473 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Improved V I Log(gf) Values and Abundance Determinations in the Photospheres of the Sun and Metal-Poor Star HD 84937
New emission branching fraction measurements for 836 lines of the first spectrum of vanadium (V I) are determined from hollow cathode lamp spectra recorded with the National Solar Observatory 1 m Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS) and a high-resolution echelle spectrometer. The branching fractions are combined with recently published radiative lifetimes from laser-induced fluorescence measurements to determine accurate absolute atomic transition probabilities for the 836 lines. The FTS data are also used to extract new hyperfine structure A coefficients for 26 levels of neutral vanadium. These new laboratory data are applied to determine the V abundance in the Sun and metal-poor star HD 84937, yielding log epsilon(V) = 3.956 +/- 0.004 (sigma = 0.037) based on 93 V I lines and log epsilon(V) = 1.89 +/- 0.03 (sigma = 0.07) based on nine Vi lines, respectively, using the Holweger-Muller 1D model. These new V I abundance values for the Sun and HD 84937 agree well with our earlier determinations based upon V II.NASA NNX10AN93GNSF AST-1211055, AST-1211585Astronom
Lateral phase separation in mixtures of lipids and cholesterol
In an effort to understand "rafts" in biological membranes, we propose phenomenological models for saturated and unsaturated lipid mixtures, and lipid-cholesterol mixtures. We consider simple couplings between the local composition and internal membrane structure, and their influence on transitions between liquid and gel membrane phases. Assuming that the gel transition temperature of the saturated lipid is shifted by the presence of the unsaturated lipid, and that cholesterol acts as an external field on the chain melting transition, a variety of phase diagrams are obtained. The phase diagrams for binary mixtures of saturated/unsaturated lipids and lipid/cholesterol are in semi-quantitative agreement with the experiments. Our results also apply to regions in the ternary phase diagram of lipid/lipid/cholesterol systems
U-series Disequilibria in Guatemalan Lavas, Crustal Contamination, and Implications for Magma Genesis Along the Central American Subduction Zone
New U-series results indicate that Guatemalan volcanic rocks display both 238U and
230Th excesses. 230Th excess is restricted to volcanoes in central Guatemala, both along
and behind the front. 230Th excess correlates with a number of incompatible element
ratios, such as Th/Nb and Ba/Th. It also shows a negative correlation with MgO.
Guatemalan volcanic rocks have (230Th/232Th) ratios that overlap those of Costa Rican
volcanics and are therefore considerably lower than the unusually high ratios
characterizing volcanic rocks from Nicaragua. Along-arc variations in (230Th/232Th)
therefore mirror those of a number of diagnostic geochemical parameters, such as Ba/La,
which are symmetrical about a peak in west central Nicaragua. The one siliceous lava
analyzed, from the Cerro Quemado dome complex, has a recognizable crustal imprint,
distinguished, for instance, by high Th/Nb and low Ba/Th. In mafic samples, 238U excess
is attributed to addition of a U-enriched fluid component from the subducting Cocos plate.
Our preferred explanation for 230Th excess in Guatemalan mafic samples, on the other
hand, is crustal contamination, consistent with the relatively high Th/Nb and low Ba/Th
ratios in these samples. We suspect, however, that crustal contamination only exerts a
sizable control over the U-series disequilibrium of mafic magmas in Guatemala, and not
elsewhere along the Central American volcanic front. This agrees with previously
published trace element and isotopic evidence that throughout Central America, with the
exception of Guatemala, mafic magmas are largely uncontaminated by crustal material.The work was supported by NSF grant OCE-0405666
Angular dependence of domain wall resistivity in SrRuO films
is a 4d itinerant ferromagnet (T 150 K) with
stripe domain structure. Using high-quality thin films of SrRuO we study
the resistivity induced by its very narrow ( nm) Bloch domain walls,
(DWR), at temperatures between 2 K and T as a function of the
angle, , between the electric current and the ferromagnetic domains
walls. We find that which provides the first experimental
indication that the angular dependence of spin accumulation contribution to DWR
is . We expect magnetic multilayers to exhibit a similar
behavior.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Subitizing with Variational Autoencoders
Numerosity, the number of objects in a set, is a basic property of a given
visual scene. Many animals develop the perceptual ability to subitize: the
near-instantaneous identification of the numerosity in small sets of visual
items. In computer vision, it has been shown that numerosity emerges as a
statistical property in neural networks during unsupervised learning from
simple synthetic images. In this work, we focus on more complex natural images
using unsupervised hierarchical neural networks. Specifically, we show that
variational autoencoders are able to spontaneously perform subitizing after
training without supervision on a large amount images from the Salient Object
Subitizing dataset. While our method is unable to outperform supervised
convolutional networks for subitizing, we observe that the networks learn to
encode numerosity as basic visual property. Moreover, we find that the learned
representations are likely invariant to object area; an observation in
alignment with studies on biological neural networks in cognitive neuroscience
Preschoolers' Precision of the Approximate Number System Predicts Later School Mathematics Performance
The Approximate Number System (ANS) is a primitive mental system of nonverbal representations that supports an intuitive sense of number in human adults, children, infants, and other animal species. The numerical approximations produced by the ANS are characteristically imprecise and, in humans, this precision gradually improves from infancy to adulthood. Throughout development, wide ranging individual differences in ANS precision are evident within age groups. These individual differences have been linked to formal mathematics outcomes, based on concurrent, retrospective, or short-term longitudinal correlations observed during the school age years. However, it remains unknown whether this approximate number sense actually serves as a foundation for these school mathematics abilities. Here we show that ANS precision measured at preschool, prior to formal instruction in mathematics, selectively predicts performance on school mathematics at 6 years of age. In contrast, ANS precision does not predict non-numerical cognitive abilities. To our knowledge, these results provide the first evidence for early ANS precision, measured before the onset of formal education, predicting later mathematical abilities
An Exploration of the Relations between External Representations and Working Memory
It is commonly hypothesized that external representations serve as memory aids and improve task performance by means of expanding the limited capacity of working memory. However, very few studies have directly examined this memory aid hypothesis. By systematically manipulating how information is available externally versus internally in a sequential number comparison task, three experiments were designed to investigate the relation between external representations and working memory. The experimental results show that when the task requires information from both external representations and working memory, it is the interaction of information from the two sources that determines task performance. In particular, when information from the two sources does not match well, external representations hinder instead of enhance task performance. The study highlights the important role the coordination among different representations plays in distributed cognition. The general relations between external representations and working memory are discussed
- …