19,795 research outputs found
Environmental factors influencing the spread of the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus in wild birds in Europe
A large number of occurrences of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus in wild birds were reported in Europe. The relationship between the occurrence pattern and environmental factors has, however, not yet been explored. This research uses logistic regression to quantify the relationships between anthropogenic or physical environmental factors and HPAI H5N1 occurrences. Our results indicate that HPAI H5N1 occurrences are highly correlated with the following: the increased normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in December; intermediate NDVI in March; lower elevations; increased minimum temperatures in January; and reduced precipitation in January. A predictive risk map of HPAI H5N1 occurrences in wild birds in Europe was generated on the basis of five key environmental factors. Independent validation of the risk map showed the predictive model to be of high accuracy (79%). The analysis suggests that HPAI H5N1 occurrences in wild birds are strongly influenced by the availability of food resources and are facilitated by increased temperatures and reduced precipitation. We therefore deduced that HPAI H5N1 occurrences in wild birds in Europe are probably caused by contact with other wild birds and not by contact with domestic poultry. These findings are important considerations for the global surveillance of HPAI H5N1 occurrences in wild birds
Extended calculations of energy levels, radiative properties, , hyperfine interaction constants, and Land\'e -factors for nitrogen-like \mbox{Ge XXVI}
Employing two state-of-the-art methods, multiconfiguration
Dirac--Hartree--Fock and second-order many-body perturbation theory, highly
accurate calculations are performed for the lowest 272 fine-structure levels
arising from the , , , ~(), (), and ()
configurations in nitrogen-like Ge XXVI. Complete and consistent atomic data,
including excitation energies, lifetimes, wavelengths, hyperfine structures,
Land\'e -factors, and E1, E2, M1, M2 line strengths, oscillator
strengths, and transition rates among these 272 levels are provided.
Comparisons are made between the present two data sets, as well as with other
available experimental and theoretical values. The present data are accurate
enough for identification and deblending of emission lines involving the
levels, and are also useful for modeling and diagnosing fusion plasmas
A grid-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval
In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the DILIGENT Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science
Lom: discovering logic flaws within MongoDB-based web applications
Logic flaws within web applications will allow malicious operations to be triggered towards back-end database. Existing approaches to identifying logic flaws of database accesses are strongly tied to structured query language (SQL) statement construction and cannot be applied to the new generation of web applications that use not only structured query language (NoSQL) databases as the storage tier. In this paper, we present Lom, a black-box approach for discovering many categories of logic flaws within MongoDBbased web applications. Our approach introduces a MongoDB operation model to support new features of MongoDB and models the application logic as a mealy finite state machine. During the testing phase, test inputs which emulate state violation attacks are constructed for identifying logic flaws at each application state. We apply Lom to several MongoDB-based web applications and demonstrate its effectiveness
Early reionization by decaying particles in the light of three year WMAP data
We study the reionization histories where ionizing UV photons are emitted
from decaying particles, in addition to usual contributions from stars and
quasars, taking account of the fact that the universe is not fully ionized
until z = 6 as observed by Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Likelihood analysis of the
three-year data from the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) severely
constrains the decaying particle scenario.In particular, the decaying particle
with relatively short lifetime is not favored by the polarization data.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figure
Andreev Reflection and Spin Injection into and wave Superconductors
We study the effect of spin injection into and wave superconductors,
with an emphasis on the interplay between boundary and bulk spin transport
properties. The quantities of interest include the amount of non-equilibrium
magnetization (), as well as the induced spin-dependent current () and
boundary voltage (). In general, the Andreev reflection makes each of the
three quantities depend on a different combination of the boundary and bulk
contributions. The situation simplifies either for half-metallic ferromagnets
or in the strong barrier limit, where both and depend solely on the
bulk spin transport/relaxation properties. The implications of our results for
the on-going spin injection experiments in high cuprates are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, REVTEX, 1 figure included; typos correcte
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