Interactions between shorebirds and benthic invertebrates at Culbin Sands lagoon, NE Scotland: effects of avian predation on their prey community density and structure

In the North Sea, during autumn-winter, intertidal flats often receive a massive influx of migratory shorebirds (wildfowl, waders and seabirds), which utilise the high prey densities that are available. The present study was conducted at Culbin Sands lagoon, NE Scotland, in 1994-1996, to investigate benthic invertebrate standing stock, and the energy flow from benthic invertebrates to shorebirds. Benthic invertebrate standing stock was estimated to be 500 kJ m(-2) yr(-1), and shorebird consumption efficiency to be 18% of the available standing stock. A series of manipulative field experiments were then conducted to test the effects of shorebirds on benthic invertebrate densities and community structure. Birds were excluded from caged areas (exclosures), and benthic invertebrate densities (total and by class size) in caged and uncaged areas were compared for each season separately. During autumn-winter, especially the gastropod Hydrobia ulvae and larger-sized (> 15 mm) clams Macoma balthica were observed to be the roost impacted species, being significantly more abundant in bird-exclosures than in bird-accessed areas.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Head model acquisition from silhouettes

This paper describes a practical system developed for generating 3D models of human heads from silhouettes alone. The input to the system is an image sequence acquired from circular motion. Both the camera motion and the 3D structure of the head are estimated using silhouettes which are tracked throughout the sequence. Special properties of the camera motion and their relationships with the intrinsic parameters of the camera are exploited to provide a simple parameterization of the fundamental matrix relating any pair of views in the sequence. Such a parameterization greatly reduces the dimension of the search space for the optimization problem. In contrast to previous methods, this work can cope with incomplete circular motion and more widely spaced images. Experiments on real image sequences are carried out, showing accurate recovery of 3D shapes.postprintThe 4th International Workshop on Visual Form (IWVF-4), Capri, Italy, 28-30 May 2001. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Visual Form, 2001, p. 787-79

Further Characterization of the Mitigation of Radiation Lethality by Protective Wounding

There continues to be a major effort in the United States to develop mitigators for the treatment of mass casualties that received high-intensity acute ionizing radiation exposures from the detonation of an improvised nuclear device during a radiological terrorist attack. The ideal countermeasure should be effective when administered after exposure, and over a wide range of absorbed doses. We have previously shown that the administration of a subcutaneous incision of a defined length, if administered within minutes after irradiation, protected young adult female C57BL/6 mice against radiation-induced lethality, and increased survival after total-body exposure to an LD50/30 X-ray dose from 50% to over 90%. We refer to this approach as "protective wounding". In this article, we report on our efforts to further optimize, characterize and demonstrate the validity of the protective wounding response by comparing the response of female and male mice, varying the radiation dose, the size of the wound, and the timing of wounding with respect to administration of the radiation dose. Both male and female mice that received a subcutaneous incision after irradiation were significantly protected from radiation lethality. We observed that the extent of protection against lethality after an LD50/30 X-ray dose was independent of the size of the subcutaneous cut, and that a 3 mm subcutaneous incision is effective at enhancing the survival of mice exposed to a broad range of radiation doses (LD15-LD100). Over the range of 6.2-6.7 Gy, the increase in survival observed in mice that received an incision was associated with an enhanced recovery of hematopoiesis. The enhanced rate of recovery of hematopoiesis was preceded by an increase in the production of a select group of cytokines. Thus, a thorough knowledge of the timing of the cytokine cascade after wounding could aid in the development of novel pharmacological radiation countermeasures that can be administered several days after the actual radiation exposure

Dynamical trapping and relaxation of scalar gravitational fields

We present a framework for nonlinearly coupled scalar-tensor theory of gravity to address both inflation and core-collapse supernova problems. The unified approach is based on a novel dynamical trapping and relaxation of scalar gravity in highly energetic regimes. The new model provides a viable alternative mechanism of inflation free from various issues known to affect previous proposals. Furthermore, it could be related to observable violent astronomical events, specifically by releasing a significant amount of additional gravitational energy during core-collapse supernovae. A recent experiment at CERN relevant for testing this new model is briefly outlined.Comment: 4 pages; version to appear in PL

Migrating to Cloud-Native Architectures Using Microservices: An Experience Report

Migration to the cloud has been a popular topic in industry and academia in recent years. Despite many benefits that the cloud presents, such as high availability and scalability, most of the on-premise application architectures are not ready to fully exploit the benefits of this environment, and adapting them to this environment is a non-trivial task. Microservices have appeared recently as novel architectural styles that are native to the cloud. These cloud-native architectures can facilitate migrating on-premise architectures to fully benefit from the cloud environments because non-functional attributes, like scalability, are inherent in this style. The existing approaches on cloud migration does not mostly consider cloud-native architectures as their first-class citizens. As a result, the final product may not meet its primary drivers for migration. In this paper, we intend to report our experience and lessons learned in an ongoing project on migrating a monolithic on-premise software architecture to microservices. We concluded that microservices is not a one-fit-all solution as it introduces new complexities to the system, and many factors, such as distribution complexities, should be considered before adopting this style. However, if adopted in a context that needs high flexibility in terms of scalability and availability, it can deliver its promised benefits