A recently published theory has suggested that a cloak of invisibility is in principle possible, at least over a narrow frequency band. We describe here the first practical realization of such a ...cloak; in our demonstration, a copper cylinder was "hidden" inside a cloak constructed according to the previous theoretical prescription. The cloak was constructed with the use of artificially structured metamaterials, designed for operation over a band of microwave frequencies. The cloak decreased scattering from the hidden object while at the same time reducing its shadow, so that the cloak and object combined began to resemble empty space.
Rapid adjustments are responses to forcing agents that cause a perturbation to the top of atmosphere energy budget but are uncoupled to changes in surface warming. Different mechanisms are ...responsible for these adjustments for a variety of climate drivers. These remain to be quantified in detail. It is shown that rapid adjustments reduce the effective radiative forcing (ERF) of black carbon by half of the instantaneous forcing, but for CO2 forcing, rapid adjustments increase ERF. Competing tropospheric adjustments for CO2 forcing are individually significant but sum to zero, such that the ERF equals the stratospherically adjusted radiative forcing, but this is not true for other forcing agents. Additional experiments of increase in the solar constant and increase in CH4 are used to show that a key factor of the rapid adjustment for an individual climate driver is changes in temperature in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.
Plain Language Summary
Long‐term global warming can be estimated with knowledge of how climate forcing agents affect the Earth's top‐of‐atmosphere energy imbalance or effective radiative forcing. Changes in climate forcers, such as greenhouse gases, the Sun's intensity, or emission of aerosol particles, typically impose a direct change in the energy budget, termed an instantaneous radiative forcing. Further to this, a climate forcer may induce changes in the atmosphere, such as a change in thermal structure, clouds, or humidity. These changes themselves, termed rapid adjustments, contribute to the top‐of‐atmosphere energy budget. Together, the instantaneous radiative forcing plus rapid adjustments equals the effective radiative forcing. We show that for different climate forcing agents, the rapid adjustments behave very differently and are driven by different atmospheric mechanisms. For example, rapid adjustments add to the instantaneous forcing for a carbon dioxide increase, due to a cooling of the stratosphere, but oppose instantaneous forcing for black carbon, driven by a warming troposphere and lowering of cloud height. Understanding rapid adjustments gives a more complete picture of the climate effects of different climate forcers.
Key Points
Rapid adjustments affect the Earth's energy balance in different ways for greenhouse gas, aerosol, and solar forcing
Radiative kernels and partial radiative perturbations are used to diagnose rapid adjustments from atmospheric and cloud changes
Noncloud adjustments agree well between models, whereas cloud adjustments exhibit more spread
Context. Deep far-infrared (FIR) cosmological surveys are known to be affected by source confusion, causing issues when examining the main sequence (MS) of star forming galaxies. In the past this has ...typically been partially tackled by the use of stacking. However, stacking only provides the average properties of the objects in the stack. Aims. This work aims to trace the MS over 0.2 ≤ z < 6.0 using the latest de-blended Herschel photometry, which reaches ≈10 times deeper than the 5σ confusion limit in SPIRE. This provides more reliable star formation rates (SFRs), especially for the fainter galaxies, and hence a more reliable MS. Methods. We built a pipeline that uses the spectral energy distribution (SED) modelling and fitting tool CIGALE to generate flux density priors in the Herschel SPIRE bands. These priors were then fed into the de-blending tool XID+ to extract flux densities from the SPIRE maps. In the final step, multi-wavelength data were combined with the extracted SPIRE flux densities to constrain SEDs and provide stellar mass (M⋆) and SFRs. These M⋆ and SFRs were then used to populate the SFR-M⋆ plane over 0.2 ≤ z < 6.0. Results. No significant evidence of a high-mass turn-over was found; the best fit is thus a simple two-parameter power law of the form log(SFR) = αlog(M⋆) − 10.5 + β. The normalisation of the power law increases with redshift, rapidly at z ≲ 1.8, from 0.58 ± 0.09 at z ≈ 0.37 to 1.31 ± 0.08 at z ≈ 1.8. The slope is also found to increase with redshift, perhaps with an excess around 1.8 ≤ z < 2.9. Conclusions. The increasing slope indicates that galaxies become more self-similar as redshift increases. This implies that the specific SFR of high-mass galaxies increases with redshift, from 0.2 to 6.0, becoming closer to that of low-mass galaxies. The excess in the slope at 1.8 ≤ z < 2.9, if present, coincides with the peak of the cosmic star formation history.
The LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey Shimwell, T. W.; Röttgering, H. J. A.; Best, P. N. ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
02/2017, Volume:
598
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey (LoTSS) is a deep 120–168 MHz imaging survey that will eventually cover the entire northern sky. Each of the 3170 pointings will be observed for 8 h, which, at most ...declinations, is sufficient to produce ∼5 resolution images with a sensitivity of ∼100 µJy/beam and accomplish the main scientific aims of the survey, which are to explore the formation and evolution of massive black holes, galaxies, clusters of galaxies and large-scale structure. Owing to the compact core and long baselines of LOFAR, the images provide excellent sensitivity to both highly extended and compact emission. For legacy value, the data are archived at high spectral and time resolution to facilitate subarcsecond imaging and spectral line studies. In this paper we provide an overview of the LoTSS. We outline the survey strategy, the observational status, the current calibration techniques, a preliminary data release, and the anticipated scientific impact. The preliminary images that we have released were created using a fully automated but direction-independent calibration strategy and are significantly more sensitive than those produced by any existing large-area low-frequency survey. In excess of 44 000 sources are detected in the images that have a resolution of 25 , typical noise levels of less than 0.5 mJy/beam, and cover an area of over 350 square degrees in the region of the HETDEX Spring Field (right ascension 10h45m00s to 15h30m00s and declination 45 • 00 00 to 57 • 00 00).
With the advent of the Heliophysics/Geospace System Observatory (H/GSO), a complement of multi-spacecraft missions and ground-based observatories to study the space environment, data retrieval, ...analysis, and visualization of space physics data can be daunting. The Space Physics Environment Data Analysis System (SPEDAS), a grass-roots software development platform (
www.spedas.org
), is now officially supported by NASA Heliophysics as part of its data environment infrastructure. It serves more than a dozen space missions and ground observatories and can integrate the full complement of past and upcoming space physics missions with minimal resources, following clear, simple, and well-proven guidelines. Free, modular and configurable to the needs of individual missions, it works in both command-line (ideal for experienced users) and Graphical User Interface (GUI) mode (reducing the learning curve for first-time users). Both options have “crib-sheets,” user-command sequences in ASCII format that can facilitate record-and-repeat actions, especially for complex operations and plotting. Crib-sheets enhance scientific interactions, as users can move rapidly and accurately from exchanges of technical information on data processing to efficient discussions regarding data interpretation and science. SPEDAS can readily query and ingest all International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP)-compatible products from the Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF), enabling access to a vast collection of historic and current mission data. The planned incorporation of Heliophysics Application Programmer’s Interface (HAPI) standards will facilitate data ingestion from distributed datasets that adhere to these standards. Although SPEDAS is currently Interactive Data Language (IDL)-based (and interfaces to Java-based tools such as Autoplot), efforts are under-way to expand it further to work with python (first as an interface tool and potentially even receiving an under-the-hood replacement). We review the SPEDAS development history, goals, and current implementation. We explain its “modes of use” with examples geared for users and outline its technical implementation and requirements with software developers in mind. We also describe SPEDAS personnel and software management, interfaces with other organizations, resources and support structure available to the community, and future development plans.
Metals support surface plasmons at optical wavelengths and have the ability to localize light to subwavelength regions. The field enhancements that occur in these regions set the ultimate limitations ...on a wide range of nonlinear and quantum optical phenomena. We found that the dominant limiting factor is not the resistive loss of the metal, but rather the intrinsic nonlocality of its dielectric response. A semiclassical model of the electronic response of a metal places strict bounds on the ultimate field enhancement. To demonstrate the accuracy of this model, we studied optical scattering from gold nanoparticles spaced a few angstroms from a gold film. The bounds derived from the models and experiments impose limitations on all nanophotonic systems.
We present a sample of 1483 sources that display spectral peaks between 72 MHz and 1.4 GHz, selected from the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky Murchison Widefield Array (GLEAM) survey. The GLEAM ...survey is the widest fractional bandwidth all-sky survey to date, ideal for identifying peaked-spectrum sources at low radio frequencies. Our peaked-spectrum sources are the low-frequency analogs of gigahertz-peaked spectrum (GPS) and compact-steep spectrum (CSS) sources, which have been hypothesized to be the precursors to massive radio galaxies. Our sample more than doubles the number of known peaked-spectrum candidates, and 95% of our sample have a newly characterized spectral peak. We highlight that some GPS sources peaking above 5 GHz have had multiple epochs of nuclear activity, and we demonstrate the possibility of identifying high-redshift (z > 2) galaxies via steep optically thin spectral indices and low observed peak frequencies. The distribution of the optically thick spectral indices of our sample is consistent with past GPS/CSS samples but with a large dispersion, suggesting that the spectral peak is a product of an inhomogeneous environment that is individualistic. We find no dependence of observed peak frequency with redshift, consistent with the peaked-spectrum sample comprising both local CSS sources and high-redshift GPS sources. The 5 GHz luminosity distribution lacks the brightest GPS and CSS sources of previous samples, implying that a convolution of source evolution and redshift influences the type of peaked-spectrum sources identified below 1 GHz. Finally, we discuss sources with optically thick spectral indices that exceed the synchrotron self-absorption limit.
Relative brain size has long been considered a reflection of cognitive capacities and has played a fundamental role in developing core theories in the life sciences. Yet, the notion that relative ...brain size validly represents selection on brain size relies on the untested assumptions that brain-body allometry is restrained to a stable scaling relationship across species and that any deviation from this slope is due to selection on brain size. Using the largest fossil and extant dataset yet assembled, we find that shifts in allometric slope underpin major transitions in mammalian evolution and are often primarily characterized by marked changes in body size. Our results reveal that the largest-brained mammals achieved large relative brain sizes by highly divergent paths. These findings prompt a reevaluation of the traditional paradigm of relative brain size and open new opportunities to improve our understanding of the genetic and developmental mechanisms that influence brain size.
Genetic variation can affect drug response in multiple ways, although it remains unclear how rare genetic variants affect drug response. The electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network, ...collaborating with the Pharmacogenomics Research Network, began eMERGE‐PGx, a targeted sequencing study to assess genetic variation in 82 pharmacogenes critical for implementation of “precision medicine.” The February 2015 eMERGE‐PGx data release includes sequence‐derived data from ∼5,000 clinical subjects. We present the variant frequency spectrum categorized by variant type, ancestry, and predicted function. We found 95.12% of genes have variants with a scaled Combined Annotation‐Dependent Depletion score above 20, and 96.19% of all samples had one or more Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium Level A actionable variants. These data highlight the distribution and scope of genetic variation in relevant pharmacogenes, identifying challenges associated with implementing clinical sequencing for drug treatment at a broader level, underscoring the importance for multifaceted research in the execution of precision medicine.
This paper is the second in a pair of papers presenting data release 1 (DR1) of the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS), the largest single open-time key project carried out ...with the Herschel
Space Observatory. The H-ATLAS is a wide-area imaging survey carried out in five photometric bands at 100, 160, 250, 350 and 500 μm covering a total area of 600 deg2. In this paper, we describe the identification of optical counterparts to submillimetre sources in DR1, comprising an area of 161 deg2 over three equatorial fields of roughly 12 × 4.5 deg centred at 9h, 12h and 14
${^{\rm h}_{.}}$
5, respectively. Of all the H-ATLAS fields, the equatorial regions benefit from the greatest overlap with current multi-wavelength surveys spanning ultraviolet (UV) to mid-infrared regimes, as well as extensive spectroscopic coverage. We use a likelihood ratio technique to identify Sloan Digital Sky Survey counterparts at r < 22.4 for 250-μm-selected sources detected at ≥4σ (≈28 mJy). We find ‘reliable’ counterparts (reliability R ≥ 0.8) for 44 835 sources (39 per cent), with an estimated completeness of 73.0 per cent and contamination rate of 4.7 per cent. Using redshifts and multi-wavelength photometry from GAMA and other public catalogues, we show that H-ATLAS-selected galaxies at z < 0.5 span a wide range of optical colours, total infrared (IR) luminosities and IR/UV ratios, with no strong disposition towards mid-IR-classified active galactic nuclei in comparison with optical selection. The data described herein, together with all maps and catalogues described in the companion paper, are available from the H-ATLAS website at www.h-atlas.org.
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