Water requirements and footprint of a super intensive olive grove under Mediterranean climate

Abstract The water footprint of a product can be described as the volume of freshwater used to produce it, associated to a geographic and temporal resolution. For crops, the water footprint relates crop water requirements and yield. The components of water footprint, blue, green and grey water footprints, refer to the volumes of respectively, surface and groundwater, rainfall, and water required to assimilate pollution, used to produce the crop yield. The global standard for crop water footprint assessment relies on evapotranspiration models to estimate green and blue water evapotranspiration. This approach has been used in the present study to estimate the water footprint of a very high density drip irrigated olive grove and further compared with data obtained from evapotranspiration measurements or from its components: the eddy covariance method to quantify latent heat flux, a heat dissipation sap flow technique to determine transpiration and microlysimeters to evaluate soil evaporation. The eddy covariance technique was used for short periods in 2011 and 2012, while sap flow measurements were performed continuously, hence allowing the extension of the data series. Measurements of evapotranspiration with the eddy covariance method provided an average close to 3.4 mm d-1 (2011) and 2.5 mm d-1 (2012). The ratio of evapotranspiration to reference evapotranspiration approached 0.6 and 0.4 for the respective periods. The water footprint of the olive crop under study, calculated with field data, was higher than the water footprint simulated using the global standard assessment and was lower than that reported in literature for olives. Lower values are probably related to differences in cultural practices, e.g., the density of plantation, harvesting techniques and irrigation management. The irrigated high-density olive grove under study had a high yield, which compensates for high water consumption, thus leading to a water footprint lower than the ones of rainfed or less dense groves. Other differences may relate to the procedures used to determine evapotranspiration

Stellate Cells in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex Are Required for Spatial Learning

Summary: Spatial learning requires estimates of location that may be obtained by path integration or from positional cues. Grid and other spatial firing patterns of neurons in the superficial medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) suggest roles in behavioral estimation of location. However, distinguishing the contributions of path integration and cue-based signals to spatial behaviors is challenging, and the roles of identified MEC neurons are unclear. We use virtual reality to dissociate linear path integration from other strategies for behavioral estimation of location. We find that mice learn to path integrate using motor-related self-motion signals, with accuracy that decreases steeply as a function of distance. We show that inactivation of stellate cells in superficial MEC impairs spatial learning in virtual reality and in a real world object location recognition task. Our results quantify contributions of path integration to behavior and corroborate key predictions of models in which stellate cells contribute to location estimation. : Tennant et al. develop virtual reality tasks that dissociate beaconing and path integration strategies for location estimation. In combination with genetically targeted inactivation of synaptic output, the authors provide evidence for a critical role for entorhinal stellate cells in spatial learning. Keywords: spatial cognition, learning, memory, neural computation, location estimation, cue-based navigation, path integration, entorhinal cortex, virtual reality, behavio

Anomalies in water as obtained from computer simulations of the TIP4P/2005 model: density maxima, and density, isothermal compressibility and heat capacity minima

The so-called thermodynamic anomalies of water form an integral part of the peculiar behaviour of this both important and ubiquitous molecule. In this paper our aim is to establish whether the recently proposed TIP4P/2005 model is capable of reproducing a number of these anomalies. Using molecular dynamics simulations we investigate both the maximum in density and the minimum in the isothermal compressibility along a number of isobars. It is shown that the model correctly describes the decrease in the temperature of the density maximum with increasing pressure. At atmospheric pressure the model exhibits an additional minimum in density at a temperature of about 200K, in good agreement with recent experimental work on super-cooled confined water. The model also presents a minimum in the isothermal compressibility close to 310K. We have also investigated the atmospheric pressure isobar for three other water models; the SPC/E and TIP4P models also present a minimum in the isothermal compressibility, although at a considerably lower temperature than the experimental one. For the temperature range considered no such minimum is found for the TIP5P model.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figure

Vertical transport and electroluminescence in InAs/GaSb/InAs structures: GaSb thickness and hydrostatic pressure studies

We have measured the current-voltage (I-V) of type II InAs/GaSb/InAs double heterojunctions (DHETs) with 'GaAs like' interface bonding and GaSb thickness between 0-1200 \AA. A negative differential resistance (NDR) is observed for all DHETs with GaSb thickness $>$ 60 \AA below which a dramatic change in the shape of the I-V and a marked hysteresis is observed. The temperature dependence of the I-V is found to be very strong below this critical GaSb thickness. The I-V characteristics of selected DHETs are also presented under hydrostatic pressures up to 11 kbar. Finally, a mid infra-red electroluminescence is observed at 1 bar with a threshold at the NDR valley bias. The band profile calculations presented in the analysis are markedly different to those given in the literature, and arise due to the positive charge that it is argued will build up in the GaSb layer under bias. We conclude that the dominant conduction mechanism in DHETs is most likely to arise out of an inelastic electron-heavy-hole interaction similar to that observed in single heterojunctions (SHETs) with 'GaAs like' interface bonding, and not out of resonant electron-light-hole tunnelling as proposed by Yu et al. A Zener tunnelling mechanism is shown to contribute to the background current beyond NDR.Comment: 8 pages 12 fig

Three-generation flavor transitions and decays of supernova relic neutrinos

If neutrinos have mass, they can also decay. Decay lifetimes of cosmological interest can be probed, in principle, through the detection of the redshifted, diffuse neutrino flux produced by all past supernovae--the so-called supernova relic neutrino (SRN) flux. In this work, we solve the SRN kinetic equations in the general case of three-generation flavor transitions followed by invisible (nonradiative) two-body decays. We then use the general solution to calculate observable SRN spectra in some representative decay scenarios. It is shown that, in the presence of decay, the SRN event rate can basically span the whole range below the current experimental upper bound--a range accessible to future experimental projects. Radiative SRN decays are also briefly discussed.Comment: 25 pages, including 7 figure

Gauge and Scheme Dependence of Mixing Matrix Renormalization

We revisit the issue of mixing matrix renormalization in theories that include Dirac or Majorana fermions. We show how a gauge-variant on-shell renormalized mixing matrix can be related to a manifestly gauge-independent one within a generalized ${\bar {\rm MS}}$ scheme of renormalization. This scheme-dependent relation is a consequence of the fact that in any scheme of renormalization, the gauge-dependent part of the mixing-matrix counterterm is ultra-violet safe and has a pure dispersive form. Employing the unitarity properties of the theory, we can successfully utilize the afore-mentioned scheme-dependent relation to preserve basic global or local symmetries of the bare Lagrangian through the entire process of renormalization. As an immediate application of our study, we derive the gauge-independent renormalization-group equations of mixing matrices in a minimal extension of the Standard Model with isosinglet neutrinos.Comment: 31 pages, LaTeX, uses axodraw.st

Dark Energy and Gravity

I review the problem of dark energy focusing on the cosmological constant as the candidate and discuss its implications for the nature of gravity. Part 1 briefly overviews the currently popular `concordance cosmology' and summarises the evidence for dark energy. It also provides the observational and theoretical arguments in favour of the cosmological constant as the candidate and emphasises why no other approach really solves the conceptual problems usually attributed to the cosmological constant. Part 2 describes some of the approaches to understand the nature of the cosmological constant and attempts to extract the key ingredients which must be present in any viable solution. I argue that (i)the cosmological constant problem cannot be satisfactorily solved until gravitational action is made invariant under the shift of the matter lagrangian by a constant and (ii) this cannot happen if the metric is the dynamical variable. Hence the cosmological constant problem essentially has to do with our (mis)understanding of the nature of gravity. Part 3 discusses an alternative perspective on gravity in which the action is explicitly invariant under the above transformation. Extremizing this action leads to an equation determining the background geometry which gives Einstein's theory at the lowest order with Lanczos-Lovelock type corrections. (Condensed abstract).Comment: Invited Review for a special Gen.Rel.Grav. issue on Dark Energy, edited by G.F.R.Ellis, R.Maartens and H.Nicolai; revtex; 22 pages; 2 figure

Search for supersymmetry with a dominant R-parity violating LQDbar couplings in e+e- collisions at centre-of-mass energies of 130GeV to 172 GeV

A search for pair-production of supersymmetric particles under the assumption that R-parity is violated via a dominant LQDbar coupling has been performed using the data collected by ALEPH at centre-of-mass energies of 130-172 GeV. The observed candidate events in the data are in agreement with the Standard Model expectation. This result is translated into lower limits on the masses of charginos, neutralinos, sleptons, sneutrinos and squarks. For instance, for m_0=500 GeV/c^2 and tan(beta)=sqrt(2) charginos with masses smaller than 81 GeV/c^2 and neutralinos with masses smaller than 29 GeV/c^2 are excluded at the 95% confidence level for any generation structure of the LQDbar coupling.Comment: 32 pages, 30 figure