Blocking of word-boundary consonant lengthening in Sienese Italian

This paper examines an aspect of Raddoppiamento sintattico (RS), the lengthening of word-initial consonants following certain words e.g. tre [mm]ele ‘three apples’ in Italian. Most phonological accounts claim the phenomenon is predictable and obligatory (e.g. Nespor & Vogel 1986). However, descriptive sources on Italian (e.g. Camilli 1941) have long claimed that RS interacts with and can be blocked by other phenomena operative in natural speech e.g. pausing. In this paper we outline the phonetic details of the RS blocking phenomena and present the results of an auditory and preliminary acoustic analysis of the interaction between RS and these other phenomena based on a corpus of spontaneous speech data

Understanding radionuclide migration from the D1225 Shaft, Dounreay, Caithness, UK

A 65 m vertical shaft was sunk at Dounreay in the 1950s to build a tunnel for the offshore discharge of radioactive effluent from the various nuclear facilities then under construction. In 1959, the Shaft was licensed as a disposal facility for radioactive wastes and was routinely used for the disposal of ILW until 1970. Despite the operation of a hydraulic containment scheme, some radioactivity is known to have leaked into the surrounding rocks. Detailed logging, together with mineralogical and radiochemical analysis of drillcore has revealed four distinct bedding-parallel zones of contamination. The data show that Sr-90 dominates the bulk beta/gamma contamination signal, whereas Cs-137 and Pu-248/249 are found only to be weakly mobile, leading to very low activities and distinct clustering around the Shaft. The data also suggest that all uranium seen in the geosphere is natural in origin. At the smaller scale, contamination adjacent to fracture surfaces is present within a zone of enhanced porosity created by the dissolution of carbonate cements from the Caithness flagstones during long-term rockwater interactions. Quantitative modelling of radionuclide migration, using the multiphysics computer code QPAC shows the importance of different sorption mechanisms and different mineralogical substrates in the Caithnesss flagstones in controlling radionuclide migration

Apple pollination investigations

Publication authorized March 18, 1930.Includes bibliographical references (pages 35-36)

The Extreme Small Scales: Do Satellite Galaxies Trace Dark Matter?

We investigate the radial distribution of galaxies within their host dark matter halos by modeling their small-scale clustering, as measured in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Specifically, we model the Jiang et al. (2011) measurements of the galaxy two-point correlation function down to very small projected separations (10 < r < 400 kpc/h), in a wide range of luminosity threshold samples (absolute r-band magnitudes of -18 up to -23). We use a halo occupation distribution (HOD) framework with free parameters that specify both the number and spatial distribution of galaxies within their host dark matter halos. We assume that the first galaxy in each halo lives at the halo center and that additional satellite galaxies follow a radial density profile similar to the dark matter Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) profile, except that the concentration and inner slope are allowed to vary. We find that in low luminosity samples, satellite galaxies have radial profiles that are consistent with NFW. M_r < -20 and brighter satellite galaxies have radial profiles with significantly steeper inner slopes than NFW (we find inner logarithmic slopes ranging from -1.6 to -2.1, as opposed to -1 for NFW). We define a useful metric of concentration, M_(1/10), which is the fraction of satellite galaxies (or mass) that are enclosed within one tenth of the virial radius of a halo. We find that M_(1/10) for low luminosity satellite galaxies agrees with NFW, whereas for luminous galaxies it is 2.5-4 times higher, demonstrating that these galaxies are substantially more centrally concentrated within their dark matter halos than the dark matter itself. Our results therefore suggest that the processes that govern the spatial distribution of galaxies, once they have merged into larger halos, must be luminosity dependent, such that luminous galaxies become poor tracers of the underlying dark matter.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, Accepted to Ap

Dark matter halos and the anisotropy of ultra-high energy cosmic rays

Several explanations for the existence of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays invoke the idea that they originate from the decay of massive particles created in the reheating following inflation. It has been suggested that the decay products can explain the observed isotropic flux of cosmic rays. We have calculated the anisotropy expected for various models of the dark matter distribution and find that at present data are too sparse above $4 \times 10^{19}$ eV to discriminate between different models. However we show that with data from three years of operation of the southern section of the Pierre Auger Observatory significant progress in testing the proposals will be made.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures (ps), Astroparticle Physics (accepted for publication