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Glaciers and ice streams flowing over sediment beds commonly have a layer of ice‐rich debris adhered to their base, known as a “frozen fringe,” but its impact on basal friction is unknown. We simulated basal slip over granular beds with a cryogenic ring shear device while ice infiltrated the bed to grow a fringe, and measured the frictional response under different effective stresses and slip speeds. Frictional resistance increased with increasing slip speed until it plateaued at the frictional strength of the till, closely resembling the regularized Coulomb slip law associated with clean ice over deformable beds. We hypothesize that this arises from deformation in a previously unidentified zone of weakly frozen sediments at the fringe's base, which is highly sensitive to temperature and stress gradients. We show how a rheologic model for ice‐rich debris coupled with the thermomechanics of fringe growth can account for the regularized Coulomb behavior.

 

Migration is an adaptive life‐history strategy across taxa that helps individuals maximise fitness by obtaining forage and avoiding predation risk. The mechanisms driving migratory changes are poorly understood, and links between migratory behaviour, space use, and demographic consequences are rare.

Here, we use a nearly 20‐year record of individual‐based monitoring of a large herbivore, elk (Cervus canadensis) to test hypotheses for changing patterns of migration in and adjacent to a large protected area in Banff National Park (BNP), Canada.

We test whether bottom‐up (forage quality) or top‐down (predation risk) factors explained trends in (i) the proportion of individuals using 5 different migratory tactics, (ii) differences in survival rates of migratory tactics during migration and whilst on summer ranges, (iii) cause‐specific mortality by wolves and grizzly bears, and (iv) population abundance.

We found dramatic shifts in migration consistent with behavioural plasticity in individual choice of annual migratory routes. Shifts were inconsistent with exposure to the bottom‐up benefits of migration. Instead, exposure to landscape gradients in predation risk caused by exploitation outside the protected area drove migratory shifts. Carnivore exploitation outside the protected area led to higher survival rates for female elk remaining resident or migrating outside the protected area.

Cause‐specific mortality aligned with exposure to predation risk along migratory routes and summer ranges. Wolf predation risk was higher on migratory routes than summer ranges of montane‐migrant tactics, but wolf predation risk traded‐off with heightened risk from grizzly bears on summer ranges. A novel eastern migrant tactic emerged following a large forest fire that enhanced forage in an area with lower predation risk outside of the protected area.

The changes in migratory behaviour translated to population abundance, where abundance of the montane‐migratory tactics declined over time. The presence of diverse migratory life histories maintained a higher total population abundance than would have been the case with only one migratory tactic in the population.

Our study demonstrates the complex ways in which migratory populations change over time through behavioural plasticity and associated demographic consequences because of individuals balancing predation risk and forage trade‐offs.

 

Theories involving niche diversification to explain high levels of tropical diversity propose that species are more likely to co-occur if they partition at least one dimension of their ecological niche space. Yet, numerous species appear to have widely overlapping niches based upon broad categorizations of resource use or functional traits. In particular, the extent to which food partitioning contributes to species coexistence in hyperdiverse tropical ecosystems remains unresolved. Here, we use a molecular approach to investigate inter- and intraspecific dietary partitioning between two species of damselfish (Dascyllus flavicaudus, Chromis viridis) that commonly co-occur in branching corals. Species-level identification of their diverse zooplankton prey revealed significant differences in diet composition between species despite their seemingly similar feeding strategies. Dascyllus exhibited a more diverse diet than Chromis, whereas Chromis tended to select larger prey items. A large calanoid copepod, Labidocera sp., found in low density and higher in the water column during the day, explained more than 19% of the variation in dietary composition between Dascyllus and Chromis. Dascyllus did not significantly shift its diet in the presence of Chromis, which suggests intrinsic differences in feeding behaviour. Finally, prey composition significantly shifted during the ontogeny of both fish species. Our findings show that levels of dietary specialization among coral reef associated species have likely been underestimated, and they underscore the importance of characterizing trophic webs in tropical ecosystems at higher levels of taxonomic resolution. They also suggest that niche redundancy may not be as common as previously thought. 

A search for the nonresonant production of Higgs boson pairs in the$HH\to b\overline{b}{\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$channel is performed using$140{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The analysis strategy is optimized to probe anomalous values of the Higgs boson self-coupling modifier${\kappa }_{\lambda }$and of the quartic$HHVV$($V=W,Z$) coupling modifier${\kappa }_{2V}$. No significant excess above the expected background from Standard Model processes is observed. An observed (expected) upper limit${\mu }_{HH}<5.9(3.3)$is set at 95% confidence-level on the Higgs boson pair production cross section normalized to its Standard Model prediction. The coupling modifiers are constrained to an observed (expected) 95% confidence interval of$-3.1<{\kappa }_{\lambda }<9.0$($-2.5<{\kappa }_{\lambda }<9.3$) and$-0.5<{\kappa }_{2V}<2.7$($-0.2<{\kappa }_{2V}<2.4$), assuming all other Higgs boson couplings are fixed to the Standard Model prediction. The results are also interpreted in the context of effective field theories via constraints on anomalous Higgs boson couplings and Higgs boson pair production cross sections assuming different kinematic benchmark scenarios.

© 2024 CERN, for the ATLAS Collaboration2024CERN 

A search for leptoquark pair production decaying into$$te^- \bar{t}e^+$$$t{e}^{-}\overline{t}{e}^{+}$or$$t\mu ^- \bar{t}\mu ^+$$$t{\mu }^{-}\overline{t}{\mu }^{+}$in final states with multiple leptons is presented. The search is based on a dataset ofppcollisions at$$\sqrt{s}=13~\text {TeV} $$$\sqrt{s}=13\text{TeV}$recorded with the ATLAS detector during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb$$^{-1}$$$_{}^{-1}$. Four signal regions, with the requirement of at least three light leptons (electron or muon) and at least two jets out of which at least one jet is identified as coming from ab-hadron, are considered based on the number of leptons of a given flavour. The main background processes are estimated using dedicated control regions in a simultaneous fit with the signal regions to data. No excess above the Standard Model background prediction is observed and 95% confidence level limits on the production cross section times branching ratio are derived as a function of the leptoquark mass. Under the assumption of exclusive decays into$$te^{-}$$$t{e}^{-}$($$t\mu ^{-}$$$t{\mu }^{-}$), the corresponding lower limit on the scalar mixed-generation leptoquark mass$$m_{\textrm{LQ}_{\textrm{mix}}^{\textrm{d}}}$$$m_{{\text{LQ}}_{\text{mix}}^{\text{d}}}$is at 1.58 (1.59) TeV and on the vector leptoquark mass$$m_{{\tilde{U}}_1}$$$m_{{\tilde{U}}_1}$at 1.67 (1.67) TeV in the minimal coupling scenario and at 1.95 (1.95) TeV in the Yang–Mills scenario.

 

The ATLAS trigger system is a crucial component of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. It is responsible for selecting events in line with the ATLAS physics programme. This paper presents an overview of the changes to the trigger and data acquisition system during the second long shutdown of the LHC, and shows the performance of the trigger system and its components in the proton-proton collisions during the 2022 commissioning period as well as its expected performance in proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions for the remainder of the third LHC data-taking period (2022–2025).