Sources of the ultraheavy cosmic rays

The suggestions that the source abundances of cosmic ray nuclei heavier then Fe differ significantly from Solar System abundances are not well supported by the data without assuming preferential acceleration. The Solar System abundances of Pb and Bi are split into r-, standard s-, and cyclic 8-process components; the apprarent deficiency of Pb seen in the HEAO-3 Heavy Nuclei Experiment data might indicate an absence of Pb from the recycling 8-process

Curve fits of predicted inviscid stagnation-point radiative heating rates, cooling factors, and shock standoff distances for hyperbolic earth entry

Curve-fit formulas are presented for the stagnation-point radiative heating rate, cooling factor, and shock standoff distance for inviscid flow over blunt bodies at conditions corresponding to high-speed earth entry. The data which were curve fitted were calculated by using a technique which utilizes a one-strip integral method and a detailed nongray radiation model to generate a radiatively coupled flow-field solution for air in chemical and local thermodynamic equilibrium. The range of free-stream parameters considered were altitudes from about 55 to 70 km and velocities from about 11 to 16 km.sec. Spherical bodies with nose radii from 30 to 450 cm and elliptical bodies with major-to-minor axis ratios of 2, 4, and 6 were treated. Powerlaw formulas are proposed and a least-squares logarithmic fit is used to evaluate the constants. It is shown that the data can be described in this manner with an average deviation of about 3 percent (or less) and a maximum deviation of about 10 percent (or less). The curve-fit formulas provide an effective and economic means for making preliminary design studies for situations involving high-speed earth entry

Analysis of hydrodynamic (landau) instability in liquid-propellant combustion at normal and reduced gravity

The burning of liquid propellants is a fundamental combustion problem that is applicable to various types of propulsion and energetic systems. The deflagration process is often rather complex, with vaporization and pyrolysis occurring at the liquid/gas interface and distributed combustion occurring either in the gas phase or in a spray. Nonetheless, there are realistic limiting cases in which combustion may be approximated by an overall reaction at the liquid/gas interface. In one such limit, distributed combustion occurs in an intrusive regime, the reaction zone lying closer to the liquid/gas interface than the length scale of any disturbance of interest. Such limiting models have recently been formulated thereby significantly generalizing earlier classical models that were originally introduced to study the hydrodynamic stability of a reactive liquid/gas interface. In all of these investigations, gravity appears explicitly and plays a significant role, along with surface tension, viscosity, and, in the more recent models, certain reaction-rate parameters associated with the pressure and temperature sensitivities of the reaction itself. In particular, these parameters determine the stability of the deflagration with respect to not only classical hydrodynamic disturbances, but also with respect to reactive/diffusive influences as well. These instabilities thus lead to a number of interesting phenomena, such as the sloshing type of waves that have been observed in mixtures of HAN and triethanolammonium nitrate (TEAN) with water. Although the Froude number was treated as an O(l) quantity in these studies, the limit of small inverse Froude number corresponding to the microgravity regime is increasingly of interest. In the present work, the author formally exploits this limiting parameter regime to compare some of the features of hydrodynamic instability of liquid-propellant combustion at reduced gravity with the same phenomenon at normal gravity

Meson decay in an independent quark model

Leptonic decay widths and leptonic decay constants of light vector mesons and weak leptonic decay widths and weak decay constants of light and heavy pseudoscalar mesons have been studied in a field- theoretic framework based on the independent quark model with a scalar- vector power-law potential. The results are in very good agreement with the experimental data.Comment: 13 page

Reliability in the Identification of Midbrain Dopamine Neurons

Brain regions typically contain intermixed subpopulations of neurons with different connectivity and neurotransmitters. This complicates identification of neuronal phenotypes in electrophysiological experiments without using direct detection of unique molecular markers. A prime example of this difficulty is the identification of dopamine (DA) neurons in the midbrain ventral tegmental area (VTA). Although immunocytochemistry (ICC) against tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) is widely used to identify DA neurons, a high false negative rate for TH ICC following ex vivo electrophysiology experiments was recently reported, calling into question the validity of comparing DA and non-DA VTA neurons based on post-hoc ICC. However, in whole cell recordings from randomly selected rat VTA neurons we have found that TH labeling is consistently detected in ∼55% of neurons even after long recording durations (range: 2.5–150 min). This is consistent with our prior anatomical finding that 55% of VTA neurons are TH(+). To directly estimate a false negative rate for our ICC method we recorded VTA neurons from mice in which EGFP production is driven by the TH promoter. All 12 EGFP(+) neurons recorded with a K-gluconate internal solution (as used in our rat recordings) were strongly labeled by TH ICC (recording duration 16.6±1.8 min). However, using recording electrodes with an internal solution with high Cl− concentration reduced the intensity of TH co-labeling, in some cases to background (recording duration 16.7±0.9 min; n = 10). Thus TH is a highly reliable molecular marker for DA neurons in VTA patch clamp recordings provided compatible microelectrode solutions are used

Spatio-temporal patterns in a mechanical model for mesenchymal morphogenesis

We present an in-depth study of spatio-temporal patterns in a simplified version of a mechanical model for pattern formation in mesenchymal morphogenesis. We briefly motivate the derivation of the model and show how to choose realistic boundary conditions to make the system well-posed. We firstly consider one-dimensional patterns and carry out a nonlinear perturbation analysis for the case where the uniform steady state is linearly unstable to a single mode. In two-dimensions, we show that if the displacement field in the model is represented as a sum of orthogonal parts, then the model can be decomposed into two sub-models, only one of which is capable of generating pattern. We thus focus on this particular sub-model. We present a nonlinear analysis of spatio-temporal patterns exhibited by the sub-model on a square domain and discuss mode interaction. Our analysis shows that when a two-dimensional mode number admits two or more degenerate mode pairs, the solution of the full nonlinear system of partial differential equations is a mixed mode solution in which all the degenerate mode pairs are represented in a frequency locked oscillation