Bennett, Breen, and the birdman of alcatraz: A case study of collaborative censorship between the production code administration and the federal bureau of prisons

In bringing to the screen the life of murderer Robert Stroud in Birdman of Alcatraz (United Artists, 1962), filmmakers encountered official obstruction from the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, James V. Bennett. Campaigning for the release of Stroud, Burt Lancaster retaliated by exposing Bennett’s efforts to censor the film as evidence of a personal vendetta against the prisoner. However, new archival research demonstrates how the Bureau had collaborated with Hollywood’s own censorship body, the Production Code Administration, for many years - and that Birdman was in fact the culmination of a decades-long struggle to control all films about Alcatraz

Plant composition of three woodland communities of variable condition in the western Riverina, New South Wales, Australia

We examined differences in floristics among three regionally-threatened woodland communities in the western Riverina: Blackbox (Eucalyptus largiflorens), Bimble box-Pine (Eucalyptus populnea-Callitris glaucophylla) and Boree (Acacia pendula) between 2001 and 2004. Our aim was to examine possible relationships between the diversity and biomass of groundstorey vegetation, and remnant condition and rainfall both among communities and across years. The three woodland communities varied widely in their plant species composition, with only 22% of the 358 species common to all communities. Seven species, mainly exotic grasses and forbs, contributed 25% of the total cover across all sites and times. Blackbox communities had the greatest number of exotic and annual species. There were poor relationships between condition and diversity, richness, evenness or abundance of groundstorey plant species within 400 m2 quadrats. Overall, sites in better condition tended to support a greater cover of native plants and a lower cover of exotic plants (Blackbox only). There were only weak relationships between rainfall and biomass. The marked variation in species diversity in relation to changing seasonal conditions and within similar condition classes highlights the difficulties of developing benchmarks for separating the effects of management, and seasonal and longer-term climate change

Spatial patterns of infiltration vary with disturbance in a shrub-encroached woodland

Author's manuscript made available in accordance with the publisher's policy.Woody plant encroachment is known to have substantial effects on a range of ecosystem processes. Research worldwide indicates that the area around shrubs and trees has higher levels of infiltration than the interspaces. Little is known, however, about the hydrological consequences of shrub removal on infiltration, and how this might be influenced by grazing. We examined the spatial patterns of infiltration across three treatments relating to shrub removal and grazing: (i) undisturbed (ungrazed, unploughed), (ii) grazed but unploughed, and (iii) grazed and ploughed. In general we found that disturbance was associated with a greater cover of bare soil but lower infiltrability, our laboratory–based measure of infiltration. At the undisturbed site, bare soil was patchy and localized, with an autocorrelation range or connectivity of 1.4 m. The autocorrelation range of infiltrability at this site (A0 = 3 m) was larger than would be predicted from the size of the shrub canopy, and this was attributed to the presence of a well–developed understorey layer and biological soil crust community. At both grazed sites, infiltration was confined to the immediate canopy area of the remaining shrubs (A0 = 1.2 m in the unploughed–grazed site). Additionally, there was increasing connectivity of bare soil with disturbance, up to 6.8 m at the ploughed–grazed site. With increasing disturbance, resource-rich shrub patches are likely to become more developed, further reinforcing their growth and persistence at the expense of the bare interspaces. Our results indicate the importance of shrubs for maintaining landscape connectivity, and the long-term unsustainable practice of removal by ploughing, which is likely to promote shrub dominance rather than suppression

Ploughing and grazing alter the spatial patterning of surface soils in a shrub-encroached woodland

Author's manuscript made available in accordance with the publisher's policy.Grazing is known to affect the spatial patterning of soil resources through biologically-mediated processes such as the removal of plant biomass and deposition of dung. In dense shrublands, grazing is thought to reinforce the concentration of resources around shrubs (fertile island effect) by enhancing the movement of resources from the interspace to the shrub hummocks. Shrub removal practices such as ploughing, which is commonly used to manage dense shrub patches, has unknown impacts on the distribution of soil properties. In this study we examined the effects of two land management practices, grazing and ploughing, on the spatial distribution of surface soil resources. At the unploughed–ungrazed site, the connectivity (autocorrelation range) of shrub cover was about 3.9 m and there was a well-defined pattern in soil labile C that was related to the distribution of the cover of both shrubs and litter. We also observed a strong pattern of biological crust cover and an autocorrelation range of 2.5 m, similar to that of mineralisable and mineral N. At the unploughed–grazed site, the autocorrelation range of both shrub and crust cover was reduced to 1.9 m and 1.8 m, respectively, although the range of litter cover increased to 4.4 m. Under a treatment of grazing without ploughing, the autocorrelation range of soil labile C was less related to litter cover. Whilst ploughing slightly increased the autocorrelation range of both shrub and litter cover at sites that were grazed, it obliterated any spatial pattern in biological soil crusts. We attribute changes in the spatial patterns of soil N under grazing to inputs of animal dung rather than soil crust cover. Our results indicate that grazing alone, or in combination with ploughing, leads to reduced connectivity of shrub and crust cover, reduction in crust patterning, and marked effects on shrub–litter–nutrient spatial relationships. The results reinforce the notion that management of shrublands by grazing and ploughing is likely to have marked effects on the distribution of surface soils

Shrub encroachment alters the spatial patterns of infiltration

Author's manuscript made available in accordance with the publisher's policy.Encroachment of open woodlands by shrubs is a global phenomenon associated with marked changes in ecosystem structure and function. We measured sorptivity and steady-state infiltration at two supply potentials under shrubs and grasses and in their interspaces where shrubs were encroaching into grassland. Steady-state infiltration (ponded) and sorptivity were greater at the grassland than the shrubland site, and there was substantially greater infiltration under shrubs (48.2 mm h−1) and grasses (50.0 mm h−1) than the corresponding interspaces (17.0 and 32.3 mm h−1 for shrubland and grassland, respectively). The difference between grasses and their interspaces was substantially less (1.5 times) than that between shrubs and their interspaces (three times). Shrub encroachment also affected the spatial patterns of infiltration. Although the autocorrelation range for shrublands coincided almost exactly with the average distance between shrub canopies (3.5 m), the range for grasslands was three times greater (1.5 m) than the mean grass canopy, indicating a greater connectivity of infiltration in the grasslands than the shrublands. Our study indicates that encroachment by shrubs does not change infiltration under individual plants. Rather, it reduces the interspace infiltration rates significantly, resulting in lower estimated site-level infiltration rates in shrublands. Our research suggests therefore that it is the shrubland interspaces that are the likely drivers of reduced infiltration rates when grasslands are encroached, rather than increase in the total cover of shrubs per se. Management strategies that result in greater retention of grass cover and minimize the level of interspace disturbances are likely to result in increased infiltration

An Upper Mass Limit on a Red Supergiant Progenitor for the Type II-Plateau Supernova SN 2006my

We analyze two pre-supernova (SN) and three post-SN high-resolution images of the site of the Type II-Plateau supernova SN 2006my in an effort to either detect the progenitor star or to constrain its properties. Following image registration, we find that an isolated stellar object is not detected at the location of SN 2006my in either of the two pre-SN images. In the first, an I-band image obtained with the Wide-Field and Planetary Camera 2 on board the Hubble Space Telescope, the offset between the SN 2006my location and a detected source ("Source 1") is too large: > 0.08", which corresponds to a confidence level of non-association of 96% from our most liberal estimates of the transformation and measurement uncertainties. In the second, a similarly obtained V-band image, a source is detected ("Source 2") that has overlap with the SN 2006my location but is definitively an extended object. Through artificial star tests carried out on the precise location of SN 2006my in the images, we derive a 3-sigma upper bound on the luminosity of a red supergiant that could have remained undetected in our pre-SN images of log L/L_Sun = 5.10, which translates to an upper bound on such a star's initial mass of 15 M_Sun from the STARS stellar evolutionary models. Although considered unlikely, we can not rule out the possibility that part of the light comprising Source 1, which exhibits a slight extension relative to other point sources in the image, or part of the light contributing to the extended Source 2, may be due to the progenitor of SN 2006my. Only additional, high-resolution observations of the site taken after SN 2006my has faded beyond detection can confirm or reject these possibilities.Comment: Minor text changes from Version 1. Appendix added detailing the determination of confidence level of non-association of point sources in two registered astronomical image

Climatic vulnerabilities and ecological preferences of soil invertebrates across biomes.

Unlike plants and vertebrates, the ecological preferences, and potential vulnerabilities of soil invertebrates to environmental change, remain poorly understood in terrestrial ecosystems globally. We conducted a cross-biome survey including 83 locations across six continents to advance our understanding of the ecological preferences and vulnerabilities of the diversity of dominant and functionally important soil invertebrate taxa, including nematodes, arachnids and rotifers. The diversity of invertebrates was analyzed through amplicon sequencing. Vegetation and climate drove the diversity and dominant taxa of soil invertebrates. Our results suggest that declines in forest cover and plant diversity, and reductions in plant production associated with increases in aridity, can result in reductions of the diversity of soil invertebrates in a drier and more managed world. We further developed global atlases of the diversity of these important soil invertebrates, which were cross-validated using an independent database. Our study advances the current knowledge of the ecological preferences and vulnerabilities of the diversity and presence of functionally important soil invertebrates in soils from across the globe. This information is fundamental for improving and prioritizing conservation efforts of soil genetic resources and management policies

Diffuse Galactic antimatter from faint thermonuclear supernovae in old stellar populations

Our Galaxy hosts the annihilation of a few $\times 10^{43}$ low-energy positrons every second. Radioactive isotopes capable of supplying such positrons are synthesised in stars, stellar remnants, and supernovae. For decades, however, there has been no positive identification of a main stellar positron source leading to suggestions that many positrons originate from exotic sources like the Galaxy's central super-massive black hole or dark matter annihilation. %, but such sources would not explain the recently-detected positron signal from the extended Galactic disk. Here we show that a single type of transient source, deriving from stellar populations of age 3-6 Gyr and yielding ~0.03 $M_\odot$ of the positron emitter $^{44}$Ti, can simultaneously explain the strength and morphology of the Galactic positron annihilation signal and the solar system abundance of the $^{44}$Ti decay product $^{44}$Ca. This transient is likely the merger of two low-mass white dwarfs, observed in external galaxies as the sub-luminous, thermonuclear supernova known as SN1991bg-like.Comment: 28 pages main text with 4 figures in preprint style; 26 pages of Supplementary Informatio