5,540 research outputs found
Cutting-Edge Life Sciences in Swiss Gymnasia – Success is not a Secret
What can be done to achieve a high-quality education in Life Sciences at gymnasia level that arouses the interest of most students and motivates them to accomplish high performances? The recipe for success is simple: Employ excellent natural scientists who combine the passion for their
subject with strong pedagogic skills as teachers to your school. The challenge is to create an environment that makes teaching attractive for scientists and that has a positive and lasting effect on the motivation of the teachers. We consider the following criteria especially significant:
The social structure/arrangement is likely to be the key aspect. Ideally it consists of a constructive relation between the teachers, the school administrators, the staff and most importantly the students. The work must be challenging, but the workload should be in a good proportion to the
resources of the teachers. To communicate a realistic impression of Life Sciences an adequate infrastructure and facilities are necessary that allow an education based on experiments and practica. The curriculum should consider the interests of the students and should contain topics which
are relevant for society. Finally it should grant enough educational latitude for the teachers so they can use their specialized skills. Contacts to other gymnasia, universities and industry are important for orientation, the exchange of knowledge and to enable extracurricular projects
Ultimate periodicity of b-recognisable sets : a quasilinear procedure
It is decidable if a set of numbers, whose representation in a base b is a
regular language, is ultimately periodic. This was established by Honkala in
1986.
We give here a structural description of minimal automata that accept an
ultimately periodic set of numbers. We then show that it can verified in linear
time if a given minimal automaton meets this description.
This thus yields a O(n log(n)) procedure for deciding whether a general
deterministic automaton accepts an ultimately periodic set of numbers.Comment: presented at DLT 201
Characterizing precursors to stellar clusters with Herschel
Context. Despite their profound effect on the universe, the formation of massive stars and stellar clusters remains elusive. Recent advances in observing facilities and computing power have brought us closer to understanding this formation process. In the past decade, compelling evidence has emerged that suggests infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) may be precursors to stellar clusters. However, the usual method for identifying IRDCs is biased by the requirement that they are seen in absorption against background mid-IR emission, whereas dust continuum observations allow cold, dense pre-stellar-clusters to be identified anywhere. Aims: We aim to understand what dust temperatures and column densities characterize and distinguish IRDCs, to explore the population of dust continuum sources that are not IRDCs, and to roughly characterize the level of star formation activity in these dust continuum sources. Methods: We use Hi-GAL 70 to 500 m bright sources at the warmest. Finally, we identify five candidate IRDC-like sources on the far-side of the Galaxy. These are cold (20 K), high column density (N(H) gt 10 cm) clouds identified with Hi-GAL which, despite bright surrounding mid-IR emission, show little to no absorption at 8 $m. These are the first inner Galaxy far-side candidate IRDCs of which the authors are aware. Herschel in an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation by NASA.The FITS files discussed in the paper would be released publicly WITH the Hi-GAL data (on the Hi-GAL website) when the Hi-GAL data is released publicly.Peer reviewe
On the Commutative Equivalence of Context-Free Languages
The problem of the commutative equivalence of context-free and regular languages is studied. In particular conditions ensuring that a context-free language of exponential growth is commutatively equivalent with a regular language are investigated
The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey. XII. Distance Catalog Expansion Using Kinematic Isolation of Dense Molecular Cloud Structures With 13CO(1-0)
We present an expanded distance catalog for 1,710 molecular cloud structures
identified in the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS) version 2, representing
a nearly threefold increase over the previous BGPS distance catalog. We
additionally present a new method for incorporating extant data sets into our
Bayesian distance probability density function (DPDF) methodology. To augment
the dense-gas tracers (e.g., HCO+(3-2), NH3(1,1)) used to derive line-of-sight
velocities for kinematic distances, we utilize the Galactic Ring Survey
13CO(1-0) data to morphologically extract velocities for BGPS sources. The
outline of a BGPS source is used to select a region of the GRS 13CO data, along
with a reference region to subtract enveloping diffuse emission, to produce a
line profile of 13CO matched to the BGPS source. For objects with a HCO+(3-2)
velocity, \approx 95% of the new 13CO(1-0) velocities agree with that of the
dense gas. A new prior DPDF for kinematic distance ambiguity (KDA) resolution,
based on a validated formalism for associating molecular cloud structures with
known objects from the literature, is presented. We demonstrate this prior
using catalogs of masers with trigonometric parallaxes and HII regions with
robust KDA resolutions. The distance catalog presented here contains
well-constrained distance estimates for 20% of BGPS V2 sources, with typical
distance uncertainties \lesssim 0.5 kpc. Approximately 75% of the
well-constrained sources lie within 6 kpc of the Sun, concentrated in the
Scutum-Centarus arm. Galactocentric positions of objects additionally trace out
portions of the Sagittarius, Perseus, and Outer arms in the first and second
Galactic quadrants, and we also find evidence for significant regions of
interarm dense gas.Comment: 28 pages, 19 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ.
Distance-Omnibus code available at https://github.com/BGPS/distance-omnibu
Hypervelocity A & B Stars should be slow rotators
The most commonly accepted explanation for the origin of hypervelocity stars
in the halo of the Milky Way is that they are the result of tidal disruption of
binaries by the massive black hole at the center of the Galaxy. We show that,
if this scenario is correct, and if the original binary properties are similar
to those in the local stellar neighbourhood, then the hypervelocity stars
should rotate with velocities measureably lower than those for field stars of
similar spectral type. This may prove to be a more direct test of the model
than trying to predict the position and velocity distributions.Comment: 11 pages, including 4 figures. To appear in Astrophysical Journal
Letter
The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey. XIII. Physical Properties and Mass Functions of Dense Molecular Cloud Structures
We use the distance probability density function (DPDF) formalism of
Ellsworth-Bowers et al. (2013, 2015) to derive physical properties for the
collection of 1,710 Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS) version 2 sources with
well-constrained distance estimates. To account for Malmquist bias, we estimate
that the present sample of BGPS sources is 90% complete above 400 and
50% complete above 70 . The mass distributions for the entire sample
and astrophysically motivated subsets are generally fitted well by a lognormal
function, with approximately power-law distributions at high mass. Power-law
behavior emerges more clearly when the sample population is narrowed in
heliocentric distance (power-law index for sources nearer
than 6.5 kpc and for objects between 2 kpc and 10 kpc).
The high-mass power-law indices are generally for
various subsamples of sources, intermediate between that of giant molecular
clouds and the stellar initial mass function. The fit to the entire sample
yields a high-mass power-law . Physical
properties of BGPS sources are consistent with large molecular cloud clumps or
small molecular clouds, but the fractal nature of the dense interstellar medium
makes difficult the mapping of observational categories to the dominant
physical processes driving the observed structure. The face-on map of the
Galactic disk's mass surface density based on BGPS dense molecular cloud
structures reveals the high-mass star-forming regions W43, W49, and W51 as
prominent mass concentrations in the first quadrant. Furthermore, we present a
0.25-kpc resolution map of the dense gas mass fraction across the Galactic disk
that peaks around 5%.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 32 pages, 21 figure
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