Waved albatrosses can navigate with strong magnets attached to their head

The foraging excursions of waved albatrosses Phoebastria irrorata during incubation are ideally suited for navigational studies because they navigate between their Galápagos breeding site and one specific foraging site in the upwelling zone of Peru along highly predictable, straight-line routes. We used satellite telemetry to follow free-flying albatrosses after manipulating magnetic orientation cues by attaching magnets to strategic places on the birds' heads. All experimental, sham-manipulated and control birds, were able to navigate back and forth from Galápagos to their normal foraging sites at the Peruvian coast over 1000 km away. Birds subjected to the three treatments did not differ in the routes flown or in the duration and speed of the trips. The interpretations and implications of this result depend on which of the current suggested magnetic sensory mechanisms is actually being used by the birds

Periodicity of high-order functions in the CNS Final progress report, year ending 30 Jun. 1971

Analysis of cerebral slow potentials underlying human attentive processes in central nervous syste

Development and demonstration of manufacturing processes for fabricating graphite/LARC 160 polyimide structural elements

The development and demonstration of manufacturing technologies for the structural application of Celion graphite/LARC-160 polyimide composite material is discussed. Process development and fabrication of demonstration components are discussed. Process development included establishing quality assurance of the basic composite material and processing, nondestructive inspection of fabricated components, developing processes for specific structural forms, and qualification of processes through mechanical testing. Demonstration components were fabricated. The demonstration components consisted of flat laminates, skin/stringer panels, honeycomb panels, chopped fiber compression moldings, and a technology demonstrator segment (TDS) representative of the space shuttle aft body flap

Boosting Higgs pair production in the bbˉbbˉb\bar{b}b\bar{b} final state with multivariate techniques

The measurement of Higgs pair production will be a cornerstone of the LHC program in the coming years. Double Higgs production provides a crucial window upon the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and has a unique sensitivity to the Higgs trilinear coupling. We study the feasibility of a measurement of Higgs pair production in the $b\bar{b}b\bar{b}$ final state at the LHC. Our analysis is based on a combination of traditional cut-based methods with state-of-the-art multivariate techniques. We account for all relevant backgrounds, including the contributions from light and charm jet mis-identification, which are ultimately comparable in size to the irreducible $4b$ QCD background. We demonstrate the robustness of our analysis strategy in a high pileup environment. For an integrated luminosity of $\mathcal{L}=3$ ab$^{-1}$, a signal significance of $S/\sqrt{B}\simeq 3$ is obtained, indicating that the $b\bar{b}b\bar{b}$ final state alone could allow for the observation of double Higgs production at the High-Luminosity LHC.Comment: 47 pages, 22 figures. v2: updated references, added comparison of post-MVA kinematic distributions. v3: matches published version in EPJ

The Effect of Silage Harvester Type on Harvesting Efficiency

Choice of harvesting system can significantly influence production costs. Whether a tractor-powered or self-propelled forage harvester or a self-loading forage wagon system is used will depend on particular circumstances. However, in order to make an informed choice relevant information has to be available. A trial was commissioned by Landmec Pottinger (Ivybridge, UK) and Traynors (Clonmel, Ireland) at this Institute to investigate the performance of a self-propelled forage harvester system and a self-loading forage wagon system

Non-adjacent dependency learning in infancy, and its link to language development

To acquire language, infants must learn how to identify words and linguistic structure in speech. Statistical learning has been suggested to assist both of these tasks. However, infants’ capacity to use statistics to discover words and structure together remains unclear. Further, it is not yet known how infants’ statistical learning ability relates to their language development. We trained 17-month-old infants on an artificial language comprising non-adjacent dependencies, and examined their looking times on tasks assessing sensitivity to words and structure using an eye-tracked head-turn-preference paradigm. We measured infants’ vocabulary size using a Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) concurrently and at 19, 21, 24, 25, 27, and 30 months to relate performance to language development. Infants could segment the words from speech, demonstrated by a significant difference in looking times to words versus part-words. Infants’ segmentation performance was significantly related to their vocabulary size (receptive and expressive) both currently, and over time (receptive until 24 months, expressive until 30 months), but was not related to the rate of vocabulary growth. The data also suggest infants may have developed sensitivity to generalised structure, indicating similar statistical learning mechanisms may contribute to the discovery of words and structure in speech, but this was not related to vocabulary size

Doctors' understanding of individualisation of drug treatments: a qualitative interview study

addresses: University of Exeter Medical School, Institute of Health Services Research, Exeter, UK.notes: PMCID: PMC3657639To explore doctors' understanding of individualisation of drug treatments, and identify the methods used to achieve individualisation