The infrared interferometer spectrometer experiment /iris/. volume ii- meteorological mission

IRIS - infrared interferometer spectrometer measurements of atmosphere vertical structure - humidity, temperature, and cloud heigh

Soil nematodes in five spruce forests of the Beskydy mountains, Czech Republic

Cette étude concerne les peuplements de nématodes du sol de cinq forêts d'épicéas âgées de 5 à 138 ans, situées dans les Monts Beskydy, Moravie du Nord, République Tchèque. Au total, 92 espèces ont été répertoriées dans les sites étudiés. L'abondance des nématodes varie de 272,9 à 6238,9 x 1000 ind/m2, la valeur moyenne de cette abondance étant de 1409,6 x 1000 ind/m2. La biomasse fluctue de 33,6 mg/m2 à 1197,0 mg/m2 (moyenne : 337,2). Les nématodes myco-phytophages de l'ordre des #Tylenchida$ présentent l'abondance la plus élevée. Considérés individuellement, les genres montrent des préférences variables. L'abondance des nématodes bactériophages est semblable dans tous les sites. La structure des communautés de nématodes est influencée par l'âge des arbres, la nature du sous-bois et l'altitude

High spectral resolution ground-based observations of Venus in the 450-1250 cm sup-1 region

The thermal emission of Venus was recorded during the winter of 1970-1971, and in 1973 using the 2.7m telescope at McDonald Observatory. The double beam Michelson interferometer installed at the Coude focus was used. The spectrum was recorded between 400/cm and 1,400/cm. For the 1970 observations, the spectral resolution was 0.25/cm and the linear spatial resolution was 3/4 of the disk of Venus. In 1973 the spectral resolution was 0.20/cm with a spatial resolution 1/3 of the planetary disk. In addition to Venus, the moon, the sky adjacent to each object, and the zenith sky were recorded to help eliminate the absorption and emission effects of the earth's atmosphere

Eye and neural defects associated with loss of GDF6

BACKGROUND: In Xenopus the bone morphogenetic protein growth and differentiation factor 6 (GDF6) is expressed at the edge of the neural plate, and within the anterior neural plate including the eye fields. Here we address the role of GDF6 in neural and eye development by morpholino knockdown experiments. RESULTS: We show that depletion of GDF6 (BMP13) resulted in a reduction in eye size, loss of laminar structure and a reduction in differentiated neural cell types within the retina. This correlated with a reduction in staining for Smad1/5/8 phosphorylation indicating a decrease in GDF6 signalling through loss of phosphorylation of these intracellular mediators of bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signalling. In addition, the Pax6 expression domain is reduced in size at early optic vesicle stages. Neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM) is generally reduced in intensity along the neural tube, while in the retina and brain discreet patches of NCAM expression are also lost. GDF6 knock down resulted in an increase in cell death along the neural tube and within the retina as determined by terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) staining. CONCLUSION: Our data demonstrate that GDF6 has an important role in neural differentiation in the eye as well as within the central nervous system, and that GDF6 may act in some way to maintain cell survival within the ectoderm, during the normal waves of programmed cell death

When do generalized entropies apply? How phase space volume determines entropy

We show how the dependence of phase space volume $\Omega(N)$ of a classical system on its size $N$ uniquely determines its extensive entropy. We give a concise criterion when this entropy is not of Boltzmann-Gibbs type but has to assume a {\em generalized} (non-additive) form. We show that generalized entropies can only exist when the dynamically (statistically) relevant fraction of degrees of freedom in the system vanishes in the thermodynamic limit. These are systems where the bulk of the degrees of freedom is frozen and is practically statistically inactive. Systems governed by generalized entropies are therefore systems whose phase space volume effectively collapses to a lower-dimensional 'surface'. We explicitly illustrate the situation for binomial processes and argue that generalized entropies could be relevant for self organized critical systems such as sand piles, for spin systems which form meta-structures such as vortices, domains, instantons, etc., and for problems associated with anomalous diffusion.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

BioSentinel

The BioSentinel mission was selected in 2013 as one of three secondary payloads to fly on the Space Launch Systems first Exploration Mission (EM-1) planned for launch in December 2017. The primary objective of BioSentinel is to demonstrate the use of simple model organisms as biosentinels to detect, measure, and correlate the impact of space radiation to biological organisms including humans, a health risk over long durations beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). While progress identifying and characterizing biological radiation effects using Earth-based facilities has been significant, no terrestrial source duplicates the unique space radiation environment

How driving rates determine the statistics of driven non-equilibrium systems with stationary distributions

Sample space reducing (SSR) processes offer a simple analytical way to understand the origin and ubiquity of power-laws in many path-dependent complex systems. SRR processes show a wide range of applications that range from fragmentation processes, language formation to search and cascading processes. Here we argue that they also offer a natural framework to understand stationary distributions of generic driven non-equilibrium systems that are composed of a driving- and a relaxing process. We show that the statistics of driven non-equilibrium systems can be derived from the understanding of the nature of the underlying driving process. For constant driving rates exact power-laws emerge with exponents that are related to the driving rate. If driving rates become state-dependent, or if they vary across the life-span of the process, the functional form of the state-dependence determines the statistics. Constant driving rates lead to exact power-laws, a linear state-dependence function yields exponential or Gamma distributions, a quadratic function produces the normal distribution. Logarithmic and power-law state dependence leads to log-normal and stretched exponential distribution functions, respectively. Also Weibull, Gompertz and Tsallis-Pareto distributions arise naturally from simple state-dependent driving rates. We discuss a simple physical example of consecutive elastic collisions that exactly represents a SSR process

The freshwater crayfish Austropotamobius pallipes in South Tyrol. Heritage species and bioindicator

Rapid decline of crayfish in European freshwaters and continuing threat necessitate integrated actions in conservation and management of native crayfish populations. Besides biological reasons (diseases, plague), the impact of toxic and harmful substances (fertilisers, herbicides) or wastewater effluents, habitat alteration or fragmentation have been responsible for their decline in some regions. The same is true for the region of South Tyrol, where compared to previous investigations, only 10 of a former total of 15 crayfish locations in the water bodies could be affirmed. Although two new populations of the non-indigenous Astacus astacus were detected, the native Austropotamobius pallipes continues to decline. While many investigations have focused accurately on causal coherences for the decline of native populations, the properties of crayfish facilitate to reverse the situation. In a few examples, the potential of Austropotamobius pallipes, the native crayfish in South Tyrol, as “surrogate species” for effective biological conservation is discussed. Given the various adequate attributes of freshwater crayfish as surrogate species (including indicator species, umbrella species and flagship species qualities), they may help to advance not only the crayfish situation itself but also freshwater ecosystem properties in general

BioSentinel

The BioSentinel mission was selected in 2013 as one of three secondary payloads to fly on the Space Launch Systems first Exploration Mission (EM-1) planned for launch in December 2017. The primary objective of BioSentinel is to develop a biosensor using a simple model organism to detect, measure, and correlate the impact of space radiation to living organisms overlong durations beyond Low Earth Orbit(LEO). While progress identifying and characterizing biological radiation effects using Earth-based facilities has been significant, no terrestrial source duplicates the unique space radiation environment.The BioSentinel biosensor uses the buddin