3,201 research outputs found
Six Strategies for Rehabilitating Land Disturbed by Oil Development in Arctic Alaska
Oil development in arctic Alaska has left a range of disturbed lands that will eventually require rehabilitation. These lands include gravel roads and pads, gravel pits and overburden stockpiles, drilling reserve pits, occasional accidental spills, and other minor disturbances to the tundra. A long-term research program investigating site-specific and cost-effective methods for rehabilitating degraded lands for fish and wildlife habitat has developed six general strategies that are applicable to the range of disturbed conditions. These strategies include 1) flooding of gravel mine sites for fish habitat, 2) creation of wetlands in ponds perched on overburden stockpiles, 3) revegetation of thick gravel fill and overburden to compensate for lost wildlife habitat, 4) removal of gravel fill to help restore wet tundra habitats, 5) restoration of tundra on less severely modified habitats, and 6) remediation of areas contaminated by oil spills, seawater spills, and drilling mud. Although most techniques are in the early stage of evaluation, preliminary results suggest that successful methods are available to create diverse, productive, and self-sustaining communities that are useful to a range of wildlife.Key words: Arctic, Alaska, disturbance, habitat, tundra, oilfield, rehabilitation, revegetation, restoration, wetlandsL'exploitation du pétrole dans la zone arctique de l'Alaska a entraîné une gamme de perturbations sur des terrains qu'il va falloir un jour réhabiliter. Ces derniers comprennent les routes et plates-formes de gravier, les gravières et déblais des terrains de recouvrement, les bassins de réserve de forage, les terrains ayant été le site de déversements accidentels occasionnels et autres perburbations mineures de la toundra. Six stratégies générales applicables à la gamme des terres ayant subi des perturbations ont été développées grâce à un programme de recherche à long terme portant sur les méthodes - rentables et spécifiques à chaque site - de réhabilitation des terres dégradées pour la faune aquatique et terrestre. Ces stratégies comprennent 1) l'inondation de gravières pour l'habitat du poisson, 2) la création de terres humides dans les étangs situés en haut des déblais des terrains de recouvrement, 3) la restauration de la végétation sur les remblais de gravier et déblais épais, pour compenser la perte de l'habitat faunique, 4) l'enlèvement des remblais de gravier comme aide à la restauration des habitats de toundra humide, 5) la restauration de la toundra dans des habitats n'ayant pas subi de modifications aussi sérieuses, et 6) la décontamination de zones ayant subi des déversements de pétrole, d'eau de mer et de boue de forage. Bien que la plupart des techniques en soient au stade préliminaire de l'évaluation, les premiers résultats donnent à penser qu'il existe des moyens efficaces de créer des communautés diverses, productives et autorégulatrices qui permettent la présence d'une flore et d'une faune diversifiées.Mots clés: Arctic, Alaska, perturbation, habitat, toundra, gisement pétrolier, réhabilitation, revégétation, restauration, terres humide
Cosmic homogeneity demonstrated with luminous red galaxies
We test the homogeneity of the Universe at with the Luminous Red
Galaxy (LRG) spectroscopic sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. First, the
mean number of LRGs within completely surveyed LRG-centered spheres of
comoving radius is shown to be proportional to at radii greater than
. The test has the virtue that it does not rely
on the assumption that the LRG sample has a finite mean density; its results
show, however, that there \emph{is} such a mean density. Secondly, the survey
sky area is divided into 10 disjoint solid angular regions and the fractional
rms density variations of the LRG sample in the redshift range
among these () regions is found to be 7
percent of the mean density. This variance is consistent with typical biased
\lcdm models and puts very strong constraints on the quality of SDSS
photometric calibration.Comment: submitted to Ap
Salsalate treatment improves glycemia without altering adipose tissue in nondiabetic obese hispanics.
ObjectiveSalsalate treatment has well-known effects on improving glycemia, and the objective of this study was to examine whether the mechanism of this effect was related to changes in adipose tissue.MethodsA randomized double-blind and placebo-controlled trial in obese Hispanics (18-35 years) was conducted. The intervention consisted of 4 g day(-1) of salsalate (n = 11) versus placebo (n = 13) for 4 weeks. Outcome measures included glycemia, adiposity, ectopic fat, and adipose tissue gene expression and inflammation.ResultsIn those receiving salsalate, plasma fasting glucose decreased by 3.4% (P < 0.01), free fatty acids decreased by 42.5% (P = 0.06), and adiponectin increased by 27.7% (P < 0.01). Salsalate increased insulin AUC by 38% (P = 0.01) and HOMA-B by 47.2% (P < 0.01) while estimates of insulin sensitivity/resistance were unaffected. These metabolic improvements occurred without changes in total, abdominal, visceral, or liver fat. Plasma markers of inflammation/immune activation were unchanged following salsalate. Salsalate had no effects on adipose tissue including adipocyte size, presence of crown-like structures, or gene expression of adipokines, immune cell markers, or cytokines downstream of NF-κB with the exception of downregulation of IL-1β (P < 0.01).ConclusionsFindings suggest that metabolic improvements in response to salsalate occurred without alterations in adiposity, ectopic fat, or adipose tissue gene expression and inflammation
Six Strategies for Rehabilitating Land Disturbed by Oil Development in Arctic Alaska
ABSTRACT. Oil development in arctic Alaska has left a range of disturbed lands that will eventually require rehabilitation. These lands include gravel roads and pads, gravel pits and overburden stockpiles, drilling reserve pits, occasional accidental spills, and other minor disturbances to the tundra. A long-term research program investigating site-specific and cost-effective methods for rehabilitating degraded lands for fish and wildlife habitat has developed six general strategies that are applicable to the range of disturbed conditions. These strategies include 1) flooding of gravel mine sites for fish habitat, 2) creation of wetlands in ponds perched on overburden stockpiles, 3) revegetation of thick gravel fill and overburden to compensate for lost wildlife habitat, 4) removal of gravel fill to help restore wet tundra habitats, 5) restoration of tundra on less severely modified habitats, and 6) remediation of areas contaminated by oil spills, seawater spills, and drilling mud. Although most techniques are in the early stage of evaluation, preliminary results suggest that successful methods are available to create diverse, productive, and self-sustaining communities that are useful to a range of wildlife
An M-theory Flop as a Large N Duality
We show how a recently proposed large duality in the context of type IIA
strings with supersymmetry in 4 dimensions can be derived from
purely geometric considerations by embedding type IIA strings in M-theory. The
phase structure of M-theory on holonomy manifolds and an flop are
the key ingredients in this derivation.Comment: 17 pages, references added and correcte
The Ages of Galactic Bulge Stars with Realistic Uncertainties
Using modern isochrones with customized physics and carefully considered
statistical techniques, we recompute the age distribution for a sample of 91
micro-lensed dwarfs in the Galactic bulge presented by Bensby et al. (2017) and
do not produce an age distribution consistent with their results. In
particular, our analysis finds that only 15 of 91 stars have ages younger than
7 Gyr, compared to their finding of 42 young stars in the same sample. While we
do not find a constituency of very young stars, our results do suggest the
presence of an Gyr population at the highest metallicities, thus
contributing to long-standing debate about the age--metallicity distribution of
the Galactic bulge. We supplement this with attempts at independent age
determinations from two sources of photometry, BDBS and \textit{Gaia}, but find
that the imprecision of photometric measurements prevents reliable age and age
uncertainty determinations. Lastly, we present age uncertainties derived using
a first-order consideration of global modeling uncertainties in addition to
standard observational uncertainties. The theoretical uncertainties are based
on the known variance of free parameters in the 1D stellar evolution models
used to generate isochrones, and when included, result in age uncertainties of
-- Gyr for this spectroscopically well-constrained sample. These error
bars, which are roughly twice as large as typical literature values, constitute
realistic lower limits on the true age uncertainties.Comment: accepted to ApJ; revisions complet
On the mean-field spherical model
Exact solutions are obtained for the mean-field spherical model, with or
without an external magnetic field, for any finite or infinite number N of
degrees of freedom, both in the microcanonical and in the canonical ensemble.
The canonical result allows for an exact discussion of the loci of the Fisher
zeros of the canonical partition function. The microcanonical entropy is found
to be nonanalytic for arbitrary finite N. The mean-field spherical model of
finite size N is shown to be equivalent to a mixed isovector/isotensor
sigma-model on a lattice of two sites. Partial equivalence of statistical
ensembles is observed for the mean-field spherical model in the thermodynamic
limit. A discussion of the topology of certain state space submanifolds yields
insights into the relation of these topological quantities to the thermodynamic
behavior of the system in the presence of ensemble nonequivalence.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure
The Manifold Scattering Transform for High-Dimensional Point Cloud Data
The manifold scattering transform is a deep feature extractor for data
defined on a Riemannian manifold. It is one of the first examples of extending
convolutional neural network-like operators to general manifolds. The initial
work on this model focused primarily on its theoretical stability and
invariance properties but did not provide methods for its numerical
implementation except in the case of two-dimensional surfaces with predefined
meshes. In this work, we present practical schemes, based on the theory of
diffusion maps, for implementing the manifold scattering transform to datasets
arising in naturalistic systems, such as single cell genetics, where the data
is a high-dimensional point cloud modeled as lying on a low-dimensional
manifold. We show that our methods are effective for signal classification and
manifold classification tasks.Comment: Accepted for publication in the TAG in DS Workshop at ICML. For
subsequent theoretical guarantees, please see Section 6 of arXiv:2208.0856
Hospital evacuation planning tool for assistance devices (HEPTAD)
A new software tool, called HEPTAD (Hospital Evacuation Planning Tool for Assistance Devices), designed to aid evacuation planning in hospitals is described and demonstrated in this paper. The software can identify regions within a hospital geometry that are inappropriate for patients who require the use of specific movement assistance devices in the event of an emergency evacuation. Using the software, Hospital Emergency Coordinators can reduce the risk of allocating a bed to a patient from which they cannot be evacuated within a safe time. In addition, HEPTAD is designed to be a proof of concept for algorithms that will later be incorporated within the EXODUS egress model. HEPTAD utilises several techniques from autonomous robotics to generate the fastest viable egress route for movement assistance devices from every location in the geometry while considering device spatial constraints (size and shape) and kinematic constraints (maximum speeds, turning radius and holonomicity). It then uses the egress time of this route along with factors from space syntax (isovist and spaciousness) to analyse the emergency vulnerability of every location within the geometry
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