Effects of Group Living on Pupation in a Lady Beetle

To further understand the lives and development habits of insects, we must know how they influence each other through pupation periods. This will ultimately help us understand how interactive insects are throughout their life. To answer this question, we tested the pupation rates of Hippodamia convergens in groups and alone. This will help us delineate the advantages or disadvantages of the organism in groups versus singular pupation. We hypothesized that the Lady Beetles reared alone will develop faster and have a higher growth rate than those reared in groups. During the experiment, the subjects engaged in cannibalism which could have affected our results. Cannibalism occurs when food in the environment is scarce, and although the Lady Beetles were fed, the amounts that were given may not have been proper for their size nor consistent with each group member. At the end of this experiment we saw that the specimens reared in groups pupated more consistently than those reared alone. We assume that the reason Lady Beetles in groups pupated more consistently is because of the stressors in their environment, while the ones alone did not have any stressors. These conclusions may be important because it will help us determine the factors that influence pupation before and during the process in relation to other species of insects

Locking Up Families Is Inhumane—and Unconstitutional

From the fear of asylum-seekers in Western Europe to the panic around “illegals” in the United States, there is a global backlash against immigrants. These sentiments are increasingly accompanied by a crackdown in enforcement. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement placed 352,882 people in detention facilities during fiscal year 2016, a sharp increase from the 193,951 detained in 2015. U.S. President Donald Trump promises to lock up exponentially more, having made the fight against “illegal immigration” a central plank of his campaign platform. But who are the people incarcerated in these immigration prisons? What are they running from? And do they really need to be locked up for the sake of national security? While the undocumented population of the U.S. is diverse, those held in immigration detention are often people seeking asylum, or safe haven, from violence. Thousands of the detainees being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are mothers and their young children, most of whom are fleeing harsh conditions in Central America

Asociación entre disfuncionalidad familiar y depresión posparto en puérperas del Centro de Atención Primaria III Luis Negreiros Vega en enero 2017

Determina la asociación entre disfuncionalidad familiar y depresión posparto en puérperas que acuden a consultorios de crecimiento y desarrollo. Estudio descriptivo, correlacional y transversal. Como instrumento de recolección de datos utiliza un cuestionario de cuatro preguntas, el test de APGAR familiar y la Escala de Depresión Posparto de Edimburgo. La muestra es no probabilística por conveniencia, conformada por 117 puérperas cuyas edades fluctúan entre 18 a 50 años. Los son tabulados en el programa Microsoft Excel 2010 ® y procesados en el software estadístico SPSS 20.0 ®.Tesi

Contact complete integrability

Complete integrability in a symplectic setting means the existence of a Lagrangian foliation leaf-wise preserved by the dynamics. In the paper we describe complete integrability in a contact set-up as a more subtle structure: a flag of two foliations, Legendrian and co-Legendrian, and a holonomy-invariant transverse measure of the former in the latter. This turns out to be equivalent to the existence of a canonical $\R\ltimes \R^{n-1}$ structure on the leaves of the co-Legendrian foliation. Further, the above structure implies the existence of $n$ contact fields preserving a special contact 1-form, thus providing the geometric framework and establishing equivalence with previously known definitions of contact integrability. We also show that contact completely integrable systems are solvable in quadratures. We present an example of contact complete integrability: the billiard system inside an ellipsoid in pseudo-Euclidean space, restricted to the space of oriented null geodesics. We describe a surprising acceleration mechanism for closed light-like billiard trajectories

Photoionization in the time and frequency domain

Ultrafast processes in matter, such as the electron emission following light absorption, can now be studied using ultrashort light pulses of attosecond duration ($10^{-18}$s) in the extreme ultraviolet spectral range. The lack of spectral resolution due to the use of short light pulses may raise serious issues in the interpretation of the experimental results and the comparison with detailed theoretical calculations. Here, we determine photoionization time delays in neon atoms over a 40 eV energy range with an interferometric technique combining high temporal and spectral resolution. We spectrally disentangle direct ionization from ionization with shake up, where a second electron is left in an excited state, thus obtaining excellent agreement with theoretical calculations and thereby solving a puzzle raised by seven-year-old measurements. Our experimental approach does not have conceptual limits, allowing us to foresee, with the help of upcoming laser technology, ultra-high resolution time-frequency studies from the visible to the x-ray range.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

On the Discrepancy in Simultaneous Observations of the Structure Parameter of Temperature Using Scintillometers and Unmanned Aircraft

We elaborate on the preliminary results presented in Beyrich et al. (in Boundary-Layer Meteorol 144:83–112, 2012), who compared the structure parameter of temperature (C2T) obtained with the unmanned meteorological mini aerial vehicle ( M 2 AV ) versus C2T obtained with two large-aperture scintillometers (LASs) for a limited dataset from one single experiment (LITFASS-2009). They found that C2T obtained from the M 2 AV data is significantly larger than that obtained from the LAS data. We investigate if similar differences can be found for the flights on the other six days during LITFASS-2009 and LITFASS-2010, and whether these differences can be reduced or explained through a more elaborate processing of both the LAS data and the M 2 AV data. This processing includes different corrections and measures to reduce the differences between the spatial and temporal averaging of the datasets. We conclude that the differences reported in Beyrich et al. can be found for other days as well. For the LAS-derived values the additional processing steps that have the largest effect are the saturation correction and the humidity correction. For the M 2 AV -derived values the most important step is the application of the scintillometer path-weighting function. Using the true air speed of the M 2 AV to convert from a temporal to a spatial structure function rather than the ground speed (as in Beyrich et al.) does not change the mean discrepancy, but it does affect C2T values for individual flights. To investigate whether C2T derived from the M 2 AV data depends on the fact that the underlying temperature dataset combines spatial and temporal sampling, we used large-eddy simulation data to analyze C2T from virtual flights with different mean ground speeds. This analysis shows that C2T does only slightly depends on the true air speed when averaged over many flights.DFG/BA1988/9-1DFG/BE2044/3-1DFG/RA617/20-1Dutch Science Foundation/DN76-274DFG/BE2044/3-3DFG/RA617/20-

Characterization of broadband few-cycle laser pulses with the d-scan technique

We present an analysis and demonstration of few-cycle ultrashort laser pulse characterization using second-harmonic dispersion scans and numerical phase retrieval algorithms. The sensitivity and robustness of this technique with respect to noise, measurement bandwidth and complexity of the measured pulses is discussed through numerical examples and experimental results. Using this technique, we successfully demonstrate the characterization of few-cycle pulses with complex and structured spectra generated from a broadband ultrafast laser oscillator and a high-energy hollow fiber compressor. (C)2012 Optical Society of Americ

Time-resolved kinetic assessment of the role of singlet and triplet excited states in the photocatalytic treatment of pollutants at different concentrations

[EN] A kinetic-based rationale to assess the role of each excited species in thermodynamically favoured photocatalytic processes at different pollutant concentrations, has been developed and illustrated with new experimental data. Specifically, 2,4,6-triphenylthiapyrylium (TPTP+) salt has been chosen as a representative organic compound capable to act as photocatalyst, and the possible involvement of its excited states in the photodegradation of pollutants commonly found in aqueous ecosystems has been investigated using five chemicals, namely acetaminophen, acetamiprid, caffeine, clofibric acid and carbamazepine. First, steady-state photolysis has been carried out under simulated solar irradiation in the presence of TPTP+, and second, photophysical measurements (fluorescence and laser flash photolysis) have been performed in order to obtain reliable fast kinetic data. Thermodynamic considerations allow ruling out energy transfer processes, while the kinetic results are in good agreement with an electron transfer to the triplet excited state of TPTP+. Hence, the higher the intersystem crossing quantum yield the better. Although quenching of the singlet excited state is also observed, the contribution of this reactive species is only minor, due to its shorter lifetime. In general, the efficiency of a photocatalyst should be enhanced at higher pollutant concentrations, at which the intrinsic decay of the triplet excited state is minimized. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Financial support from Spanish Government (Grants SEV-2012-0267, CTQ2012-38754-C03-03 and CTQ2015-69832-C4-4-R) and Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo Program) is gratefully acknowledged. R. Martinez-Haya thanks financial support from Spanish Government (Grant SEV-2012-0267). We also thank support from VLC/Campus.Martínez-Haya, R.; Gomis, J.; Arques Sanz, A.; Marín García, ML.; Amat Payá, AM.; Miranda Alonso, MÁ. (2017). Time-resolved kinetic assessment of the role of singlet and triplet excited states in the photocatalytic treatment of pollutants at different concentrations. Applied Catalysis B Environmental. 203:381-388. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apcatb.2016.10.042S38138820