The design of four hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft

Four different hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft were designed by separate student teams. These aircraft were designed to provide the U.S. with a system to acquire aerial tactical reconnaissance when satellite reconnaissance proved unobtainable or ineffective. The design requirements given for this project stated that these aircraft must carry a 7500 lb, 250 cu ft payload of electronic and photographic intelligence gathering equipment over a target area at speeds between Mach 4-7 and at altitudes above 80,000 ft. Two of the aircraft were required to be manned by a crew of two and have a range of 12,000 nmi. One of these was to use airborne refueling to complete its mission while the other was not to use any refueling. The other two aircraft were required to be unmanned with a range of 6,000 nmi. One of these was to take off from another aircraft. The final details of all four aircraft designs along with an overview of the design process is provided

On the Question of Sporadic or Atypical Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

TOC Summary: Atypical BSE is probably not sporadic and not related to sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Testing the inverted neutrino mass ordering with neutrinoless double-β decay

We quantify the extent to which future experiments will test the existence of neutrinoless double-beta decay mediated by light neutrinos with inverted-ordered masses. While it remains difficult to compare measurements performed with different isotopes, we find that future searches will fully test the inverted ordering scenario, as a global, multi-isotope endeavor. They will also test other possible mechanisms driving the decay, including a large uncharted region of the allowed parameter space assuming that neutrino masses follow the normal ordering

Westerville Jaycee Pool

Due to low attendance and poor community support, the owner of the Westerville Jaycee (WJC) Swimming Pool considered permanently closing this facility two years ago. The goal of this project was to increase awareness for WJC and draw attention to the property itself. By setting objectives to improve the landscaping conditions, and creating a social media presence for WJC, we hoped to achieve these goals. To meet these objectives, the team created a WJC Twitter account, and asked that friends and family like and share their preexisting Facebook page. Our team also contacted several companies to inquire about landscaping donations. We were successful in setting a date to mulch and plant flowers with The Grounds Guys of Westerville at WJC. An evaluation of our success was determined by an increase in Twitter followers, and also by management’s satisfaction with our work at the property. In regards to our evaluation standards, our results were successful. The legacy we hope to leave behind is a property that WJC can be proud of, as they are an important asset to the Westerville Community. We hope that our creation of a social media presence will help them reach out to new age groups. By the end of our project, WJC was able to strengthen its ties within the community, by forming a relationship The Grounds Guys of Westerville. Our recommendations for the continuation of this project would be to obtain a boulder that WJC can use as a landscaping piece for the front lawn

Toward the discovery of matter creation with neutrinoless ββ decay

The discovery of neutrinoless ⁢ decay could soon be within reach. This hypothetical ultrarare nuclear decay offers a privileged portal to physics beyond the standard model of particle physics. Its observation would constitute the discovery of a matter-creating process, corroborating leading theories of why the Universe contains more matter than antimatter, and how forces unify at high energy scales. It would also prove that neutrinos and antineutrinos are not two distinct particles but can transform into each other, with their mass described by a unique mechanism conceived by Majorana. The recognition that neutrinos are not massless necessitates an explanation and has boosted interest in neutrinoless ⁢ decay. The field stands now at a turning point. A new round of experiments is currently being prepared for the next decade to cover an important region of parameter space. In parallel, advances in nuclear theory are laying the groundwork to connect the nuclear decay with the underlying new physics. Meanwhile, the particle theory landscape continues to find new motivations for neutrinos to be their own antiparticle. This review brings together the experimental, nuclear theory, and particle theory aspects connected to neutrinoless ⁢ decay to explore the path toward, and beyond, its discovery

Rivers and Roads : Exploring How Environmental Governance Impacts State Management of Forest Roads

This study explores how environmental governance mechanisms affect state management of forest roads to address the chronic delivery of sediment to streams in Oregon, Washington, and California on private and state forestlands. Forest roads can degrade water quality and harm aquatic life when runoff mobilizes fine sediments from the road surface into streams. This study uses content analysis and semi-structured interviews with experts in each state to describe and evaluate the environmental governance mechanisms that shape state approaches to forest road management. General trends, such as the strong role of the Endangered Species Act and weaker role of the Clean Water Act, were found across all three states in varying degrees. In Washington, the role of tribal reserved rights emerged as a unique driver of policy compared to Oregon and California. This research reveals that federal laws around non-point source pollution and endangered species conservation play out differently in different contexts and can be used to inform decision-making as the EPA assesses potential changes to management of forest roads at the federal level under the Clean Water Act

A stochastic spectral analysis of transcriptional regulatory cascades

The past decade has seen great advances in our understanding of the role of noise in gene regulation and the physical limits to signaling in biological networks. Here we introduce the spectral method for computation of the joint probability distribution over all species in a biological network. The spectral method exploits the natural eigenfunctions of the master equation of birth-death processes to solve for the joint distribution of modules within the network, which then inform each other and facilitate calculation of the entire joint distribution. We illustrate the method on a ubiquitous case in nature: linear regulatory cascades. The efficiency of the method makes possible numerical optimization of the input and regulatory parameters, revealing design properties of, e.g., the most informative cascades. We find, for threshold regulation, that a cascade of strong regulations converts a unimodal input to a bimodal output, that multimodal inputs are no more informative than bimodal inputs, and that a chain of up-regulations outperforms a chain of down-regulations. We anticipate that this numerical approach may be useful for modeling noise in a variety of small network topologies in biology

A Generic Surface Sampler for Monte Carlo Simulations

We present an implementation of a Monte Carlo algorithm that generates points randomly and uniformly on a set of arbitrary surfaces. The algorithm is completely general and only requires the geometry modeling software to provide the intersection points of an arbitrary line with the surface being sampled. We demonstrate the algorithm using the Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation toolkit. The efficiency of the sampling algorithm is discussed, along with various options in the implementation and example applications

The MGDO software library for data analysis in Ge neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments

The GERDA and Majorana experiments will search for neutrinoless double-beta decay of germanium-76 using isotopically enriched high-purity germanium detectors. Although the experiments differ in conceptual design, they share many aspects in common, and in particular will employ similar data analysis techniques. The collaborations are jointly developing a C++ software library, MGDO, which contains a set of data objects and interfaces to encapsulate, store and manage physical quantities of interest, such as waveforms and high-purity germanium detector geometries. These data objects define a common format for persistent data, whether it is generated by Monte Carlo simulations or an experimental apparatus, to reduce code duplication and to ease the exchange of information between detector systems. MGDO also includes general-purpose analysis tools that can be used for the processing of measured or simulated digital signals. The MGDO design is based on the Object-Oriented programming paradigm and is very flexible, allowing for easy extension and customization of the components. The tools provided by the MGDO libraries are used by both GERDA and Majorana.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, proceedings for TAUP201

Renormalization group parameter evolution of the minimal supersymmetric standard model with R-parity violation

A comparison of spectra obtained using the 1-loop MSSM and 2-loop R-parity violating MSSM renormalization group equations is presented. Influence of higher loop corrections and R-parity violating terms is discussed. Some numerical constraints on the R-parity violating parameters are also given.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, using RevTE