Theme Overview: Weighing Healthy Choices for the School Meals Program

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Consumer Issues and Demand

Consumer/Household Economics, Livestock Production/Industries, D12, F13,

Fixed points, stability and intermittency in a shell model for advection of passive scalars

We investigate the fixed points of a shell model for the turbulent advection of passive scalars introduced Jensen, Paladin and Vulpiani. The passive scalar field is driven by the velocity field of the popular GOY shell model. The scaling behavior of the static solutions is found to differ significantly from Obukhov-Corrsin scaling theta_n ~ k_n^(-1/3) which is only recovered in the limit where the diffusivity vanishes, D -> 0. From the eigenvalue spectrum we show that any perturbation in the scalar will always damp out, i.e. the eigenvalues of the scalar are negative and are decoupled from the eigenvalues of the velocity. Furthermore we estimate Lyapunov exponents and the intermittency parameters using a definition proposed by Benzi et al. The full model is as chaotic as the GOY model, measured by the maximal Lyapunov exponent, but is more intermittent.Comment: 6 pages, REVTex, 4 figure

In field N transfer, build-up, and leaching in ryegrass-clover mixtures

Two field experiments investigating dynamics in grass-clover mixtures were conducted, using 15N- and 14C-labelling to trace carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) from grass (Lolium perenne L.) and clover (Trifolium repens L. and Trifolium pratense L.). The leaching of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN), as measured in pore water sampled by suction cups, increased during the autumn and winter, whereas the leaching of dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) was fairly constant during this period. Leaching of 15N from the sward indicated that ryegrass was the direct source of less than 1-2 percent of the total N leaching measured, whereas N dynamics pointed to clover as an important contributor to N leaching. Sampling of roots indicates that the dynamics in smaller roots were responsible for N and C build-up in the sward, and that N became available for transfer among species and leaching from the root zone. The bi-directional transfer of N between ryegrass and clover could however not be explained only by root turnover. Other processes like direct uptake of organic N compounds, may have contributed

A solvable non-conservative model of Self-Organized Criticality

We present the first solvable non-conservative sandpile-like critical model of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC), and thereby substantiate the suggestion by Vespignani and Zapperi [A. Vespignani and S. Zapperi, Phys. Rev. E 57, 6345 (1998)] that a lack of conservation in the microscopic dynamics of an SOC-model can be compensated by introducing an external drive and thereby re-establishing criticality. The model shown is critical for all values of the conservation parameter. The analytical derivation follows the lines of Broeker and Grassberger [H.-M. Broeker and P. Grassberger, Phys. Rev. E 56, 3944 (1997)] and is supported by numerical simulation. In the limit of vanishing conservation the Random Neighbor Forest Fire Model (R-FFM) is recovered.Comment: 4 pages in RevTeX format (2 Figures) submitted to PR