First records of Mottled Swift Tachymarptis aequatorialis and Alpine Swift T. melba for Niger

Female-biased mortality in experimentally parasitized Alpine Swift Apus melba nestlings

1. Sex-biased mortality in adult vertebrates is often attributed to lower immunocompetence and higher parasite susceptibility of males. Although sex-specific mortality has also been reported during growth, the importance of sex-specific immunocompetence and parasite susceptibility in explaining male-biased mortality remains ambiguous in growing individuals because of potentially confounding sou...

Spectroscopic SWIFT

INTRODUCTION Often the ability to obtain chemical-shift information is needed and advantageous in MRI. In addition to providing chemical information, the acquired spectral dimension can also be used to reduce image blur resulting from frequency shifts of all types. This work describes a new 3D and 4D spectroscopic technique involving an intrinsic frequency dimension. The method is based on an o...

The Oxford SWIFT Spectrograph: first commissioning and on-sky results

The Oxford SWIFT spectrograph, an I & z band (6500–10500 Å) integral field spectrograph, is designed to operate as a facility instrument at the 200 inch Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, in conjunction with the Palomar laser guide star adaptive optics system PALAO (and its upgrade to PALM3000). SWIFT provides spectra at R( / )~4000 of a contiguous two-dimensional field, 44 89 spatial pixels (...

SWIFT adoption challenges perSpecTIve

The Swift/BAT High Latitude Survey: First Results

We present preliminary results from the first 3 months of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) high galactic latitude survey in the 14–195 keV band. The survey reaches a flux of ∼ 10 erg cm s and has ∼ 2.7 (90% confidence) positional uncertainties for the faintest sources. This represents the most sensitive survey to date in this energy band. These data confirm the conjectures that a high ener...