REMOTE OPERATION OF THE WEST COAST AND ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER

The remote control of real time derivation of earthquake location and magnitude and the issuance of tsunami and earthquake bulletins was done using off-the-shelf remote control software and hardware. Such remote operation of the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center can decrease the time needed to respond to an earthquake by eliminating travel from the duty standers’ home to the tsunami warning center

The Effect of Different Organic Fertilizers on Yield and Soil and Crop Nutrient Concentrations

At present, organic fertilizers are not widely used in intensive arable agriculture, and not much is known about their effects on crop nutrition. In a field experiment at Rothamsted, UK, anaerobic digestate (AD), compost, farmyard manure (FYM), straw, and mixes of amendment + straw, were applied at: 1, 1.75, 2.5 or 3.5 t carbon ha−1, with all plots receiving the same input of mineral fertilizer. After five seasons of application, plots receiving non-straw amendments had greater straw and grain yield of 28% and 18% respectively, and plots receiving the highest amendment rate had a 37% higher straw and 23% higher grain yield, compared to control plots. Whereas, the straw-only amendment did not increase yield compared to the control. The concentrations of secondary and micro nutrients in the crop, particularly P, Ca, and S in the straw, and P and Fe in the grain, were significantly greater in the crop receiving non-straw amendment compared to the control. Interestingly K, Fe, and Zn were greater in the crop straw treated with the straw-only amendment. Therefore ‘biomass dilution’ of secondary and micro nutrients did not occur in the higher-yielding amended plots after five seasons, and organic fertilizers would improve the quality of high-yielding, intensively produced crops. The study also demonstrates that portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) could be a reliable, cost-effective tool for screening potential organic fertilizers

Mannose binding lectin is required for alphavirus-induced arthritis/myositis

Mosquito-borne alphaviruses such as chikungunya virus and Ross River virus (RRV) are emerging pathogens capable of causing large-scale epidemics of virus-induced arthritis and myositis. The pathology of RRV-induced disease in both humans and mice is associated with induction of the host inflammatory response within the muscle and joints, and prior studies have demonstrated that the host complement system contributes to development of disease. In this study, we have used a mouse model of RRV-induced disease to identify and characterize which complement activation pathways mediate disease progression after infection, and we have identified the mannose binding lectin (MBL) pathway, but not the classical or alternative complement activation pathways, as essential for development of RRV-induced disease. MBL deposition was enhanced in RRV infected muscle tissue from wild type mice and RRV infected MBL deficient mice exhibited reduced disease, tissue damage, and complement deposition compared to wild-type mice. In contrast, mice deficient for key components of the classical or alternative complement activation pathways still developed severe RRV-induced disease. Further characterization of MBL deficient mice demonstrated that similar to C3(-/-) mice, viral replication and inflammatory cell recruitment were equivalent to wild type animals, suggesting that RRV-mediated induction of complement dependent immune pathology is largely MBL dependent. Consistent with these findings, human patients diagnosed with RRV disease had elevated serum MBL levels compared to healthy controls, and MBL levels in the serum and synovial fluid correlated with severity of disease. These findings demonstrate a role for MBL in promoting RRV-induced disease in both mice and humans and suggest that the MBL pathway of complement activation may be an effective target for therapeutic intervention for humans suffering from RRV-induced arthritis and myositis.This work was supported by NIH/NIAMS R01 AR 047190 awarded to MTH

Un análisis multinivel de población y deforestación en el Parque Nacional Sierra de Lacandón (Petén, Guatemala)

Este estudio examina los factores demográficos asociados con la deforestación en el Parque Nacional Sierra de Lacandón (PNSL), Guatemala, utilizando un análisis de regresión multinivel. Más del 10% del PNSL ha sido deforestado desde mediados de la década de 1980, a causa del crecimiento demográfico de la población campesina y su subsiguiente manejo de la tierra. Utilizando un análisis de regresión múltiple de dos niveles, este estudio examina datos demográficos y otras características de los hogares para explicar variaciones en el bosque roturado entre 241 fincas agrícolas en ocho comunidades en el PNSL. Esta metodología, novedosa en el estudio de uso del suelo en los trópicos, toma en cuenta la variación espacial entre comunidades, así como entre hogares. Al usar modelos de multinivel, se puede llegar a resultados mejores sobre los impactos de los factores, tanto a nivel de comunidad como a nivel de hogar sobre la deforestación, con implicaciones más adecuadas para políticas de desarrollo.Aquest estudi examina els factors demogràfics associats amb la desforestació al Parc Nacional Sierra de Lacandon (PNSL), Guatemala, mitjançant una anàlisi de regressió multinivell. Més del 10 % del PNSL ha estat desforestat des de la meitat de la dècada de 1980, com a conseqüència del creixement demogràfic i les pràctiques de gestió agrícola. Utilitzant una anàlisi de regressió múltiple de dos nivells, aquest estudi examina dades demogràfiques i unes altres característiques de les llars per explicar variacions en el bosc artigat entre 241 finques agrícoles en vuit comunitats al PNSL. Aquesta metodologia té en compte la variació especial entre comunitats i entre llars, i abans no havia estat mai aplicada als tròpics. El model de regressió multinivell pot ajudar a explicar millor els impactes de factors propis de les comunitats i de les llars en la desforestació, per tant, pot contribuir a millorar les polítiques de desenvolupament.Cette étude a examiné les facteurs démographiques associés au phénomène de déforestation du Parc National Sierra de Lacandón (PNSL, Guatemala) en utilisant une analyse de régression multi-niveau. Depuis le milieu des années 1980, plus de 10 % du PNSL a été déboisé par la croissance démographique de la population rurale, son besoin en surface et l'utilisation variée de la terre. En utilisant une analyse de régression multiple de deux niveaux, cette étude examine des données démographiques et plusieurs caractéristiques liées aux exploitations, dans le but d'expliquer les variations dans le parc défriché entre 241 propriétés agricoles dans huit communautés du PNSL. Cette méthodologie, nouvelle dans l'étude de l'usage du sol dans les tropiques, prend en compte la variation spatiale entre des communautés ainsi que des exploitations. En utilisant ces modèles de multi-niveaux, on peut arriver à de meilleurs résultats concernant les impacts des facteurs au niveau des communautés et des exploitations concernant la déforestation, avec des résultats plus adapatées pour les politiques de développement.The paper examines depopulation factors associated with deforestation in the Natural park of the Sierra de Lacandón (PNSL), using multi-level regresión analysis. More than 10 percent of the park area has been deforested since the mid 1980s because of rural population growth and agricultural practices. By means of a two-level regression analysis the study use dem ographic and other household data to explain variations in deforested land in 241 agricultural estates in 8 communities of the PNSL. The methodology, not applied before in the tropics, takes into account spatial variations between communities and households. Multilvel regression allows for better results on the impacts of socioeconomic factors on deforestation, both at the community and at the household levels with important implications for development policies

A six-parameter space to describe galaxy diversification

Galaxy diversification proceeds by transforming events like accretion, interaction or mergers. These explain the formation and evolution of galaxies that can now be described with many observables. Multivariate analyses are the obvious tools to tackle the datasets and understand the differences between different kinds of objects. However, depending on the method used, redundancies, incompatibilities or subjective choices of the parameters can void the usefulness of such analyses. The behaviour of the available parameters should be analysed before an objective reduction of dimensionality and subsequent clustering analyses can be undertaken, especially in an evolutionary context. We study a sample of 424 early-type galaxies described by 25 parameters, ten of which are Lick indices, to identify the most structuring parameters and determine an evolutionary classification of these objects. Four independent statistical methods are used to investigate the discriminant properties of the observables and the partitioning of the 424 galaxies: Principal Component Analysis, K-means cluster analysis, Minimum Contradiction Analysis and Cladistics. (abridged)Comment: Accepted for publicationin A\&

A Massive Progenitor of the Luminous Type IIn Supernova 2010jl

The bright, nearby, recently discovered supernova SN2010jl is a member of the rare class of relatively luminous Type~IIn events. Here we report archival HST observations of its host galaxy UGC5189A taken roughly 10yr prior to explosion, as well as early-time optical spectra of the SN. The HST images reveal a bright, blue point source at the position of the SN, with an absolute magnitude of -12.0 in the F300W filter. If it is not just a chance alignment, the source at the SN position could be (1) a massive young (less than 6 Myr) star cluster in which the SN resided, (2) a quiescent, luminous blue star with an apparent temperature around 14,000K, (3) a star caught during a bright outburst akin to those of LBVs, or (4) a combination of option 1 and options 2 or 3. Although we cannot confidently choose between these possibilities with the present data, any of them imply that the progenitor of SN2010jl had an initial mass above 30Msun. This reinforces mounting evidence that many SNe IIn result from very massive stars, that massive stars can produce visible SNe without collapsing quietly to black holes, and that massive stars can retain their H envelopes until shortly before explosion. Standard stellar evolution models fail to account for these observed properties.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Ap

Globular cluster formation within the Aquarius simulation

The Aquarius project is a very high-resolution simulation capable of resolving the full mass range of potential globular cluster (GC) formation sites. With a particle mass mp= 1.4 × 104 M¿, Aquarius yields more than 100 million particles within the virial radius of the central halo which has a mass of 1.8 × 1012 M¿, similar to that of the Milky Way. With this particle mass, dark matter concentrations (haloes) that give rise to GCs via our formation criteria contain a minimum of ~2000 particles. Here, we use this simulation to test a model of metal-poor GC formation based on collapse physics. In our model, GCs form when the virial temperatures of haloes first exceed 104 K as this is when electronic transitions allow the gas to cool efficiently. We calculate the ionizing flux from the stars in these first clusters and stop the formation of new clusters when all the baryonic gas of the Galaxy is ionized. This is achieved by adopting reasonable values for the star formation efficiencies and escape fraction of ionizing photons which result in similar numbers and masses of clusters to those found in the Milky Way. The model is successful in that it predicts ages (peak age ~13.3 Gyr) and a spatial distribution of metal-poor GCs which are consistent with the observed populations in the Milky Way. The model also predicts that less than 5 per cent of GCs within a radius of 100 kpc have a surviving dark matter halo, but the more distant clusters are all found in dark matter concentrations. We then test a scenario of metal-rich cluster formation by examining mergers that trigger star formation within central gas discs. This results in younger (~7¿13.3 Gyr), more centrally located clusters (40 metal-rich GCs within 18 kpc from the centre of the host) which are consistent with the Galactic metal-rich population. We test an alternate model in which metal-rich GCs form in dwarf galaxies that become stripped as they merge with the main halo. This process is inconsistent with observed metal-rich globulars in the Milky Way because it predicts spatial distributions that are far too extended

Spectroscopic bulge-disc decomposition: a new method to study the evolution of lenticular galaxies

A new method for spectroscopic bulge-disc decomposition is presented, in which the spatial light profile in a two-dimensional spectrum is decomposed wavelength-by-wavelength into bulge and disc components, allowing separate one-dimensional spectra for each component to be constructed. This method has been applied to observations of a sample of nine S0s in the Fornax Cluster in order to obtain clean high-quality spectra of their individual bulge and disc components. So far this decomposition has only been fully successful when applied to galaxies with clean light profiles, consequently limiting the number of galaxies that could be separated into bulge and disc components. Lick index stellar population analysis of the component spectra reveals that in those galaxies where the bulge and disc could be distinguished, the bulges have systematically higher metallicities and younger stellar populations than the discs. This correlation is consistent with a picture in which S0 formation comprises the shutting down of star formation in the disc accompanied by a final burst of star formation in the bulge. The variation in spatial-fit parameters with wavelength also allows us to measure approximate colour gradients in the individual components. Such gradients were detected separately in both bulges and discs, in the sense that redder light is systematically more centrally concentrated in all components. However, a search for radial variations in the absorption line strengths determined for the individual components revealed that they are absent from the vast majority of S0 discs and bulges. The absence of gradients in line indices for most galaxies implies that the colour gradient cannot be attributed to age or metallicity variations, and is therefore most likely associated with varying degrees of obscuration by dust.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in MNRA

The Tully-Fisher relation for S0 galaxies

We present a study of the local B and K-band Tully-Fisher Relation (TFR) between absolute magnitude and maximum circular speed in S0 galaxies. To make this study, we have combined kinematic data, including a new high-quality spectral data set from the Fornax Cluster, with homogeneous photometry from the RC3 and 2MASS catalogues, to construct the largest sample of S0 galaxies ever used in a study of the TFR. Independent of environment, S0 galaxies are found to lie systematically below the TFR for nearby spirals in both optical and infrared bands. This offset can be crudely interpreted as arising from the luminosity evolution of spiral galaxies that have faded since ceasing star formation. However, we also find a large scatter in the TFR. We show that most of this scatter is intrinsic, not due to the observational uncertainties. The presence of such a large scatter means that the population of S0 galaxies cannot have formed exclusively by the above simple fading mechanism after all transforming at a single epoch. To better understand the complexity of the transformation mechanism, we have searched for correlations between the offset from the TFR and other properties of the galaxies such as their structural properties, central velocity dispersions and ages (as estimated from line indices). For the Fornax Cluster data, the offset from the TFR relates with the estimated age of the stars in the individual galaxies, in the sense and of the magnitude expected if S0 galaxies had passively faded since being converted from spirals. This correlation implies that a significant part of the scatter in the TFR arises from the different times at which galaxies began their transformation.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA

Strong margin influence on the Arctic Ocean Barium Cycle revealed by pan‐Arctic synthesis

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Whitmore, L., Shiller, A., Horner, T., Xiang, Y., Auro, M., Bauch, D., Dehairs, F., Lam, P., Li, J., Maldonado, M., Mears, C., Newton, R., Pasqualini, A., Planquette, H., Rember, R., & Thomas, H. Strong margin influence on the Arctic Ocean Barium Cycle revealed by pan‐Arctic synthesis. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 127(4), (2022): e2021JC017417, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021jc017417.Early studies revealed relationships between barium (Ba), particulate organic carbon and silicate, suggesting applications for Ba as a paleoproductivity tracer and as a tracer of modern ocean circulation. But, what controls the distribution of barium (Ba) in the oceans? Here, we investigated the Arctic Ocean Ba cycle through a one-of-a-kind data set containing dissolved (dBa), particulate (pBa), and stable isotope Ba ratio (δ138Ba) data from four Arctic GEOTRACES expeditions conducted in 2015. We hypothesized that margins would be a substantial source of Ba to the Arctic Ocean water column. The dBa, pBa, and δ138Ba distributions all suggest significant modification of inflowing Pacific seawater over the shelves, and the dBa mass balance implies that ∼50% of the dBa inventory (upper 500 m of the Arctic water column) was supplied by nonconservative inputs. Calculated areal dBa fluxes are up to 10 μmol m−2 day−1 on the margin, which is comparable to fluxes described in other regions. Applying this approach to dBa data from the 1994 Arctic Ocean Survey yields similar results. The Canadian Arctic Archipelago did not appear to have a similar margin source; rather, the dBa distribution in this section is consistent with mixing of Arctic Ocean-derived waters and Baffin Bay-derived waters. Although we lack enough information to identify the specifics of the shelf sediment Ba source, we suspect that a sedimentary remineralization and terrigenous sources (e.g., submarine groundwater discharge or fluvial particles) are contributors.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation [OCE-1434312 (AMS), OCE-1436666 (RN), OCE-1535854 (PL), OCE-1736949, OCE-2023456 (TJH), and OCE-1829563 (R. Anderson for open access support)], Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)-Climate Change and Atmospheric Research (CCAR) Program (MTM), and LEFE-CYBER EXPATE (HP). HT acknowledges support by the Canadian GEOTRACES via NSERC-CCAR and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD): MOPGA-GRI (Make Our Planet Great Again—Research Initiative) sponsored by BMBF (Federal German Ministry of Education and Research; Grant No. 57429828)