How countries plan to address agricultural adaptation and mitigation

Agriculture is well represented in Parties’ adaptation and mitigation strategies as communicated in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). There is much attention to conventional agricultural practices that can be climate-smart (e.g. livestock and crop management), but less to the enabling services that can facilitate uptake (e.g. climate information services, insurance, and credit). Considerable finance is needed for agricultural adaptation and mitigation by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) – in the order of USD 3 billion annually for adaptation and 2 billion annually for mitigation. Parties need better information in order to refine their finance needs. Non-Annex 1 Parties raise issues of climate justice, social inequality and food security in their INDCs

Response of an Excitatory-Inhibitory Neural Network to External Stimulation: An Application to Image Segmentation

Neural network models comprising elements which have exclusively excitatory or inhibitory synapses are capable of a wide range of dynamic behavior, including chaos. In this paper, a simple excitatory-inhibitory neural pair, which forms the building block of larger networks, is subjected to external stimulation. The response shows transition between various types of dynamics, depending upon the magnitude of the stimulus. Coupling such pairs over a local neighborhood in a two-dimensional plane, the resultant network can achieve a satisfactory segmentation of an image into ``object'' and ``background''. Results for synthetic and and ``real-life'' images are given.Comment: 8 pages, latex, 5 figure

High speed synchrotron X-ray imaging studies of the ultrasound shockwave and enhanced flow during metal solidification processes

The highly dynamic behaviour of ultrasonic bubble implosion in liquid metal, the multiphase liquid metal flow containing bubbles and particles, and the interaction between ultrasonic waves and semisolid phases during solidification of metal were studied in situ using the complementary ultrafast and high speed synchrotron X-ray imaging facilities housed respectively at the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory, US, and Diamond Light Source, UK. Real-time ultrafast X-ray imaging of 135,780 frames per second (fps) revealed that ultrasonic bubble implosion in a liquid Bi-8 wt. %Zn alloy can occur in a single wave period (30 kHz), and the effective region affected by the shockwave at implosion was 3.5 times the original bubble diameter. Furthermore, ultrasound bubbles in liquid metal move faster than the primary particles, and the velocity of bubbles is 70 ~ 100% higher than that of the primary particles present in the same locations close to the sonotrode. Ultrasound waves can very effectively create a strong swirling flow in a semisolid melt in less than one second. The energetic flow can detach solid particles from the liquid-solid interface and redistribute them back into the bulk liquid very effectively

Exact Solution for the Critical State in Thin Superconductor Strips with Field Dependent or Anisotropic Pinning

An exact analytical solution is given for the critical state problem in long thin superconductor strips in a perpendicular magnetic field, when the critical current density j_c(B) depends on the local induction B according to a simple three-parameter model. This model describes both isotropic superconductors with this j_c(B) dependence, but also superconductors with anisotropic pinning described by a dependence j_c(theta) where theta is the tilt angle of the flux lines away from the normal to the specimen plane

Rotational band structures in N=89 153Gd

The reactions 152Sm(α,3n) at 37 MeV and 124Sn(36S,α3n) at 165 MeV were used to produce high-spin states in the transitional rare-earth nucleus 153Gd. Significant extensions in angular momentum and excitation energy with respect to earlier work were achieved and several new rotational sequences were observed. The rotational behavior of 153Gd is described in terms of quasiparticle assignments and the observed alignment properties are analyzed within the framework of the cranked shell model. Detailed comparisons with other N=89 nuclei are presented. These have led to corrections to the 157Er level scheme

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results