Assessing road effects on bats: the role of landscape, road features, and bat activity on road-kills

Recent studies suggest that roads can significantly impact bat populations. Though bats are one of the most threatened groups of European vertebrates, studies aiming to quantify bat mortality and determine the main factors driving it remain scarce. Between March 16 and October 31 of 2009, we surveyed road-killed bats daily along a 51-km-long transect that incorporates different types of roads in southern Portugal. We found 154 road-killed bats of 11 species. The two most common species in the study area, Pipistrellus kuhlii and P. pygmaeus, were also the most commonly identified road-kill, representing 72 % of the total specimens collected. About two-thirds of the total mortality occurred between mid July and late September, peaking in the second half of August. We also recorded casualties of threatened and rare species, including Miniopterus schreibersii, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, R. hipposideros, Barbastella barbastellus, and Nyctalus leisleri. These species were found mostly in early autumn, corresponding to the mating and swarming periods. Landscape features were the most important variable subset for explaining bat casualties. Road stretches crossing or in the vicinity of high-quality habitats for bats—including dense Mediterranean woodland (‘‘montado’’) areas, water courses with riparian gallery, and water reservoirs—yielded a significantly higher number of casualties. Additionally, more roadkilled bats were recorded on high-traffic road stretches with viaducts, in areas of higher bat activity and near known roosts

Rotating Stars in Relativity

Rotating relativistic stars have been studied extensively in recent years, both theoretically and observationally, because of the information one could obtain about the equation of state of matter at extremely high densities and because they are considered to be promising sources of gravitational waves. The latest theoretical understanding of rotating stars in relativity is reviewed in this updated article. The sections on the equilibrium properties and on the nonaxisymmetric instabilities in f-modes and r-modes have been updated and several new sections have been added on analytic solutions for the exterior spacetime, rotating stars in LMXBs, rotating strange stars, and on rotating stars in numerical relativity.Comment: 101 pages, 18 figures. The full online-readable version of this article, including several animations, will be published in Living Reviews in Relativity at http://www.livingreviews.org

Measurement of the underlying event activity at the LHC with root s=7 TeV and comparison with root s=0.9 TeV

A measurement of the underlying activity in events with a jet of transverse momentum in the several GeV region is performed in proton-proton collisions at s√=0.9 and 7 TeV, using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. The production of charged particles with pseudorapidity |η|  0.5 GeV/c is studied in the azimuthal region transverse to that of the leading set of charged particles forming a track-jet. A significant growth of the average multiplicity and scalar-p T sum of the particles in the transverse region is observed with increasing p T of the leading track-jet, followed by a much slower rise above a few GeV/c. For track-jet p T larger than a few GeV/c, the activity in the transverse region is approximately doubled with a centre-of-mass energy increase from 0.9 to 7 TeV. Predictions of several QCD-inspired models as implemented in pythia are compared to the data

Search for B-s(0) - GT mu(+)mu(-) and B-0 - GT mu(+)mu(-) Decays in pp Collisions at root s=7 TeV

A search for the rare decays B-s(0) -- GT mu(+)mu(-) and B-0 -- GT mu(+)mu(-) is performed in pp collisions at root s = 7 TeV, with a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.14 fb(-1), collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. In both cases, the number of events observed after all selection requirements is consistent with expectations from background and standard-model signal predictions. The resulting upper limits on the branching fractions are B(B-s(0) -- GT mu(+)mu(-)) LT 1.9 x 10(-8) and B(B-0 -- GT mu(+)mu(-)) LT 4.6 x 10(-9), at 95% confidence level