Search results for "Flight"
showing 10 items of 372 documents
How Do We Know If There’s a Message?
2010
As we have seen, radio waves can be excellent candidates for interplanetary communication, due to the fact that our galaxy is transparent to them. The problem lies in properly identifying the origin – artificial or natural – of an arriving signal. When we tune a radio receiver and we turn the antenna toward the cosmos, we gather hundreds of different signals. Even some of the natural signals are quite suggestive, and one can be tempted to consider them emissions from other civilizations.
Predicting the risk of extinction from shared ecological characteristics
2005
Understanding the ultimate causes of population declines and extinction is vital in our quest to stop the currently rampant biodiversity loss. Comparison of ecological characteristics between threatened and nonthreatened species may reveal these ultimate causes. Here, we report an analysis of ecological characteristics of 23 threatened and 72 nonthreatened butterfly species. Our analysis reveals that threatened butterflies are characterized by narrow niche breadth, restricted resource distribution, poor dispersal ability, and short flight period. Based on the characteristics, we constructed an ecological extinction risk rank and predicted which of the currently nonthreatened species are at …
Robust fault tolerant tracking controller design for a VTOL aircraft
2013
This paper deals with the fault tolerant control (FTC) design for a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft subject to external disturbances and actuator faults. The aim is to synthesize a fault tolerant controller ensuring trajectory tracking for the nonlinear uncertain system represented by a Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) model. In order to design the FTC law, a proportional integral observer (PIO) is adopted which estimate both of the faults and the faulty system states. Based on the Lyapunov theory and ℓ2 optimization, the trajectory tracking performance and the stability of the closed loop system are analyzed. Sufficient conditions are obtained in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMI). …
Transition from self tilt to object tilt during maintained lateral tilt in parabolic flight.
1991
Abstract 19 young healthy subjects were subjected to parabolic rollercoaster flight. A horizontal luminous line was seen by the subjects in a headfixed goggle device. During the hypergravic phases of parabolic flight the luminous line seemed to rotate into and during the hypogravic phase against the direction of static head tilt. Ocular counter rotation and activity of the neck position receptors cannot explain these subjective rotations. We conclude that information from the otolith system, converging with visual information within the brain, dislocated the headfixed visual target line. While the retinal image of the luminous line remains unchanged, loading and unloading the otoliths in pa…
Icarus and Daedalus in Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon"
2012
In Song of Solomon Toni Morrison rewrites the legend of the Flying Africans and the Myth of Icarus to create her own Myth. Her depiction of the black hero’s search for identity has strong mythical overtones. Morrison rescues those elements of mythology black culture which are still relevant to blacks and fuses them with evident allusions to Greek mythology. She reinterprets old images and myths of flight, the main mythical motif in the story. Her Icarus engages on an archetypical journey to the South, to his family past, led by his Daedalic guide, on which he finally recovers his ancestral ability to fly. His flight signals a spiritual epiphany in the hero’s quest for self-definition in the…
Deciliation: A stressful event for Paracentrotus lividus embryos.
1998
In this report, by using mono- and two-dimensional electrophoretic analysis, we demonstrate that deciliation on sea urchin embryos induces a stress response. Deciliation indeed causes not only the activation of ciliary subroutine, but also a transient decrease of bulk protein synthesis. This decrease is in agreement with our previous results on heat shock response in sea urchin, although deciliation does not induce the expression of the same main hsp set. We were able to characterize one main deciliation-stress protein of 40 kDa whose expression is transiently induced by deciliation and whose localisation is likely to be nuclear.
Scattering lengths and universality in superdiffusive L\'evy materials
2012
We study the effects of scattering lengths on L\'evy walks in quenched one-dimensional random and fractal quasi-lattices, with scatterers spaced according to a long-tailed distribution. By analyzing the scaling properties of the random-walk probability distribution, we show that the effect of the varying scattering length can be reabsorbed in the multiplicative coefficient of the scaling length. This leads to a superscaling behavior, where the dynamical exponents and also the scaling functions do not depend on the value of the scattering length. Within the scaling framework, we obtain an exact expression for the multiplicative coefficient as a function of the scattering length both in the a…
Photobiology in space: An experiment on Spacelab I
1984
The joint European/US Spacelab Mission I, scheduled for October 1983 for a 9 day lasting Earth-orbiting flight, provides a laboratory system for various disciplines of science, including exobiology. On the pallet, in the experiment ES 029 "Microorganisms and Biomolecules in Space Hard Environment" 316 dry samples of Bacillus subtilis spores will be exposed to space vacuum and/or selected wavelenghs of solar UV radiation. After recovery action spectra of inactivation, mutation induction, reparability and photochemical damage in DNA and protein will be determined. The results will contribute to the understanding of the mechanism of the increased UV sensitivity of bacterial spores in vacuo and…
Switching times in long-overlap Josephson junctions subject to thermal fluctuations and non-Gaussian noise sources
2014
We investigate the superconducting lifetime of long current-biased Josephson junctions, in the presence of Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise sources. In particular, we analyze the dynamics of a Josephson junction as a function of the noise signal intensity, for different values of the parameters of the system and external driving currents. We find that the mean lifetime of the superconductive state is characterized by nonmonotonic behavior as a function of noise intensity, driving frequency and junction length. We observe that these nonmonotonic behaviours are connected with the dynamics of the junction phase string during the switching towards the resistive state. An important role is played…
FRIPON: a worldwide network to track incoming meteoroids
2020
Context. Until recently, camera networks designed for monitoring fireballs worldwide were not fully automated, implying that in case of a meteorite fall, the recovery campaign was rarely immediate. This was an important limiting factor as the most fragile - hence precious - meteorites must be recovered rapidly to avoid their alteration. Aims. The Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network (FRIPON) scientific project was designed to overcome this limitation. This network comprises a fully automated camera and radio network deployed over a significant fraction of western Europe and a small fraction of Canada. As of today, it consists of 150 cameras and 25 European radio receiver…