The effect of human activities on moisture content of soils and underlying permafrost from the McMurdo Sound region, Antarctica

Soils and the underlying permafrost from undisturbed sites and sites that had been disturbed by construction activities at Marble Point and Pram Point in the McMurdo Sound region were sampled from excavated pits and drill cores. Gravimetric moisture (ice) contents and particle size distribution were determined. Volumetric moisture contents were calculated from these results. At undisturbed sites soil moisture contents within the active layer (to c. 60 cm depth) were low and ranged from 0.5% by weight at the soil surface to 10% above the permafrost. The permafrost was generally completely saturated with ice, but sometimes contained considerable excess ice, with ice contents rising as high as 80% by volume. At disturbed sites, soil moisture contents within the active layer were similar to those of the undisturbed sites (generally <10% by weight) but within the permafrost, moisture contents were lower and less variable than in the undisturbed sites, rarely exceeding 20% by weight. The release of considerable quantities of water from the permafrost as a result of land disturbance during construction activities caused stream flows, soil shrinkage, land slumping and salinisation, resulting in significant permanent environmental damage. At Marble Point there has been no significant re-establishment of icy permafrost in the disturbed soils in the 30 years since land disturbance occurred

Mapping the Physical Properties of Cosmic Hot Gas with Hyper-spectral Imaging

A novel inversion technique is proposed to compute parametric maps showing the temperature, density and chemical composition of cosmic hot gas from X-ray hyper-spectral images. The parameters are recovered by constructing a unique non-linear mapping derived by combining a physics-based modelling of the X-ray spectrum with the selection of optimal bandpass filters. Preliminary results and analysis are presented.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures; accepted by the 5th IEEE Workshop on Application of Computer Vision (WACV/MOTION 2005), Breckenridge, CO, USA, 2005; uses ieee.cls (included). For a pdf version with full-resolution figures, try http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~exc/Research/Papers/ieee_astro_05.pd

Heavy metal contamination in some soils of the McMurdo Sound region, Antarctica

Soil samples from eight sites at Marble Point and Pram Point, McMurdo Sound region, contaminated by human activities were examined for heavy metal content, using sequential extraction methods. The redistribution of lead, zinc and copper arising from point sources of these metals was demonstrated. The levels found are not considered to represent serious pollution but do indicate that human activities can change the chemistry of the Antarctic environment in localized areas

Pharmacometabonomics in humans: a new tool for personalized medicine

Pharmacogenomics is now over 50 years old and has had some impact in clinical practice, through its use to select patient subgroups who will enjoy efficacy without side effects when treated with certain drugs. However, pharmacogenomics, has had less impact than initially predicted. One reason for this is that many diseases, and the way in which the patients respond to drug treatments, have both genetic and environmental elements. Pure genomics is almost blind to the environmental elements. A new methodology has emerged, termed pharmacometabonomics that is concerned with the prediction of drug effects through the analysis of predose, biofluid metabolite profiles, which reflect both genetic and environmental influences on human physiology. In this review we will cover what pharmacometabonomics is, how it works, what applications exist and what the future might hold in this exciting new area

Geometric Aspects of Composite Pulses

Unitary operations acting on a quantum system must be robust against systematic errors in control parameters for reliable quantum computing. Composite pulse technique in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) realises such a robust operation by employing a sequence of possibly poor quality pulses. In this article, we demonstrate that two kinds of composite pulses, one compensates for a pulse length error in a one-qubit system and the other compensates for a J-coupling error in a twoqubit system, have vanishing dynamical phase and thereby can be seen as geometric quantum gates, which implement unitary gates by the holonomy associated with dynamics of cyclic vectors defined in the text.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Designing Robust Unitary Gates: Application to Concatenated Composite Pulse

We propose a simple formalism to design unitary gates robust against given systematic errors. This formalism generalizes our previous observation [Y. Kondo and M. Bando, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 80, 054002 (2011)] that vanishing dynamical phase in some composite gates is essential to suppress amplitude errors. By employing our formalism, we naturally derive a new composite unitary gate which can be seen as a concatenation of two known composite unitary operations. The obtained unitary gate has high fidelity over a wider range of the error strengths compared to existing composite gates.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Major revision: improved presentation in Sec. 3, references and appendix adde

How to tell a happy from an unhappy schizotype:Personality factors and mental health outcomes in individuals with psychotic experiences

Objective: It is unclear why some individuals reporting psychotic experiences have balanced lives while others go on to develop mental health problems. The objective of this study was to test if the personality traits of harm avoidance, self-directedness, and self-transcendence can be used as criteria to differentiate healthy from unhealthy schizotypal individuals. Methods: We interviewed 115 participants who reported a high frequency of psychotic experiences. The instruments used were the Temperament and Character Inventory (140), Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV, and the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences. Results: Harm avoidance predicted cognitive disorganization (&#946; = 0.319; t = 2.94), while novelty seeking predicted bipolar disorder (&#946; = 0.136, Exp [&#946;] = 1.146) and impulsive non-conformity (&#946; = 0.322; t = 3.55). Self-directedness predicted an overall decrease in schizotypy, most of all in cognitive disorganization (&#946; = -0.356; t = -2.95) and in impulsive non-conformity (&#946; = -0.313; t = -2.83). Finally, self-transcendence predicted unusual experiences (&#946; = 0.256; t = 2.32). Conclusion: Personality features are important criteria to distinguish between pathology and mental health in individuals presenting high levels of anomalous experiences (AEs). While self-directedness is a protective factor, both harm avoidance and novelty seeking were predictors of negative mental health outcomes. We suggest that the impact of AEs on mental health is moderated by personality factors

Finite-Field Matrix Channels for Network Coding

In 2010, Silva et al. studied certain classes of finite-field matrix channels in order to model random linear network coding where exactly t random errors are introduced. In this paper, we consider a generalization of these matrix channels where the number of errors is not required to be constant, indeed the number of errors may follow any distribution. We show that a capacity-achieving input distribution can always be taken to have a very restricted form (the distribution should be uniform given the rank of the input matrix). This result complements, and is inspired by a paper of Nobrega et al., which establishes a similar result for a class of matrix channels that model network coding with link erasures. Our result shows that the capacity of our channels can be expressed as maximization over probability distributions on the set of possible ranks of input matrices: a set of linear rather than exponential size