Quantum Black Holes as the Link Between Microphysics and Macrophysics

There appears to be a duality between elementary particles, which span the mass range below the Planck scale, and black holes, which span the mass range range above it. In particular, the Black Hole Uncertainty Principle Correspondence posits a smooth transition between the Compton and Schwarzschild scales as a function of mass. This suggests that all black holes are in some sense quantum, that elementary particles can be interpreted as sub-Planckian black holes, and that there is a subtle connection between quantum and classical physics.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 2015 Karl Schwarzschild Meeting on Gravitational Physics, eds. P. Nicolini, J. Mureika, M. Kaminski and M. Bleiche

Histological Assessment Of The Lobster (Homarus Americanus) In The 100 Lobsters Project

The emergence of epizootic shell disease in the American lobster (Homarus americanus) has been devastating to the industry in the coastal waters of southern New England. A comprehensive assessment of the disease syndrome, known as the 100 Lobsters Project, was initiated to examine health and physiological parameters among laboratories involved in the research on lobster shell disease. A histological study of the 100 lobsters was undertaken as part of that assessment. Tissues from 90 lobsters from Rhode Island and 19 lobsters from Maine were examined as a general health assessment of the 100 lobsters. Approximately half the lobsters from Rhode Island were selected because they had frank epizootic shell disease, whereas none of the lobsters from Maine exhibited the syndrome. In addition to epizootic shell disease, the histological findings revealed 3 other idiopathic syndromes-necrotizing hepatopancreatitis, idiopathic blindness, and nonspecific granulomas-in higher prevalences in lobsters from Rhode Island compared with those from Maine. Necrotizing hepatopancreatitis, a newly described disease syndrome in lobsters, was observed in 15% of the lobsters from Rhode Island. Idiopathic blindness was present in 54% of the lobsters from Rhode Island, and 16% of the animals from Maine. This is the first report of the syndrome in lobsters from Maine. None of the idiopathic syndromes was associated with epizootic shell disease. The detection of multiple disease syndromes such as epizootic shell disease, necrotizing hepatopancreatitis, and idiopathic blindness may be indicative of exposure to environmental stressors in Narragansett Bay, RI

The 100 Lobsters Project: A Cooperative Demonstration Project For Health Assessments Of Lobsters From Rhode Island

The emergence of epizootic shell disease in the American lobster (Homarus americanus) has been devastating to the fishing industry in southern New England. In response, research was initiated to understand the roles of the environment, pathogens, and pollutants in the ecology and etiology of the disease. A comprehensive project was initiated in which tissues and hemolymph from 100 lobsters were collected from an endemic area of disease, Narragansett Bay, RI. The project has moved forward with the purpose of compiling, synthesizing, and propagating the findings from the 100 Lobsters Project. The resulting tissue bank and Web-based data repository and instructional tools serve as a nascent demonstration project to both the scientific community working on this disease as well as to members of the lobster industry

Drawing quantum contextuality with 'dessins d'enfants'

The Frontiers Collection: "It from Bit orBit from It", ed. by A. Aguirre, B. Foster, Z. Meralli (Springer, 2014), pp 37-50International audienceIn the standard formulation of quantum mechanics, there exists an inherent feedback of the measurement setting on the elementary object under scrutiny. Thus one cannot assume that an 'element of reality' prexists to the measurement and, it is even more intriguing that unperformed/counterfactual observables enter the game. This is called quantum contextuality. Simple finite projective geometries are a good way to picture the commutation relations of quantum observables entering the context, at least for systems with two or three parties. In the essay, it is further discovered a mathematical mechanism for 'drawing' the contexts. The so-called 'dessins d'enfants' of the celebrated mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck feature group, graph, topological, geometric and algebraic properties of the quantum contexts that would otherwise have been 'hidden' in the apparent randomness of measurement outcomes

An inhomogeneous toy-model of the quantum gravity with explicitly evolvable observables

An inhomogeneous (1+1)-dimensional model of the quantum gravity is considered. It is found, that this model corresponds to a string propagating against some curved background space. The quantization scheme including the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and the "particle on a sphere" type of the gauge condition is suggested. In the quantization scheme considered, the "problem of time" is solved by building of the quasi-Heisenberg operators acting in a space of solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and the normalization of the wave function corresponds to the Klein-Gordon type. To analyze the physical consequences of the scheme, a (1+1)-dimensional background space is considered for which a classical solution is found and quantized. The obtained estimations show the way to solution of the cosmological constant problem, which consists in compensation of the zero-point oscillations of the matter fields by the quantum oscillations of the scale factor. Along with such a compensation, a slow global evolution of a background corresponding to an universe expansion exists.Comment: 18 page

Mitochondrial phylogeography and demographic history of the Vicuña: implications for conservation

The vicuña (Vicugna vicugna; Miller, 1924) is a conservation success story, having recovered from near extinction in the 1960s to current population levels estimated at 275 000. However, lack of information about its demographic history and genetic diversity has limited both our understanding of its recovery and the development of science-based conservation measures. To examine the evolution and recent demographic history of the vicuña across its current range and to assess its genetic variation and population structure, we sequenced mitochondrial DNA from the control region (CR) for 261 individuals from 29 populations across Peru, Chile and Argentina. Our results suggest that populations currently designated as Vicugna vicugna vicugna and Vicugna vicugna mensalis comprise separate mitochondrial lineages. The current population distribution appears to be the result of a recent demographic expansion associated with the last major glacial event of the Pleistocene in the northern (18 to 22°S) dry Andes 14–12 000 years ago and the establishment of an extremely arid belt known as the 'Dry Diagonal' to 29°S. Within the Dry Diagonal, small populations of V. v. vicugna appear to have survived showing the genetic signature of demographic isolation, whereas to the north V. v. mensalis populations underwent a rapid demographic expansion before recent anthropogenic impacts

Naturalizing Dasein and other (Alleged) Heresies

First paragraph: To my mind, being wrong is nowhere near as disheartening as being boring, so I am encouraged by the fact that, in the four chapters immediately preceding this one, four thinkers for whom I have nothing but the utmost intellectual respect have found my ongoing project to articulate the philosophical groundwork for a genuinely Heideggerian cognitive science interesting enough that they have taken the trouble to explain precisely why it is flawed. Just how deep the supposed flaws go depends on which set of criticisms one chooses to read. For Ratcliffe and Rehberg they go very deep indeed, since, for these thinkers, there is a sense in which the very idea of a Heideggerian cognitive science borders on the incoherent. Dreyfus and Rietveld, on the other hand, seem to agree with me that something worth calling a Heideggerian cognitive science is certainly possible; it's just that my version of it is seriously defective

The Influence of Water on the Strength of Olivine Dislocation Slip Systems

The nature of lattice‐preferred orientation (LPO) in olivine‐rich rocks strongly influences many important physical properties of Earth's upper mantle. Different LPO types have been observed to develop in deformation experiments on olivine‐rich rocks carried out at different water fugacity conditions. The development of the different LPO types has been attributed to dislocation slip systems in olivine having different sensitivities to water fugacity, but this hypothesis has not been directly tested. To measure the influence of water fugacity on the relative strengths of olivine dislocation slip systems, we carried out a series of deformation experiments on olivine single crystals under either anhydrous or hydrous conditions. The crystals were oriented to activate either the (010)[100], (001)[100], or (100)[001] dislocation slip systems using a direct shear geometry, which allows for isolation of single slip systems, in contrast to the multiple systems activated in experiments carried out in compression. Post‐deformation electron backscatter diffraction analyses reveal orientation gradients consistent with deformation occurring via the motion of dislocations on the activated slip systems. Crystals in all of the investigated orientations exhibit hydrolytic weakening, but crystals oriented to activate the (001)[100] slip system exhibit the largest degree of weakening. These results are consistent with a water‐induced change in LPO in olivine‐rich rocks deforming by dislocation creep. The rheological data obtained from the experiments can be used to improve models of LPO evolution in Earth's mantle, which is critical for imaging the structure of Earth's interior and predicting the movement of Earth's tectonic plates

Complex-Distance Potential Theory and Hyperbolic Equations

An extension of potential theory in R^n is obtained by continuing the Euclidean distance function holomorphically to C^n. The resulting Newtonian potential is generated by an extended source distribution D(z) in C^n whose restriction to R^n is the delta function. This provides a natural model for extended particles in physics. In C^n, interpreted as complex spacetime, D(z) acts as a propagator generating solutions of the wave equation from their initial values. This gives a new connection between elliptic and hyperbolic equations that does not assume analyticity of the Cauchy data. Generalized to Clifford analysis, it induces a similar connection between solutions of elliptic and hyperbolic Dirac equations. There is a natural application to the time-dependent, inhomogeneous Dirac and Maxwell equations, and the `electromagnetic wavelets' introduced previously are an example.Comment: 25 pages, submited to Proceedings of 5th Intern. Conf. on Clifford Algebras, Ixtapa, June 24 - July 4, 199

Insights into the room temperature magnetism of ZnO/Co3O4 mixtures

The origin of room temperature (RT) ferromagneticlike behavior in ZnO-based diluted magnetic semiconductors is still an unclear topic. The present work concentrates on the appearance of RT magnetic moments in just mixed ZnO/Co3O4 mixtures without thermal treatment. In this study, it is shown that the magnetism seems to be related to surface reduction of the Co3O4 nanoparticles, in which, an antiferromagnetic Co3O4 nanoparticle (core) is surrounded by a CoO-like shell. This singular superficial magnetism has also been found in other mixtures with semiconductors such as TiO2 and insulators such as Al2O3