103,854 research outputs found
Life detection
Compact automated laboratory unit has 60 independently treatable culture chamber assemblies for metabolic studies of cultured microorganisms on the surface of Mars or other planets
Arithmetic completely regular codes
In this paper, we explore completely regular codes in the Hamming graphs and
related graphs. Experimental evidence suggests that many completely regular
codes have the property that the eigenvalues of the code are in arithmetic
progression. In order to better understand these "arithmetic completely regular
codes", we focus on cartesian products of completely regular codes and products
of their corresponding coset graphs in the additive case. Employing earlier
results, we are then able to prove a theorem which nearly classifies these
codes in the case where the graph admits a completely regular partition into
such codes (e.g, the cosets of some additive completely regular code).
Connections to the theory of distance-regular graphs are explored and several
open questions are posed.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figur
Killing and replacing queen-laid eggs: low cost of worker policing in the honey bee
Worker honeybees, Apis mellifera, police each other’s reproduction by killing worker-laid eggs. Previous experiments demonstrated that worker policing is effective, killing most (∼98%) worker-laid eggs. However, many queen-laid eggs were also killed (∼50%) suggesting that effective policing may have high costs. In these previous experiments, eggs were transferred using forceps into test cells, mostly into unrelated discriminator colonies. We measured both the survival of unmanipulated queen-laid eggs and the proportion of removal errors that were rectified by the queen laying a new egg. Across 2 days of the 3-day egg stage, only 9.6% of the queen-laid eggs in drone cells and 4.1% in worker cells were removed in error. When queen-laid eggs were removed from cells, 85% from drone cells and 61% from worker cells were replaced within 3 days. Worker policing in the honeybee has a high benefit to policing workers because workers are more related to the queen’s sons (brothers, r = 0.25) than sister workers’ sons (0.15). This study shows that worker policing also has a low cost in terms of the killing of queen-laid eggs, as only a small proportion of queen-laid eggs are killed, most of which are rapidly replaced
A Monte Carlo study of surface critical phenomena: The special point
We study the special point in the phase diagram of a semi-infinite system,
where the bulk transition is in the three-dimensional Ising universality class.
To this end we perform a finite size scaling study of the improved Blume-Capel
model on the simple cubic lattice with two different types of surface
interactions. In order to check for the effect of leading bulk corrections we
have also simulated the spin-1/2 Ising model on the simple cubic lattice. We
have accurately estimated the surface enhancement coupling at the special point
of these models. We find and for the
surface renormalization group exponents of the special transitions. These
results are compared with previous ones obtained by using field theoretic
methods and Monte Carlo simulations of the spin-1/2 Ising model. Furthermore we
study the behaviour of the surface transition near the special point and
finally we discuss films with special boundary conditions at one surface and
fixed ones at the other.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures. figure 1 replaced, various typos correcte
Models for the Effects of G-seat Cuing on Roll-axis Tracking Performance
Including whole-body motion in a flight simulator improves performance for a variety of tasks requiring a pilot to compensate for the effects of unexpected disturbances. A possible mechanism for this improvement is that whole-body motion provides high derivative vehicle state information whic allows the pilot to generate more lead in responding to the external disturbances. During development of motion simulating algorithms for an advanced g-cuing system it was discovered that an algorithm based on aircraft roll acceleration producted little or no performance improvement. On the other hand, algorithms based on roll position or roll velocity produced performance equivalent to whole-body motion. The analysis and modeling conducted at both the sensory system and manual control performance levels to explain the above results are described
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