They made a big deal about those two birds. Apparently Betty and her mate were the subjects of a test to determine whether crows could learn how to extract meat from a test tube with a wire. The birds were presented with two wires, one straight and the other bent into a hook. The experiment did not last long. As soon as the crows learned that only the bent wire was effective, the dominant male ...

Non stationary cylindrically symmetric exact solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell equations are derived as single soliton perturbations of a Levi{Civita metric, by an application of Alekseev inverse scattering method. We show that the metric derived by L. Witten, interpreted as describing the electrogravitational eld of a straight, stationary, conducting wire may be recovered in the limit of a `wi...

The current-voltage relation for the surface layer of an iron wire immersed in nitric acid was investigated by the voltage clamp technique. Comparing the phase of nitric acid to the axoplasm and the metallic phase to the external fluid medium for the nerve fiber, a striking analogy was found between the voltage clamp behavior of the iron-nitric acid system and that of the nerve membrane. The cu...

The governing equations are Maxwell’s. The source of the current is either j = ey δ(z − z0)δ(x)f(t) or eφ δ(z − z0)δ(r − r0)f(t) (straight wire or loop of current, f(t) is a pulse). The conductivity σ(z) and permittivity ε(z) are unknown in the medium (z > 0) and are known in the air (z < 0). The source is in the air: z0 < 0. The μ is a known constant. The data are the values of E(x, y, z, t) a...

We study the macroscopic electrical conductivity of a composite made of straight or coiled nanowires suspended in a poorly conducting medium. We assume that the volume fraction of the wires is so large that spaces occupied by them overlap, but there is still enough room to distribute the wires isotropically. We found a wealth of scaling regimes at different ratios of conductivities of the wire,...

This report compares industrial state-of-the-art products (TTTech, DaVinci and dSPACE) for development of dependable real-time applications with the methodology introduced by Giotto and refined by the Timing Definition Language (TDL). Giotto/TDL aims at a paradigm shift in the development of dependable real-time control systems by focusing on the application rather than on the platform. It repr...

Accurate identification of unknown contacts crucial in military intelligence. Automated systems that quickly and accurately determine the identity of a contact could be a benefit in backing up electronic-signals identification methods. This work reports two experimental systems for ship classification from infrared FLIR images. In an edge-histogram approach, we used the histogram of the binned ...