Electrodynamics of a flux transfer event: Experimental test of the Southwood model.

On 12 September 1999, a conjunction between two SuperDARN radars and the Ørsted satellite gave, for the first time, simultaneous access to the ionospheric convection enhancement and the field-aligned currents (FACs) associated with a Flux Transfer Event. The radars observed an azimuthally elongated convection flow burst and the Ørsted satellite observed a series of successive small-scale parallel currents alternating between downward and upward. The most poleward pair of currents, whose directions were in agreement with the Southwood model, was observed when Ørsted crossed the front edge of the flow burst. A quantitative comparison of the current density of each FAC and of the Pedersen current density indicates that the closure current for this FACs pair occurred inside the flow burst, confirming the validity of the Southwood model. The Poynting flux carried by the parallel currents was less than 1% of the power carried by the solar wind plasma

Simultaneous transients in the auroral zone and the equator as observed with SuperDARN and magnetometers: A correlation with equatorial counter electrojet (CEJ) event

An equatorial counter electrojet (CEJ) event characterized by a large amplitude (～150 nT) and a short duration (～15 min) magnetic disturbance occurred in the dayside region at 0053 UT, 23 October 1994. This event was detected by the ground magnetometers along the dayside dip-equator. The CEJ current, with local westward ionospheric currents, was located to the north of the normal eastward current (equatorial electrojet: EEJ) that existed prior to the CEJ event. Simultaneously with the occurrence of the CEJ event, an enhanced plasma convection with very high velocity (～2000 m/s) was observed by SuperDARN in the dusk sector of the auroral zone. These simultaneous occurrences in the auroral zone and at the equator may suggest that such an impulsive CEJ event could be inteipreted as a violation of the shielding of the high-latitude potential pattern

Individual differences in behavioral responses to novelty and amphetamine self-administration in male and female rats

Previous work has shown that individual differences in locomotor activity in an inescapable novel environment can predict acquisition of amphetamine self-administration. The current study examined whether individual differences in approach to novelty in a free choice test could also predict amphetamine self-administration. Further, the current study examined whether individual differences in either free choice or inescapable novelty tests could predict responding for a nondrug reinforcer (sucrose) in the presence and absence of amphetamine. Male and female rats were first tested for their response to free choice novelty (playground maze and novelty-induced place preference tests) and inescapable novelty. They were then tested for acquisition of sucrose-reinforced responding, amphetamine-induced changes in maintenance of sucrose-reinforced responding, and amphetamine self-administration. Based on the inescapable novelty test, acquisition of sucrose-reinforced responding was more rapid in male high responders (HR) compared to low responders (LR). This effect in males did not generalize to females. None of the novelty tests predicted the ability of amphetamine to decrease sucrose-maintained responding. However, using the inescapable novelty test, both male and female HRs self-administered more amphetamine than LRs within the dose range tested (0.03-0.16mg/ kg/infusion). Neither the playground maze nor the novelty-induced place preference test predicted amphetamine self-administration. These results indicate that responses to free choice novelty and inescapable novelty predict different components of amphetamine-induced behavior

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Joint magnetometer array and radar backscatter observations of auroral currents in Northern Scandinavia

As a contribution to the International Magnetospheric Study the University of Munster has installed an array of 32 Gough-Reitzel type magnetometers located mostly in Northern Scandinavia. Also for the IMS, the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy at Lindau is operating the Scandinavian Twin Auroral Radar Experiment (STARE) which consists of two nearly identical backscatter radars located near Trondheim (Norway) and Sauvamaki (Finland). For a weak isolated substorm on October 7, 1976 the spatial structure of the electron density irregularities observed by the Trondheim-radar and the equivalent current distribution derived from the magnetic measurements have been compared. A good correspondence has been found between the location and magnitude of the maxima of the horizontal magnetic disturbance and the radar backscatter amplitude for an eastward electrojet. For most of the comparison there appeared also to be good agreement between the direction of the equivalent current and the direction antiparallel to the line-of-sight irregularity drift. This supports the idea that the backscatter irregularities are caused by current driven plasma instabilities and that it is possible to determine auroral ionospheric currents with the backscatter radar technique. However, during periods of enhanced electron precipitation, differences between the drift directions given by the two methods were observed.           ARK: https://n2t.net/ark:/88439/y099827 Permalink: https://geophysicsjournal.com/article/250 &nbsp