18,305 research outputs found
Curriculum and beyond: Mathematics support for first year life science students
The move into higher education is a real challenge for students from all educational backgrounds, with the adaptation to a new curriculum and style of learning and teaching posing a daunting task. A series of exercises were planned to boost the impact of the mathematics support for level four students and was focussed around a core module for all students. The
intention was to develop greater confidence in tackling mathematical problems in all levels of ability and to provide more structured transition period in the first semester of level 4. Over a two-year period the teaching team for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology provided a series of structured formative tutorials and “interactive” online problems. Video solutions to
all formative problems were made available, in order that students were able to engage with the problems at any time and were not disadvantaged if they could not attend. The formative problems were specifically set to dovetail into a practical report in which the mathematical skills developed were specifically assessed. Students overwhelmingly agreed that the structured formative activities had broadened their
understanding of the subject and that more such activities would help. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the package of changes undertaken resulted in a significant increase in the overall module mark over the two years of development
Low relaxation rate in a low-Z alloy of iron
The longest relaxation time and sharpest frequency content in ferromagnetic
precession is determined by the intrinsic (Gilbert) relaxation rate \emph{}.
For many years, pure iron (Fe) has had the lowest known value of for all pure ferromagnetic metals or binary alloys. We show that an
epitaxial iron alloy with vanadium (V) possesses values of which are
significantly reduced, to 355 Mhz at 27% V. The result can be understood
as the role of spin-orbit coupling in generating relaxation, reduced through
the atomic number .Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure
A Mesolithic settlement site at Howick, Northumberland: a preliminary report
Excavations at a coastal site at Howick during 2000 and 2002 have revealed evidence for a substantial Mesolithic settlement and a Bronze Age cist cemetery. Twenty one radiocarbon determinations of the earlier eighth millennium BP (Cal.) indicate that the Mesolithic site is one of the earliest known in northern Britain. An 8m core of sediment was recovered from stream deposits adjacent to the archaeological site which provides information on local environmental conditions. Howick offers a unique opportunity to understand aspects of hunter-gatherer colonisation and settlement during a period of rapid palaeogeographical change around the margins of the North Sea basin, at a time when it was being progressively inundated by the final stages of the postglacial marine transgression. The cist cemetery will add to the picture of Bronze Age occupation of the coastal strip and again reveals a correlation between the location of Bronze Age and Mesolithic sites which has been observed elsewhere in the region
Principal Component Analysis with Noisy and/or Missing Data
We present a method for performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on
noisy datasets with missing values. Estimates of the measurement error are used
to weight the input data such that compared to classic PCA, the resulting
eigenvectors are more sensitive to the true underlying signal variations rather
than being pulled by heteroskedastic measurement noise. Missing data is simply
the limiting case of weight=0. The underlying algorithm is a noise weighted
Expectation Maximization (EM) PCA, which has additional benefits of
implementation speed and flexibility for smoothing eigenvectors to reduce the
noise contribution. We present applications of this method on simulated data
and QSO spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASP; v2 with minor updates, mostly to
bibliograph
Monitoring Tropospheric Gases with Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) during the Second CLOUDMAP Flight Campaign
Small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) are a promising technology for atmospheric monitoring of trace atmospheric gases. While sUAS can be navigated to provide information with higher spatiotemporal resolution than tethered balloons, they can also bridge the gap between the regions of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) sampled by ground stations and manned aircraft. Additionally, sUAS can be effectively employed in the petroleum industry, e.g., to constrain leaking regions of hydrocarbons from long gasoducts. Herein, sUAS are demonstrated to be a valuable technology for studying the concentration of important trace tropospheric gases in the ABL. The successful detection and quantification of gases is performed with lightweight sensor packages of low-power consumption that possess limits of detection on the ppm scale or below with reasonably fast response times. The datasets reported include timestamps with position, temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and variable mixing ratio values of ~400 ppm CO2, ~1900 ppb CH4, and ~5.5 ppb NH3. The sensor packages were deployed aboard two different sUAS operating simultaneously during the second CLOUDMAP flight campaign in Oklahoma, held during 26–29 June 2017. A Skywalker X8 fixed wing aircraft was used to fly horizontally at a constant altitude, while vertical profiles were provided by a DJI Phantom 3 (DJI P3) quadcopter flying upward and downward at fixed latitude-longitude coordinates. The results presented have been gathered during 8 experiments consisting of 32 simultaneous flights with both sUAS, which have been authorized by the United States Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) under the current regulations (Part 107). In conclusion, this work serves as proof of concept showing the atmospheric value of information provided by the developed sensor systems aboard sUAS
Black Holes in Einstein-Aether Theory
We study black hole solutions in general relativity coupled to a unit
timelike vector field dubbed the "aether". To be causally isolated a black hole
interior must trap matter fields as well as all aether and metric modes. The
theory possesses spin-0, spin-1, and spin-2 modes whose speeds depend on four
coupling coefficients. We find that the full three-parameter family of local
spherically symmetric static solutions is always regular at a metric horizon,
but only a two-parameter subset is regular at a spin-0 horizon. Asymptotic
flatness imposes another condition, leaving a one-parameter family of regular
black holes. These solutions are compared to the Schwarzschild solution using
numerical integration for a special class of coupling coefficients. They are
very close to Schwarzschild outside the horizon for a wide range of couplings,
and have a spacelike singularity inside, but differ inside quantitatively. Some
quantities constructed from the metric and aether oscillate in the interior as
the singularity is approached. The aether is at rest at spatial infinity and
flows into the black hole, but differs significantly from the the 4-velocity of
freely-falling geodesics.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures; v2: minor editing; v3: corrected overall sign in
twist formula and an error in the equation for the aether stress tensor.
Results unchanged since correct form was used in calculations; v4: corrected
minor typ
The Cooling Flow to Accretion Flow Transition
Cooling flows in galaxy clusters and isolated elliptical galaxies are a
source of mass for fueling accretion onto a central supermassive black hole. We
calculate the dynamics of accreting matter in the combined gravitational
potential of a host galaxy and a central black hole assuming a steady state,
spherically symmetric flow (i.e., no angular momentum). The global dynamics
depends primarily on the accretion rate. For large accretion rates, no simple,
smooth transition between a cooling flow and an accretion flow is possible; the
gas cools towards zero temperature just inside its sonic radius, which lies
well outside the region where the gravitational influence of the central black
hole is important. For accretion rates below a critical value, however, the
accreting gas evolves smoothly from a radiatively driven cooling flow at large
radii to a nearly adiabatic (Bondi) flow at small radii. We argue that this is
the relevant parameter regime for most observed cooling flows. The transition
from the cooling flow to the accretion flow should be observable in M87 with
the {\it Chandra X-ray Observatory}.Comment: emulateapj.sty, 10 pages incl. 5 figures, to appear in Ap
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