The Wasteland

Riverine floodplains and deltas that have cradled human civilization and are now ravaged by ecologically blind land-use policies form the context of this poem. Policies that term nutrient rich wetlands as wastelands are economically motivated and backed by policy makers for short-term gains. The conversion of wetlands makes refugees out of resident wild species. The first few lines of the poem describe the character of the fishing cat, the only cat in South Asia that is adapted for wetlands and is an indicator of the health of wetland ecosystems. The poem talks of a nemesis that awaits the human world—we would meet the same fate that we are meting out to the fishing cat. The poem ends as it alludes to the peace that a motherly womb offers. Wetlands are such wombs: they are life givers

Astrophysical aspects of neutrino dynamics in ultra-degenerate quark gluon plasma

The cardinal focus of the present review is to explore the role of neutrinos originating from the ultra-dense core of neutron stars composed of quark gluon plasma in the astrophysical scenario. The collective excitations of the quarks involving the neutrinos through the different kinematical processes have been studied. The cooling of the neutron stars as well as pulsar kicks due to asymmetric neutrino emission have been discussed in detail. Results involving calculation of relevant physical quantities like neutrino mean free path and emissivity have been presented in the framework of non-Fermi liquid behavior as applicable to ultra-degenerate plasma.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, Accepted for publication as Review Article in Advances of High Energy Physics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1204.2684; text overlap with arXiv:0706.4381 by other author

Role of magnetic interactions in neutron stars

In this work, we present a calculation of the non-Fermi liquid correction to the specific heat of magnetized degenerate quark matter present at the core of the neutron star. The role of non-Fermi liquid corrections to the neutrino emissivity has been calculated beyond leading order. We extend our result to the evaluation of the pulsar kick velocity and cooling of the star due to such anomalous corrections and present a comparison with the simple Fermi liquid case.Comment: 6 pages, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics, Kolymbari, Crete, Greece (matches published version

Decay and Decoupling of heavy Right-handed Majorana Neutrinos in the L-R model

Heavy right-handed neutrinos are of current interest. The interactions and decay of such neutrinos determine their decoupling epoch during the evolution of the universe. This in turn affects various observable features like the energy density, nucleosynthesis, CMBR spectrum, galaxy formation, and baryogenesis. Here, we consider reduction of right-handed electron-type Majorana neutrinos, in the left-right symmetric model, by the WR+ - WR- channel and the channel originating from an anomaly, involving the SU(2)R gauge group, as well as decay of such neutrinos. We study the reduction of these neutrinos for different ranges of left-right model parameters, and find that, if the neutrino mass exceeds the right-handed gauge boson mass, then the neutrinos never decouple for realistic values of the parameters, but, rather, decay in equilibrium. Because there is no out-of-equilibrium decay, no mass bounds can be set for the neutrinos.Comment: Latex, 16 pages, No figures. Some additions in the text and references. Conclusions unaffected. To appear in Eur. Phys. J.

Draft genome sequence of the naturally competent Bacillus simplex strain WY10

ABSTRACT We sequenced a naturally competent bacterial isolate, WY10, cultured from a Wyoming soil sample. Sequence analysis revealed that WY10 is a novel strain of Bacillus simplex . To our knowledge, WY10 is the first B. simplex strain to be characterized as naturally competent for DNA uptake by transformation. </jats:p

Inference on Categorical Survey Response: A Predictive Approach

We consider the estimation of finite population proportions of categorical survey responses obtained by probability sampling. The customary design-based estimator does not make use of the auxiliary data available for all the population units at the estimation stage. We adopt a model-based predictive approach to incorporate this information and make the estimates more efficient. In the first part of our paper we consider a multinomial logit type model when logit function is a known parametric function of the covariates. We then use it for the prediction of non-sampled responses. This together with sampled responses is used to obtain the estimates of the proportions. The asymptotic biases and variances of these estimators are obtained. The main drawback of this approach is, being a parametric model it may suffer from model misspecification and thus, may lose it’s efficiencies over the usual design-based estimates. To overcome this drawback, in the next part of this paper we replace the multinomial logit type model by a nonparametric model using recently developed random coefficients splines models. Finally, we carry out a simulation study. It shows that the nonparametric approach may lead to an appreciable improvement over both parametric and design-based approaches when the regression function is quite different from multinomial logit.