Have you ever listened coastal inhabitants? Know what they think…

Coastal dynamics changes, caused by natural or man-made factors, can to give rise serious consequences, namely at urban areas, exposing coastal population at risk. In this context, the understanding of the way people perceive the coastal dynamics and their exposure to risk is essential for the land use management and Integrated Coastal Zone Management. To get the perception of coastal population, this research was based in a risk map proposed by Water Institute (1999) that classifies the Portuguese territory in three categories of risk: low, mean and high. A questionnaire was applied to the dwellings owners in coastal risk areas of Praia de Esmoriz, Praia de Cortegaça, Furadouro, Torreira, Praia da Barra, Costa Nova do Prado and Praia da Vagueira, during the summer season, in 2006. The questionnaire has as main objectives: coastal risks social perception; coastal dynamics social perception; identification of territorial and environmental changes in the coastal areas; identification of socio-environmental conflicts. A total of 418 questionnaires were completed which corresponds to 10% of the dwellings at risk in the study area. Almost all of respondents recognize the shoreline retreat and would accept having their houses relocated if it were confirmed that there home was in fact in danger, however the inquired population confirms to feeling safe near the sea. In other words, there is negligence of the coastal risks. It is necessary to inform the population of the problems that the coastal areas are suffering of and to get everyone involved in coastal issues

Discriminating among the theoretical origins of new heavy Majorana neutrinos at the CERN LHC

A study on the possibility of distinguishing new heavy Majorana neutrino models at LHC energies is presented. The experimental confirmation of standard neutrinos with non-zero mass and the theoretical possibility of lepton number violation find a natural explanation when new heavy Majorana neutrinos exist. These new neutrinos appear in models with new right-handed singlets, in new doublets of some grand unified theories and left-right symmetrical models. It is expected that signals of new particles can be found at the CERN high-energy hadron collider (LHC). We present signatures and distributions that can indicate the theoretical origin of these new particles. The single and pair production of heavy Majorana neutrinos are calculated and the model dependence is discussed. Same-sign dileptons in the final state provide a clear signal for the Majorana nature of heavy neutrinos, since there is lepton number violation. Mass bounds on heavy Majorana neutrinos allowing model discrimination are estimated for three different LHC luminosities.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Constraining the redshift evolution of the Cosmic Microwave Background black-body temperature with PLANCK data

We constrain the deviation of adiabatic evolution of the Universe using the data on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies measured by the {\it Planck} satellite and a sample of 481 X-ray selected clusters with spectroscopically measured redshifts. To avoid antenna beam effects, we bring all the maps to the same resolution. We use a CMB template to subtract the cosmological signal while preserving the Thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (TSZ) anisotropies; next, we remove galactic foreground emissions around each cluster and we mask out all known point sources. If the CMB black-body temperature scales with redshift as $T(z)=T_0(1+z)^{1-\alpha}$, we constrain deviations of adiabatic evolution to be $\alpha=-0.007\pm 0.013$, consistent with the temperature-redshift relation of the standard cosmological model. This result could suffer from a potential bias $\delta\alpha$ associated with the CMB template, that we quantify it to be $|\delta\alpha|\le 0.02$ and with the same sign than the measured value of $\alpha$, but is free from those biases associated with using TSZ selected clusters; it represents the best constraint to date of the temperature-redshift relation of the Big-Bang model using only CMB data, confirming previous results.Comment: ApJ, in press. Manuscript matches the accepted version: 10 pages, 7 figures, 3 table

Dark matter from cosmic defects on galactic scales?

We discuss the possible dynamical role of extended cosmic defects on galactic scales, specifically focusing on the possibility that they may provide the dark matter suggested by the classical problem of galactic rotation curves. We emphasize that the more standard defects (such as Goto-Nambu strings) are unsuitable for this task, but show that more general models (such as transonic wiggly strings) could in principle have a better chance. In any case, we show that observational data severely restricts any such scenarios.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. D (Brief Reports). v2: Reference added and some typos corrected, matches published versio