872 research outputs found
Proposal: International Year of the Biosphere
‘The time is ripe to step up and expand current efforts to understand the great interlocking systems of air, water, and minerals, that nourish the Earth', wrote Gilbert F. White (President of the International Council of Scientific Unions' Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) and Mostafa K. Tolba (Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme) in Environmental Conservation (Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 88,1979
The fluid dynamics of swimming by jumping in copepods
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Royal Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface 8 (2011): 1090-1103, doi:10.1098/rsif.2010.0481.Copepods swim either continuously by vibrating their feeding appendages or erratically
by repeatedly beating their swimming legs resulting in a series of small jumps. The two
swimming modes generate different hydrodynamic disturbances and therefore expose the
swimmers differently to rheotactic predators. We developed an impulsive stresslet model to
quantify the jump-imposed flow disturbance. The predicted flow consists of two counterrotating
viscous vortex rings of similar intensity, one in the wake and one around the body of
the copepod. We showed that the entire jumping flow is spatially limited and temporally
ephemeral owing to jump-impulsiveness and viscous decay. In contrast, continuous steady
swimming generates two well-extended long-lasting momentum jets both in front of and
behind the swimmer, as suggested by the well-known steady stresslet model. Based on the
observed jump-swimming kinematics of a small copepod Oithona davisae, we further
showed that jump-swimming produces a hydrodynamic disturbance with much smaller
spatial extension and shorter temporal duration than that produced by a same-size copepod
cruising steadily at the same average translating velocity. Hence, small copepods in jumpswimming
are much less detectable by rheotactic predators. The present impulsive stresslet
model improves a previously published impulsive Stokeslet model that applies only to the
wake vortex.This work was supported by National Science Foundation grants NSF OCE-0352284 &
IOS-0718506 and an award from WHOI’s Ocean Life Institute to H.J and by grants from the
Danish Research Council for independent research and the Niels Bohr Foundation to T.K
From random walk to multifractal random walk in zooplankton swimming behaviour
EDITORIAL OFFICE, TAIPEI, TAIWAN,
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Ion holes in the hydrodynamic regime in ultracold neutral plasmas
We describe the creation of localized density perturbations, or ion holes, in an ultracold neutral
plasma in the hydrodynamic regime, and show that the holes propagate at the local ion acoustic wave
speed. We also observe the process of hole splitting, which results from the formation of a density
depletion initially at rest in the plasma. One-dimensional, two-fluid hydrodynamic simulations
describe the results well. Measurements of the ion velocity distribution also show the effects of the
ion hole and confirm the hydrodynamic conditions in the plasma
Stellarator coil design and plasma sensitivity
The rich information contained in the plasma response to external magnetic perturbations can be used to help design stellarator coils more effectively. We demonstrate the feasibility by first devel- oping a simple, direct method to study perturbations in stellarators that do not break stellarator symmetry and periodicity. The method applies a small perturbation to the plasma boundary and evaluates the resulting perturbed free-boundary equilibrium to build up a sensitivity matrix for the important physics attributes of the underlying configuration. Using this sensitivity information, design methods for better stellarator coils are then developed. The procedure and a proof-of-principle application are given that (1) determine the spatial distributions of external normal magnetic field at the location of the unperturbed plasma boundary to which the plasma properties are most sen- sitive, (2) determine the distributions of external normal magnetic field that can be produced most efficiently by distant coils, (3) choose the ratios of the magnitudes of the the efficiently produced magnetic distributions so the sensitive plasma properties can be controlled. Using these methods, sets of modular coils are found for the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) that are either smoother or can be located much farther from the plasma boundary than those of the present design
Vertical distribution of buoyant Microcystis blooms in a Lagrangian particle tracking model for short‐term forecasts in Lake Erie
Cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (CHABs) are a problem in western Lake Erie, and in eutrophic fresh waters worldwide. Western Lake Erie is a large (3000 km2), shallow (8 m mean depth), freshwater system. CHABs occur from July to October, when stratification is intermittent in response to wind and surface heating or cooling (polymictic). Existing forecast models give the present location and extent of CHABs from satellite imagery, then predict two‐dimensional (surface) CHAB movement in response to meteorology. In this study, we simulated vertical distribution of buoyant Microcystis colonies, and 3‐D advection, using a Lagrangian particle model forced by currents and turbulent diffusivity from the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM). We estimated the frequency distribution of Microcystis colony buoyant velocity from measured size distributions and buoyant velocities. We evaluated several random‐walk numerical schemes to efficiently minimize particle accumulation artifacts. We selected the Milstein scheme, with linear interpolation of the diffusivity profile in place of cubic splines, and varied the time step at each particle and step based on the curvature of the local diffusivity profile to ensure that the Visser time step criterion was satisfied. Inclusion of vertical mixing with buoyancy significantly improved model skill statistics compared to an advection‐only model, and showed greater skill than a persistence forecast through simulation day 6, in a series of 26 hindcast simulations from 2011. The simulations and in situ observations show the importance of subtle thermal structure, typical of a polymictic lake, along with buoyancy in determining vertical and horizontal distribution of Microcystis.Key Points:Microcystis vertical distribution is a dynamic balance between turbulence and buoyancyAppropriate time step and numerical scheme avoid artifacts in random walk modelsVertical mixing with buoyancy improved simulation of bloom spatial distributionPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134116/1/jgrc21832_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134116/2/jgrc21832.pd
The Quasar SDSS J105041.35+345631.3: Black Hole Recoil or Extreme Double-Peaked Emitter?
The quasar SDSS J105041.35+345631.3 (z = 0.272) has broad emission lines
blueshifted by 3500 km/s relative to the narrow lines and the host galaxy. Such
an object may be a candidate for a recoiling supermassive black hole, binary
black hole, a superposition of two objects, or an unusual geometry for the
broad emission-line region. The absence of narrow lines at the broad line
redshift argues against superposition. New Keck spectra of J1050+3546 place
tight constraints on the binary model. The combination of large velocity shift
and symmetrical H-beta profile, as well as aspects of the narrow line spectrum,
make J1050+3546 an interesting candidate for black hole recoil. Other aspects
of the spectrum, however, suggest that the object is most likely an extreme
case of a ``double-peaked emitter.'' We discuss possible observational tests to
determine the true nature of this exceptional object.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, LaTeX; substantial revision
Turbulent Friction in Rough Pipes and the Energy Spectrum of the Phenomenological Theory
The classical experiments on turbulent friction in rough pipes were performed
by J. Nikuradse in the 1930's. Seventy years later, they continue to defy
theory. Here we model Nikuradse's experiments using the phenomenological theory
of Kolmog\'orov, a theory that is widely thought to be applicable only to
highly idealized flows. Our results include both the empirical scalings of
Blasius and Strickler, and are otherwise in minute qualitative agreement with
the experiments; they suggest that the phenomenological theory may be relevant
to other flows of practical interest; and they unveil the existence of close
ties between two milestones of experimental and theoretical turbulence.Comment: Accepted for publication in PRL; 4 pages, 4 figures; revised versio
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