Giant sessile barnacles contribute to the construction of cold-water coral habitats south of Malta (Mediterranean Sea)

Sessile barnacles may be important contributors to benthic communities worldwide from warm temperate to polar latitudes. Although barnacles are more often found in shallow settings, they equally occur below wave base down to bathyal depths. A case in point is represented by the presence of live populations of the thoracican cirripede Pachylasma giganteum (Philippi, 1836) associated with the lush and highly diverse deep sea cold-water coral communities (cwc) south of Malta. P. giganteum is a large cirriped (> 40 mm in height and > 30 mm in basal diameter) that is uncommon recorded in the Mediterranean Sea and the Azores region. It is relatively frequent in the Strait of Messina on circalittoral hard substrates between 80-200 m to bathyal depths (435-640 m) in the NE Atlantic where it has been found attached to scleractinians and sponges. The species is recorded as epibiont on turtles in the Aegean Sea. Finally, P. giganteum is also known as a fossil from Pleistocene palaeo-strait deposits in the Messina area (Sicily), a record which is consistent with the association of this suspension feeder with submarine topographies under the influence of strong currents.peer-reviewe

The ocean change : management patterns and the environment

Since the 1960s, the rapid development of the international Law of the Sea has outstripped the capacity of most maritime states for developing and implementing policy. The delimitation of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which resulted from the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) brought about an extension of its area, within which the sate exercise control over all resources and economic activities. At the same time as the jurisdiction of the state has encroached seawards, there has been a significant increase in the range of opportunities for the use of the offshore zone. Until now, the most common approach to managing Malta's marine and coastal resources has been to regulate activities. Thus, regulations concerning constructions on the foreshore, transport of sand, recreational activities on the coast, commercial fishing, control of pollution, shipping and other related marine activities exist. These regulations are not sufficient to safeguard marine resources or to ensure maximal sustainable use. Some regulations are outdated, others are not enforced and different sets of regulations may actually conflict. This situation is not unique to the coastal zone, but it is also true for the whole island. In general, Malta's development has been haphazard and piecemeal and not regulated by any national plan, formulated on the basis of a scientific study of the country's physical, economic, social and cultural characteristics, existing and projected needs and the necessity for maintaining environmental quality. Recognizing this, the Maltese government is in the process of drafting national planning guidelines in the form of the Malta Structure Plan. As a first step towards fulfilling this objective, the Planning Services Division of the Ministry for Development of Infra- structure commissioned a Coastal Zone Survey of the Maltese Islands. As part of this, a survey of the terrestrial part of the coastal zone was carried out over a six-week period from early July 1989 by a joint team from the Universities of Durham and Malta. The output of this survey comprised a report of the survey, coastal land-use maps on a scale of 1:2,500, a series of synoptic land-use maps on a scale of 1:25,000, and a series of synoptic maps on various scales, depicting coastal features of ecologjcal importance. This in the hope of determining which areas are to be preserved and which are to be used for economic gain.peer-reviewe

Unexorcized ghost in DGP brane world

The braneworld model of Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati realizes the self-accelerating universe. However, it is known that this cosmological solution contains a spin-2 ghost. We study the possibility of avoiding the appearance of the ghost by slightly modifying the model, introducing the second brane. First we consider a simple model without stabilization of the separation of the brane. By changing the separation between the branes, we find we can erase the spin-2 ghost. However, this can be done only at the expense of the appearance of a spin-0 ghost instead. We discuss why these two different types of ghosts are correlated. Then, we examine a model with stabilization of the brane separation. Even in this case, we find that the correlation between spin-0 and spin-2 ghosts remains. As a result we find we cannot avoid the appearance of ghost by two-branes model.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur

The effect of Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate on the ethanolic fractionation of dilute gelatin solutions

Gelatin is a heterogeneous protein with a broad molecular weight profile (MWP), which determines its behaviour in solution. Addition of a non-solvent, such as ethanol, to aqueous gelatin solutions causes progressive desolvation of the polymer. When sufficient solvent molecules are removed, the gelatin molecules begin to aggregate, resulting in phase separation, and forming a coacervate or, if sufficient desolvation occurs, a precipitate.1 Sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) associates with gelatin through hydrophobic interactions involving the hydrocarbon tail, and through ionic interactions between the negatively charged headgroup of SDS and positively charged side groups on the gelatin molecule; both mechanisms cause unfolding of the protein and yield a hydrophobic complex.2 It can be hypothesised that addition of SDS to dilute gelatin solutions will affect their desolvation behaviour, depending on the degree of binding of SDS to gelatin at different pH’s. The objective of this work was to determine the effect of dilute SDS concentrations on the response of B225 gelatin to the non-solvent ethanol at different pH’s.peer-reviewe

Potentiometric studies on gelatin solutions and gelatin nanoparticle dispersions

Gelatin is the denaturation product of the protein collagen. The denaturation can be performed by acid hydrolysis or base hydrolysis rendering A- type or B-type gelatin respectively. Gelatin molecules have a nonuniform distribution of 18 amino acids. As a typical protein, gelatin carries both positive and negative charges. Table 1 lists the main amino acids present in gelatin that can contribute towards the presence of a charge on a gelatin macromolecule, together with their respective pKa's.peer-reviewe

Welcome to the 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Thyroid Association

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140259/1/thy.2013.0486.pd

Named Entity Recognition as Dependency Parsing

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing, concerned with identifying spans of text expressing references to entities. NER research is often focused on flat entities only (flat NER), ignoring the fact that entity references can be nested, as in [Bank of [China]] (Finkel and Manning, 2009). In this paper, we use ideas from graph-based dependency parsing to provide our model a global view on the input via a biaffine model (Dozat and Manning, 2017). The biaffine model scores pairs of start and end tokens in a sentence which we use to explore all spans, so that the model is able to predict named entities accurately. We show that the model works well for both nested and flat NER through evaluation on 8 corpora and achieving SoTA performance on all of them, with accuracy gains of up to 2.2 percentage points

The Role of Animal Models for Research on Severe Malaria

The Role of Animal Models for Research on Severe Malari

Physics Beyond the Standard Model

I briefly summarize the prospects for extending our understanding of physics beyond the standard model within the next five years.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX. Presented at the 1999 UK Phenomenology Workshop, Durham, September 1999. To be published in Journal of Physics

Education for sustainable development in Malta

This paper is a 2004 revised version of the case study prepared for the 2003 Expert Meeting on Capacity Development for Sustainable Development in SIDS: Building Partnerships for Sustainable development through Education, Public Awareness and Training.This paper is intended to make a case for mainstreaming Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in school and University curricula in Malta. It identifies gaps in ESD and proposes a plan of action to put ESD on a strong footing in Malta.peer-reviewe