LIV. Conjectures concerning the cause, and observations upon the phænomena, of earthquakes; particularly of that great earthquake of the first of November 1775, which proved so fatal to the city of Lisbon, and whose effects were felt as far as Africa, and more or less throughout almost all Europe

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Indian Islamic Architecture

The British scholar John Burton-Page contributed numerous formative articles on Indian Islamic architecture for the Encyclopaedia of Islam over a period of 25 years. Assembled here for the first time, these offer an insightful overview of the subject, ranging from the earliest mosques and tombs erected by the Delhi sultans in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, to the great monuments of the Mughal emperors dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. The articles cover the principal forms of Indian Islamic architecture -- mosques, tombs, minarets, forts, gateways and water structures -- as well as the most important sites and their monuments. Unsurpassed for their compression of information, these succinct articles serve as the best possible introduction to the subject, indispensible for both students and travellers. The articles are supplemented by a portfolio of photographs especially selected for the volume, as well as a glossary and up to date bibliography

Optimal Power Distribution Network Reconfiguration using Cuckoo Search

This paper presents an adaptation of a new metaheuristic algorithm known as Cuckoo Search (CS) to solve the distribution network reconfiguration problem (DNRC), where the objective is to minimize the real power losses subject to constraints such as voltage levels in nodes, current levels in branches, and maintaining a radial topology in the distribution test system. The performance of the proposed method is compared with a popular meta-heuristic algorithm, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The methods have been tested on the IEEE 37 bus radial distribution system. Experiments were carried out to compare the simulation time, which is a critical measure for the real implementation of the method in real power distribution systems

Recent trends of the most used metaheuristic techniques for distribution network reconfiguration

Distribution network reconfiguration (DNR) continues to be a good option to reduce technical losses in a distribution power grid. However, this non-linear combinatorial problem is not easy to assess by exact methods when solving for large distribution networks, which requires large computational times. For solving this type of problem, some researchers prefer to use metaheuristic techniques due to convergence speed, near-optimal solutions, and simple programming. Some literature reviews specialize in topics concerning the optimization of power network reconfiguration and try to cover most techniques. Nevertheless, this does not allow detailing properly the use of each technique, which is important to identify the trend. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, it presents the objective functions and constraints used in DNR with the most used metaheuristics. Second, it reviews the most important techniques such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), ant colony optimization (ACO), immune algorithms (IA), and tabu search (TS). Finally, this paper presents the trend of each technique from 2011 to 2016. This paper will be useful for researchers interested in knowing the advances of recent approaches in these metaheuristics applied to DNR in order to continue developing new best algorithms and improving solutions for the topi

How Black Holes Form in High Energy Collisions

We elucidate how black holes form in trans-Planckian collisions. In the rest frame of one of the incident particles, the gravitational field of the other, which is rapidly moving, looks like a gravitational shock wave. The shock wave focuses the target particle down to a much smaller impact parameter. In turn, the gravitational field of the target particle captures the projectile when the resultant impact parameter is smaller than its own Schwarzschild radius, forming a black hole. One can deduce this by referring to the original argument of escape velocities exceeding the speed of light, which Michell and Laplace used to discover the existence of black holes.Comment: 8 pages, 3 .eps figures, essa

Insulin-stimulated phosphorylation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase at serine-615 contributes to nitric oxide synthesis

Insulin stimulates endothelial NO (nitric oxide) synthesis via PKB (protein kinase B)/Akt-mediated phosphorylation and activation of eNOS (endothelial NO synthase) at Ser-1177. In previous studies, we have demonstrated that stimulation of eNOS phosphorylation at Ser-1177 may be required, yet is not sufficient for insulin-stimulated NO synthesis. We therefore investigated the role of phosphorylation of eNOS at alternative sites to Ser-1177 as candidate parallel mechanisms contributing to insulin-stimulated NO synthesis. Stimulation of human aortic endothelial cells with insulin rapidly stimulated phosphorylation of both Ser-615 and Ser-1177 on eNOS, whereas phosphorylation of Ser-114, Thr-495 and Ser-633 was unaffected. Insulin-stimulated Ser-615 phosphorylation was abrogated by incubation with the PI3K (phosphoinositide 3-kinase) inhibitor wortmannin, infection with adenoviruses expressing a dominant-negative mutant PKB/Akt or pre-incubation with TNFα (tumour necrosis factor α), but was unaffected by high culture glucose concentrations. Mutation of Ser-615 to alanine reduced insulin-stimulated NO synthesis, whereas mutation of Ser-615 to aspartic acid increased NO production by NOS in which Ser-1177 had been mutated to an aspartic acid residue. We propose that the rapid PKB-mediated stimulation of phosphorylation of Ser-615 contributes to insulin-stimulated NO synthesis

Distribution Network Reconfiguration with Large Number of Switches Solved by a Modified Binary Bat Algorithm and Improved Seed Population

The paper presents a methodology based on a Modified Binary Bat Algorithm (MBBA) and Improved Seed Population search that provides nearly optimal solutions to the power loss minimization problem, considering network reconfiguration and a large number of switches. The existence of many switches leads to a very large number of combinations, making it hard for algorithms to find a good solution. The proposed method is based on eliminating non-feasible solutions and defining an initial matrix with improved seed population for searching the optimal solution. This seed is used for the random process of the algorithm to produce new solutions and is continually updated to obtain better results close to the optimal solutions found during the searching process of the metaheuristic algorithm. This algorithm was tested against the Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and the Seed Population search alone on the modified versions of the IEEE 13-node test and IEEE 123-node test feeders. From several runs, the proposed method reached the optimal solution more times than the other algorithms and the remainder achieved near-optimal solutions. With this result, the MBBA provides good options to improve the solutions in the network reconfiguration problem with a large number of switches

Reply to: "Reflecting the causes of variability of EEG responses elicited by cerebellar TMS"

In their commentary on our recently published paper about electroencephalographic responses induced by cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation (Fong et al., 2023), Gassmann and colleagues (Gassmann et al., 2023b) try to explain the differences between our results and their own previous work on the same topic. We agree with them that many of the differences arise from our use of a different magnetic stimulation coil. However, two unresolved questions remain. (1) Which method is most likely to achieve optimal activation of cerebellar output? (2) To what extent are the evoked cerebellar responses contaminated by concomitant sensory input? We highlight the role of careful experimental design and of combining electrophysiological and behavioural data to obtain reliable TMS-EEG data