Olivine on Vesta as exogenous contaminants brought by impacts: Constraints from modeling Vesta's collisional history and from impact simulations

The survival of asteroid Vesta during the violent early history of the Solar System is a pivotal constraint on theories of planetary formation. Particularly important from this perspective is the amount of olivine excavated from the vestan mantle by impacts, as this constrains both the interior structure of Vesta and the number of major impacts the asteroid suffered during its life. The NASA Dawn mission revealed that olivine is present on Vesta's surface in limited quantities, concentrated in small patches at a handful of sites and interpreted as the result of the excavation of endogenous olivine. Later works raised the possibility that the olivine had an exogenous origin, based on the geologic and spectral features of the deposits. In this work we quantitatively explore the proposed scenario of a exogenous origin for the detected olivine to investigate whether its presence on Vesta can be explained as a natural outcome of the collisional history of the asteroid. We took advantage of the impact contamination model previously developed to study the origin and amount of dark and hydrated materials observed by Dawn on Vesta, which we updated by performing dedicated hydrocode impact simulations. We show that the exogenous delivery of olivine by impacts can offer a viable explanation for the currently identified olivine-rich sites without violating the constraint posed by the lack of global olivine signatures on Vesta. Our results indicate that no mantle excavation is in principle required to explain the observations of the Dawn mission and support the idea that the vestan crust could be thicker than indicated by simple geochemical models based on the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite family of meteorites.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication on the journal Icaru

Baccharis nebularis (Asteraceae, Astereae): a new species of B. subgen. Tarchonanthoides sect. Curitybenses from the mountains of Southern Brazil.

Baccharis nebularis, a new species belonging to B. subgen. Tarchonanthoides sect. Curitybenses, is described, illustrated, and compared to B. chionolaenoides and B. curitybensis. A key for its identification is provided. The new species occurs in patches of cloud forest thickets mixed with high altitude tropical grasslands in the southern Brazilian mountains. Data on distribution and habitat, phenology, conservation status, as well as a list of specimens examined are also presented

Expectations Versus Realities Of Higher Education: Gap Analysis And University Service Examination

The university education providers are waking to student recruitment challenges, competition, and the realities of marketing. With these changes, a related and equally important issue has emerged; that is, the student service quality and evaluating of the educational encounter. Using university services as the primary study setting, the study explores the concept of university services quality and its evaluation from both the university provider and student perspectives. Gap analysis is used as an appropriate approach for examining the similarities and differences in expectations of the university services. The findings, based on a survey of 712 responses, provide special empirical insights on the gaps that can arise from inconsistent perceptions of expectations and experiences between the students and the university. Finally, implications for university administration, marketing and research are presented

Cultural Value And Travel Motivation Of European Tourists

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among demographic characteristic, cultural values, and travel motivations in regards to understanding the context of tourist’s motivation and how cultural values impact the travel motivation. The study was limited to the tourists who came to the attractive city of Chiang Mai during the research time period. The results indicated that demographic characteristic is a source of cultural values and cultural values impact the travel motivations of the tourists. Also, no significant relationship was found between demographic characteristic and travel motivations. Data analysis and implications are discussed and recommendations are provided

Methane-Rare Gas Interaction Potentials from Scattering Experiments

By using total differential cross sections with resolved diffraction oscillations and absolute integral cross sections with glory oscillations, a new improved spherically averaged potential surface for Ne-CH4 is determined with a potential well depth of ε = 5.50 meV and a minimum distance of Rm = 3.78 Å. A slightly improved parameter set is also given for the isotropic Ar-CH4 interaction. By assuming the same realistic reduced potential form as was found for Ne-CH4 and Ar-CH4, the isotropic parts of the potential for Kr-CH4 and Xe-CH4 are obtained from absolute integral cross sections

Estimating weekly excess mortality at sub-national level in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this study we present the first comprehensive analysis of the spatio-temporal differences in excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. We used a population-based design on all-cause mortality data, for the 7,904 Italian municipalities. We estimated sex-specific weekly mortality rates for each municipality, based on the first four months of 2016-2019, while adjusting for age, localised temporal trends and the effect of temperature. Then, we predicted all-cause weekly deaths and mortality rates at municipality level for the same period in 2020, based on the modelled spatio-temporal trends. Lombardia showed higher mortality rates than expected from the end of February, with 23,946 (23,013 to 24,786) total excess deaths. North-West and North-East regions showed one week lag, with higher mortality from the beginning of March and 6,942 (6,142 to 7,667) and 8,033 (7,061 to 9,044) total excess deaths respectively. We observed marked geographical differences also at municipality level. For males, the city of Bergamo (Lombardia) showed the largest percent excess, 88.9% (81.9% to 95.2%), at the peak of the pandemic. An excess of 84.2% (73.8% to 93.4%) was also estimated at the same time for males in the city of Pesaro (Central Italy), in stark contrast with the rest of the region, which does not show evidence of excess deaths. We provided a fully probabilistic analysis of excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic at sub-national level, suggesting a differential direct and indirect effect in space and time. Our model can be used to help policy-makers target measures locally to contain the burden on the health-care system as well as reducing social and economic consequences. Additionally, this framework can be used for real-time mortality surveillance, continuous monitoring of local temporal trends and to flag where and when mortality rates deviate from the expected range, which might suggest a second wave of the pandemic

Dirac equations in curved space-time versus Papapetrou spinning particles

We find out classical particles, starting from Dirac quantum fields on a curved space-time, by an eikonal approximation and a localization hypothesis for amplitudes. We recover the results by Mathisson-Papapetrou, hence establishing a fundamental correspondence between the coupling of classical and quantum spinning particles with the gravitational field.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in Europhysics Letter