Detection of the temporal variation of the sun's cosmic ray shadow with the IceCube detector

We report on the observation of a deficit in the cosmic ray flux from the directions of the Moon and Sun with five years of data taken by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Between 2010 May and 2011 May the IceCube detector operated with 79 strings deployed in the glacial ice at the South Pole, and with 86 strings between 2011 May and 2015 May. A binned analysis is used to measure the relative deficit and significance of the cosmic ray shadows. Both the cosmic ray Moon and Sun shadows are detected with high statistical significance (> 10 sigma) for each year. The results for the Moon shadow are consistent with previous analyses and verify the stability of the IceCube detector over time. This work represents the first observation of the Sun shadow with the IceCube detector. We show that the cosmic ray shadow of the Sun varies with time. These results make it possible to study cosmic ray transport near the Sun with future data from IceCube

DTT Divertor Tokamak Test facility. Interim Design Report. Summary

La proposta di progetto DTT, Divertor Tokamak Test facility, rappresenta una proposta innovativa e completa nella roadmap verso l’implementazione dell’energia da fusione termonucleare. Il progetto coinvolge un centinaio di ricercatori provenienti da università e laboratori italiani e stranieri. Approvato dalle autorità italiane, il progetto potrà beneficiare di finanziamenti governativi e regionali e di un ampio sostegno europeo, ottenuto nell’ambito del Piano europeo per gli investimenti in infrastrutture. La pubblicazione intende fornire i dati chiave aggiornati del complesso e articolato progetto

Gestione sostenibile delle foreste Mediterranee e uso energetico delle biomasse forestali residuali

he book describes the reasons that led the Regional Department of Rural and Territorial Development to take part in the PROFORBIOMED Project. They can be summarized by the need to dispose of a tool for the sustainable management of all the state-owned forests of the Region. As a matter of fact, the Project aims at developing a model of sustainable forest management, through the recovery and reuse of wood scraps from ordinary silvicultural operations, to be used for the production of power and heat inside of a process adopting natural renewable energy sources. The main actions taken and the methodologies adopted are described, as well as the principles and instruments required for the setting up and execution of the work. Some of the most relevant are: the drafting of “Forest Management Plans”, the “Short Supply Chain” and the “Biomass Traceability Protocol”, together with the application of “Best Practices” of Management and the “Monitoring of impacts” caused by the woody biomass extraction procedures. The “forest – wood – energy” chain developed and proposed is exclusively related to the territory pertaining to one municipality, and with CHP plants fed with biomass exclusively produced within the territory of each municipality, in strict compliance with the “sustainable forest management” principles, as well as with the fundamental principle of “short supply chain”. For these reasons the CHP plans proposed shall be sized according to the biomass available in each municipality, with the possibility of integrating residual forest biomass with other waste wood resources potentially available in the territory and coming from prunings in agricultural activities. Therefore, the replicable model prepared and proposed by PROFORBIOMED aims at appraising from the economic point of view a waste product, such is currently considered the residual forest biomass from the forests of Sicily, and at the same time significantly improving the natural environment, thanks to the reduction in oil consumption

A Comparison Between Similarity Measures Based on Minimal Absent Words: An Experimental Approach

In this paper we make some experimental considerations on the sets D(x, y), M(x)M(y), M(x) ∪ M(y) involving minimal absent words of two words x and y. This study is motivated by the computation of distances based on these sets

On the long term behavior of meandering rivers

In spite of notable advances in the description of river morphodynamics, the long-term dynamics of meandering rivers is still an open question, in particular, regarding the existence of a possible statistical steady state and its scaling properties induced by the competing action of cutoffs and reach elongation. By means of extensive numerical simulations, using three fluid dynamic models of different complexity and analysis of real data from the Amazon, North America, and Russia, we show that the reach cutoffs, besides providing stability and self-confinement to the meander belt, also act as a dynamical filter on several hydrodynamic mechanisms, selecting only those that really dominate the long-term dynamics. The results show that the long-term equilibrium conditions are essentially governed by only one spatial scale (proportional to the ratio of the river depth and the friction coefficient) and one temporal scale (proportional to the square of the spatial scale divided by the river width, the mean longitudinal velocity, and the erodibility coefficient) that contain the most important fluid dynamic quantities. The ensuing statistical long-term behavior of meandering rivers proves to be universal and largely unaffected by the details of the fluid dynamic processes that govern the short-term river behavio

Neutrinos below 100 TeV from the southern sky employing refined veto techniques to IceCube data

Many Galactic sources of gamma rays, such as supernova remnants, are expected to produce neutrinos with a typical energy cutoff well below 100 TeV. For the IceCube Neutrino Observatory located at the South Pole, the southern sky, containing the inner part of the Galactic plane and the Galactic Center, is a particularly challenging region at these energies, because of the large background of atmospheric muons. In this paper, we present recent advancements in data selection strategies for track-like muon neutrino events with energies below 100 TeV from the southern sky. The strategies utilize the outer detector regions as veto and features of the signal pattern to reduce the background of atmospheric muons to a level which, for the first time, allows IceCube searching for point-like sources of neutrinos in the southern sky at energies between 100 GeV and several TeV in the muon neutrino charged current channel. No significant clustering of neutrinos above background expectation was observed in four years of data recorded with the completed IceCube detector. Upper limits on the neutrino flux for a number of spectral hypotheses are reported for a list of astrophysical objects in the southern hemisphere.Comment: 19 pages, 17 figures, 2 table

Comparing different models of the development of verb inflection in early child Spanish

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge of verb inflection is only partially productive is tested by comparing the average number of different inflections per verb in matched samples of child and adult speech. The generativist claim that children's early use of verb inflection is essentially error-free is tested by investigating the rate at which the children made subjectverb agreement errors in different parts of the present tense paradigm. Our results show: 1) that, although even adults ' use of verb inflection in Spanish tends to look somewhat lexically restricted, both children's use of verb inflection was significantly less flexible than that of their caregivers, and 2) that, although the rate at which the two children produced subjectverb agreement errors in their speech was very low, this overall error rate hid a consistent pattern of error in which error rates were substantially higher in low frequency than in high frequency contexts, and substantially higher for low frequency than for high frequency verbs. These results undermine the claim that children's use of verb inflection is fully productive from the earliest observable stages, and are consistent with the constructivist claim that knowledge of verb inflection develops only gradually

Characteristics and Outcomes of Patients Discharged Directly Home From the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit

Introduction: Patients admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) typically transfer to an acute care floor prior to discharge (ACD). Various circumstances, including rapid clinical improvement, technology dependence, or capacity constraints, may lead to discharge directly to home from a PICU (DDH). This practice has been studied in adult intensive care units, but research is lacking for PICU patients. Methods: We aimed to describe characteristics and outcomes of patients requiring PICU admission who experienced DDH versus ACD. We conducted a retrospective cohort study of patients ≤18 years old admitted to our academic, tertiary care PICU between 1/1/15 and 12/31/20. Patients who died or were transferred to another facility were excluded. Baseline characteristics (including home ventilator dependence) and markers of illness severity, specifically the need for vasoactive infusion or new mechanical ventilation, were compared between groups. Admission diagnoses were categorized using the Pediatric Clinical Classification System (PECCS). Our primary outcome was hospital readmission within 30 days. Results: Of 4042 PICU admissions during the study period, 768 (19%) were DDH. Baseline demographic characteristics were similar, although DDH patients were more likely to have a tracheostomy (30% vs 5%, P < .01) and require a home ventilator at discharge (24% vs 1%, P < .01). DDH was associated with being less likely to have required a vasoactive infusion (7% vs 11%, P < .01), shorter median length of stay (LOS) (2.1 days vs 5.9 days, P < .01) and increased rate of readmission within 30 days of discharge (17% vs 14%, P < .05). However, repeat analysis after removing ventilator-dependent patients at discharge (n = 202) showed no difference in rates of readmission (14% vs 14%, P = .88). Conclusions: Direct discharge home from the PICU is a common practice. DDH and ACD groups had similar 30-day readmission rate when patient admissions with home ventilator dependence were excluded