Using unstructured crowd-sourced data to evaluate urban tolerance of terrestrial native animal species within a California Mega-City.

In response to biodiversity loss and biotic community homogenization in urbanized landscapes, there are increasing efforts to conserve and increase biodiversity within urban areas. Accordingly, around the world, previously extirpated species are (re)colonizing and otherwise infiltrating urban landscapes, while other species are disappearing from these landscapes. Tracking the occurrence of traditionally urban intolerant species and loss of traditionally urban tolerant species should be a management goal of urban areas, but we generally lack tools to study this phenomenon.

A genome assembly of the Yuma myotis bat, Myotis yumanensis.

The Yuma myotis bat (Myotis yumanensis) is a small vespertilionid bat and one of 52 species of new world Myotis bats in the subgenus Pizonyx. While M. yumanensis populations currently appear relatively stable, it is one of 12 bat species known or suspected to be susceptible to white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease causing declines in bat populations across North America.

Observation of a gravitational Aharonov-Bohm effect.

Gravity curves space and time. This can lead to proper time differences between freely falling, nonlocal trajectories. A spatial superposition of a massive particle is predicted to be sensitive to this effect.

State of the ART: Using artificial refuge traps to control invasive crayfish in southern California streams.

Invasive species are a widespread threat to stream ecosystems across the planet. In Southern California, USA, the invasive red swamp crayfish Procambarus clarkii (Girard, 1852) poses a significant threat to native aquatic fauna. Studies have suggested that artificial refuge traps (ARTs) resembling crayfish burrows can be used to remove invasive crayfish, but, to date, no studies have focused on optimizing ART design and deployment to maximize crayfish catch.

40 W, 780 nm laser system with compensated dual beam splitters for atom interferometry.

We demonstrate a narrow-linewidth 780 nm laser system with up to 40 power and a frequency modulation bandwidth of 230 MHz. Efficient overlap on nonlinear optical elements combines two pairs of phase-locked frequency components into a single beam. Serrodyne modulation with a high-quality sawtooth waveform is used to perform frequency shifts with >96.

Atom-Interferometric Test of the Equivalence Principle at the 10^{-12} Level.

We use a dual-species atom interferometer with 2 s of free-fall time to measure the relative acceleration between ^{85}Rb and ^{87}Rb wave packets in the Earth's gravitational field. Systematic errors arising from kinematic differences between the isotopes are suppressed by calibrating the angles and frequencies of the interferometry beams. We find an Eötvös parameter of η=[1.

Detection, Prevalence and Phylogenetic Relationships of Demodex spp and further Skin Prostigmata Mites (Acari, Arachnida) in Wild and Domestic Mammals.

This study was conceived to detect skin mites in social mammals through real-time qPCR, and to estimate taxonomic Demodex and further Prostigmata mite relationships in different host species by comparing sequences from two genes: mitochondrial 16S rRNA and nuclear 18S rRNA. We determined the mite prevalence in the hair follicles of marmots (13%) and bats (17%). The high prevalence found in marmots and bats by sampling only one site on the body may indicate that mites are common inhabitants of their skin.