Root traits predict decomposition across a landscape-scale grazing experiment

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the Woodland Trust for maintenance of and access to the Glen Finglas experiment. We thank Debbie Fielding, William Smith, Sarah McCormack, Allan Sim, Marcel Junker and Elaine Runge for help in the field and the laboratory. This research was part of the Glen Finglas project (formerly Grazing and Upland Birds (GRUB)) funded by the Scottish Government (RERAS). S.W.S. was funded by a BBSRC studentship.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Physical risk factors for neck pain.

To identify physical risk factors for neck pain, a systematic review of the literature was carried out. Based on methodological quality and study design, 4 levels of evidence were defined to establish the strength of evidence for the relationship between risk factors and neck pain. Altogether, 22 cross-sectional studies, 2 prospective cohort studies, and 1 case-referent study were eligible for determining the level of evidence. The results showed some evidence for a positive relationship between neck pain and the duration of sitting and twisting or bending of the trunk. A sensitivity analysis was carried out excluding 3 items of the quality list, the importance of which seemed doubtful. On the basis of this sensitivity analysis, it was concluded that there is some evidence for a positive relationship between neck pain and the following work-related risk factors: neck flexion, arm force, arm posture, duration of sitting, twisting or bending of the trunk, hand-arm vibration, and workplace design

Local and international perspectives on the historical sociolinguistics of Dutch

Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Simulation of a fully coupled 3D glacial isostatic adjustment – ice sheet model for the Antarctic ice sheet over a glacial cycle

Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) has a stabilizing effect on the evolution of the Antarctic ice sheet by reducing the grounding line migration following ice melt. The timescale and strength of this feedback depends on the spatially varying viscosity of the Earth's mantle. Most studies assume a relatively long and laterally homogenous response time of the bedrock. However, the mantle viscosity is spatially variable, with a high mantle viscosity beneath East Antarctica and a low mantle viscosity beneath West Antarctica. For this study, we have developed a new method to couple a 3D GIA model and an ice sheet model to study the interaction between the solid Earth and the Antarctic ice sheet during the last glacial cycle. With this method, the ice sheet model and GIA model exchange ice thickness and bedrock elevation during a fully coupled transient experiment. The feedback effect is taken into account with a high temporal resolution, where the coupling time steps between the ice sheet and GIA model are 5000 years over the glaciation phase and vary between 500 and 1000 years over the deglaciation phase of the last glacial cycle. During each coupling time step, the bedrock elevation is adjusted at every ice sheet model time step, and the deformation is computed for a linearly changing ice load. We applied the method using the ice sheet model ANICE and a 3D GIA finite element model. We used results from a regional seismic model for Antarctica embedded in the global seismic model SMEAN2 to determine the patterns in the mantle viscosity. The results of simulations over the last glacial cycle show that differences in mantle viscosity of an order of magnitude can lead to differences in the grounding line position up to 700 km and to differences in ice thickness of the order of 2 km for the present day near the Ross Embayment. These results underline and quantify the importance of including local GIA feedback effects in ice sheet models when simulating the Antarctic ice sheet evolution over the last glacial cycle.</p

Entanglement between charge qubits induced by a common dissipative environment

We study entanglement generation between two charge qubits due to the strong coupling with a common bosonic environment (Ohmic bath). The coupling to the boson bath is a source of both quantum noise (leading to decoherence) and an indirect interaction between qubits. As a result, two effects compete as a function of the coupling strength with the bath: entanglement generation and charge localization induced by the bath. These two competing effects lead to a non-monotonic behavior of the concurrence as a function of the coupling strength with the bath. As an application, we present results for charge qubits based on double quantum dots.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure