Wetland restoration and nitrate reduction: the example of the periurban wetland of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country, North Spain)

Changes in land use and agricultural intensification caused wetlands on the quaternary aquifer of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country) to disappear some years ago and nitrate concentration in groundwaters increased very quickly. The Basque Government recently declared the East Sector of this aquifer a Vulnerable Zone according to the 91/676/CEE European Directive. Recently, the wetlands have been restored through the closure of the main drainage ditches, the consequent elevation of the water table and the abondonment of agricultural practices near the wetlands. This is the case of the Zurbano wetland. Restoration has allowed the recovery of its biogeochemical function, which has reduced nitrate concentrations in waters. Nitrate concentrations which exceed 50 mg l–1 in groundwaters entering into the wetland are less than 10 mg l–1 at the outlet. Conditions in the wetland are conducive to the loss of nitrates: organic matter rich wetted soils, clay presence allowing a local semiconfined flow and very low hydraulic gradient. Water quality monitoring at several points around the wetland showed the processes involved in nitrate loss, although some aspects still remain unresolved. However, during storm events, the wetland effectively reduces the nitrate concentration entering the Alegria River, the most important river on the quaternary aquifer

Well-posedness and stability results for the Gardner equation

In this article we present local well-posedness results in the classical Sobolev space H^s(R) with s > 1/4 for the Cauchy problem of the Gardner equation, overcoming the problem of the loss of the scaling property of this equation. We also cover the energy space H^1(R) where global well-posedness follows from the conservation laws of the system. Moreover, we construct solitons of the Gardner equation explicitly and prove that, under certain conditions, this family is orbitally stable in the energy space.Comment: 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Nonlin.Diff Eq.and App

Experimental violation of a spin-1 Bell inequality using maximally-entangled four-photon states

We demonstrate the first experimental violation of a spin-1 Bell inequality. The spin-1 inequality is a calculation based on the Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt formalism. For entangled spin-1 particles the maximum quantum mechanical prediction is 2.552 as opposed to a maximum of 2, predicted using local hidden variables. We obtained an experimental value of 2.27 $\pm 0.02$ using the four-photon state generated by pulsed, type-II, stimulated parametric down-conversion. This is a violation of the spin-1 Bell inequality by more than 13 standard deviations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Revtex4. Problem with figures resolve

Coupling Between Thermal Oscillations in the Surface of a Micro-Cylinder and Vortex Shedding

his article studies the coupling between prescribed thermal oscillations in the surface of a micro-cylinder and vortex shedding. We deal with the unsteady, laminar, compressible flow regime where the aerodynamics forces have a periodic behavior. It is shown that appropriate spatial and time-dependent temperature oscillations on the surface of the micro-cylinder create a resonance that controls the amplitude and frequency of both lift and drag coefficients. In practice, what we study is a mechanism to modulate the amplitude and frequency of mechanical loads of aerodynamics origin in a micro-structure by using surface temperature fluctuations as the control parameter

Constraining the properties of neutron star crusts with the transient low-mass X-ray binary Aql X-1

Aql X-1 is a prolific transient neutron star low-mass X-ray binary that exhibits an accretion outburst approximately once every year. Whether the thermal X-rays detected in intervening quiescent episodes are the result of cooling of the neutron star or due to continued low-level accretion remains unclear. In this work we use Swift data obtained after the long and bright 2011 and 2013 outbursts, as well as the short and faint 2015 outburst, to investigate the hypothesis that cooling of the accretion-heated neutron star crust dominates the quiescent thermal emission in Aql X-1. We demonstrate that the X-ray light curves and measured neutron star surface temperatures are consistent with the expectations of the crust cooling paradigm. By using a thermal evolution code, we find that ~1.2-3.2 MeV/nucleon of shallow heat release describes the observational data well, depending on the assumed mass-accretion rate and temperature of the stellar core. We find no evidence for varying strengths of this shallow heating after different outbursts, but this could be due to limitations of the data. We argue that monitoring Aql X-1 for up to ~1 year after future outbursts can be a powerful tool to break model degeneracies and solve open questions about the magnitude, depth and origin of shallow heating in neutron star crusts.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to MNRA

Instabilities in Zakharov Equations for Laser Propagation in a Plasma

F.Linares, G.Ponce, J-C.Saut have proved that a non-fully dispersive Zakharov system arising in the study of Laser-plasma interaction, is locally well posed in the whole space, for fields vanishing at infinity. Here we show that in the periodic case, seen as a model for fields non-vanishing at infinity, the system develops strong instabilities of Hadamard's type, implying that the Cauchy problem is strongly ill-posed

Prolonged Remission of Cushing\u27s Disease Following Bromocriptine Therapy

A 33-year-old woman developed hypercorticism of fulminant onset following delivery of a full-term, normal child. An ectopic hormone-producing neoplasm was excluded by extensive studies. Pituitary dependent hypercorticism of intermediate lobe origin was suggested on the basis of onset following pregnancy, failure of Cortisol suppression by high-dose dexamethasone, hyperresponsiveness of prolactin to thyrotropin-releasing hormone stimulation, and reduction in adrenocorticotropin titers following oral administration of bromocriptine. Initial remission of disease achieved with bromocriptine was followed by recurrence on discontinuation of the agent. However, complete remission which occurred following a prolonged course of bromocriptine has persisted for a total of 22 months

Microscopic cluster model for the description of (18O,16O) two-neutron transfer reactions

Excitation energy spectra and absolute cross-section angular distributions were measured for the 13C(18O,16O)15C two-neutron transfer reaction at 84 MeV incident energy. Exact finite-range coupled reaction channel calculations are used to analyse the data considering both the direct two-neutron transfer and the two-step sequential mechanism. For the direct calculations, two approaches are discussed: The extreme cluster and the newly introduced microscopic cluster. The latter makes use of spectroscopic amplitudes in the centre-of-mass reference frame, derived from shell-model calculations. The results describe well the experimental cross sections