Family memory and the Crusades

No abstract available

Compost and digestate: sustainability, benefits, impacts for the environment and for plant production

This proceedings volume contains the papers presented at the CODIS 2008 congress held on 27 - 29 February 2008 in Solothurn (Switzerland).The composting and digestion of biogenic waste materials and the subsequent application of compost and digestate to soil contributes to nutrient recycling and renewable energy production. Moreover, compost and digestate can improve soil fertility and suppress plant diseases. On the other hand, compost and digestate may also contain a variety of pollutants hazardous to soil, such as heavy metals and organic contaminants.Compost and digestate have been thoroughly investigated in the framework of two associated projects entitled Organic Pollutants in Compost and Digestate in Switzerland and Effects of Composts and Digestate on the Environment, Soil Fertility and Plant Health. These projects yielded new insights into the properties of compost and digestate, mainly with regard to biological parameters and the occurrence of both classic and emerging organic pollutants.The CODIS 2008 congress was the final event of these two projects

Thermal Pions

I discuss the absorption and dispersion of pions in hot matter. A two-loop calculation in the framework of chiral perturbation theory is presented and its result is compactly written in terms of the two- and three-particle forward $\pi \pi$ scattering amplitudes. At modest temperatures, $T \le 100$ MeV, the change in the pion mass is small and its dispersion law closely resembles the free space one. At these temperatures, all quantities of interest are given to a good degree of accuracy by the first term in the virial expansion which is linear in the density. (BUTP-93/16, uses espcrc1.sty from North-Holland Publishing)Comment: 7 pp, LaTeX, uses espcrc1.sty from North-Holland Publishing, BUTP-93/1

John H. Pryor (ed.), Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades. Proceedings of a Workshop Held at the Centre of Medieval Studies, University of Sydney, 20 September to 4 October 2002, Aldershot, Hampshire (Ashgate Publishing) 2006, XXXII–365 S., ISBN 0-7546-5197-5, GBP 55,00.

No abstract available

Quantitative analyses of empirical fitness landscapes

The concept of a fitness landscape is a powerful metaphor that offers insight into various aspects of evolutionary processes and guidance for the study of evolution. Until recently, empirical evidence on the ruggedness of these landscapes was lacking, but since it became feasible to construct all possible genotypes containing combinations of a limited set of mutations, the number of studies has grown to a point where a classification of landscapes becomes possible. The aim of this review is to identify measures of epistasis that allow a meaningful comparison of fitness landscapes and then apply them to the empirical landscapes to discern factors that affect ruggedness. The various measures of epistasis that have been proposed in the literature appear to be equivalent. Our comparison shows that the ruggedness of the empirical landscape is affected by whether the included mutations are beneficial or deleterious and by whether intra- or intergenic epistasis is involved. Finally, the empirical landscapes are compared to landscapes generated with the Rough Mt.\ Fuji model. Despite the simplicity of this model, it captures the features of the experimental landscapes remarkably well.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures; to appear in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experimen

Sporopollenin, a natural copolymer, is robust under high hydrostatic pressure

Lycopodium sporopollenin, a natural copolymer, shows exceptional stability under high hydrostatic pressures (10 GPa) as determined by in situ high pressure synchrotron source FTIR spectroscopy. This stability is evaluated in terms of the component compounds of the sporopollenin: p-coumaric acid, phloretic acid, ferulic acid, and palmitic and sebacic acids, which represent the additional n-acid and ndiacid components. This high stability is attributed to interactions between these components, rather than the exceptional stability of any one molecular component. We propose a biomimetic solution for the creation of polymer materials that can withstand high pressures for a multitude of uses in aeronautics, vascular autografts, ballistics and light-weight protective materials

Internal-state thermometry by depletion spectroscopy in a cold guided beam of formaldehyde

We present measurements of the internal state distribution of electrostatically guided formaldehyde. Upon excitation with continuous tunable ultraviolet laser light the molecules dissociate, leading to a decrease in the molecular flux. The population of individual guided states is measured by addressing transitions originating from them. The measured populations of selected states show good agreement with theoretical calculations for different temperatures of the molecule source. The purity of the guided beam as deduced from the entropy of the guided sample using a source temperature of 150K corresponds to that of a thermal ensemble with a temperature of about 30 K