Comparison of Cereals Grown Under High (Conventional) and Low (Reduced) Inputs Systems

End of Project ReportThis long-term experiment, which commenced at Oak Park in September 1994, compared the effect of a high inputs system with a low inputs system on the yield and quality of winter wheat and winter barley grown (i) In a non-cereal break-crop rotation with spring barley (ii) In a continuous cereal break-crop rotation with winter oats, and (iii) Continuous cereals. The experimental site at Knockbeg consisted of a medium-heavy textured, freedraining grey-brown podzolic soil (Knockbeg Series). The objective of the experiment was to measure the effect of reduced inputs on grain yield, grain quality, production costs and the profitability of the important cereal crops grown in different rotations, so that the impact of a more environmentally-friendly inputs system could be assessed and compared with conventional production systems

Cosmic Chronometers: Constraining the Equation of State of Dark Energy. I: H(z) Measurements

We present new determinations of the cosmic expansion history from red-envelope galaxies. We have obtained for this purpose high-quality spectra with the Keck-LRIS spectrograph of red-envelope galaxies in 24 galaxy clusters in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 1.0. We complement these Keck spectra with high-quality, publicly available archival spectra from the SPICES and VVDS surveys. We improve over our previous expansion history measurements in Simon et al. (2005) by providing two new determinations of the expansion history: H(z) = 97 +- 62 km/sec/Mpc at z = 0.5 and H(z) = 90 +- 40 km/sec/Mpc at z = 0.8. We discuss the uncertainty in the expansion history determination that arises from uncertainties in the synthetic stellar-population models. We then use these new measurements in concert with cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) measurements to constrain cosmological parameters, with a special emphasis on dark-energy parameters and constraints to the curvature. In particular, we demonstrate the usefulness of direct H(z) measurements by constraining the dark- energy equation of state parameterized by w0 and wa and allowing for arbitrary curvature. Further, we also constrain, using only CMB and H(z) data, the number of relativistic degrees of freedom to be 4 +- 0.5 and their total mass to be < 0.2 eV, both at 1-sigma.Comment: Submitted to JCA

The reproductive capacity of Monk Parakeets Myiopsitta monachus is higher in their invasive range

Breeding parameters for Monk Parakeets Myiopsitta monachus nesting in Barcelona, Spain, were collected for 651 nests over five breeding seasons. This invasive population has a high reproductive capacity compared with the species in the native range: fledging success was double, the percentage of pairs attempting second broods three times higher and 55% of first-year birds bred compared with almost zero in South America

Label-free electrochemical impedance biosensor to detect human interleukin-8 in serum with sub-pg/ml sensitivity

Biosensors with high sensitivity and short time-to-result that are capable of detecting biomarkers in body fluids such as serum are an important prerequisite for early diagnostics in modern healthcare provision. Here, we report the development of an electrochemical impedance-based sensor for the detection in serum of human interleukin-8 (IL-8), a pro-angiogenic chemokine implicated in a wide range of inflammatory diseases. The sensor employs a small and robust synthetic non-antibody capture protein based on a cystatin scaffold that displays high affinity for human IL-8 with a KD of 35 ± 10 nM and excellent ligand specificity. The change in the phase of the electrochemical impedance from the serum baseline, ∆θ(ƒ), measured at 0.1 Hz, was used as the measure for quantifying IL-8 concentration in the fluid. Optimal sensor signal was observed after 15 min incubation, and the sensor exhibited a linear response versus logarithm of IL-8 concentration from 900 fg/ml to 900 ng/ml. A detection limit of around 90 fg/ml, which is significantly lower than the basal clinical levels of 5-10 pg/ml, was observed. Our results are significant for the development of point-of-care and early diagnostics where high sensitivity and short time-to-results are essential

Fitting the integrated Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies

Fitting the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies is an almost universally used technique that has matured significantly in the last decade. Model predictions and fitting procedures have improved significantly over this time, attempting to keep up with the vastly increased volume and quality of available data. We review here the field of SED fitting, describing the modelling of ultraviolet to infrared galaxy SEDs, the creation of multiwavelength data sets, and the methods used to fit model SEDs to observed galaxy data sets. We touch upon the achievements and challenges in the major ingredients of SED fitting, with a special emphasis on describing the interplay between the quality of the available data, the quality of the available models, and the best fitting technique to use in order to obtain a realistic measurement as well as realistic uncertainties. We conclude that SED fitting can be used effectively to derive a range of physical properties of galaxies, such as redshift, stellar masses, star formation rates, dust masses, and metallicities, with care taken not to over-interpret the available data. Yet there still exist many issues such as estimating the age of the oldest stars in a galaxy, finer details ofdust properties and dust-star geometry, and the influences of poorly understood, luminous stellar types and phases. The challenge for the coming years will be to improve both the models and the observational data sets to resolve these uncertainties. The present review will be made available on an interactive, moderated web page (sedfitting.org), where the community can access and change the text. The intention is to expand the text and keep it up to date over the coming years.Comment: 54 pages, 26 figures, Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

Performance of the ATLAS forward proton Time-of-Flight detector in Run 2

We present performance studies of the Time-of-Flight (ToF) subdetector of the ATLAS Forward Proton (AFP) detector at the LHC. Efficiencies and resolutions are measured using high-statistics data samples collected at low and moderate pile-up in 2017, the first year when the detectors were installed on both sides of the interaction region. While low efficiencies are observed, of the order of a few percent, the resolutions of the two ToF detectors measured individually are 21 ps and 28 ps, yielding an expected resolution of the longitudinal position of the interaction, z vtx, in the central ATLAS detector of 5.3 ± 0.6 mm. This is in agreement with the observed width of the distribution of the difference between z vtx, measured independently by the central ATLAS tracker and by the ToF detector, of 6.0 ± 2.0 mm

Beam-induced backgrounds measured in the ATLAS detector during local gas injection into the LHC beam vacuum

Inelastic beam-gas collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), within a few hundred metres of the ATLAS experiment, are known to give the dominant contribution to beam backgrounds. These are monitored by ATLAS with a dedicated Beam Conditions Monitor (BCM) and with the rate of fake jets in the calorimeters. These two methods are complementary since the BCM probes backgrounds just around the beam pipe while fake jets are observed at radii of up to several metres. In order to quantify the correlation between the residual gas density in the LHC beam vacuum and the experimental backgrounds recorded by ATLAS, several dedicated tests were performed during LHC Run 2. Local pressure bumps, with a gas density several orders of magnitude higher than during normal operation, were introduced at different locations. The changes of beam-related backgrounds, seen in ATLAS, are correlated with the local pressure variation. In addition the rates of beam-gas events are estimated from the pressure measurements and pressure bump profiles obtained from calculations. Using these rates, the efficiency of the ATLAS beam background monitors to detect beam-gas events is derived as a function of distance from the interaction point. These efficiencies and characteristic distributions of fake jets from the beam backgrounds are found to be in good agreement with results of beam-gas simulations performed with the Fluka Monte Carlo programme

Constraining Running Non-Gaussianity

The primordial non-Gaussian parameter fNL has been shown to be scale-dependent in several models of inflation with a variable speed of sound. Starting from a simple ansatz for a scale-dependent amplitude of the primordial curvature bispectrum for two common phenomenological models of primordial non-Gaussianity, we perform a Fisher matrix analysis of the bispectra of the temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation and derive the expected constraints on the parameter nNG that quantifies the running of fNL(k) for current and future CMB missions such as WMAP, Planck and CMBPol. We find that CMB information alone, in the event of a significant detection of the non-Gaussian component, corresponding to fNL = 50 for the local model and fNL = 100 for the equilateral model of non-Gaussianity, is able to determine nNG with a 1-sigma uncertainty of Delta nNG = 0.1 and Delta nNG = 0.3, respectively, for the Planck mission. In addition, we consider a Fisher matrix analysis of the galaxy power spectrum to determine the expected constraints on the running parameter nNG for the local model and of the galaxy bispectrum for the equilateral model from future photometric and spectroscopic surveys. We find that, in both cases, large-scale structure observations should achieve results comparable to or even better than those from the CMB, while showing some complementarity due to the different distribution of the non-Gaussian signal over the relevant range of scales. Finally, we compare our findings to the predictions on the amplitude and running of non-Gaussianity of DBI inflation, showing how the constraints on a scale-dependent fNL(k) translate into constraints on the parameter space of the theory.Comment: 37 pages, 14 figure