Study of meteoroid detection systems applicable to the outer planets missions

Modifications to the Pioneer 10/11 meteoroid detection experiment to allow it to be used for outer planet missions were investigated. Both pressurized cells and metal-oxide silicon (MOS) penetration detectors are considered. Both the sensors systems and the electronics are treated. Investigation of the calibration and characterization of the MOS penetration detector is reported

The Maternal Effect: Carrying the Consequences of Nutrition Across Generations

Let’s indulge ourselves in a deer-management fantasy for a moment. I’m sure it won’t be your first time! Imagine you are blessed to own and manage your own block of deer country for several years (for many fortunate readers, this is reality, not fantasy). Although the ground you purchase holds plenty of deer, the overgrown forests and grassy meadows might not be providing the nutrition necessary for these deer to achieve their genetic potential. In addition, the 6-foot high browse line resulting from extreme overabundance of deer is a likely indication of why only scrawny looking bucks are typically harvested in the area. However, you know what it takes to have healthy deer herd and grow bigger bucks, and you can see the potential your property holds. Like any responsible steward of the land, you do your homework and go the extra mile to increase the diversity of the habitat and offer more forage and browse. You establish proper food plots with forage high in digestibility and protein. You harvest numerous does each year to reduce deer numbers to a sustainable level, and conservatively harvest bucks to balance the sex ratio and develop an age structure that includes bucks of many ages. During this time, you also foster a small data-collection program framed around the close monitoring of the harvest each year, and in particular the size and age of the bucks being harvested. After a few years of intensive management, hard work, and patience, the property appears to be in better shape; a browse line is no longer evident, deer numbers are in check, bucks and does that are harvested exhibit greater fat levels, and the buck harvest is comprised mainly of mature bucks over 4½ years of age

One in the Hand Worth Two in the Bush? Reproductive Effort of Young Males Is Not Affected by the Presence of Adult Males

Reproduction is a costly endeavor, and most large, long-lived, and iteroparous mammals exhibit conservative life-history tactics wherein an individual may forego or abandon a reproduction event for the sake of survival. Nevertheless, risks and benefits associated with reproduction are not equal across males and females, nor across their life. Whereas expenditure for females is associated with rearing young (e.g., lactation), expenditure for males occurs with securing mating opportunities. Young males may be more successful when dominant males are lacking, but it is less clear whether—and at what cost—young males will expend effort when those opportunities arise. We designed an experiment to quantify reproductive effort (e.g., food intake, somatic loss [body mass and fat]) of male white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) to better understand the reproductive ecology of male ungulates, with an emphasis on determining how adult males (≥4.5 years old) affect timing and extent of reproductive effort expended by yearling males (1. 5 years old). Food intake, hormone levels, body mass, and somatic loss during rut were similar between yearling males that interacted with adult males and those that did not. Somatic loss by all males was greatest during peak estrus of females, but forage intake relative to metabolic body mass for yearling males was nearly twice that of adult males. Testosterone levels were lower for yearling than adult males early in rut and were related negatively to forage intake. Whereas adult males lost 20% (23.5 kg) of body mass and 31% (5.3 percentage points [ppt]) of body fat during the rut, yearling males lost 12% (9.3 kg) of body mass and 22% (4.7 ppt) of body fat. Reproductive effort by young males was not influenced by the presence of adult males, though young males expended less reproductive effort than adults. Instead, reproductive allocation occurred in a state-dependent manner, where pre-season levels of somatic reserves dictated reproductive effort, regardless of age. Like female ungulates, male deer displayed risk sensitive reproductive allocation wherein current reproductive allocation occurred as a function of resources garnered during the prior season and were expended in a way that should have avoided over-investing and creating a tradeoff between reproduction and survival

Study of the use of Metal-Oxide-Silicon (MOS) devices for particulate detection and monitoring in the earth's atmosphere

A metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) capacitor-type particulate sensor was evaluated for use in atmospheric measurements. An accelerator system was designed and tested for the purpose of providing the necessary energy to trigger the MOS-type sensor. The accelerator system and the MOS sensor were characterized as a function of particle size and velocity. Diamond particles were used as particulate sources in laboratory tests. Preliminary tests were performed in which the detector was mounted on an aircraft and flown in the vicinity of coal-fired electric generating plants

Panel. Faulkner and the Civil Rights Movement: A Reassessment

Long Faulkner: Charting Legacy on a Civil Rights Continuum / Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State UniversityThe concept of a “civil rights continuum” functions as a critical framework for reflecting on Faulkner’s legacy in a time frame extending from post-World War II labor activism through the post-Civil Rights era. Responsive to the call for a “long Civil Rights Movement” to trouble conventional periodization, this continuum affords a revealing long view of Faulkner’s civil rights legacy, as illustrated by two key coordinates charted in the discussion: the spatial rendering of proliferating boundaries in Intruder in the Dust in relation to the enduring trope of Mississippi as “the closed society” and the temporal rendering of the past as “not even past” in Requiem for a Nun as strategically deployed in the discourse of post-racialism. Faulkner and the Inheritors of Slavery / David A. Davis, Mercer UniversityWilliam Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black” (1940) and Richard Wright’s documentary narrative Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) depict the misunderstanding between black and white southerners in the generation before the civil rights movement. Faulkner focuses on the white community’s confusion about Rider’s grief over his wife’s death, which has disastrous results. Wright attempts to explain the history and experience of blacks to whites, adopting a didactic, first-person plural narrative voice. Wright’s narrative approach helps to explain the abrupt shift from third-person narration to the white deputy sheriff’s voice in Faulkner’s story, which signals the mysterious separation between the races in the South. Who was William Faulkner to them?: Civil Rights Workers, Mississippi Moderates and Faulkner / Sharon Monteith, University of NottinghamIn an essay titled “Faulkner and the Racial Crisis” Louis Daniel Brodsky asserts that both groups in my title were Faulkner’s detractors as a result of his “gradualist” position on civil rights. This paper explores that claim by examining civil rights organizers and Mississippi’s Freedom Summer volunteers, black and white, who were inspired by his work, and crusading racial liberals with whom Faulkner aligned himself to write satirically about segregation. Literary scholar Louis Rubin once imagined the ghost of Faulkner on the University of Mississippi campus in 1962. He mused “I think perhaps he would have put on his coat and tie and hat and gone over to the campus and stood quietly alongside of James Meredith. Would it have made any difference? I doubt it. Most of the citizens who milled about the campus would not have known who he was, or if they had, they would not have cared. Who was William Faulkner to them?” This paper teases out some possible answers to that question

Corn Hybrids: Deer Taste the Difference

As daylight begins to illuminate the countryside, a cold wind rustles through the leaves of the weedy rows of corn that you barely had time to get in the ground this past spring. The corn plants are stunted, the few small ears of corn that did grow are not even enticing to passing blackbirds, and that stud buck captured on your trail-camera months earlier is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, a couple hundred yards across the fence to the south, you hear the unmistakable sound of deer running through corn. Your heart rate involuntarily increases. As the sun continues to rise on that mid-October morning, the better view of the neighboring cornfield only becomes increasingly disheartening: Numerous whitetails are feeding back and forth across some of the rows already stripped by the combine a couple days prior. The corn plants there are twice as tall as those in your food plot that was intended for the deer, and the ears are comparatively huge with kernels exposed from the peeled-back husks. Just as the sun rises, a doe and her fawn exit the timber to the north and wander down a heavily used trail across your property. The trail leads directly into your corn plot, but the deer do not stop to feed. They continue southward across the road to join the other deer. Then, sure enough, that stud of a buck that you had dreamed about all summer appears in the neighboring cornfield, moves about to assess the receptiveness of each doe, then wanders deeper into the cornfield until he is out of sight

Particulate and aerosol detector

A device is described for counting aerosols and sorting them according to either size, mass or energy. The component parts are an accelerator, a capacitor sensor and a readout. The accelerator is a means for accelerating the aerosols toward the face of the capacitor sensor with such force that they partially penetrate the capacitor sensor, momentarily discharging it. The readout device is a means for counting the number of discharges of the capacitor sensor and measuring the amplitudes of these different discharges. The aerosols are accelerated by the accelerator in the direction of the metal layer with such force that they penetrate the metal and damage the oxide layers, thereby allowing the electrical charge on the capacitor to discharge through the damaged region. Each incident aerosol initiates a discharge path through the capacitor in such a fashion as to vaporize the conducting path. Once the discharge action is complete, the low resistance path no longer exists between the two capacitor plates and the capacitor is again able to accept a charge. The active area of the capacitor is reduced in size by the damaged area each time a discharge occurs

Multi-point monitoring of nitrous oxide emissions and aeration efficiency in a full-scale conventional activated sludge tank

In this work the biological tank of a WRRF in Italy was monitored placing five floating hoods on a plug-flow-like biological aerated tank surface in order to capture emission dynamics in both time and space domains. The five hoods report which location is more responsible for N2O production at a certain moment of the day. Moreover, with this experimental investigation, a spatial shift in N2O production towards the end of the biological tank could be detected. This provides important insights in the changes in biological dynamics especially with varying incoming load

Land-use experiments in the Loch Laidon Catchment. Eighth report on Stream Water Quality to the Rannoch Trust

This report presents the results from the Stream Water Quality component of the Loch Laidon catchment land-use experiment which began in 1992. The experiment was set up to examine the effects of cattle grazing on the aquatic and terrestrial habitats and biota of a moorland area of upland Scotland