Astrophysics from data analysis of spherical gravitational wave detectors

The direct detection of gravitational waves will provide valuable astrophysical information about many celestial objects. Also, it will be an important test to general relativity and other theories of gravitation. The gravitational wave detector SCHENBERG has recently undergone its first test run. It is expected to have its first scientific run soon. In this work the data analysis system of this spherical, resonant mass detector is tested through the simulation of the detection of gravitational waves generated during the inspiralling phase of a binary system. It is shown from the simulated data that it is not necessary to have all six transducers operational in order to determine the source's direction and the wave's amplitudes.Comment: 8 pages and 3 figure

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time, and attempts to address it require a clear understanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space. While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes, vast areas of the tropics remain understudied. In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world's most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity, but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepresented in biodiversity databases. To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications may eliminate pieces of the Amazon's biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological communities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge, it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple organism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region's vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most neglected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lost

HOW TO REPRESENT THE GENETIC CODE?

The advent of molecular genetic comprises a true revolution of far-reaching consequences for human-kind, which evolved into a specialized branch of the modern-day Biochemistry. The analysis of specicgenomic information are gaining wide-ranging interest because of their signicance to the early diag-nosis of disease, and the discovery of modern drugs. In order to take advantage of a wide assortmentof signal processing (SP) algorithms, the primary step of modern genomic SP involves convertingsymbolic-DNA sequences into complex-valued signals. How to represent the genetic code? Despitebeing extensively known, the DNA mapping into proteins is one of the relevant discoveries of genetics.The genetic code (GC) is revisited in this work, addressing other descriptions for it, which can beworthy for genomic SP. Three original representations are discussed. The inner-to-outer map buildson the unbalanced role of nucleotides of a codon. A two-dimensional-Gray genetic representationis oered as a structured map that can help interpreting DNA spectrograms or scalograms. Theseare among the powerful visual tools for genome analysis, which depends on the choice of the geneticmapping. Finally, the world-chart for the GC is investigated. Evoking the cyclic structure of thegenetic mapping, it can be folded joining the left-right borders, and the top-bottom frontiers. As aresult, the GC can be drawn on the surface of a sphere resembling a world-map. Eight parallels oflatitude are required (four in each hemisphere) as well as four meridians of longitude associated tofour corresponding anti-meridians. The tropic circles have 11.25o, 33.75o, 56.25o, and 78.5o (Northand South). Starting from an arbitrary Greenwich meridian, the meridians of longitude can be plottedat 22.5o, 67.5o, 112.5o, and 157.5o (East and West). Each triplet is assigned to a single point on thesurface that we named Nirenberg-Kohamas Earth. Despite being valuable, usual representations forthe GC can be replaced by the handy descriptions oered in this work. These alternative maps arealso particularly useful for educational purposes, giving a much rich interpretation and visualizationthan a simple look-up table