20,432 research outputs found
The inexorable resistance of inertia determines the initial regime of drop coalescence
Drop coalescence is central to diverse processes involving dispersions of
drops in industrial, engineering and scientific realms. During coalescence, two
drops first touch and then merge as the liquid neck connecting them grows from
initially microscopic scales to a size comparable to the drop diameters. The
curvature of the interface is infinite at the point where the drops first make
contact, and the flows that ensue as the two drops coalesce are intimately
coupled to this singularity in the dynamics. Conventionally, this process has
been thought to have just two dynamical regimes: a viscous and an inertial
regime with a crossover region between them. We use experiments and simulations
to reveal that a third regime, one that describes the initial dynamics of
coalescence for all drop viscosities, has been missed. An argument based on
force balance allows the construction of a new coalescence phase diagram
Constructing sonified haptic line graphs for the blind student: first steps
Line graphs stand as an established information visualisation and analysis technique taught at various levels of difficulty according to standard Mathematics curricula. It has been argued that blind individuals cannot use line graphs as a visualisation and analytic tool because they currently primarily exist in the visual medium. The research described in this paper aims at making line graphs accessible to blind students through auditory and haptic media. We describe (1) our design space for representing line graphs, (2) the technology we use to develop our prototypes and (3) the insights from our preliminary work
Borromean rays and hyperplanes
Three disjoint rays in euclidean 3-space form Borromean rays provided their
union is knotted, but the union of any two components is unknotted. We
construct infinitely many Borromean rays, uncountably many of which are
pairwise inequivalent. We obtain uncountably many Borromean hyperplanes.Comment: 41 pages, 30 figures (19 with captions, 11 inline
High Spectral and Spatial Resolution Observations of Shocked Molecular Hydrogen at the Galactic Center
The presence of OH (1720 MHz) masers, and the absence of counterparts at
1665/1667 MHz has proved to be a clear diagnostic of shocked molecular gas
associated with Galactic supernova remnants. This suggests that shocked
molecular gas should be associated with the OH (1720 MHz) masers that have been
detected in the circumnuclear disk (CND) and Sgr A East at the Galactic center.
In order to test this hypothesis, we observed the H 1--0 S(1) and Br
lines using NICMOS on the HST and UNSWIRF on the AAT, near the regions
where OH (1720 MHz) masers are detected in the CND and Sgr A East. We present
the distribution of H in the North and South lobes of the CND and in Sgr A
East. H emission accompanies almost all of the maser spots detected at the
Galactic center. In particular, we find a striking filamentary structure near
the Northwest of the CND and evidence that shocked molecular gas is associated
with the 70 \kms molecular cloud at the Galactic center. We argue that the
emission from the CND could arise in gas heated by the dissipation of the
random motion of clumps by collisions or the dissipation of turbulence in a
more homogeneous medium. In addition, highly red-shifted gas of up to 140 \kms\
close to the eastern edge of the Sgr A East shell is detected. These
observations combined with OH (1720 MHz) results suggest that the H gas is
shocked and accelerated by the expansion of Sgr A East into the 50 and the 70
\kms cloud and into the lobes of the CND.Comment: 31 pages plus 14 figures, ApJ (in press
Locating regions in a sequence under density constraints
Several biological problems require the identification of regions in a
sequence where some feature occurs within a target density range: examples
including the location of GC-rich regions, identification of CpG islands, and
sequence matching. Mathematically, this corresponds to searching a string of 0s
and 1s for a substring whose relative proportion of 1s lies between given lower
and upper bounds. We consider the algorithmic problem of locating the longest
such substring, as well as other related problems (such as finding the shortest
substring or a maximal set of disjoint substrings). For locating the longest
such substring, we develop an algorithm that runs in O(n) time, improving upon
the previous best-known O(n log n) result. For the related problems we develop
O(n log log n) algorithms, again improving upon the best-known O(n log n)
results. Practical testing verifies that our new algorithms enjoy significantly
smaller time and memory footprints, and can process sequences that are orders
of magnitude longer as a result.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures; v2: minor revisions, additional explanations; to
appear in SIAM Journal on Computin
Chronic acceleration studies - Physiological responses to artificial alterations in weight Progress report
Influence of chronic acceleration on energy metabolism of chickens and animals, as indicated by maintenance feed requiremen
Palatini Variational Principle for -Dimensional Dilaton Gravity
We consider a Palatini variation on a general -Dimensional second order,
torsion-free dilaton gravity action and determine the resulting equations of
motion. Consistency is checked by considering the restraint imposed due to
invariance of the matter action under simple coordinate transformations, and
the special case of N=2 is examined. We also examine a sub-class of theories
whereby a Palatini variation dynamically coincides with that of the "ordinary"
Hilbert variational principle; in particular we examine a generalized
Brans-Dicke theory and the associated role of conformal transformations.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe
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