Early Development of Transplanted Isidioid Soredia of Lobaria Pulmonaria in an Endangered Population

Vegetative diaspores of Lobaria pulmonaria were transplanted to previously uncolonized trees. The early development of the corticated but otherwise non-stratified isidioid soredia was studied mainly by low-temperature scanning electron microscopy. Anchoring hyphae developed from cortical hyphae after 2-4 months and later apical or lateral pseudomeristematic growth zones were formed. After 15 months the growth zones further differentiated into 0·5-mm-broad lobes and revealed a stratified thallus typical for this foliose epiphytic lichen species. The experiment showed that the small population size of L. pulmonaria was limited by the low reproductive potential of the species and that it might fail to compensate for a relatively high disturbance, natural or anthropogenic, in the stan

FISH: A 3D parallel MHD code for astrophysical applications

FISH is a fast and simple ideal magneto-hydrodynamics code that scales to ~10 000 processes for a Cartesian computational domain of ~1000^3 cells. The simplicity of FISH has been achieved by the rigorous application of the operator splitting technique, while second order accuracy is maintained by the symmetric ordering of the operators. Between directional sweeps, the three-dimensional data is rotated in memory so that the sweep is always performed in a cache-efficient way along the direction of contiguous memory. Hence, the code only requires a one-dimensional description of the conservation equations to be solved. This approach also enable an elegant novel parallelisation of the code that is based on persistent communications with MPI for cubic domain decomposition on machines with distributed memory. This scheme is then combined with an additional OpenMP parallelisation of different sweeps that can take advantage of clusters of shared memory. We document the detailed implementation of a second order TVD advection scheme based on flux reconstruction. The magnetic fields are evolved by a constrained transport scheme. We show that the subtraction of a simple estimate of the hydrostatic gradient from the total gradients can significantly reduce the dissipation of the advection scheme in simulations of gravitationally bound hydrostatic objects. Through its simplicity and efficiency, FISH is as well-suited for hydrodynamics classes as for large-scale astrophysical simulations on high-performance computer clusters. In preparation for the release of a public version, we demonstrate the performance of FISH in a suite of astrophysically orientated test cases.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figure

Evolutionary Trends in the Physciaceae

The current delimitation of the family Physciaceae has been generally accepted since detailed descriptions of ascus characters allowed for a more natural circumscription of lichenized ascomycetes. The generic relations within the family are, however, still controversial and depend on the importance different authors attribute to specific morphological or chemical characteristics. The aim of this paper is to describe ascospore ontogeny and to test the present taxonomic structure of the family against a parsimony-based cladistic analysis, which includes three different scenarios of a priori character weighting. A study of ascospore ontogeny revealed two distinct developmental lines. One line revealed a delayed septum formation, which clearly showed transitions from spores with apical and median thickenings to spores without apical, but still well developed median thickenings, and to spores without any thickenings. In the second developmental line with an early septum formation again taxa with no thickenings, median thickenings, and both median and apical thickenings were found. Although these characters were constant at a species level, median wall thickenings especially varied among otherwise closely related taxa. In the cladistic analyses the current taxonomic structure of the Physciaceae was only obtained after the five character groups, namely morphology and anatomy of the vegetative thallus, conidiomata and conidia, morphology and anatomy of the apothecia, ontogeny of the ascospores, and secondary metabolites of the thallus, were given equal importance, and after a subjective a priori weighting further increased the weight of the three characters ‘conidial shape', ‘presence of apical thickenings', and ‘spore septation delayed'. This structure was not supported by a cladistic analysis with equally weighted characters but reflected the biased character weighting of the present day Physdaceae taxonomy. The taxonomic importance of conidial characters and of anatomical and ontogenetical spore characteristics need, therefore, a careful reconsideration in futur

Fellhanera gyrophorica, a new European species with conspicuous pycnidia

Fellhanera gyrophorica Sérus., Coppins, Diederich & Scheidegger is described as new from Europe Austria, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Switzerland and Ukraine. It is a sterile corticolous species with conspicuous and sometimes shortly stalked pycnidia whose outer walls produce gyrophoric acid. Its position in the genus Fellhanera (Pilocarpaceae) is tentative and further studies may necessitate its transfer to another genu

Representing and analyzing temporal complexity in children's story books

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-82).In this thesis, the temporal complexity in children's stories is analyzed to better understand the development of children's perception of time. The temporal complexity increases both in greater deviations from a chronological presentation of events, as well as an increase in the different kinds of temporal relations between events. Tools to analyze and display the temporal complexity were developed and are used to demonstrate an increase in temporal complexity as the grade level increases. The results from this were then used to determine the appropriate reading material for a given grade of sample stories. Unlike the normal assessments methods, that use only the word and sentence complexity, this thesis takes into account both the the semantic contents of the story and the cognitive ability of the child.by Madleina C. Scheidegger.M.Eng

Gravitational waves from supernova matter

We have performed a set of 11 three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical core collapse supernova simulations in order to investigate the dependencies of the gravitational wave signal on the progenitor's initial conditions. We study the effects of the initial central angular velocity and different variants of neutrino transport. Our models are started up from a 15 solar mass progenitor and incorporate an effective general relativistic gravitational potential and a finite temperature nuclear equation of state. Furthermore, the electron flavour neutrino transport is tracked by efficient algorithms for the radiative transfer of massless fermions. We find that non- and slowly rotating models show gravitational wave emission due to prompt- and lepton driven convection that reveals details about the hydrodynamical state of the fluid inside the protoneutron stars. Furthermore we show that protoneutron stars can become dynamically unstable to rotational instabilities at T/|W| values as low as ~2 % at core bounce. We point out that the inclusion of deleptonization during the postbounce phase is very important for the quantitative GW prediction, as it enhances the absolute values of the gravitational wave trains up to a factor of ten with respect to a lepton-conserving treatment.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, accepted, to be published in a Classical and Quantum Gravity special issue for MICRA200

Interface Equations for Capillary Rise in Random Environment

We consider the influence of quenched noise upon interface dynamics in 2D and 3D capillary rise with rough walls by using phase-field approach, where the local conservation of mass in the bulk is explicitly included. In the 2D case the disorder is assumed to be in the effective mobility coefficient, while in the 3D case we explicitly consider the influence of locally fluctuating geometry along a solid wall using a generalized curvilinear coordinate transformation. To obtain the equations of motion for meniscus and contact lines, we develop a systematic projection formalism which allows inclusion of disorder. Using this formalism, we derive linearized equations of motion for the meniscus and contact line variables, which become local in the Fourier space representation. These dispersion relations contain effective noise that is linearly proportional to the velocity. The deterministic parts of our dispersion relations agree with results obtained from other similar studies in the proper limits. However, the forms of the noise terms derived here are quantitatively different from the other studies

On D0-branes in Gepner models

We show why and when D0-branes at the Gepner point of Calabi-Yau manifolds given as Fermat hypersurfaces exist.Comment: 22 pages, substantial improvements in sections 2 and 3, references added, version to be publishe