Molecular and fossil evidence place the origin of cichlid fishes long after Gondwanan rifting.

Cichlid fishes are a key model system in the study of adaptive radiation, speciation and evolutionary developmental biology. More than 1600 cichlid species inhabit freshwater and marginal marine environments across several southern landmasses. This distributional pattern, combined with parallels between cichlid phylogeny and sequences of Mesozoic continental rifting, has led to the widely accepted hypothesis that cichlids are an ancient group whose major biogeographic patterns arose from Gondwanan vicariance. Although the Early Cretaceous (ca 135 Ma) divergence of living cichlids demanded by the vicariance model now represents a key calibration for teleost molecular clocks, this putative split pre-dates the oldest cichlid fossils by nearly 90 Myr. Here, we provide independent palaeontological and relaxed-molecular-clock estimates for the time of cichlid origin that collectively reject the antiquity of the group required by the Gondwanan vicariance scenario. The distribution of cichlid fossil horizons, the age of stratigraphically consistent outgroup lineages to cichlids and relaxed-clock analysis of a DNA sequence dataset consisting of 10 nuclear genes all deliver overlapping estimates for crown cichlid origin centred on the Palaeocene (ca 65-57 Ma), substantially post-dating the tectonic fragmentation of Gondwana. Our results provide a revised macroevolutionary time scale for cichlids, imply a role for dispersal in generating the observed geographical distribution of this important model clade and add to a growing debate that questions the dominance of the vicariance paradigm of historical biogeography

Quasi-Chemical and Structural Analysis of Polarizable Anion Hydration

Quasi-chemical theory is utilized to analyze the roles of solute polarization and size in determining the structure and thermodynamics of bulk anion hydration for the Hofmeister series Cl$^-$, Br$^-$, and I$^-$. Excellent agreement with experiment is obtained for whole salt hydration free energies using the polarizable AMOEBA force field. The quasi-chemical approach exactly partitions the solvation free energy into inner-shell, outer-shell packing, and outer-shell long-ranged contributions by means of a hard-sphere condition. Small conditioning radii, even well inside the first maximum of the ion-water(oxygen) radial distribution function, result in Gaussian behavior for the long-ranged contribution that dominates the ion hydration free energy. The spatial partitioning allows for a mean-field treatment of the long-ranged contribution, leading to a natural division into first-order electrostatic, induction, and van der Waals terms. The induction piece exhibits the strongest ion polarizability dependence, while the larger-magnitude first-order electrostatic piece yields an opposing but weaker polarizability dependence. In addition, a structural analysis is performed to examine the solvation anisotropy around the anions. As opposed to the hydration free energies, the solvation anisotropy depends more on ion polarizability than on ion size: increased polarizability leads to increased anisotropy. The water dipole moments near the ion are similar in magnitude to bulk water, while the ion dipole moments are found to be significantly larger than those observed in quantum mechanical studies. Possible impacts of the observed over-polarization of the ions on simulated anion surface segregation are discussed.Comment: slight revision, in press at J. Chem. Phy

Radiation of Angular Momentum by Neutrinos from Merged Binary Neutron Stars

We study neutrino emission from the remnant of an inspiraling binary neutron star following coalescence. The mass of the merged remnant is likely to exceed the stability limit of a cold, rotating neutron star. However, the angular momentum of the remnant may also approach or even exceed the Kerr limit, J/M^2 = 1, so that total collapse may not be possible unless some angular momentum is dissipated. We find that neutrino emission is very inefficient in decreasing the angular momentum of these merged objects and may even lead to a small increase in J/M^2. We illustrate these findings with a post-Newtonian, ellipsoidal model calculation. Simple arguments suggest that the remnant may form a bar mode instability on a timescale similar to or shorter than the neutrino emission timescale, in which case the evolution of the remnant will be dominated by the emission of gravitational waves.Comment: 12 pages AASTeX, 2 figures, to appear in Ap

Phylogenetic informativeness reconciles ray-finned fish molecular divergence times

BACKGROUND: Discordance among individual molecular age estimates, or between molecular age estimates and the fossil record, is observed in many clades across the Tree of Life. This discordance is attributed to a variety of variables including calibration age uncertainty, calibration placement, nucleotide substitution rate heterogeneity, or the specified molecular clock model. However, the impact of changes in phylogenetic informativeness of individual genes over time on phylogenetic inferences is rarely analyzed. Using nuclear and mitochondrial sequence data for ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) as an example, we extend the utility of phylogenetic informativeness profiles to predict the time intervals when nucleotide substitution saturation results in discordance among molecular ages estimated. RESULTS: We demonstrate that even with identical calibration regimes and molecular clock methods, mitochondrial based molecular age estimates are systematically older than those estimated from nuclear sequences. This discordance is most severe for highly nested nodes corresponding to more recent (i.e., Jurassic-Recent) divergences. By removing data deemed saturated, we reconcile the competing age estimates and highlight that the older mtDNA based ages were driven by nucleotide saturation. CONCLUSIONS: Homoplasious site patterns in a DNA sequence alignment can systematically bias molecular divergence time estimates. Our study demonstrates that PI profiles can provide a non-arbitrary criterion for data exclusion to mitigate the influence of homoplasy on time calibrated branch length estimates. Analyses of actinopterygian molecular clocks demonstrate that scrutiny of the time scale on which sequence data is informative is a fundamental, but generally overlooked, step in molecular divergence time estimation

Large transverse field tunnel splittings in the Fe_8 spin Hamiltonian

The spin Hamiltonian that describes the molecular magnet Fe$_8$ has biaxial symmetry with mutually perpendicular easy, medium, and hard magnetic axes. Previous calculations of the ground state tunnel splittings in the presence of a magnetic field along the hard axis are extended, and the meaning of the previously discovered oscillation of this splitting is further clarified

On wormholes with arbitrarily small quantities of exotic matter

Recently several models of traversable wormholes have been proposed which require only arbitrarily small amounts of negative energy to hold them open against self-collapse. If the exotic matter is assumed to be provided by quantum fields, then quantum inequalities can be used to place constraints on the negative energy densities required. In this paper, we introduce an alternative method for obtaining constraints on wormhole geometries, using a recently derived quantum inequality bound on the null-contracted stress-energy averaged over a timelike worldline. The bound allows us to perform a simplified analysis of general wormhole models, not just those with small quantities of exotic matter. We then use it to study, in particular, the models of Visser, Kar, and Dadhich (VKD) and the models of Kuhfittig. The VKD models are constrained to be either submicroscopic or to have a large discrepancy between throat size and curvature radius. A recent model of Kuhfittig is shown to be non-traversable. This is due to the fact that the throat of his wormhole flares outward so slowly that light rays and particles, starting from outside the throat, require an infinite lapse of affine parameter to reach the throat.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figure

Non-monotonic field-dependence of the ZFC magnetization peak in some systems of magnetic nanoparticles

We have performed magnetic measurements on a diluted system of gamma-Fe2O3 nanoparticles (~7nm), and on a ferritin sample. In both cases, the ZFC-peak presents a non-monotonic field dependence, as has already been reported in some experiments,and discussed as a possible evidence of resonant tunneling. Within simple assumptions, we derive expressions for the magnetization obtained in the usual ZFC, FC, TRM procedures. We point out that the ZFC-peak position is extremely sensitive to the width of the particle size distribution, and give some numerical estimates of this effect. We propose to combine the FC magnetization with a modified TRM measurement, a procedure which allows a more direct access to the barrier distribution in a field. The typical barrier values which are obtained with this method show a monotonic decrease for increasing fields, as expected from the simple effect of anisotropy barrier lowering, in contrast with the ZFC results. From our measurements on gamma-Fe2O3 particles, we show that the width of the effective barrier distribution is slightly increasing with the field, an effect which is sufficient for causing the observed initial increase of the ZFC-peak temperatures.Comment: LaTeX file 19 pages, 9 postscript figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. B (tentative schedule: Dec.97

Resonant Magnetization Tunneling in Mn12 Acetate: The Absence of Inhomogeneous Hyperfine Broadening

We present the results of a detailed study of the thermally-assisted-resonant-tunneling relaxation rate of Mn12 acetate as a function of an external, longitudinal magnetic field and find that the data can be fit extremely well to a Lorentzian function. No hint of inhomogeneous broadening is found, even though some is expected from the Mn nuclear hyperfine interaction. This inconsistency implies that the tunneling mechanism cannot be described simply in terms of a random hyperfine field.Comment: Some minor revisions, title changed, updated figures, two added notes, one added reference. RevTeX, 4 pages, 3 postscript figures. Submitted to Rapid Communication