Some specialized aquatic snakes such as Natrix tessellata strike at fish by rapidly accelerating their head towards the prey with their mouth opened widely. This strategy is believed to be suboptimal as relatively high drag forces act on the open jaws and, therefore, probably limit strike speed. Moreover, the bow wave in front of the snake's jaws could push prey away from the mouth, thus potent...

An offshore zone of faulting approximately 10 km from the southern California coast connects the seismically active strike-slip Newport–Inglewood fault zone in the Los Angeles metropolitan region with the active Rose Canyon fault zone in the San Diego area. Relatively little seismicity has been recorded along the offshore Newport–Inglewood Rose Canyon fault zone, although it has long been suspe...

Abstract Tilt angle optimization of the solar collector is essential to achieve maximum power output. In this study, performance analysis monthly and yearly optimum tilt angles has been carried out for plant setup-able sites in Western Himalayan region India. A mathematic model used assessment. Annual average enhancement 10–11%, 5–7% 4–6% from horizontal, tilted at latitude an angle, respective...

Glottal volume velocity waveform characteristics of 224 subjects, categorized in four groups according to gender and vocal training, were determined, and their relations to sound-pressure level, fundamental frequency, intra-oral pressure, and age were analyzed. Subjects phonated at three intensity conditions. The glottal volume velocity waveforms were obtained by inverse filtering the oral flow...

Electric power utilities face increasing demand for service reliability. Since cloud-toground lightning strikes are among the most frequent yet least understood causes of service interruption, predicting the geographical and temporal distribution of the lightning strikes can help power system planners and designers improve the protection of new and existing transmission lines. Lightning is the ...

Technical Abstract We determined orientations of principal stresses around the San Andreas Fault (SAF) system in the greater San Francisco Bay Area and regions further north along the strike-slip plate boundary. Stress orientations, as well as a ratio between stress magnitudes, were determined by inversions of approximately 6000 earthquake fault plane solutions, divided into ~100 groups based o...

A pair of two dimensional fast cameras with a wide angle view (allowing a full radial and toroidal coverage of the lower divertor) was installed in the National Spherical Torus Experiment in order to monitor non-axisymmetric effects. A custom polar remapping procedure and an absolute photometric calibration enabled the easier visualization and quantitative analysis of non-axisymmetric plasma ma...