Leech Parasitism of the Gulf Coast Box Turtle, Terrapene carolina major (Testudines:Emydidae) in Mississippi, USA

Ten leeches were collected from a Gulf Coast box turtle, Terrapene carolina major, found crossing a road in Gulfport, Harrison County, Mississippi, USA. Eight of the leeches were identified as Placobdella multilineata and 2 were identified as Helobdella europaea. This represents the second vouchered report of leeches from a box turtle. Helobdella europaea is reported for the first time associated with a turtle and for the second time from the New World

Cavitation in a bulb turbine

The flow in a horizontal shaft bulb turbine is calculated as a two-phase flow with a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD-)-code including cavitation model. The results are compared with experimental results achieved at a closed loop test rig for model turbines. On the model test rig, for a certain operating point (i.e.volume flow, net head, blade angle, guide vane opening) the pressure behind the turbine is lowered (i.e. the Thomacoefficient s is lowered) and the efficiency of the turbine is recorded. The measured values can be depicted in a so-called s?break curve or h-s?diagram. Usually, the efficiency is independent of the Thoma-coefficient up to a certain value. When lowering the Thoma-coefficient below this value the efficiency will drop rapidly. Visual observations of the different cavitation conditions complete the experiment. In analogy, several calculations are done for different Thoma-coefficients s and the corresponding hydraulic losses of the runner are evaluated quantitatively. Besides, the fraction of water vapour as an indication of the size of the cavitation cavity is analyzed qualitatively. The experimentally and the numerically obtained results are compared and show a good agreement. Especially the drop in efficiency can be calculated with satisfying accuracy. This drop in efficiency is of high practical importance since it is one criterion to determine the admissible cavitation in a bulbturbine. The visual impression of the cavitation in the CFDanalysis is well in accordance with the observed cavitation bubbles recorded on sketches and/or photographs.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/84277/1/CAV2009-final91.pd

The 2016 Perseids

The Perseid meteor shower has been observed since ancient times. One of the most prolific annual showers, the Perseids have also been known to outburst. At least two spacecraft have suffered anomalies potentially caused by meteoroid impacts during Perseid outbursts. Olympus, an ESA telecommunications satellite, was likely impacted by a Perseid meteoroid during the 1993 outburst that ultimately led to the termination of the spacecraft's mission. Landsat-5, an imaging satellite jointly managed by NASA and the USGS, lost gyro stability during the peak of the Perseids in 2009. The Perseid meteor shower is expected to outburst again in 2016. Stream model predictions place the peak activity on the night of August 11-12 (UT) as the Earth passes through several old debris trails from parent comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Observing geometry favors Europe at the onset, but increased activity for about half a day means that North America is also well-placed for observations. A call for observations to characterize the stream and constrain numerical models is made. Modeling results, observing geometry, and spacecraft risk during the 2016 Perseids will be discussed

Preheating after N-flation

We study preheating in N-flation, assuming the Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur mass distribution, equal energy initial conditions at the beginning of inflation and equal axion-matter couplings, where matter is taken to be a single, massless bosonic field. By numerical analysis we find that preheating via parametric resonance is suppressed, indicating that the old theory of perturbative preheating is applicable. While the tensor-to-scalar ratio, the non-Gaussianity parameters and the scalar spectral index computed for N-flation are similar to those in single field inflation (at least within an observationally viable parameter region), our results suggest that the physics of preheating can differ significantly from the single field case.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, references added, fixed typo

Integration and Visualization Public Health Dashboard: The medi plus board Pilot Project

Traditional public health surveillance systems would benefit from integration with knowledge created by new situation-aware realtime signals from social media, online searches, mobile/sensor networks and citizens' participatory surveillance systems. However, the challenge of threat validation, cross-verification and information integration for risk assessment has so far been largely untackled. In this paper, we propose a new system, medi+board, monitoring epidemic intelligence sources and traditional case-based surveillance to better automate early warning, cross-validation of signals for outbreak detection and visualization of results on an interactive dashboard. This enables public health professionals to see all essential information at a glance. Modular and configurable to any 'event' defined by public health experts, medi+board scans multiple data sources, detects changing patterns and uses a configurable analysis module for signal detection to identify a threat. These can be validated by an analysis module and correlated with other sources to assess the reliability of the event classified as the reliability coefficient which is a real number between zero and one. Events are reported and visualized on the medi+board dashboard which integrates all information sources and can be navigated by a timescale widget. Simulation with three datasets from the swine flu 2009 pandemic (HPA surveillance, Google news, Twitter) demonstrates the potential of medi+board to automate data processing and visualization to assist public health experts in decision making on control and response measures

Conservation laws in the continuum 1/r21/r^2 systems

We study the conservation laws of both the classical and the quantum mechanical continuum $1/r^2$ type systems. For the classical case, we introduce new integrals of motion along the recent ideas of Shastry and Sutherland (SS), supplementing the usual integrals of motion constructed much earlier by Moser. We show by explicit construction that one set of integrals can be related algebraically to the other. The difference of these two sets of integrals then gives rise to yet another complete set of integrals of motion. For the quantum case, we first need to resum the integrals proposed by Calogero, Marchioro and Ragnisco. We give a diagrammatic construction scheme for these new integrals, which are the quantum analogues of the classical traces. Again we show that there is a relationship between these new integrals and the quantum integrals of SS by explicit construction.Comment: 19 RevTeX 3.0 pages with 2 PS-figures include

Investigations on unconventional aspects in the quantum Hall regime of narrow gate defined channels

We report on theoretical and experimental investigations of the integer quantized Hall effect in narrow channels at various mobilities. The Hall bars are defined electrostatically in two-dimensional electron systems by biasing metal gates on the surfaces of GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures. In the low mobility regime the classical Hall resistance line is proportional to the magnetic field as measured in the high temperature limit and cuts through the center of each Hall plateau. For high mobility samples we observe in linear response measurements, that this symmetry is broken and the classical Hall line cuts the plateaus not at the center but at higher magnetic fields near the edges of the plateaus. These experimental results confirm the unconventional predictions of a model for the quantum Hall effect taking into account mutual screening of charge carriers within the Hall bar. The theory is based on solving the Poisson and Schr\"odinger equations in a self-consistent manner.Comment: EP2DS-17 Proceedings, 6 Pages, 2 Figure

CASE STUDY: Feed Intake and Performance of Heifers Sired by High- or Low-Residual Feed Intake Angus Bulls

The objective of this project was to investigate the effects of selecting sires for residual feed intake (RFI) on the performance of their daughters. Bulls with low or high estimated breeding values (EBV) for RFI were selected from the Angus Society of Australia sire summary and mated to Angus cross commercial cows at the Kansas State University Cow-Calf Unit in 2005 and 2006. The average EBV of low- and high-RFI bulls were −0.55 and 0.27 kg DM, respectively. Heifers born in 2006 were tested for feed intake in 2 groups (n = 24, n = 26), and heifers born in 2007 (n = 42) were sent to a commercial bull test facility for feed intake and BW gain tests. Body weights were collected every 14 d and used to calculate midtest BW and ADG. Actual feed intake was regressed on midtest metabolic BW and ADG to calculate an expected feed intake for each heifer. Residual feed intake was calculated by subtracting the expected intake from the actual intake. There were no significant differences between heifers sired by lowor high-RFI EBV bulls in RFI, feed intake, G:F, or BW gain (P \u3e 0.05). Heifers in this study were being developed on a less energy-dense diet than the diet used to rank their sires. Genetic differences in RFI calculated in growing bulls may not have been expressed on the lower plane of nutrition of these developing heifers