The Devono-Carboniferous transition in the Franco-Belgian basin with reference to Foraminifera and Brachiopods

After a brief summary of the most striking evolutionary trends of the Upper Frasnian through Lower Tournaisian foraminifer assemblages in Northwestern Europe, some new biostratigraphic data are discussed mainly from an important section near St. Hilaire (Avesnois area, Northern France) as well as their impact on the problem of the Devono-Carboniferous boundary in the Franco-Belgian Basin

Crucial Physical Dependencies of the Core-Collapse Supernova Mechanism

We explore with self-consistent 2D F{\sc{ornax}} simulations the dependence of the outcome of collapse on many-body corrections to neutrino-nucleon cross sections, the nucleon-nucleon bremsstrahlung rate, electron capture on heavy nuclei, pre-collapse seed perturbations, and inelastic neutrino-electron and neutrino-nucleon scattering. Importantly, proximity to criticality amplifies the role of even small changes in the neutrino-matter couplings, and such changes can together add to produce outsized effects. When close to the critical condition the cumulative result of a few small effects (including seeds) that individually have only modest consequence can convert an anemic into a robust explosion, or even a dud into a blast. Such sensitivity is not seen in one dimension and may explain the apparent heterogeneity in the outcomes of detailed simulations performed internationally. A natural conclusion is that the different groups collectively are closer to a realistic understanding of the mechanism of core-collapse supernovae than might have seemed apparent.Comment: 25 pages; 10 figure

Asymmetry through time dependency

Given a single network of interactions, asymmetry arises when the links are directed. For example, if protein A upregulates protein B and protein B upregulates protein C, then (in the absence of any further relationships between them) A may affect C but not vice versa. This type of imbalance is reflected in the associated adjacency matrix, which will lack symmetry. A different type of imbalance can arise when interactions appear and disappear over time. If A meets B today and B meets C tomorrow, then (in the absence of any further relationships between them) A may pass a message or disease to C, but not vice versa. Hence, even when each interaction is a two-way exchange, the effect of time ordering can introduce asymmetry. This observation is very closely related to the fact that matrix multiplication is not commutative. In this work, we describe a method that has been designed to reveal asymmetry in static networks and show how it may be combined with a measure that summarizes the potential information flow between nodes in the temporal case. This results in a new method that quantifies the asymmetry arising through time ordering. We show by example that the new tool can be used to visualize and quantify the amount of asymmetry caused by the arrow of time