Negative 4-Probe Conductances of Mesoscopic Superconducting Wires

We analyze the longitudinal 4-probe conductance of mesoscopic normal and superconducting wires and predict that in the superconducting case, large negative values can arise for both the weakly disordered and localized regimes. This contrasts sharply with the behaviour of the longitudinal 4-probe conductance of normal wires, which in the localized limit is always exponentially small and positive.Comment: Latex, 3 figures available on request to [email protected] (Simon Robinson

Sustainability, certification, and regulation of biochar

Biochar has a relatively long half-life in soil and can fundamentally alter soil properties, processes, and ecosystem services. The prospect of global-scale biochar application to soils highlights the importance of a sophisticated and rigorous certification procedure. The objective of this work was to discuss the concept of integrating biochar properties with environmental and socioeconomic factors, in a sustainable biochar certification procedure that optimizes complementarity and compatibility between these factors over relevant time periods. Biochar effects and behavior should also be modelled at temporal scales similar to its expected functional lifetime in soils. Finally, when existing soil data are insufficient, soil sampling and analysis procedures need to be described as part of a biochar certification procedure.O “biochar” tem um tempo de meia-vida no solo relativamente longo e pode alterar substancialmente as propriedades, processos e funções do solo. A perspectiva da aplicação de “biochar” aos solos, em escala global, evidencia a importância de se lhe atribuir um processo de certificação sofisticado e rigoroso. O objetivo deste trabalho foi discutir o conceito da integração das propriedades do “biochar” com os fatores ambientais e socioeconômicos relevantes do local de aplicação selecionado, como parte de um procedimento de certificação sustentável que otimize a complementaridade e a compatibilidade entre esses fatores, em períodos de tempo relevantes. Os efeitos e o comportamento do “biochar” devem, também, ser modelados em escalas temporais similares às de seu tempo de vida funcional nos solos do local selecionado. Finalmente, onde os dados existentes sobre as características do solo forem insuficientes, procedimentos de amostragem e análise do solo devem ser descritos como parte do procedimento de certificação do “biochar”.publishe

Horizontal Branch Stars: The Interplay between Observations and Theory, and Insights into the Formation of the Galaxy

We review HB stars in a broad astrophysical context, including both variable and non-variable stars. A reassessment of the Oosterhoff dichotomy is presented, which provides unprecedented detail regarding its origin and systematics. We show that the Oosterhoff dichotomy and the distribution of globular clusters (GCs) in the HB morphology-metallicity plane both exclude, with high statistical significance, the possibility that the Galactic halo may have formed from the accretion of dwarf galaxies resembling present-day Milky Way satellites such as Fornax, Sagittarius, and the LMC. A rediscussion of the second-parameter problem is presented. A technique is proposed to estimate the HB types of extragalactic GCs on the basis of integrated far-UV photometry. The relationship between the absolute V magnitude of the HB at the RR Lyrae level and metallicity, as obtained on the basis of trigonometric parallax measurements for the star RR Lyrae, is also revisited, giving a distance modulus to the LMC of (m-M)_0 = 18.44+/-0.11. RR Lyrae period change rates are studied. Finally, the conductive opacities used in evolutionary calculations of low-mass stars are investigated. [ABRIDGED]Comment: 56 pages, 22 figures. Invited review, to appear in Astrophysics and Space Scienc

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations1,2,3,4,5,6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees

Protein species and moonlighting proteins: Very small changes in a protein's covalent structure can change its biochemical function

In the past few decades, hundreds of moonlighting proteins have been identified that perform two or more distinct and physiologically relevant biochemical or biophysical functions that are not due to gene fusions, multiple RNA splice variants, or pleiotropic effects. For this special issue on protein species, this article discusses three topics related to moonlighting proteins that illustrate how small changes or differences in protein covalent structures can result in different functions. Examples are given of moonlighting proteins that switch between functions after undergoing post-translational modifications (PTMs), proteins that share high levels of amino acid sequence identity to a moonlighting protein but share only one of its functions, and several "neomorphic moonlighting proteins" in which a single amino acid mutation results in the addition of a new function. Biological significance: For this special issue on protein species, this article discusses three topics related to moonlighting proteins: Post-translational modifications (PTMs) that can cause a switch between functions, homologs that share only one of multiple functions, and proteins in which a single amino acid mutation results in the creation of a new function. The examples included illustrate that even in an average protein of hundreds of amino acids, a relatively small difference in sequence or PTMs can result in a large difference in function, which can be important in predicting protein functions, regulation of protein functions, and in the evolution of new functions

One-dimensional modelling of convective CO2 exchange in the Tropical Atlantic

Diurnal changes in seawater temperature affect the amount of air–sea gas exchange taking place through changes in solubility and buoyancy-driven nocturnal convection, which enhances the gas transfer velocity. We use a combination of in situ and satellite derived radiometric measurements and a modified version of the General Ocean Turbulence Model (GOTM), which includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coupled-Ocean Atmospheric Response Experiment (NOAA-COARE) air–sea gas transfer parameterization, to investigate heat and carbon dioxide exchange over the diurnal cycle in the Tropical Atlantic. A new term based on a water-side convective velocity scale (w*w) is included, to improve parameterization of convectively driven gas transfer. Meteorological data from the PIRATA mooring located at 10°S10°W in the Tropical Atlantic are used, in conjunction with cloud cover estimates from Meteosat-7, to calculate fluxes of longwave, latent and sensible heat along with a heat budget and temperature profiles during February 2002. Twin model experiments, representing idealistic and realistic conditions, reveal that over daily time scales the additional contribution to gas exchange from convective overturning is important. Increases in transfer velocity of up to 20% are observed during times of strong insolation and low wind speeds (&lt;6 m s?1); the greatest enhancement from w*w to the CO2 flux occurs when diurnal warming is large. Hence, air–sea fluxes of CO2 calculated using simple parameterizations underestimate the contribution from convective processes. The results support the need for parameterizations of gas transfer that are based on more than wind speed alone and include information about the heat budget. <br/

Forest or meadow: the consequences of habitat on female arctic ground squirrel condition

Body condition of animals influences the likelihood of surviving harsh environmental conditions, successfully reproducing and resisting disease. The sum of these individual components of fitness, in turn, have consequences for the growth and persistence of wildlife populations. Here we compared the body mass and condition of adult female arctic ground squirrels, Urocitellus parryii (Richardson, 1825) (an obligate hibernator) in source and sink habitats. We tested the hypothesis that adult females would be in poorer condition in the boreal forest than in adjacent meadows. We found that, during spring, postpartum females in forests weighed less (405 ± 7g (SE) vs. 437 ± 11g) and were in poorer condition (mean residual of mass over structural size = -11.0 ± 10.2g vs. 20.5 ± 6.1g) compared to females in meadow source habitat. However, by the onset of entrance into hibernation in August, forest squirrels had reached parity with meadow squirrels and no difference was found in mass (519 ± 13g vs. 520 ± 15g) or condition (residual index = -0.01 ±0.01 vs. 0.03 ±0.01). We suggest that, for squirrels in formerly occupied boreal forests a) poor spring body condition decreased reproductive success, and b) achieving compensatory growth, via increased foraging, comes at the costs of higher predation risk. These costs likely contributed to the recent local extinction of AGS in boreal forest habitat.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author

A Bayesian Network Approach to Ontology Mapping

Abstract. This paper presents our ongoing effort on developing a principled methodology for automatic ontology mapping based on BayesOWL, a probabilistic framework we developed for modeling uncertainty in semantic web. In this approach, the source and target ontologies are first translated into Bayesian networks (BN); the concept mapping between the two ontologies are treated as evidential reasoning between the two translated BNs. Probabilities needed for constructing conditional probability tables (CPT) during translation and for measuring semantic similarity during mapping are learned using text classification techniques where each concept in an ontology is associated with a set of semantically relevant text documents, which are obtained by ontology guided web mining. The basic ideas of this approach are validated by positive results from computer experiments on two small real-world ontologies.