Hand pollination to increase seed-set of red helleborine Cephalanthera rubra in the Chiltern Hills, Buckinghamshire, England

In 2007 and in previous years, as part of ongoing attempts to improve red helleborine Cephalanthera rubra seed-set, hand pollination of florets has been undertaken at a small colony of this species in Buckinghamshire, southern England. Natural pollination rarely occurs (one mature pod recorded in 10 years) at this site. In 2007, hand pollination resulted in the production of four seed pods, of which one withered and died. Upon ripening, the three remaining pods were removed for attempted micropropagation of the seeds. Ongoing conservation management has probably benefited the solitary bee Chelostoma campanularum which now appears fairly plentiful at the site, but despite the presence of this red helleborine flower visitor, natural pollination remains virtually unrecorded at this locality; field observations suggest that C.campanularum is in fact probably not large enough to act as an effective red helleborine pollinator as it can slip in and out of the flowers without removing the pollinia, unlike it larger relative C.fuliginosum, absent from the UK but which is a known pollinator of red helleborine in continental Europe

Worldsheet Instanton Corrections to the Kaluza-Klein Monopole

The Kaluza-Klein monopole is a well known object in both gravity and string theory, related by T-duality to a "smeared" NS5-brane which retains the isometry around the duality circle. As the true NS5-brane solution is localized at a point on the circle, duality implies that the Kaluza-Klein monopole should show some corresponding behavior. In this paper, we express the Kaluza-Klein monopole as a gauged linear sigma model in two dimensions and show that worldsheet instantons give corrections to its geometry. These corrections can be understood as a localization in "winding space" which could be probed by strings with winding charge around the circle.Comment: 20 pages, REVTeX, v2: minor equation correctio

D0-brane tension in string field theory

We compute the D0-brane tension in string field theory by representing it as a tachyon lump of the D1-brane compactified on a circle of radius $R$. To this aim, we calculate the lump solution in level truncation up to level L=8. The normalized D0-brane tension is independent on $R$. The compactification radius is therefore chosen in order to cancel the subleading correction $1/L^2$. We show that an optimal radius $R^*$ indeed exists and that at $R^*$ the theoretical prediction for the tension is reproduced at the level of $10^{-5}$. As a byproduct of our calculation we also discuss the determination of the marginal tachyon field at $R\to 1$.Comment: 13 pages, 3 Eps figure

Minimax studies

Effect of nonzero initial conditions on selection of minimax controllers for large launch vehicles and extremal bounded amplitude bounded rate inputs to linear system

Design-for-test structure to facilitate test vector application with low performance loss in non-test mode.

A switching based circuit is described which allows application of voltage test vectors to internal nodes of a chip without the problem of backdriving. The new circuit has low impact on the performance of an analogue circuit in terms of loss of bandwidth and allows simple application of analogue test voltages into internal nodes. The circuit described facilitates implementation of the forthcoming IEEE 1149.4 DfT philosophy [1]

The Adjudication and Enforcement of Rights After Brexit

This report records the inaugural meeting and roundtable of the Brexit and Rights Engagement Network (BREN) on Tuesday 3rd July 2018 at Edinburgh Law School. Attendees at the roundtable included network members, fellow academics, representatives of the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Government, the Scottish Human Rights Commission, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the legal professions, and NGOs. Two years after the EU Referendum and only a few days after the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the 2018 Act) receiving Royal Assent, the Brexit and Rights Engagement Network met for the first time. The purpose of the roundtable was to ignite debate amongst legal scholars and policy makers, and others working in a rights environment relating to interpretation, adjudication and enforcement of rights in the lead up to, and following “Brexit Day,” (March 29, 2019). This report is split into two sections, Part A will consider the adjudication of EU rights, but also their enforcement under the 2018 Act and the Withdrawal Agreement, whilst ‘options for the future’ will be broached in Part B

Laminated ferrite memory, phase II FINAL technical report, Jun. 1, 1965 - Jun. 30, 1966

Thermally stable ferrite materials tailored to laminated memory arrays operated at low current level

Wave-like spread of Ebola Zaire

In the past decade the Zaire strain of Ebola virus (ZEBOV) has emerged repeatedly into human populations in central Africa and caused massive die-offs of gorillas and chimpanzees. We tested the view that emergence events are independent and caused by ZEBOV variants that have been long resident at each locality. Phylogenetic analyses place the earliest known outbreak at Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo, very near to the root of the ZEBOV tree, suggesting that viruses causing all other known outbreaks evolved from a Yambuku-like virus after 1976. The tendency for earlier outbreaks to be directly ancestral to later outbreaks suggests that outbreaks are epidemiologically linked and may have occurred at the front of an advancing wave. While the ladder-like phylogenetic structure could also bear the signature of positive selection, our statistical power is too weak to reach a conclusion in this regard. Distances among outbreaks indicate a spread rate of about 50 km per year that remains consistent across spatial scales. Viral evolution is clocklike, and sequences show a high level of small-scale spatial structure. Genetic similarity decays with distance at roughly the same rate at all spatial scales. Our analyses suggest that ZEBOV has recently spread across the region rather than being long persistent at each outbreak locality. Controlling the impact of Ebola on wild apes and human populations may be more feasible than previously recognized