408 research outputs found
Trade-offs, condition dependence and stopover site selection by migrating sandpipers
Western sandpipers Calidris mauri on southward migration fly over the Gulf of Alaska to the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, where they stop for a few days to replenish reserves before continuing. In the Strait, individuals captured on the extensive tidal mudflats of the Fraser estuary (∼25000 ha) are significantly heavier (2.71 g, or >10% of lean body mass) than those captured on the small (<100 ha) mudflat of nearby Sidney Island. Previous work has shown that the difference cannot be attributed to seasonal timing, size, age or gender effects, and here we compare predictions made by six hypotheses about a diverse set of data to explain why, partway through a migratory journey of ∼10000 km, birds have such different body masses at two stopover sites within 40 km of each other. The ‘trade-off’ hypothesis – that the large Fraser estuary offers safety from predators, but a lower fattening rate, while the small Sidney Island site is more dangerous, but offers a higher fattening rate – made six successful predictions, all of which were upheld by the data. All other hypotheses failed at least one prediction. We infer that calidrid sandpipers arriving in the Strait of Georgia with little fat remaining (and therefore low body mass) choose to take advantage of the high feeding rate at small sites like Sidney Island because they are less vulnerable to avian predators than are individuals with higher fat reserves, who instead elect to feed at large open sites like the Fraser estuary mudflats
Construction of alkyl-substituted pentaphosphido ligands in the coordination sphere of cobalt
Parallelisable Heterotic Backgrounds
We classify the simply-connected supersymmetric parallelisable backgrounds of
heterotic supergravity. They are all given by parallelised Lie groups admitting
a bi-invariant lorentzian metric. We find examples preserving 4, 8, 10, 12, 14
and 16 of the 16 supersymmetries.Comment: 17 pages, AMSLaTe
Singular open book structures from real mappings
We prove extensions of Milnor's theorem for germs with nonisolated
singularity and use them to find new classes of genuine real analytic mappings
with positive dimensional singular locus \Sing \psi \subset
\psi^{-1}(0), for which the Milnor fibration exists and yields an open book
structure with singular binding.Comment: more remark
Subtyping sub-Saharan esophageal squamous cell carcinoma by comprehensive molecular analysis
Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is endemic in regions of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where it is the third most common cancer. Here, we describe whole-exome tumor/normal sequencing and RNA transcriptomic analysis of 59 patients with ESCC in Malawi. We observed similar genetic aberrations as reported in Asian and North American cohorts, including mutations of TP53, CDKN2A, NFE2L2, CHEK2, NOTCH1, FAT1, and FBXW7. Analyses for nonhuman sequences did not reveal evidence for infection with HPV or other occult pathogens. Mutational signature analysis revealed common signatures associated with aging, cytidine deaminase activity (APOBEC), and a third signature of unknown origin, but signatures of inhaled tobacco use, aflatoxin and mismatch repair were notably absent. Based on RNA expression analysis, ESCC could be divided into 3 distinct subtypes, which were distinguished by their expression of cell cycle and neural transcripts. This study demonstrates discrete subtypes of ESCC in SSA, and suggests that the endemic nature of this disease reflects exposure to a carcinogen other than tobacco and oncogenic viruses
A probabilistic model for gene content evolution with duplication, loss, and horizontal transfer
We introduce a Markov model for the evolution of a gene family along a
phylogeny. The model includes parameters for the rates of horizontal gene
transfer, gene duplication, and gene loss, in addition to branch lengths in the
phylogeny. The likelihood for the changes in the size of a gene family across
different organisms can be calculated in O(N+hM^2) time and O(N+M^2) space,
where N is the number of organisms, is the height of the phylogeny, and M
is the sum of family sizes. We apply the model to the evolution of gene content
in Preoteobacteria using the gene families in the COG (Clusters of Orthologous
Groups) database
De Sitter and Schwarzschild-De Sitter According to Schwarzschild and De Sitter
When de Sitter first introduced his celebrated spacetime, he claimed,
following Schwarzschild, that its spatial sections have the topology of the
real projective space RP^3 (that is, the topology of the group manifold SO(3))
rather than, as is almost universally assumed today, that of the sphere S^3.
(In modern language, Schwarzschild was disturbed by the non-local correlations
enforced by S^3 geometry.) Thus, what we today call "de Sitter space" would not
have been accepted as such by de Sitter. There is no real basis within
classical cosmology for preferring S^3 to RP^3, but the general feeling appears
to be that the distinction is in any case of little importance. We wish to
argue that, in the light of current concerns about the nature of de Sitter
space, this is a mistake. In particular, we argue that the difference between
"dS(S^3)" and "dS(RP^3)" may be very important in attacking the problem of
understanding horizon entropies. In the approach to de Sitter entropy via
Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime, we find that the apparently trivial
difference between RP^3 and S^3 actually leads to very different perspectives
on this major question of quantum cosmology.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, typos fixed, references added, equation numbers
finally fixed, JHEP versio
Tensor network states and geometry
Tensor network states are used to approximate ground states of local
Hamiltonians on a lattice in D spatial dimensions. Different types of tensor
network states can be seen to generate different geometries. Matrix product
states (MPS) in D=1 dimensions, as well as projected entangled pair states
(PEPS) in D>1 dimensions, reproduce the D-dimensional physical geometry of the
lattice model; in contrast, the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz
(MERA) generates a (D+1)-dimensional holographic geometry. Here we focus on
homogeneous tensor networks, where all the tensors in the network are copies of
the same tensor, and argue that certain structural properties of the resulting
many-body states are preconditioned by the geometry of the tensor network and
are therefore largely independent of the choice of variational parameters.
Indeed, the asymptotic decay of correlations in homogeneous MPS and MERA for
D=1 systems is seen to be determined by the structure of geodesics in the
physical and holographic geometries, respectively; whereas the asymptotic
scaling of entanglement entropy is seen to always obey a simple boundary law --
that is, again in the relevant geometry. This geometrical interpretation offers
a simple and unifying framework to understand the structural properties of, and
helps clarify the relation between, different tensor network states. In
addition, it has recently motivated the branching MERA, a generalization of the
MERA capable of reproducing violations of the entropic boundary law in D>1
dimensions.Comment: 18 pages, 18 figure
Fitting the integrated Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies
Fitting the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies is an almost
universally used technique that has matured significantly in the last decade.
Model predictions and fitting procedures have improved significantly over this
time, attempting to keep up with the vastly increased volume and quality of
available data. We review here the field of SED fitting, describing the
modelling of ultraviolet to infrared galaxy SEDs, the creation of
multiwavelength data sets, and the methods used to fit model SEDs to observed
galaxy data sets. We touch upon the achievements and challenges in the major
ingredients of SED fitting, with a special emphasis on describing the interplay
between the quality of the available data, the quality of the available models,
and the best fitting technique to use in order to obtain a realistic
measurement as well as realistic uncertainties. We conclude that SED fitting
can be used effectively to derive a range of physical properties of galaxies,
such as redshift, stellar masses, star formation rates, dust masses, and
metallicities, with care taken not to over-interpret the available data. Yet
there still exist many issues such as estimating the age of the oldest stars in
a galaxy, finer details ofdust properties and dust-star geometry, and the
influences of poorly understood, luminous stellar types and phases. The
challenge for the coming years will be to improve both the models and the
observational data sets to resolve these uncertainties. The present review will
be made available on an interactive, moderated web page (sedfitting.org), where
the community can access and change the text. The intention is to expand the
text and keep it up to date over the coming years.Comment: 54 pages, 26 figures, Accepted for publication in Astrophysics &
Space Scienc
Observation of hard scattering in photoproduction events with a large rapidity gap at HERA
Events with a large rapidity gap and total transverse energy greater than 5
GeV have been observed in quasi-real photoproduction at HERA with the ZEUS
detector. The distribution of these events as a function of the
centre of mass energy is consistent with diffractive scattering. For total
transverse energies above 12 GeV, the hadronic final states show predominantly
a two-jet structure with each jet having a transverse energy greater than 4
GeV. For the two-jet events, little energy flow is found outside the jets. This
observation is consistent with the hard scattering of a quasi-real photon with
a colourless object in the proton.Comment: 19 pages, latex, 4 figures appended as uuencoded fil
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