Dispersion and separation of nanostructured carbon in organic solvents

The present invention relates to dispersions of nanostructured carbon in organic solvents containing alkyl amide compounds and/or diamide compounds. The invention also relates to methods of dispersing nanostructured carbon in organic solvents and methods of mobilizing nanostructured carbon. Also disclosed are methods of determining the purity of nanostructured carbon

Host response to cuckoo song is predicted by the future risk of brood parasitism

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Introduction: Risk assessment occurs over different temporal and spatial scales and is selected for when individuals show an adaptive response to a threat. Here, we test if birds respond to the threat of brood parasitism using the acoustical cues of brood parasites in the absence of visual stimuli. We broadcast the playback of song of three brood parasites (Chalcites cuckoo species) and a sympatric non-parasite (striated thornbill, Acanthiza lineata) in the territories of superb fairy-wrens (Malurus cyaneus) during the peak breeding period and opportunistic breeding period. The three cuckoo species differ in brood parasite prevalence and the probability of detection by the host, which we used to rank the risk of parasitism (high risk, moderate risk, low risk). Results: Host birds showed the strongest response to the threat of cuckoo parasitism in accordance with the risk of parasitism. Resident wrens had many alarm calls and close and rapid approach to the playback speaker that was broadcasting song of the high risk brood parasite (Horsfield’s bronze-cuckoo, C. basalis) across the year (peak and opportunistic breeding period), some response to the moderate risk brood parasite (shining bronze-cuckoo, C. lucidus) during the peak breeding period, and the weakest response to the low risk brood parasite (little bronzecuckoo, C. minutillus). Playback of the familiar control stimulus in wren territories evoked the least response. Conclusion: Host response to the threat of cuckoo parasitism was assessed using vocal cues of the cuckoo and was predicted by the risk of future parasitism

The link between accretion mode and environment in radio-loud active galaxies

The interactions between radio-loud AGN and their environments play an important rôle in galaxy and cluster evolution. Recent work has demonstrated fundamental differences between high- and low-excitation radio galaxies (HERGs and LERGs), and shown that they may have different relationships with their environments. In the Chandra Large Project ERA (Environments of Radio-loud AGN), we made the first systematic X-ray environmental study of the cluster environments of radio galaxies at a single epoch (z ~ 0.5), and found tentative evidence for a correlation between radio luminosity and cluster X-ray luminosity. We also found that this relationship appeared to be driven by the LERG subpopulation. We have now repeated the analysis with a low-redshift sample (z ~ 0.1), and found strong correlations between radio luminosity and environment richness and between radio luminosity and central density for the LERGs but not for the HERGs. These results are consistent with models in which the HERGs are fuelled from accretion discs maintained from local reservoirs of gas, while LERGs are fuelled more directly by gas ingested from the intracluster medium. Comparing the samples, we found that although the maximum environment richness of the HERG environments is similar in both samples, there are poorer HERG environments in the z ~ 0.1 sample than in the z ~ 0.5 sample. We have therefore tentative evidence of evolution of the HERG environments. We found no differences between the LERG subsamples for the two epochs, as would be expected if radio and cluster luminosities are related.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio