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Carbon stable isotope analysis of cereal remains as a way to reconstruct water availability: preliminary results
Reconstructing past water availability, both as rainfall and irrigation, is important to answer questions about the way society reacts to climate and its changes and the role of irrigation in the development of social complexity. Carbon stable isotope analysis of archaeobotanical remains is a potentially valuable method for reconstructing water availability. To further define the relationship between water availability and plant carbon isotope composition and to set up baseline values for the Southern Levant, grains of experimentally grown barley and sorghum were studied. The cereal crops were grown at three stations under five different irrigation regimes in Jordan. Results indicate that a positive but weak relationship exists between irrigation regime and total water input of barley grains, but no relationship was found for sorghum. The relationship for barley is site-specific and inter-annual variation was present at Deir ‘Alla, but not at Ramtha and Khirbet as-Samra
Stochastic Growth Equations and Reparametrization Invariance
It is shown that, by imposing reparametrization invariance, one may derive a
variety of stochastic equations describing the dynamics of surface growth and
identify the physical processes responsible for the various terms. This
approach provides a particularly transparent way to obtain continuum growth
equations for interfaces. It is straightforward to derive equations which
describe the coarse grained evolution of discrete lattice models and analyze
their small gradient expansion. In this way, the authors identify the basic
mechanisms which lead to the most commonly used growth equations. The
advantages of this formulation of growth processes is that it allows one to go
beyond the frequently used no-overhang approximation. The reparametrization
invariant form also displays explicitly the conservation laws for the specific
process and all the symmetries with respect to space-time transformations which
are usually lost in the small gradient expansion. Finally, it is observed, that
the knowledge of the full equation of motion, beyond the lowest order gradient
expansion, might be relevant in problems where the usual perturbative
renormalization methods fail.Comment: 42 pages, Revtex, no figures. To appear in Rev. of Mod. Phy
Binary and Millisecond Pulsars at the New Millennium
We review the properties and applications of binary and millisecond pulsars.
Our knowledge of these exciting objects has greatly increased in recent years,
mainly due to successful surveys which have brought the known pulsar population
to over 1300. There are now 56 binary and millisecond pulsars in the Galactic
disk and a further 47 in globular clusters. This review is concerned primarily
with the results and spin-offs from these surveys which are of particular
interest to the relativity community.Comment: 59 pages, 26 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in Living
Reviews in Relativity (http://www.livingreviews.org
Evidence of antineutrinos from distant reactors using pure water at SNO
The SNO+ Collaboration reports the first evidence of reactor antineutrinos in a Cherenkov detector. The nearest nuclear reactors are located 240 km away in Ontario, Canada. This analysis uses events with energies lower than in any previous analysis with a large water Cherenkov detector. Two analytical methods are used to distinguish reactor antineutrinos from background events in 190 days of data and yield consistent evidence for antineutrinos with a combined significance of 3.5σ
Association Analysis of the Extended MHC Region in Celiac Disease Implicates Multiple Independent Susceptibility Loci
Celiac disease is a common autoimmune disease caused by sensitivity to the dietary protein gluten. Forty loci have been implicated in the disease. All disease loci have been characterized as low-penetrance, with the exception of the high-risk genotypes in the HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DQB1 genes, which are necessary but not sufficient to cause the disease. The very strong effects from the known HLA loci and the genetically complex nature of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) have precluded a thorough investigation of the region. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that additional celiac disease loci exist within the extended MHC (xMHC). A set of 1898 SNPs was analyzed for association across the 7.6 Mb xMHC region in 1668 confirmed celiac disease cases and 517 unaffected controls. Conditional recursive partitioning was used to create an informative indicator of the known HLA-DQA1 and HLA-DQB1 high-risk genotypes that was included in the association analysis to account for their effects. A linkage disequilibrium-based grouping procedure was utilized to estimate the number of independent celiac disease loci present in the xMHC after accounting for the known effects. There was significant statistical evidence for four new independent celiac disease loci within the classic MHC region. This study is the first comprehensive association analysis of the xMHC in celiac disease that specifically accounts for the known HLA disease genotypes and the genetic complexity of the region
Study protocol for VIdeo assisted thoracoscopic lobectomy versus conventional Open LobEcTomy for lung cancer, a UK multicentre randomised controlled trial with an internal pilot (the VIOLET study)
INTRODUCTION: Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide and surgery remains the main treatment for early stage disease. Prior to the introduction of video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS), lung resection for cancer was undertaken through an open thoracotomy. To date, the evidence base supporting the different surgical approaches is based on non-randomised studies, small randomised trials and is focused mainly on short-term in-hospital outcomes. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The VIdeo assisted thoracoscopic lobectomy versus conventional Open LobEcTomy for lung cancer study is a UK multicentre parallel group randomised controlled trial (RCT) with blinding of outcome assessors and participants (to hospital discharge) comparing the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and acceptability of VATS lobectomy versus open lobectomy for treatment of lung cancer. We will test the hypothesis that VATS lobectomy is superior to open lobectomy with respect to self-reported physical function 5 weeks after randomisation (approximately 1 month after surgery). Secondary outcomes include assessment of efficacy (hospital stay, pain, proportion and time to uptake of chemotherapy), measures of safety (adverse health events), oncological outcomes (proportion of patients upstaged to pathologic N2 (pN2) disease and disease-free survival), overall survival and health related quality of life to 1 year. The QuinteT Recruitment Intervention is integrated into the trial to optimise recruitment. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This trial has been approved by the UK (Dulwich) National Research Ethics Service Committee London. Findings will be written-up as methodology papers for conference presentation, and publication in peer-reviewed journals. Many aspects of the feasibility work will inform surgical RCTs in general and these will be reported at methodology meetings. We will also link with lung cancer clinical studies groups. The patient and public involvement group that works with the Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit at the Brompton Hospital will help identify how we can best publicise the findings
Observation of Antineutrinos from Distant Reactors using Pure Water at SNO+
The SNO+ collaboration reports the first observation of reactor antineutrinos
in a Cherenkov detector. The nearest nuclear reactors are located 240 km away
in Ontario, Canada. This analysis used events with energies lower than in any
previous analysis with a large water Cherenkov detector. Two analytical methods
were used to distinguish reactor antineutrinos from background events in 190
days of data and yielded consistent observations of antineutrinos with a
combined significance of 3.5 .Comment: v2: add missing author, add link to supplemental materia
Electron-muon ranger: performance in the MICE muon beam
The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will perform a detailed study of ionization cooling to evaluate the feasibility of the technique. To carry out this program, MICE requires an efficient particle-identification (PID) system to identify muons. The Electron-Muon Ranger (EMR) is a fully-active tracking-calorimeter that forms part of the PID system and tags muons that traverse the cooling channel without decaying. The detector is capable of identifying electrons with an efficiency of 98.6%, providing a purity for the MICE beam that exceeds 99.8%. The EMR also proved to be a powerful tool for the reconstruction of muon momenta in the range 100–280 MeV/c
Electron-muon ranger: performance in the MICE muon beam
The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will perform a detailed study of ionization cooling to evaluate the feasibility of the technique. To carry out this program, MICE requires an efficient particle-identification (PID) system to identify muons. The Electron-Muon Ranger (EMR) is a fully-active tracking-calorimeter that forms part of the PID system and tags muons that traverse the cooling channel without decaying. The detector is capable of identifying electrons with an efficiency of 98.6%, providing a purity for the MICE beam that exceeds 99.8%. The EMR also proved to be a powerful tool for the reconstruction of muon momenta in the range 100–280 MeV/c
Improved search for invisible modes of nucleon decay in water with the SNO+ detector
This paper reports results from a search for single and multi-nucleon
disappearance from the O nucleus in water within the \snoplus{} detector
using all of the available data. These so-called "invisible" decays do not
directly deposit energy within the detector but are instead detected through
their subsequent nuclear de-excitation and gamma-ray emission. New limits are
given for the partial lifetimes:
years, years, years,
years, and years at 90\% Bayesian
credibility level (with a prior uniform in rate). All but the () results improve on existing limits by a factor of about 3.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
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