A Development in Polar Education

Although a remarkably large number of organizations exist which are devoted to research in polar regions and/or to the collection and dissemination of knowledge about them, very few of them are "polar" institutions, or even "arctic" institutions in the sense of being interested in everything polar, or arctic. ... The major exceptions are the Arctic Institute of North America, the Scott Polar Research Institute in England and, to some extent, the Arctic and Antarctic Scientific Research Institute of Leningrad, with their large diversified libraries. Many of the existing polar and arctic institutions ... perform their teaching roles, if any, principally through the involvement of their staffs in the academic departments of the universities with which they are most closely associated. As institutions, they appear to stimulate teaching rather than act as centres of it. This situation is illustrated in the case of Canada where a report by Kupsch and Caillol shows that virtually all teaching about the Arctic is being carried on within specialist academic departments - of history, anthropology, biology, geography, geology, etc. ... Some polar institutions seem to have stimulated more teaching than have others over the years. In Canada, again, the relatively recent upsurge of courses dealing with aspects of the Arctic at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta, including very successful extension courses conducted at locations in the Arctic, are a reflection of the efforts of the Institute for Northern Studies, Saskatoon, and the Boreal Institute, Edmonton, respectively. Similarly, it would appear that the Centre d'Etudes Nordiques has greatly stimulated teaching about the Arctic at Université Laval, Québec. In the United States, Dartmouth College at Hanover, New Hampshire, with its Steffansson Collection has been a focus for teaching about the Arctic; and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Ohio State Institute of Polar Studies are other centres which are currently active in the field. The development of universities at high latitudes has, of course, provided a fine opportunity for students to pursue their studies within normal academic disciplines while gaining real experience of the Arctic. Developments in the U.S.S.R. (Syktyvkar and Yakutsk), Sweden (Luleå), Norway (Tromsø) and Finland (Oulu) are clearly of great significance in this regard. In the English-speaking world, the University of Alaska is still the only institution of university status located in the Arctic. ... It would appear, ... that the first formal programme leading to a postgraduate qualification in polar studies - outside the U.S.S.R. at least - will be inaugurated in October 1975 by the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) of Cambridge, England. ... A new development will be the commencement in October 1975 of a one-year postgraduate course, for graduates of any discipline, leading to a Diploma in Polar Studies of the University of Cambridge. The objects of this course are to provide a broad background of polar knowledge and to offer to each candidate a topic of his or her choice to investigate in depth. Lectures and seminars will cover the following subjects in their relation to both the Arctic and Antarctic: natural environment, peoples, history, resources and problems of development, government and social relations. As no such course is given elsewhere in the world, this is an experiment which will be observed with much interest

Search for Small Trans-Neptunian Objects by the TAOS Project

The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to determine the number of small icy bodies in the outer reach of the Solar System by means of stellar occultation. An array of 4 robotic small (D=0.5 m), wide-field (f/1.9) telescopes have been installed at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan to simultaneously monitor some thousand of stars for such rare occultation events. Because a typical occultation event by a TNO a few km across will last for only a fraction of a second, fast photometry is necessary. A special CCD readout scheme has been devised to allow for stellar photometry taken a few times per second. Effective analysis pipelines have been developed to process stellar light curves and to correlate any possible flux changes among all telescopes. A few billion photometric measurements have been collected since the routine survey began in early 2005. Our preliminary result of a very low detection rate suggests a deficit of small TNOs down to a few km size, consistent with the extrapolation of some recent studies of larger (30--100 km) TNOs.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, IAU Symposium 23

Osteosclerosis in the extinct Cayaoa Bruneti (Aves, anseriformes) : insights on behavior and fligftlessness

Fil: Mendoza, Ricardo de. División Paleontología Vertebrados. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo. Universidad Nacional de La PlataFil: Tambussi, Claudia Patricia. Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Tierra (CICTERRA). Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; Argentin

Nanoscale tunable reduction of graphene oxide for graphene electronics

International audienceGraphene is now recognized as the most likely carbon-based successor material for CMOS electronics. Recently, interest in graphene oxide (GO) has risen for producing large-scale flexible conductors and for its potential to open an electronic gap in graphene structures. We report on a means to tune the topographical and electrical properties of graphene-based materials with nanoscopic resolution by local thermal reduction of GO with a nano-size tip. The reduced GO nanostructures show an increase in conductivity up to four orders of magnitude as compared to pristine GO. No sign of tip wear or sample tearing was observed. Variably conductive nanoribbons with dimensions down to 12 nm have been produced in oxidized epitaxial graphene films in a single step that is clean, rapid and reliable

A quantum Monte Carlo study of the one-dimensional ionic Hubbard model

Quantum Monte Carlo methods are used to study a quantum phase transition in a 1D Hubbard model with a staggered ionic potential (D). Using recently formulated methods, the electronic polarization and localization are determined directly from the correlated ground state wavefunction and compared to results of previous work using exact diagonalization and Hartree-Fock. We find that the model undergoes a thermodynamic transition from a band insulator (BI) to a broken-symmetry bond ordered (BO) phase as the ratio of U/D is increased. Since it is known that at D = 0 the usual Hubbard model is a Mott insulator (MI) with no long-range order, we have searched for a second transition to this state by (i) increasing U at fixed ionic potential (D) and (ii) decreasing D at fixed U. We find no transition from the BO to MI state, and we propose that the MI state in 1D is unstable to bond ordering under the addition of any finite ionic potential. In real 1D systems the symmetric MI phase is never stable and the transition is from a symmetric BI phase to a dimerized BO phase, with a metallic point at the transition

Seasonal acclimatization to temperature in cardueline finches

1. Seasonal variation in body constituents and utilization of lipid, protein, and carbohydrate during cold stress in American goldfinches were studied to determine relations of these functions to the pronounced seasonal shift in thermogenic capacity documented in a previous study (Dawson and Carey, 1976).Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47119/1/360_2004_Article_BF00686746.pd