Encouraging natural enemies by growing attractive plants is considered an effective method of pest control in organic farming. However, it is important to identify which flowers best attract beneficial insects. In this study, relative attractiveness of 16 species of flowering plants to adult hoverflies was assessed by conducting timed observations of feeding-visit frequencies. The experiments w...

The newly-developed cosmic-ray method for measuring area-average soil moisture at the hectometer horizontal scale is being implemented in the COsmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System (or the COSMOS). The stationary cosmic-ray soil moisture probe measures the neutrons that are generated by cosmic rays within air and soil and other materials, moderated by mainly hydrogen atoms located primarily ...

The COsmic-ray Soil Moisture Observing System (COSMOS) rover may be useful for validating satellite-based estimates of near-surface soil moisture, but the accuracy with which the rover can measure 0to 5-cm soil moisture has not been previously determined. Our objectives were to calibrate and validate a COSMOS rover for mapping 0to 5-cm soil moisture at spatial scales suitable for evaluating sat...

The breakdown of statistical homogeneity and isotropy of cosmic perturbations is a generic feature of ultra large scale structure of the cosmos, in particular, of non trivial cosmic topology. The statistical isotropy (SI) of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations (CMB anisotropy) is sensitive to this breakdown on the largest scales comparable to, and even beyond the cosmic hor...

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) targets an equatorial two square degree field covering the full electromagnetic spectrum. Here we present first results from observations of the COSMOS field in the millimeter and centimeter regime done with the IRAM 30m/MAMBO array and NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) at 250GHz and 1.4GHz, respectively.

We describe the creation of a set of artificially “redshifted” galaxies in the range 0.1 < z < 1.1 using a set of ∼100 SDSS low redshift (v < 7000 km s) images as input. The intention is to generate a training set of realistic images of galaxies of diverse morphologies and a large range of redshifts for the GEMS and COSMOS galaxy evolution projects. This training set allows other studies to inv...

A fractal model of the cosmos is presented in terms of distinct orders of universes, particles, substrates and strata. Each universe in the fractal cosmos is characterized by the radius of that universe divided by the effective radius of one of its stratum particles. It is shown that this size ratio increases rapidly for higher order universes and that a series of universes of descending order ...