“Are we not Men?”: Reading the Human-Animal Interface in Science Fiction through John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?”

The so-called animal turn in literature has fostered the evolution of animal studies, a discipline aimed at interrogating the ontological, ethical, and metaphysical implications of animal depictions. Animal studies deals with representation and agency in literature, and its insights have fundamental implications for understanding the conception and progression of human-animal interactions. Considering questions raised by animal studies in the context of literary depictions of animals in science fiction, this article threads John Berger’s characterization of the present as a time of radical marginalization of animals in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” through two highly influential science fiction texts: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Applying Berger’s reasoning to these two novels raises issues of personhood, criteria for ontological demarcation, and the dynamics of power, providing an opportunity to clarify, modify, and refute a number of his finer claims. This process of refinement allows us to track conceptions of human-animal interactions through the literary landscape and explore their extrapolations into various speculative contexts, including the frontiers of science and post-apocalyptic worlds

Indirect Signatures of Type I See-Saw Scenarios

We consider the low energy constraints that can be applied to type I see-saw extensions of the Standard Model in which the right-handed neutrinos are taken at the electroweak scale. In the reported scenarios, the flavour structure of the charged current and neutral current weak interactions of the Standard Model leptons with the heavy right-handed neutrinos is essentially determined by the neutrino oscillation parameters. In this case, correlations among different measurable phenomena in the lepton sector may provide compelling indirect evidence of low energy see-saw mechanism of neutrino mass generation.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Contributions to the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP 2011), Munich, Germany, 5-9 September 201

Проблеми інтерпретації ролі української діаспори в навчальних курсах (Problems of Interpretation of the Role of the Ukrainian Diaspora in Education)

Стаття присвячена комплексному аналізу інтеграції вкладу української діаспори в сучасну українську освіту. Особлива увага приділяється розгляду особистостей деяких авторів (The article deals with the contribution of the Ukrainian Diaspora to the development of modern Ukrainian education. Special attention is paid to the activity of such people as: metropolitan Ivan Ohienko, whose works remain topical today; historian Orest Subtelny, who wrote a very popular history of Ukraine; writer Ivan Chub, who was writing in various genres, and other major figures in the Ukrainian Diaspora who made significant contribution to the development of the Ukrainian education system. The article shows that new methods of teaching facilitate the integration of educational achievements of the Ukrainian Diaspora to the overall education process. The author concludes that the educational problem exists not because students do not want to study according to old standards, but because they cannot perceive stiff forms of teaching

Experiments on Sonoluminescence: Possible Nuclear and QED Aspects and Optical Applications

Experiments aimed at testing some hypothesis about the nature of Single Bubble Sonoluminescence are discussed. A possibility to search for micro-traces of thermonuclear neutrons is analyzed, with the aid of original low-background neutron counter operating under conditions of the deep shielding from Cosmic and other sources of background. Besides, some signatures of QED-contribution to the light emission in SBSL are under the consideration, as well as new approaches to probe a temperature inside the bubble. An applied-physics portion of the program is presented also, in which an attention is being paid to single- and a few-pulse light sources on the basis of SBSL.Comment: 4 pages; to be published by AIP in the Proc. ISNA-1

WOMEN PILOTS IN THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR OF THE SOVIET UNION

Yu. Smolnikov, O.Yurchenko. WOMEN PILOTS IN THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR OF THE SOVIET UNION // PROCEEDINGS. The sixth World Comgress “Eviation in the XXI – st century.”Safety in Aviation and Space Technologies”. September 23-25, 2014. Volume 3. Kyiv, 2014. – Р. 9.93 – 9.96.Тhe article deals with the role of Soviet women pilots in the victory over Nazi Germany in the years of the Great Patriotic War

WOMEN PILOTS IN THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR OF THE SOVIET UNION

Yu. Smolnikov, O.Yurchenko. WOMEN PILOTS IN THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR OF THE SOVIET UNION // PROCEEDINGS. The sixth World Comgress “Eviation in the XXI – st century.”Safety in Aviation and Space Technologies”. September 23-25, 2014. Volume 3. Kyiv, 2014. – Р. 9.93 – 9.96.Тhe article deals with the role of Soviet women pilots in the victory over Nazi Germany in the years of the Great Patriotic War

Mitigation of 42^{42}Ar/42^{42}K background for the GERDA Phase II experiment

Background coming from the $^{42}$Ar decay chain is considered to be one of the most relevant for the GERDA experiment, which aims to search of the neutrinoless double beta decay of $^{76}$Ge. The sensitivity strongly relies on the absence of background around the Q-value of the decay. Background coming from $^{42}$K, a progeny of $^{42}$Ar, can contribute to that background via electrons from the continuous spectrum with an endpoint of 3.5 MeV. Research and development on the suppression methods targeting this source of background were performed at the low-background test facility LArGe. It was demonstrated that by reducing $^{42}$K ion collection on the surfaces of the broad energy germanium detectors in combination with pulse shape discrimination techniques and an argon scintillation veto, it is possible to suppress the $^{42}$K background by three orders of magnitude. This is sufficient for Phase II of the GERDA experiment