Magnetically controlled plasma accelerator Patent

Magnetically controlled plasma accelerator capable of ignition in low density gaseous environmen

The Application of Remotely Sensed Data and Models to Benefit Conservation and Restoration Along the Northern Gulf of Mexico Coast

New data, tools, and capabilities for decision making are significant needs in the northern Gulf of Mexico and other coastal areas. The goal of this project is to support NASA s Earth Science Mission Directorate and its Applied Science Program and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance by producing and providing NASA data and products that will benefit decision making by coastal resource managers and other end users in the Gulf region. Data and research products are being developed to assist coastal resource managers adapt and plan for changing conditions by evaluating how climate changes and urban expansion will impact land cover/land use (LCLU), hydrodynamics, water properties, and shallow water habitats; to identify priority areas for conservation and restoration; and to distribute datasets to end-users and facilitating user interaction with models. The proposed host sites for data products are NOAA s National Coastal Data Development Center Regional Ecosystem Data Management, and Mississippi-Alabama Habitat Database. Tools will be available on the Gulf of Mexico Regional Collaborative website with links to data portals to enable end users to employ models and datasets to develop and evaluate LCLU and climate scenarios of particular interest. These data will benefit the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program in ongoing efforts to protect and restore the Fish River watershed and around Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. The usefulness of data products and tools will be demonstrated at an end-user workshop

Dyonic BIon black hole in string inspired model

We construct static and spherically symmetric particle-like and black hole solutions with magnetic and/or electric charge in the Einstein-Born-Infeld-dilaton-axion system, which is a generalization of the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton-axion (EMDA) system and of the Einstein-Born-Infeld (EBI) system. They have remarkable properties which are not seen for the corresponding solutions in the EMDA and the EBI system.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, Final version in PR

Spatially clustered resources increase male aggregation and mating duration in Drosophila melanogaster

In environments where females mate multiply, males should adjust their behaviour and physiology in response to the perceived level of sperm competition to maximize their fitness. Evidence of such plasticity has been found in several laboratory and field studies, but little is known about the cues stimulating these responses in natural populations. One way in which males appear to assess sperm competition risk is through encounter rates with conspecific males. Such encounter rates may be driven by the spatial distribution of resources required by males (i.e. food patches or potential mates), which in turn affects local density. However, explicit links between resource distribution, male encounter rates and shifts in behaviour related to sperm competition have not been demonstrated. We found that when group size of Drosophila melanogaster males was held constant, a small decrease in the distance between patches of food resources had striking effects on male behaviour. Compared to those from dispersed resources, males on clustered resources had a significantly reduced intermale distance (and hence encounter rate) and subsequently a longer noncompetitive copulation duration, previously shown to be a reliable indicator of male perception of sperm competition risk. The aggregation of resources, operating via increased encounter rate, can stimulate shifts in behaviour affecting male sperm competition performance. Given that the spatial distribution of resources is typically variable in natural populations (and often unpredictable), selection is likely to favour the evolution of plasticity in sexual behaviour where resource aggregation increases the probability of sperm competition

Theory of an Electromagnetic Mass Accelerator for Achieving Hypervelocities

It is shown that for any electromagnetic accelerator which employs an electromagnetic force for driving the projectile and uses the projectile as the heat sink for the energy dissipated in it by ohmic heating, the maximum velocity attainable without melting is a function of the mass of the projectile. Therefore, for hypervelocities a large projectile mass is required and thus a power supply of very large capacity is necessary. It is shown that the only means for reducing the power requirement is maximizing the gradient of the mutual inductance. In the scheme of the sliding-coil accelerator investigated herein, the gradient of the mutual inductance is continuously maintained at a high value. It is also shown that for minimum length of the accelerator, the current must be kept constant despite the rise in induced voltage during acceleration. The use of a capacitor bank as an energy source with the condition that the current be kept constant is investigated. Experiments at low velocities are described

Magnetic Ignition of Pulsed Gas Discharges in Air of Low Pressure in a Coaxial Plasma Gun

The effect of an axial magnetic field on the breakdown voltage of a coaxial system of electrodes has been investigated by earlier workers. For low values of gas pressure times electrode spacing, the breakdown voltage is decreased by the application of the magnetic field. The electron cyclotron radius now assumes the role held by the mean free path in nonmagnetic discharges and the breakdown voltage becomes a function of the magnetic flux density. In this paper the dependence of the formative time lag as a function of the magnetic flux density is established and the feasibility of using a magnetic field for igniting high-voltage, high-current discharges is shown through theory and experiment. With a 36 microfarad capacitor bank charged to 48,000 volts, a peak current of 1.3 x 10( exp 6) amperes in a coaxial type of plasma gun was achieved with a current rise time of only 2 microseconds

Quasi-classical approximation in vortex filament dynamics. Integrable systems, gradient catastrophe and flutter

Quasiclassical approximation in the intrinsic description of the vortex filament dynamics is discussed. Within this approximation the governing equations are given by elliptic system of quasi-linear PDEs of the first order. Dispersionless Da Rios system and dispersionless Hirota equation are among them. They describe motion of vortex filament with slow varying curvature and torsion without or with axial flow. Gradient catastrophe for governing equations is studied. It is shown that geometrically this catastrophe manifests as a fast oscillation of a filament curve around the rectifying plane which resembles the flutter of airfoils. Analytically it is the elliptic umbilic singularity in the terminology of the catastrophe theory. It is demonstrated that its double scaling regularization is governed by the Painleve' I equation.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figures, minor typos correcte

Social and physical environment independently affect oviposition decisions in Drosophila

In response to environmental stimuli, including variation in the presence of conspecifics, genotypes show highly plastic responses in behavioral and physiological traits influencing reproduction. Although extensively documented in males, such female responses are rather less studied. We expect females to be highly responsive to environmental variation and to differentially allocate resources to increase offspring fitness, given the major contribution of mothers to offspring number, size, and developmental conditions. Using Drosophila melanogaster, we (a) manipulate exposure to conspecific females, which mothers could use to anticipate the number of potential mates and larval density, and; (b) test how this interacts with the spatial distribution of potential oviposition sites, with females from higher densities expected to prefer clustered resources that can support a larger number of larvae. We found that high density females were slower to start copulating and reduced their copulation duration, the opposite effect to that observed in males. There was a parallel, perhaps related, effect on egg production: females previously housed in groups laid fewer eggs than those housed in solitude. Resource patchiness also influenced oviposition behavior: females preferred aggregated substrate, which attracted more females to lay eggs. However, we found no interaction between prior housing conditions and resource patchiness, indicating that females did not perceive the value of different resource distributions differently when exposed to environments that could signal expected levels of larval competition. We show that, although exposure to consexual competition changes copulatory behaviors of females, the distribution of oviposition resources has a greater effect on oviposition decisions

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

Non-Abelian Black Holes and Catastrophe Theory I : Neutral Type

We re-analyze the globally neutral non-Abelian black holes and present a unified picture, classifying them into two types; Type I (black holes with massless non-Abelian field) and Type II (black holes with ``massive" non-Abelian field). For the Type II, there are two branches: The black hole in the high-entropy branch is ``stable" and almost neutral, while that in the low entropy branch, which is similar to the Type I, is unstable and locally charged. To analyze their stabilities, we adopt the catastrophe theoretic method, which reveals us a universal picture of stability of the black holes. It is shown that the isolated Type II black hole has a fold catastrophe structure. In a heat bath system, the Type I black hole shows a cusp catastrophe, while the Type II has both fold and cusp catastrophe.Comment: 27pages, LaTex style, WU-AP/39/94. Figures are available (hard copies) upon requests [[email protected] (T.Torii)