The concept of the return period is widely used in the analysis of the risk of extreme events and in engineering design. For example, a levee can be designed to protect against the 100-year flood, the flood which on average occurs once in 100 years. Use of the return period typically assumes that the probability of occurrence of an extreme event in the current or any future year is the same. Ho...

Raman spectroscopy in a laser heated diamond anvil cell and first principles molecular dynamics simulations have been used to study water in the temperature range 300 to 1500 K and at pressures to 56 GPa. We find a substantial decrease in the intensity of the O-H stretch mode in the liquid phase with pressure, and a change in slope of the melting line at 47 GPa and 1000 K. Consistent with these...

The effect that climatic changes can exert on parasitic interactions represents a multifactor problem whose results are difficult to predict. The actual impact of changes will depend on their magnitude and the physiological tolerance of affected organisms. When the change is considered extreme (i.e. unusual weather events that are at the extremes of the historical distribution for a given area)...

High-K isomer decay rates are compared and interpreted, with an emphasis on the spin degree of freedom. It is argued that high-K values do not in themselves lead to K mixing. Rather, evidence is presented that the most important consideration is the isomer energy relative to a rotor whose moment of inertia is approximately 85% of the rigid-body value. The high-spin limit to the occurrence of hi...

BACKGROUND Biofilm formation has been studied in much detail for a variety of bacterial species, as it plays a major role in the pathogenicity of bacteria. However, only limited information is available for the development of archaeal communities that are frequently found in many natural environments. METHODOLOGY We have analyzed biofilm formation in three closely related hyperthermophilic cr...

Interfacial temperatures attained in a pin and v-block apparatus under extreme pressure (EP) conditions were measured using pins made from either copper or an aluminum alloy from the asymptotes in the curve of removal rate versus applied load since these have been shown to correspond to the temperatures at which the interfacial material melts. The interfacial temperature rise was proportional t...

This thesis is about the design and analysis of Bloom filter and multiple choice hash table variants for application settings with extreme resource requirements. We employ a very flexible methodology, combining theoretical, numerical, and empirical techniques to obtain constructions that are both analyzable and practical. First, we show that a wide class of Bloom filter variants can be effectiv...

Supported lipid bilayers containing phosphatidylcholine headgroups are observed to undergo reorganization from a 2D fluid, lipid bilayer assembly into an array of complex 3D structures upon exposure to extreme pH environments. These conditions induce a combination of molecular packing and electrostatic interactions that can create dynamic morphologies of highly curved lipid membrane structures....

The electronic structures of the early transition metals are characterised by the relationship that exists between the occupied narrow d bands and the broad sp bands. Under pressure, the sp bands rise faster in energy, causing electrons to be transferred to the d bands (Gupta et al., 2008). This process is known as the s-d transition and it governs the structural properties of the transition me...