Low Emission Farming Systems: A whole-farm analysis of the potential impacts of greenhouse policy

The Australian government is introducing a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2010, as part of its climate change policy. After 2015 agriculture may be covered by this scheme. This paper examines how different broadacre farming systems may be affected by the policy settings of this scheme. Using the bio-economic farming systems model MIDAS (Model of an Integrated Dryland Agricultural System) the impacts of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on the profitability of different broadacre farming systems in the southwest of Australia are investigated. Results show a range of profit and enterprise impacts across the various farm types. In a scenario where agriculture is not covered by the scheme, reductions in profit range from 7 to 12 percent, attributable to more expensive ‘covered’ inputs such as fuel and fertiliser; and farmers reduce their use of expensive energy inputs such as chemicals and fertilisers. In a covered scenario profits decline by 15 to 25 percent of ‘business-as-usual’ profit and optimal farm plans involve a combination of reduced livestock numbers, the introduction of permanent woody perennial plantations on marginal lands and other changes to the farm enterprise mix to reduce emissions.agriculture, greenhouse gases, economic modelling, abatement,

Lattice softening effects at the Mott critical point of Cr-doped V2_2O3_3

We have performed sound velocity measurements in (V$_{1-x}$Cr$_x$)$_2$O$_3$ in the vicinity of the critical point of the first order Mott transition line. The pressure sweeps at constant temperature reveal a large dip in the $c_{33}$ compression modulus, this dip sharpens as the critical point is approached. We do not observe signs of criticality on the shear modulus $c_{44}$ which is consistent with a transition governed by a scalar order parameter, in accordance with the DMFT description of the transition. However, the amplitude of the effect is an order of magnitude smaller than the one obtained from DMFT calculations for a single band Hubbard model. We analyze our results using a simple model with the electronic response function obtained from the scaling relations for the conductivity

Initializing a Quantum Register from Mott Insulator States in Optical Lattices

We propose and quantitatively develop two schemes to quickly and accurately generate a stable initial configuration of neutral atoms in optical microtraps by extraction from the Mott insulator state in optical lattices. We show that thousands of atoms may be extracted and stored in the ground states of optical microtrap arrays with one atom per trap in one operational process demonstrating massive scalability. The failure probability during extraction in the first scheme can be made sufficiently small (10^{-4}) to initialize a large scale quantum register with high fidelity. A complementary faster scheme with more extracted atoms but lower fidelity is also developed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

px+ipyp_{x}+ip_{y} superfluid from s-wave interactions of fermionic cold atoms

Two-dimensional ($p_{x}+ip_{y}$) superfluids/superconductors offer a playground for studying intriguing physics such as quantum teleportation, non-Abelian statistics, and topological quantum computation. Creating such a superfluid in cold fermionic atom optical traps using p-wave Feshbach resonance is turning out to be challenging. Here we propose a method to create a $p_{x}+ip_{y}$ superfluid directly from an s-wave interaction making use of a topological Berry phase, which can be artificially generated. We discuss ways to detect the spontaneous Hall mass current, which acts as a diagnostic for the chiral p-wave superfluid.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Support Vector Machine classification of strong gravitational lenses

The imminent advent of very large-scale optical sky surveys, such as Euclid and LSST, makes it important to find efficient ways of discovering rare objects such as strong gravitational lens systems, where a background object is multiply gravitationally imaged by a foreground mass. As well as finding the lens systems, it is important to reject false positives due to intrinsic structure in galaxies, and much work is in progress with machine learning algorithms such as neural networks in order to achieve both these aims. We present and discuss a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm which makes use of a Gabor filterbank in order to provide learning criteria for separation of lenses and non-lenses, and demonstrate using blind challenges that under certain circumstances it is a particularly efficient algorithm for rejecting false positives. We compare the SVM engine with a large-scale human examination of 100000 simulated lenses in a challenge dataset, and also apply the SVM method to survey images from the Kilo-Degree Survey.Comment: Accepted by MNRA

Splenocytes and Lymphocytes: A Study in The Rat Using The Fluorochrome Acridine Orange

Single cell suspensions of lymphocytes derived from the spleen and thoracic duct of rats were labelled with the fluorochrome acridine orange, proved to be viable by tissue culture, and injected into the left ventricle of isogenic rats. No evidence for recirculation of lymphocytes from blood to thoracic duct lymph within a three hour cycle was obtained. The injected cells whether derived from the spleen or thoracic duct homed only to the tissues of the lymphomyeloid complex

Stimulation of B-lymphocyte colony formation in vitro by sera from patients with leukaemia or lymphoma.

Studies were made on the effects of 665 sera, from normal donors or patients with various diseases, on B-lymphocyte colony formation in agar by mouse spleen cells. Undiluted serum from most normal donors inhibited colony formation, but 43-53% of sera from patients with histiocytic lymphoma, lymphocytic lymphoma or Hodgkin's disease stimulated colony formation, serum activity correlating with the stage of the disease. Moderate colony-stimulating activity was observed with serum taken from patients with acute lymphoid or myeloid leukaemia following, but not prior to, chemotherapy. Colony stimulating activity was not correlated with the blood group of serum donors and could not be ascribed to the presence of endotoxin, red cells or mouse red cell haemagglutinins in the active sera. Elevated colony stimulating activity was not observed in sera from patients with non-neoplastic disorders ot haemopoiesis or with diseases of other organ systems

Imaging the Cosmic Matter Distribution using Gravitational Lensing of Pregalactic HI

21-cm emission from neutral hydrogen during and before the epoch of cosmic reionisation is gravitationally lensed by material at all lower redshifts. Low-frequency radio observations of this emission can be used to reconstruct the projected mass distribution of foreground material, both light and dark. We compare the potential imaging capabilities of such 21-cm lensing with those of future galaxy lensing surveys. We use the Millennium Simulation to simulate large-area maps of the lensing convergence with the noise, resolution and redshift-weighting achievable with a variety of idealised observation programmes. We find that the signal-to-noise of 21-cm lens maps can far exceed that of any map made using galaxy lensing. If the irreducible noise limit can be reached with a sufficiently large radio telescope, the projected convergence map provides a high-fidelity image of the true matter distribution, allowing the dark matter halos of individual galaxies to be viewed directly, and giving a wealth of statistical and morphological information about the relative distributions of mass and light. For instrumental designs like that planned for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), high-fidelity mass imaging may be possible near the resolution limit of the core array of the telescope.Comment: version accepted for publication in MNRAS (reduced-resolution figures

Borromean rays and hyperplanes

Three disjoint rays in euclidean 3-space form Borromean rays provided their union is knotted, but the union of any two components is unknotted. We construct infinitely many Borromean rays, uncountably many of which are pairwise inequivalent. We obtain uncountably many Borromean hyperplanes.Comment: 41 pages, 30 figures (19 with captions, 11 inline