Opportunity knocks : sowing wheat early in the north-eastern wheatbelt

Farmers consider many factors in deciding whether to start sowing wheat, but the most important are the amount of rain and time of year. In this study we assessed the chances of farmers in the north-eastern wheatbelt (less than 325 mm rainfall) receiving enough rain to sow wheat early. In low rainfall areas such as this, where an early finish to the season is likely, it is especially important that farmers take advantage of all early sowing opportunities. The potential benefits of sowing wheat early generally outweigh the associated risks, particularly in lower rainfall areas. However, early sowing depends on an early break to the season, and this will not happen every year. We determined a \u27planting rule\u27 for the north-eastern wheatbelt which defined the amount of rain needed before sowing could start. The planting rule\u27 was developed by asking 25 farmers about their planting decisions. We then used rainfall records to determine the chances of receiving early sowing opportunities to the season

Barriers to Fish Passage in the Queensland Murray-Darling Basin Phase II: Validation of the “Keller” method for determining discharge at weir drown-out.

Information about the distribution and characteristics of weirs is important in modelling fish movement and connectivity. One weir characteristic that is rarely available in literature is the weir drown-out threshold. This threshold describes the stream discharge where tailwater levels exceed the height of the weir, providing a theoretical opportunity for fish to move over the weir. It therefore provides a means of relating stream discharge to opportunities for fish movement. In this project, we have used an Excel spreadsheet devised by Keller, Peterken & Berghuis (2012) to calculate weir drown-out thresholds for four gauging weirs in the Upper Condamine River catchment, and validated the results using depth loggers and gauge data. Each gauging weir site was surveyed to populate the spreadsheet with the weir dimensions and the slope, roughness, cross-section and rating table of the downstream channel. Loggers were installed upstream and downstream of the weir to record depth over 12-18 months, thus detecting drown-out events. The discharge at drown-out was determined by cross-referencing the time at which drown-out commenced with discharge recorded by the gauge. The frequency of flows exceeding the calculated and measured drown-out thresholds (ML/day) were compared using the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test. The results showed that the thresholds were not significantly different for three of the four sites. The Keller, Peterken & Berghuis (2012) spreadsheet provides a method for calculating a drown-out threshold for critical barriers to fish movement. This can be achieved quickly, with minimal cost and at an accuracy suitable for modelling fish movement. The drown-out threshold provides water managers with tool to determine whether the existing or proposed infrastructure provides opportunities for fish passage, and at what frequency. At the same time, it produces values that can be used to attribute passability scores to barriers when developing connectivity models

Quantity and Quality: Scaling Small Business for Large Constellations

In 2018, Sinclair Interplanetary accepted an order constituting 40 star trackers and 80 reaction wheels, an order three times larger than had been received previously. Moreover, the delivery cadence was three times faster (12 units per month) than any previous large order. Faced with these obligations and an internal requirement to maintain quality, the company took stock of itself. Since drastically scaling its staff complement of seven people to meet the demand would have risked negatively impacting quality, Sinclair Interplanetary set out to meet its obligations by adjusting the way it manufactures its products. A combination of outsourcing, process changes, equipment upgrades, descoping, and other techniques were ultimately used to improve efficiency and meet production needs. As a result of these changes, both quality and consistency have been improved. Relevant to any small space company looking to scale its production capacity, this paper details the obstacles encountered, successes, failures and lessons learned during this exercise of production enhancement. Further, it uses this experience to predict the limits of the processes that are now in place, and what further steps would be required to exceed those limits

Dark Matter Direct Detection with Non-Maxwellian Velocity Structure

The velocity distribution function of dark matter particles is expected to show significant departures from a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This can have profound effects on the predicted dark matter - nucleon scattering rates in direct detection experiments, especially for dark matter models in which the scattering is sensitive to the high velocity tail of the distribution, such as inelastic dark matter (iDM) or light (few GeV) dark matter (LDM), and for experiments that require high energy recoil events, such as many directionally sensitive experiments. Here we determine the velocity distribution functions from two of the highest resolution numerical simulations of Galactic dark matter structure (Via Lactea II and GHALO), and study the effects for these scenarios. For directional detection, we find that the observed departures from Maxwell-Boltzmann increase the contrast of the signal and change the typical direction of incoming DM particles. For iDM, the expected signals at direct detection experiments are changed dramatically: the annual modulation can be enhanced by more than a factor two, and the relative rates of DAMA compared to CDMS can change by an order of magnitude, while those compared to CRESST can change by a factor of two. The spectrum of the signal can also change dramatically, with many features arising due to substructure. For LDM the spectral effects are smaller, but changes do arise that improve the compatibility with existing experiments. We find that the phase of the modulation can depend upon energy, which would help discriminate against background should it be found.Comment: 34 pages, 16 figures, submitted to JCAP. Tables of g(v_min), the integral of f(v)/v from v_min to infinity, derived from our simulations, are available for download at http://astro.berkeley.edu/~mqk/dmdd

The History of Flow Chemistry at Eli Lilly and Company

Flow chemistry was initially used for speed to early phase material delivery in the development laboratories, scaling up chemical transformations that we would not or could not scale up batch for safety reasons. Some early examples included a Newman Kwart Rearrangement, Claisen rearrangement, hydroformylation, and thermal imidazole cyclization. Next, flow chemistry was used to enable safe scale up of hazardous chemistries to manufacturing plants. Examples included high pressure hydrogenation, aerobic oxidation, and Grignard formation reactions. More recently, flow chemistry was used in Small Volume Continuous (SVC) processes, where highly potent oncolytic molecules were produced by fully continuous processes at about 10 kg/day including reaction, extraction, distillation, and crystallization, using disposable equipment contained in fume hoods

A Treatment Trial of Acupuncture in IBS Patients

To compare the effects of true and sham acupuncture in relieving symptoms of IBS

Decadal predictions of the cooling and freshening of the North Atlantic in the 1960s and the role of ocean circulation

In the 1960s North Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SST) cooled rapidly. The magnitude of the cooling was largest in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (SPG), and was coincident with a rapid freshening of the SPG. Here we analyze hindcasts of the 1960s North Atlantic cooling made with the UK Met Office’s decadal prediction system (DePreSys), which is initialised using observations. It is shown that DePreSys captures—with a lead time of several years—the observed cooling and freshening of the North Atlantic SPG. DePreSys also captures changes in SST over the wider North Atlantic and surface climate impacts over the wider region, such as changes in atmospheric circulation in winter and sea ice extent. We show that initialisation of an anomalously weak Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and hence weak northward heat transport, is crucial for DePreSys to predict the magnitude of the observed cooling. Such an anomalously weak AMOC is not captured when ocean observations are not assimilated (i.e. it is not a forced response in this model). The freshening of the SPG is also dominated by ocean salt transport changes in DePreSys; in particular, the simulation of advective freshwater anomalies analogous to the Great Salinity Anomaly were key. Therefore, DePreSys suggests that ocean dynamics played an important role in the cooling of the North Atlantic in the 1960s, and that this event was predictable

The state of the Martian climate

60°N was +2.0°C, relative to the 1981–2010 average value (Fig. 5.1). This marks a new high for the record. The average annual surface air temperature (SAT) anomaly for 2016 for land stations north of starting in 1900, and is a significant increase over the previous highest value of +1.2°C, which was observed in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Average global annual temperatures also showed record values in 2015 and 2016. Currently, the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of lower latitudes

Systems genetics identifies a convergent gene network for cognition and neurodevelopmental disease

Genetic determinants of cognition are poorly characterized, and their relationship to genes that confer risk for neurodevelopmental disease is unclear. Here we performed a systems-level analysis of genome-wide gene expression data to infer gene-regulatory networks conserved across species and brain regions. Two of these networks, M1 and M3, showed replicable enrichment for common genetic variants underlying healthy human cognitive abilities, including memory. Using exome sequence data from 6,871 trios, we found that M3 genes were also enriched for mutations ascertained from patients with neurodevelopmental disease generally, and intellectual disability and epileptic encephalopathy in particular. M3 consists of 150 genes whose expression is tightly developmentally regulated, but which are collectively poorly annotated for known functional pathways. These results illustrate how systems-level analyses can reveal previously unappreciated relationships between neurodevelopmental disease–associated genes in the developed human brain, and provide empirical support for a convergent gene-regulatory network influencing cognition and neurodevelopmental disease