Learning to Live With Wolves: Community-based Conservation in the Blackfoot Valley of Montana

We built on the existing capacity of a nongovernmental organization called the Blackfoot Challenge to proactively address wolf (Canis lupus)-livestock conflicts in the Blackfoot Valley of Montana. Beginning in 2007, wolves started rapidly recolonizing the valley, raising concerns among livestock producers. We built on an existing program to mitigate conflicts associated with an expanding grizzly bear population and worked within the community to build a similar program to reduce wolf conflicts using an integrative, multi-method approach. Efforts to engage the community included one-on-one meetings, workshops, field tours, and regular group meetings as well as opportunities to participate in data collection and projects. Initial projects included permanent electric fencing of calving areas and livestock carcass removal to address the threat of grizzly bears and, later, wolves. Subsequently we used intensive livestock and wolf monitoring through range riders in an attempt to reduce the frequency of encounter rates among wolves and livestock. Although we cannot claim causation from our efforts, results are encouraging. Confirmed livestock losses to wolves from 2006-2015 have been 2.2 confirmed depredations per year across nearly 50 ranches on about 3,240 km2 that are annually grazed by 16,000-18,000 head of livestock. Fewer than three wolves per year have been removed (2.4 wolves per year) due to these depredations for the same period as the population increased from one confirmed pack to approximately twelve. Our collaborative approach and prior experience with grizzly bears was key in building a proactive program to help reduce conflict with wolves in a community adjusting to an increasing large carnivore presence over a short period

A Dielectric Superfluid of Polar Molecules

We show that, under achievable experimental conditions, a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of polar molecules can exhibit dielectric character. In particular, we derive a set of self-consistent mean-field equations that couple the condensate density to its electric dipole field, leading to the emergence of polarization modes that are coupled to the rich quasiparticle spectrum of the condensate. While the usual roton instability is suppressed in this system, the coupling can give rise to a phonon-like instability that is characteristic of a dielectric material with a negative static dielectric function.Comment: Version published in New Journal of Physics, 11+ pages, 4 figure

Evaluating Preference and Rate of Gambling on Vedio Slot Machines

Casinos increasingly are providing access to five-reel video slot machines and as a result are decreasing the use of traditional three-reel slot machines. Limited research has been conducted on the characteristics of play associated with video slot machines. The present study examined participant’s play on a five-reel video slot machine, comparing the number of trials played while wagering one credit on five lines versus five credits on one line. After participants were exposed to both conditions they were asked to choose their preferred condition. The results found that participants played significantly more trials while playing during the five credits on one line setting. The results also found that 12 out of 16 participants selected to play on the five lines on one credit setting when given the option to choose the settings of the slot machine

VectorBase: improvements to a bioinformatics resource for invertebrate vector genomics.

VectorBase (http://www.vectorbase.org) is a NIAID-supported bioinformatics resource for invertebrate vectors of human pathogens. It hosts data for nine genomes: mosquitoes (three Anopheles gambiae genomes, Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus), tick (Ixodes scapularis), body louse (Pediculus humanus), kissing bug (Rhodnius prolixus) and tsetse fly (Glossina morsitans). Hosted data range from genomic features and expression data to population genetics and ontologies. We describe improvements and integration of new data that expand our taxonomic coverage. Releases are bi-monthly and include the delivery of preliminary data for emerging genomes. Frequent updates of the genome browser provide VectorBase users with increasing options for visualizing their own high-throughput data. One major development is a new population biology resource for storing genomic variations, insecticide resistance data and their associated metadata. It takes advantage of improved ontologies and controlled vocabularies. Combined, these new features ensure timely release of multiple types of data in the public domain while helping overcome the bottlenecks of bioinformatics and annotation by engaging with our user community

Effects of Contact Interactions in Molecular Bose-Einstein Condensates

We investigate the ground state and low-lying excitations of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of dipolar molecules interacting via short-range contact and long-range dipole­ dipole interactions (ddi). We find the mean field ground state via the variational principle using a separable bosonic wave function as the variational state. This state can be refined to include small excitations in the form of plane waves, and the results of the variational calculation are a set of dispersion relations for the low-lying excitations. We analyze the polarization and stability of the ground state as a function of the strength of the external polarizing electric field, the strength of the ddi, and the strength of the contact interactions. In a certain parameter regime of strong contact interactions that oppose the dipole -dipole interactions, we identify a possible signature of a first -order phase transition: the polarization of the gas discontinuously flips as the electric field is continuously ramped through zero field. By examining the dispersion relations, we find that the ground state in this parameter regime is unstable

The Wyoming Survey for H-alpha. I. Initial Results at z ~ 0.16 and 0.24

The Wyoming Survey for H-alpha, or WySH, is a large-area, ground-based, narrowband imaging survey for H-alpha-emitting galaxies over the latter half of the age of the Universe. The survey spans several square degrees in a set of fields of low Galactic cirrus emission. The observing program focuses on multiple dz~0.02 epochs from z~0.16 to z~0.81 down to a uniform (continuum+line) luminosity at each epoch of ~10^33 W uncorrected for extinction (3sigma for a 3" diameter aperture). First results are presented here for 98+208 galaxies observed over approximately 2 square degrees at redshifts z~0.16 and 0.24, including preliminary luminosity functions at these two epochs. These data clearly show an evolution with lookback time in the volume-averaged cosmic star formation rate. Integrals of Schechter fits to the extinction-corrected H-alpha luminosity functions indicate star formation rates per co-moving volume of 0.009 and 0.014 h_70 M_sun/yr/Mpc^3 at z~0.16 and 0.24, respectively. The formal uncertainties in the Schechter fits, based on this initial subset of the survey, correspond to uncertainties in the cosmic star formation rate density at the >~40% level; the tentative uncertainty due to cosmic variance is 25%, estimated from separately carrying out the analysis on data from the first two fields with substantial datasets.Comment: To appear in the Astronomical Journa