27,208 research outputs found
Knowledge discovery from mining the association between H5N1 outbreaks and environmental factors
The global spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 in poultry, wild birds and humans, poses a significant panzootic threat and a serious public health risk. An efficient surveillance and disease control system requires a deep understanding of their spread mechanisms, including environmental factors responsible for the outbreak of the disease. Previous studies suggested that H5N1 viruses occurred under specific environmental circumstances in Asia and Africa. These studies were mainly derived from poultry outbreaks. In Europe, a large number of wild bird outbreaks were reported in west Europe with few or no poultry infections nearby. This distinct outbreak pattern in relation to environmental characteristics, however, has not yet been explored. This research demonstrated the use of logistic regression analyses to examine quantitative associations between anthropogenic and physical environmental factors, and the wild bird H5N1outbreaks in Europe. A geographic information system is used to visualize and analyze the data. Our results indicate that the H5N1 outbreaks occur in wild birds in Europe under predictable environmental conditions, which are highly correlated with increased NDVI in December, decreased aspect and slope, increased minimum temperature in October and decreased precipitation in January. It suggests that H5N1 outbreaks in wild birds are strongly influenced by food resource availability and facilitated by the increased temperature and the decreased precipitation. We therefore deduce that the H5N1 outbreaks in wild birds in Europe may be mainly caused by contact with wild birds. These findings are of great importance for global surveillance of H5N1 outbreaks in wild birds
On the afterglow from the receding jet of gamma-ray burst
According to popular progenitor models of gamma-ray bursts, twin jets should
be launched by the central engine, with a forward jet moving toward the
observer and a receding jet (or the counter jet) moving backwardly. However, in
calculating the afterglows, usually only the emission from the forward jet is
considered. Here we present a detailed numerical study on the afterglow from
the receding jet. Our calculation is based on a generic dynamical description,
and includes some delicate ingredients such as the effect of the equal arrival
time surface. It is found that the emission from the receding jet is generally
rather weak. In radio bands, it usually peaks at a time of d,
with the peak flux nearly 4 orders of magnitude lower than the peak flux of the
forward jet. Also, it usually manifests as a short plateau in the total
afterglow light curve, but not as an obvious rebrightening as once expected. In
optical bands, the contribution from the receding jet is even weaker, with the
peak flux being orders of magnitude lower than the peak flux of the
forward jet. We thus argue that the emission from the receding jet is very
difficult to detect. However, in some special cases, i.e., when the
circum-burst medium density is very high, or if the parameters of the receding
jet is quite different from those of the forward jet, the emission from the
receding jet can be significantly enhanced and may still emerge as a marked
rebrightening. We suggest that the search for receding jet emission should
mostly concentrate on nearby gamma-ray bursts, and the observation campaign
should last for at least several hundred days for each event.Comment: A few citations added, together with a few minor revisions, main
conclusions unchanged, accepted for publication in A&A, 7 figures, 10 Page
Exact Moderate Deviation Asymptotics in Streaming Data Transmission
In this paper, a streaming transmission setup is considered where an encoder
observes a new message in the beginning of each block and a decoder
sequentially decodes each message after a delay of blocks. In this
streaming setup, the fundamental interplay between the coding rate, the error
probability, and the blocklength in the moderate deviations regime is studied.
For output symmetric channels, the moderate deviations constant is shown to
improve over the block coding or non-streaming setup by exactly a factor of
for a certain range of moderate deviations scalings. For the converse proof, a
more powerful decoder to which some extra information is fedforward is assumed.
The error probability is bounded first for an auxiliary channel and this result
is translated back to the original channel by using a newly developed
change-of-measure lemma, where the speed of decay of the remainder term in the
exponent is carefully characterized. For the achievability proof, a known
coding technique that involves a joint encoding and decoding of fresh and past
messages is applied with some manipulations in the error analysis.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on
Information Theor
Generalized momenta of mass and their applications to the flow of compressible fluid
We present a technique that allows to obtain certain results in the
compressible fluid theory: in particular, it is a nonexistence result for the
highly decreasing at infinity solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations, the
construction of the solutions with uniform deformation and the study of
behavior of the boundary of a material volume of liquid.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the International Conference on Hyperbolic
Problems, Lyon, 2006, France. In pres
Fermi surface and antiferromagnetism in the Kondo lattice: an asymptotically exact solution in d>1 Dimensions
Interest in the heavy fermion metals has motivated us to examine the quantum
phases and their Fermi surfaces within the Kondo lattice model. We demonstrate
that the model is soluble asymptotically exactly in any dimension d>1, when the
Kondo coupling is small compared with the RKKY interaction and in the presence
of antiferromagnetic ordering. We show that the Kondo coupling is exactly
marginal in the renormalization group sense, establishing the stability of an
ordered phase with a small Fermi surface, AFs. Our results have implications
for the global phase diagram of the heavy fermion metals, suggesting a Lifshitz
transition inside the antiferromagnetic region and providing a new perspective
for a Kondo-destroying antiferromagnetic quantum critical point.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; (v2) corrected typos and added
reference/acknowledgment; (v3) version as published in Physical Review
Letters (July, 2007
Magnetic spin moment reduction in photoexcited ferromagnets through exchange interaction quenching: Beyond the rigid band approximation
The exchange interaction among electrons is one of the most fundamental
quantum mechanical interactions in nature and underlies any magnetic phenomena
from ferromagnetic ordering to magnetic storage. The current technology is
built upon a thermal or magnetic field, but a frontier is emerging to directly
control magnetism using ultrashort laser pulses. However, little is known about
the fate of the exchange interaction. Here we report unambiguously that
photoexcitation is capable of quenching the exchange interaction in all three
ferromagnetic metals. The entire process starts with a small number of
photoexcited electrons which build up a new and self-destructive potential that
collapses the system into a new state with a reduced exchange splitting. The
spin moment reduction follows a Bloch-like law as , where is
the absorbed photon energy and is a scaling exponent. A good agreement
is found between the experimental and our theoretical results. Our findings may
have a broader implication for dynamic electron correlation effects in
laser-excited iron-based superconductors, iron borate, rare-earth
orthoferrites, hematites and rare-earth transition metal alloys.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, one supplementary material fil
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