Requiem

Pages 29-3

Volatile Plant Secondary Metabolites in \u3cem\u3eEremophila glabra\u3c/em\u3e and Their Influence on Animal Foraging Preference

One response to global climate change effects on Australia is to investigate the use in sustainable farming systems of native plants, which have evolved to cope in their harsh environment (Monjardino 2009). The EnrichTM project has screened many Australian native plants for their potential use as methane reducers in ruminants, as anthelmintics, and as nutrition sources systems (Revell 2010). Eremophila glabra is one plant that shows promise in this regard, but first the foraging animal must want to eat it. This decision is assisted by the animal\u27s assessment of the emitted volatile plant secondary metabolites (PSM) (Provenza 2007). In this paper we investigate the relationship between volatile PSM in leaf material and animal preference for a number of E. glabra accessions

NASA DEVELOP Students Rev Up Response to Gulf Oil Spill

After the April 20th explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the world witnessed one of the worst oil spill catastrophes in global history. In an effort to mitigate the disaster, the U.S. government moved quickly to establish a unified command for responding to the spill. Some of the command's most immediate needs were to track the movement of the surface oil slick, establish a baseline measurement of pre-oil coastal ecosystem conditions, and assess potential air quality and water hazards related to the spill. To help address these needs and assist the Federal response to the disaster, NASA deployed several of its airborne and satellite research sensors to collect an unprecedented amount of remotely-sensed data over the Gulf of Mexico region. Although some of these data were shared with the public via the media, much of the NASA data on the disaster was not well known to the Gulf Coast community. The need existed to inform the general public about these datasets and help improve understanding about how NASA's science research was contributing to oil spill response and recovery. With its extensive experience conducting community-oriented remote sensing projects and close ties to organizations around Gulf of Mexico, the NASA DEVELOP National Program stood in a unique position to meet this need

Consistency Conditions for an AdS/MERA Correspondence

The Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA) is a tensor network that provides an efficient way of variationally estimating the ground state of a critical quantum system. The network geometry resembles a discretization of spatial slices of an AdS spacetime and "geodesics" in the MERA reproduce the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for the entanglement entropy of a boundary region in terms of bulk properties. It has therefore been suggested that there could be an AdS/MERA correspondence, relating states in the Hilbert space of the boundary quantum system to ones defined on the bulk lattice. Here we investigate this proposal and derive necessary conditions for it to apply, using geometric features and entropy inequalities that we expect to hold in the bulk. We show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the MERA lattice can only describe physics on length scales larger than the AdS radius. Further, using the covariant entropy bound in the bulk, we show that there are no conventional MERA parameters that completely reproduce bulk physics even on super-AdS scales. We suggest modifications or generalizations of this kind of tensor network that may be able to provide a more robust correspondence.Comment: 38 pages, 9 figure

Phase Zero

In October 2006 General Charles Wald, Deputy Commander U.S. European Com- mand, brought “Phase Zero” into the joint lexicon with the publication of an article, “The Phase Zero Campaign.”1 Over the last five years the concept of taking coordinated action in peacetime to affect the strategic environment has becomewidely accepted and is now integrated into theater campaign plans. These activi- ties focus on building capacity of partners and influencing potential adversaries to avoid war. In contrast, Chinese strategic culture has encouraged taking actions to defeat an enemy prior to the onset of hostilities for two and a half millennia

Lack of Equivalence in the Elemental and Stable Isotope Chemistry Within the Sagittal Otolith Pair of the Summer Flounder, Paralichthys dentatus

In fish that are not bilaterally symmetrical, the left and right sagittae are often not symmetrical, exhibiting divergent growth patterns and mass, and may have differences in chemical composition. We investigated this in the asymmetrical summer flounder Paralichthys dentatus, collected from different nursery habitats along the US east coast. Significant differences were detected in otolith mass, δ13C, δ18O, Li:Ca, Mg:Ca, and Sr:Ca, and overall chemical signatures. These results refute the hypothesis of left-right equivalence that is prevalent for bilaterally symmetrical fishes. We tested whether a specific side was better suited for classification. The best models differed between sagittae and resulted in different classification accuracies. The left otolith produced better classification accuracies. Simulated samples of randomized sets of left or right otoliths produced mean accuracies intermediate to classification and were often highly variable. We recommend that future otolith chemistry studies involving bilaterally asymmetrical species test the hypothesis of equivalence within the sagittae before randomly choosing an otolith for chemical analyses

Spatial Variation in Otolith Chemistry of Atlantic Croaker Larvae in the Mid-Atlantic Bight

Larval Atlantic croaker Micropogonias undulatus (1 to 7 mm in standard length) were collected on the east coast of the United States from North Carolina to Delaware during 2000. We defined 3 water-mass boundaries for potential groups of spawning Atlantic croaker using temperature and salinity measured at each sampling station. We tested the hypothesis that distinct otolith chemistries existed among 3 groups of larval Atlantic croaker collected from these water masses using solution-based inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated that otolith chemistry differed significantly among water masses. Using a quadratic discriminant function, we were able to correctly classify fish from the Mid-Atlantic Bight (MAB) 73 % of the time, South Atlantic Bight (SAB) 53 % of the time, and Chesapeake Bay plume 36 % of the time. The correct reclassification rates observed were significantly better than random. Results from this study indicate that it is possible to obtain measurable elemental concentrations from otoliths much smaller than previously analyzed (weight 0.015 to 1.976 μg). Moreover, contrary to previous studies, our results indicate that it is possible to distinguish natal signatures among larvae on different spawning grounds in the MAB and SAB. Further, this new information could benefit investigations of dispersal from offshore spawning grounds to estuaries or other nursery habitats