally at low levels within remnants and plantations of Scots pine. To test whether separate host races occur in lodgepole and Scots pine stands and to examine colonization dynamics, allozyme, randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and mitochondrial variation were screened within a range of Scottish samples. RAPD analysis indicated limited long distance dispersal (FST = 0.099), and significant isolation by distance (P < 0.05); but that colonization between more proximate populations was often variable, from extensive to limited exchange. When compared with material from Germany, Scottish samples were found to be more diverse and significantly differentiated for all markers. For mtDNA, two highly divergent groups of haplotypes were evident, one group contained both German and Scottish samples and the other was predominantly Scottish. No genetic differentiation was evident between P. flammea populations sampled from different hosts, and no diversity bottleneck was observed in the lodgepole group. Indeed, lodgepole stands appear to have been colonized on multiple occasions from Scots pine sources and neighbouring populations on different hosts are close to panmixia.A.J. Lowe, B.J. Hicks, K. Worley, R.A. Ennos, J.D. Morman, G. Stone and A.D. Wat

Examining Contextual Factors and Individual Value Dimensions of Healthcare Providers Intention to Adopt Electronic Health Technologies in Developing Countries

Part 5: Research in ProgressInternational audienceDespite substantial research on electronic health (e-Health) adoption, there still exist vast differences between resource-rich and resource-poor populations regarding Information Technology adoption. To help bridge the technological gulf between developed and developing countries, this research-in-progress paper examines healthcare providers’ intention to adopt e-health technologies from two perspectives 1) contextual factors (i.e. specific to developing world settings) and 2) individual value dimensions (i.e. cultural, utilitarian, social and personal). The primary output of this paper is a theoretical model merging both the contextual factors and value dimensions; this forms a strong baseline to examine and help ensure the successful adoption of e-Health technologies within developing countries. Future research will be performed to validate the model developed in this paper, with a specific focus on mobile Health in Malawi, Africa

Neutrino oscillation studies with IceCube-DeepCore

AbstractIceCube, a gigaton-scale neutrino detector located at the South Pole, was primarily designed to search for astrophysical neutrinos with energies of PeV and higher. This goal has been achieved with the detection of the highest energy neutrinos to date. At the other end of the energy spectrum, the DeepCore extension lowers the energy threshold of the detector to approximately 10 GeV and opens the door for oscillation studies using atmospheric neutrinos. An analysis of the disappearance of these neutrinos has been completed, with the results produced being complementary with dedicated oscillation experiments. Following a review of the detector principle and performance, the method used to make these calculations, as well as the results, is detailed. Finally, the future prospects of IceCube-DeepCore and the next generation of neutrino experiments at the South Pole (IceCube-Gen2, specifically the PINGU sub-detector) are briefly discussed

Velocity-space sensitivity of the time-of-flight neutron spectrometer at JET

The velocity-space sensitivities of fast-ion diagnostics are often described by so-called weight functions. Recently, we formulated weight functions showing the velocity-space sensitivity of the often dominant beam-target part of neutron energy spectra. These weight functions for neutron emission spectrometry (NES) are independent of the particular NES diagnostic. Here we apply these NES weight functions to the time-of-flight spectrometer TOFOR at JET. By taking the instrumental response function of TOFOR into account, we calculate time-of-flight NES weight functions that enable us to directly determine the velocity-space sensitivity of a given part of a measured time-of-flight spectrum from TOFOR

Relationship of edge localized mode burst times with divertor flux loop signal phase in JET

A phase relationship is identified between sequential edge localized modes (ELMs) occurrence times in a set of H-mode tokamak plasmas to the voltage measured in full flux azimuthal loops in the divertor region. We focus on plasmas in the Joint European Torus where a steady H-mode is sustained over several seconds, during which ELMs are observed in the Be II emission at the divertor. The ELMs analysed arise from intrinsic ELMing, in that there is no deliberate intent to control the ELMing process by external means. We use ELM timings derived from the Be II signal to perform direct time domain analysis of the full flux loop VLD2 and VLD3 signals, which provide a high cadence global measurement proportional to the voltage induced by changes in poloidal magnetic flux. Specifically, we examine how the time interval between pairs of successive ELMs is linked to the time-evolving phase of the full flux loop signals. Each ELM produces a clear early pulse in the full flux loop signals, whose peak time is used to condition our analysis. The arrival time of the following ELM, relative to this pulse, is found to fall into one of two categories: (i) prompt ELMs, which are directly paced by the initial response seen in the flux loop signals; and (ii) all other ELMs, which occur after the initial response of the full flux loop signals has decayed in amplitude. The times at which ELMs in category (ii) occur, relative to the first ELM of the pair, are clustered at times when the instantaneous phase of the full flux loop signal is close to its value at the time of the first ELM

All-sky search for long-duration gravitational wave transients with initial LIGO

We present the results of a search for long-duration gravitational wave transients in two sets of data collected by the LIGO Hanford and LIGO Livingston detectors between November 5, 2005 and September 30, 2007, and July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010, with a total observational time of 283.0 days and 132.9 days, respectively. The search targets gravitational wave transients of duration 10-500 s in a frequency band of 40-1000 Hz, with minimal assumptions about the signal waveform, polarization, source direction, or time of occurrence. All candidate triggers were consistent with the expected background; as a result we set 90% confidence upper limits on the rate of long-duration gravitational wave transients for different types of gravitational wave signals. For signals from black hole accretion disk instabilities, we set upper limits on the source rate density between 3.4×10-5 and 9.4×10-4 Mpc-3 yr-1 at 90% confidence. These are the first results from an all-sky search for unmodeled long-duration transient gravitational waves. © 2016 American Physical Society