ALBERT

Description: Due to an exceptional variety of habitats, body plans, and lifestyles, crustaceans exhibit a wide array of mating systems. Some groups engage in simple, pure- search polygamous systems in which males usually search for receptive females. In other groups, males defend valuable resources to attract and/ or guard females to ensure paternity. Some species have developed highly complex systems of harem defense polygyny and monogamy, even cases of sub- and eusociality are reported. The expression of mating systems does not seem to be uniformly correlated to taxonomic affiliation, but is rather diverse within certain groups, suggesting that the evolution of mating systems is largely facilitated by the lifestyle of the species. Despite the broad range of mating systems in crustaceans, and although some groups have been studied comparably well, there remains a lack of knowledge about the behavioral and sexual biology of many species. In the light of the high diversity of lifestyles, mating systems, and habitats of certain groups, crustacean species would be ideal models to unravel the evolution of reproductive strategies and social behaviors.

Description: In this article, the concepts and background of regional climate modeling of the future Baltic Sea are summarized and state-of-the-art projections, climate change impact studies, and challenges are discussed. The focus is on projected oceanographic changes in future climate. However, as these changes may have a significant impact on biogeochemical cycling, nutrient load scenario simulations in future climates are briefly discussed as well. The Baltic Sea is special compared to other coastal seas as it is a tideless, semi-enclosed sea with large freshwater and nutrient supply from a partly heavily populated catchment area and a long response time of about 30 years, and as it is, in the early 21st century, warming faster than any other coastal sea in the world. Hence, policymakers request the development of nutrient load abatement strategies in future climate. For this purpose, large ensembles of coupled climate–environmental scenario simulations based upon high-resolution circulation models were developed to estimate changes in water temperature, salinity, sea-ice cover, sea level, oxygen, nutrient, and phytoplankton concentrations, and water transparency, together with uncertainty ranges. Uncertainties in scenario simulations of the Baltic Sea are considerable. Sources of uncertainties are global and regional climate model biases, natural variability, and unknown greenhouse gas emission and nutrient load scenarios. Unknown early 21st-century and future bioavailable nutrient loads from land and atmosphere and the experimental setup of the dynamical downscaling technique are perhaps the largest sources of uncertainties for marine biogeochemistry projections. The high uncertainties might potentially be reducible through investments in new multi-model ensemble simulations that are built on better experimental setups, improved models, and more plausible nutrient loads. The development of community models for the Baltic Sea region with improved performance and common coordinated experiments of scenario simulations is recommended.

Description: The Trans-European Suture Zone (TESZ) is the transition zone from the Precambrian East European Craton in the north and east to the younger Phanerozoic mobile belts to the south and west. It is the most prominent lithospheric tectonic feature of Europe. The term Trans-European Suture Zone was only adapted around year 2000 during the Pan-European EUROPROBE program of the European Science Foundation. Until then, parts of the zone were termed Teisseyre-Tornquist Zone, Sorgenfrei-Tornquist Zone, Trans-European Fault, and Tornquist Fan.

Description: Central Europe has experienced a severe drought almost every April for the last 14 years consecutively, driven by record high temperatures, low flows, high evapotranspiration, and high soil moisture deficit. The dynamic of this recent and recurrent mid-spring dryness is not yet understood. Here we show that the period 2007â€``2020 was characterized by a reduction of ~50% of the usual April rainfall amount over large areas in central Europe. The precipitation deficit and the record high temperatures were triggered by a multiyear recurrent high-pressure system centered over the North Sea and northern Germany and a decline in the temperature gradient between the Arctic region and the mid-latitudes, which diverted the Atlantic storm tracks northward. From a long-term perspective, the precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture anomalies observed over the last 14 years have reached the highest amplitudes over the observational record. Our study provides an in-depth analysis of the hydroclimate extremes in central Europe over the last 140 years and their atmospheric drivers, enabling us to increase our dynamical understating of long-term dry periods, which is vital to enhance forecasting and mitigation of such events.

Description: The formation and stability of collisionless self-gravitating systems is a long standing problem, which dates back to the work of D. Lynden-Bell on violent relaxation, and extends to the issue of virialization of dark matter (DM) halos. An important prediction of such a relaxation process is that spherical equilibrium states can be described by a Fermi-Dirac phase-space distribution, when the extremization of a coarse-grained entropy is reached. In the case of DM fermions, the most general solution develops a degenerate compact core surrounded by a diluted halo. As shown recently, the latter is able to explain the galaxy rotation curves while the DM core can mimic the central black hole. A yet open problem is whether this kind of astrophysical core-halo configurations can form at all, and if they remain stable within cosmological timescales. We assess these issues by performing a thermodynamic stability analysis in the microcanonical ensemble for solutions with given particle number at halo virialization in a cosmological framework. For the first time we demonstrate that the above core-halo DM profiles are stable (i.e. maxima of entropy) and extremely long lived. We find the existence of a critical point at the onset of instability of the core-halo solutions, where the fermion-core collapses towards a supermassive black hole. For particle masses in the keV range, the core-collapse can only occur for Mvir ≳ E9M⊙ starting at zvir ≈ 10 in the given cosmological framework. Our results prove that DM halos with a core-halo morphology are a very plausible outcome within nonlinear stages of structure formation.

Description: In its first encounter at solar distances as close as r = 0.16AU, Parker Solar Probe (PSP) observed numerous local reversals, or inversions, in the heliospheric magnetic field (HMF), which were accompanied by large spikes in solar wind speed. Both solar and in situ mechanisms have been suggested to explain the existence of HMF inversions in general. Previous work using Helios 1, covering 0.3–1AU, observed inverted HMF to become more common with increasing r, suggesting that some heliospheric driving process creates or amplifies inversions. This study expands upon these findings, by analysing inversion-associated changes in plasma properties for the same large data set, facilitated by observations of ‘strahl’ electrons to identify the unperturbed magnetic polarity. We find that many inversions exhibit anti-correlated field and velocity perturbations, and are thus characteristically Alfvénic, but many also depart strongly from this relationship over an apparent continuum of properties. Inversions depart further from the ‘ideal’ Alfvénic case with increasing r, as more energy is partitioned in the field, rather than the plasma, component of the perturbation. This departure is greatest for inversions with larger density and magnetic field strength changes, and characteristic slow solar wind properties. We find no evidence that inversions which stray further from ‘ideal’ Alfvénicity have different generation processes from those which are more Alfvénic. Instead, different inversion properties could be imprinted based on transport or formation within different solar wind streams.

Description: The natural night sky brightness is a relevant input for monitoring the light pollution evolution at observatory sites, by subtracting it from the overall sky brightness determined by direct measurements. It is also instrumental for assessing the expected darkness of the pristine night skies. The natural brightness of the night sky is determined by the sum of the spectral radiances coming from astrophysical sources, including zodiacal light, and the atmospheric airglow. The resulting radiance is modified by absorption and scattering before it reaches the observer. Therefore, the natural night sky brightness is a function of the location, time and atmospheric conditions. We present in this work GAMBONS (GAia Map of the Brightness Of the Natural Sky), a model to map the natural night brightness of the sky in cloudless and moonless nights. Unlike previous maps, GAMBONS is based on the extra-atmospheric star radiance obtained from the Gaia catalogue. The Gaia-DR2 archive compiles astrometric and photometric information for more than 1.6 billion stars up to G =21 magnitude. For the brightest stars, not included in Gaia-DR2, we have used the Hipparcos catalogue instead. After adding up to the star radiance the contributions of the diffuse galactic and extragalactic light, zodiacal light and airglow, and taking into account the effects of atmospheric attenuation and scattering, the radiance detected by ground-based observers can be estimated. This methodology can be applied to any photometric band, if appropriate transformations from the Gaia bands are available. In particular, we present the expected sky brightness for V(Johnson), and visual photopic and scotopic passbands.

Description: Some recent studies have examined the gamma-ray flux profile of our Galaxy to determine the signal of dark matter annihilation. However, the results are controversial and no confirmation is obtained. In this article, we study the radio flux density profile of the M31 galaxy and show that it could manifest a possible signal of dark matter annihilation. By comparing the likelihoods between the archival observed radio flux density profile data and the predicted radio flux density profile contributed by dark matter and stellar emission, we can constrain the relevant dark matter parameters. Specifically, for the thermal annihilation cross section via the $b ar{b}$ channel, the best-fit value of dark matter mass is ∼30 GeV, which is consistent with the results of many recent studies. We expect that this method would become another useful way to constrain dark matter, which is complementary to the traditional radio analyses and the other indirect detections.

Description: We present quasi-simultaneous radio, (sub-)millimetre, and X-ray observations of the Galactic black hole X-ray binary, taken during its 2017–2018 outburst, where the source remained in the hard X-ray spectral state. During this outburst, GX 339−4 showed no atypical X-ray behaviour that may act as a indicator for an outburst remaining within the hard state. However, quasi-simultaneous radio and X-ray observations showed a flatter than expected coupling between the radio and X-ray luminosities (with a best fit relation of $L_{ m radio} propto L_{ m X}^{0.39 pm 0.06}$), when compared to successful outbursts from this system ($L_{ m radio} propto L_{ m X}^{0.62 pm 0.02}$). While our 2017–2018 outburst data only span a limited radio and X-ray luminosity range (∼1 order of magnitude in both, where more than 2-orders of magnitude in LX is desired), including data from other hard-only outbursts from GX 339−4 extends the luminosity range to ∼1.2 and ∼2.8 orders of magnitude, respectively, and also results in a flatter correlation (where $L_{ m radio} propto L_{ m X}^{0.46 pm 0.04}$). This result is suggestive that for GX 339−4 a flatter radio – X-ray correlation, implying a more inefficient coupling between the jet and accretion flow, could act as an indicator for a hard-only outburst. However, further monitoring of both successful and hard-only outbursts over larger luminosity ranges with strictly simultaneous radio and X-ray observations is required from different, single sources, to explore if this applies generally to the population of black hole X-ray binaries, or even GX 339−4 at higher hard-state luminosities.

Description: C9orf72 ALS/FTD patients show remarkable clinical heterogeneity, but the complex biology of the repeat expansion mutation has limited our understanding of the disease. BAC transgenic mice were used to better understand the molecular mechanisms and repeat length effects of C9orf72 ALS/FTD. Genetic analyses of these mice demonstrate that the BAC transgene and not integration site effects cause ALS/FTD phenotypes. Transcriptomic changes in cell proliferation, inflammation and neuronal pathways are found late in disease and alternative splicing changes provide early molecular markers that worsen with disease progression. Isogenic sublines of mice with 800, 500 or 50 G4C2 repeats generated from the single-copy C9–500 line show longer repeats result in earlier onset, increased disease penetrance, and increased levels of RNA foci and dipeptide RAN protein aggregates. These data demonstrate G4C2 repeat length is an important driver of disease and identify alternative splicing changes as early biomarkers of C9orf72 ALS/FTD.