Sustainable Groundwater Exploitation under Natural Conditions in Southwest Ghana

Groundwater has been recognised as the most cost-effective option of safe water supply to rural communities in Ghana. The demand for potable water has led to the drilling of a large number of boreholes in many parts of the country. To establish the threshold of groundwater development from storage in a major river catchment (Pra River) in South-West Ghana, studies on recharge to the weathered aquifer and statistical evaluations of specific capacity and potential yield have been carried out. The SACSMA conceptual hydrological modelling system was used for the recharge estimate. With recharge rate of 50 mm/yr, the natural groundwater resources in the basin was estimated to support a maximum withdrawal of 12 l/s for a 10 hour per day pumping. The groundwater resources potential of 1.6 l/sｋ㎡ could be considered the threshold of groundwater exploitation in similar river basins in South-West Ghana. A study into the relation between permeability and recharge under different conditions and scenarios is required to define their limiting role in groundwater resources development

Genome Profiling (GP) Method Based Classification of Insects: Congruence with That of Classical Phenotype-Based One

Ribosomal RNAs have been widely used for identification and classification of species, and have produced data giving new insights into phylogenetic relationships. Recently, multilocus genotyping and even whole genome sequencing-based technologies have been adopted in ambitious comparative biology studies. However, such technologies are still far from routine-use in species classification studies due to their high costs in terms of labor, equipment and consumables.Here, we describe a simple and powerful approach for species classification called genome profiling (GP). The GP method composed of random PCR, temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (TGGE) and computer-aided gel image processing is highly informative and less laborious. For demonstration, we classified 26 species of insects using GP and 18S rDNA-sequencing approaches. The GP method was found to give a better correspondence to the classical phenotype-based approach than did 18S rDNA sequencing employing a congruence value. To our surprise, use of a single probe in GP was sufficient to identify the relationships between the insect species, making this approach more straightforward.The data gathered here, together with those of previous studies show that GP is a simple and powerful method that can be applied for actually universally identifying and classifying species. The current success supported our previous proposal that GP-based web database can be constructible and effective for the global identification/classification of species

Manipulating the nematic director by magnetic fields in the spin-triplet superconducting state of CuxBi2Se3

Electronic nematicity, a consequence of rotational symmetry breaking, is an emergent phenomenon in various new materials. In order to fully utilize the functions of these materials, ability of tuning them through a knob, the nematic director, is desired. Here we report a successful manipulation of the nematic director, the vector order-parameter (d-vector), in the spin-triplet superconducting state of CuxBi2Se3 by magnetic fields. At H = 0.5 T, the ac susceptibility related to the upper critical field shows a two-fold symmetry in the basal plane. At H = 1.5 T, however, the susceptibility shows a six-fold symmetry, which has never been reported before in any superconductor. These results indicate that the d-vector initially pinned to a certain direction is unlocked by a threshold field to respect the trigonal crystal symmetry. We further reveal that the superconducting gap in different crystals converges to p_x symmetry at high fields, although it differs at low fields.Comment: Errors in figures corrected. Published versio

Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effectiveness of Genetic Counseling and a Distance, Computer-Based, Lifestyle Intervention Program for Adult Offspring of Patients with Type 2 Diabetes: Background, Study Protocol, and Baseline Patient Characteristics

Relatives of type 2 diabetic patients are at a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes and should be regarded as target of intervention for diabetes prevention. However, it is usually hard to motivate them to implement preventive lifestyle changes, because of lack of opportunity to take advises from medical professionals, inadequate risk perception, and low priority for preventive behavior. Prevention strategy for them therefore should be highly acceptable and suited for them. The parallel, three-group trial is now being conducted to investigate the effects of genetic counseling and/or a computerized behavioral program on the prevention of type 2 diabetes in that population. The preventive strategies used in this study could provide a novel solution to the numbers of genetically high-risk individuals, if found to be effective. The objective of this paper is to describe the background, protocol, and baseline patient characteristics of the trial

On gonihedric loops and quantum gravity

We present an analysis of the gonihedric loop model, a reformulation of the two dimensional gonihedric spin model, using two different techniques. First, the usual regular lattice statistical physics problem is mapped onto a height model and studied analytically. Second, the gravitational version of this loop model is studied via matrix models techniques. Both methods lead to the conclusion that the model has $c_{matter}=0$ for all values of the parameters of the model. In this way it is possible to understand the absence of a continuous transition

Replica treatment of non-Hermitian disordered Hamiltonians

We employ the fermionic and bosonic replicated nonlinear sigma models to treat Ginibre unitary, symplectic, and orthogonal ensembles of non-Hermitian random matrix Hamiltonians. Using saddle point approach combined with Borel resummation procedure we derive the exact large-N results for microscopic density of states in all three ensembles. We also obtain tails of the density of states as well the two-point function for the unitary ensemble.Comment: REVTeX 3.1, 13 pages, 1 figure; typos fixed (v2

Boundedness of Pseudodifferential Operators on Banach Function Spaces

We show that if the Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator is bounded on a separable Banach function space $X(\mathbb{R}^n)$ and on its associate space $X'(\mathbb{R}^n)$, then a pseudodifferential operator $\operatorname{Op}(a)$ is bounded on $X(\mathbb{R}^n)$ whenever the symbol $a$ belongs to the H\"ormander class $S_{\rho,\delta}^{n(\rho-1)}$ with $0<\rho\le 1$, $0\le\delta<1$ or to the the Miyachi class $S_{\rho,\delta}^{n(\rho-1)}(\varkappa,n)$ with $0\le\delta\le\rho\le 1$, $0\le\delta0$. This result is applied to the case of variable Lebesgue spaces $L^{p(\cdot)}(\mathbb{R}^n)$.Comment: To appear in a special volume of Operator Theory: Advances and Applications dedicated to Ant\'onio Ferreira dos Santo

Eigenvalue Distributions of the QCD Dirac Operator

We compute by Monte Carlo methods the individual distributions of the $k$th smallest Dirac operator eigenvalues in QCD, and compare them with recent analytical predictions. We do this for both massless and massive quarks in an SU(3) gauge theory with staggered fermions. Very precise agreement is found in all cases. As a simple by-product we also extract the microscopic spectral density of the Dirac operator in SU(3) gauge theory with dynamical massive fermions for $N_f=1$ and 2, and obtain high-accuracy agreement with analytical expressions.Comment: LaTeX, 8 pages, 9 postscript figures. Very minor correction