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We characterize the water repartition within the partially saturated (two-phase) zone (PSZ) during evaporation out of mixed wettable porous media by controlling the wettability of glass beads, their sizes, and as well the surrounding relative humidity. Here, Capillary numbers are low and under these conditions, the percolating front is stabilized by gravity. Using experimental and numerical analyses, we find that the PSZ saturation decreases with the Bond number, where packing of smaller particles have higher saturation values than packing made of larger particles. Results also reveal that the extent (height) of the PSZ, as well as water saturation in the PSZ, both increase with wettability. We also numerically calculate the saturation exclusively contained in connected liquid films and results show that values are less than the expected PSZ saturation. These results strongly reflect that the two-phase zone is not solely made up of connected capillary networks, but also made of disconnected water clusters or pockets. Moreover, we also find that global saturation (PSZ + full wet zone) decreases with wettability, confirming that greater quantity of water is lost via evaporation with increasing hydrophilicity. These results show that connected liquid films are favored in more hydrophilic systems while disconnected water pockets are favored in less hydrophilic systems.

HII regions are the ionized spheres surrounding high-mass stars. They are ideal targets for tracing Galactic structure because they are predominantly found in spiral arms and have high luminosities at infrared and radio wavelengths. In the Green Bank Telescope HII Region Discovery Survey (GBT HRDS) we found that >30% of first Galactic quadrant HII regions have multiple hydrogen radio recombination line (RRL) velocities, which makes determining their Galactic locations and physical properties impossible. Here we make additional GBT RRL observations to determine the discrete HII region velocity for all 117 multiple-velocity sources within 18deg. < l < 65deg. The multiple-velocity sources are concentrated in the zone 22deg. < l < 32deg., coinciding with the largest regions of massive star formation, which implies that the diffuse emission is caused by leaked ionizing photons. We combine our observations with analyses of the electron temperature, molecular gas, and carbon recombination lines to determine the source velocities for 103 discrete H II regions (88% of the sample). With the source velocities known, we resolve the kinematic distance ambiguity for 47 regions, and thus determine their heliocentric distances., Comment: 44 pages, 5 figures, 16 pages of tables; Accepted by ApJS

We present a 67--93.6 GHz spectral line survey of Orion-KL with the new 4 mm Receiver on the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The survey reaches unprecedented depths and covers the low-frequency end of the 3 mm atmospheric window which has been relatively unexplored previously. The entire spectral-line survey is published electronically for general use by the astronomical community. The calibration and performance of 4 mm Receiver on the GBT is also summarized., Comment: 14 pages, including 4 figures and 4 tables. Accepted for publication in AJ. The supplementary material including the complete calibrated spectrum is available online from AJ upon publication (dfrayer@nrao.edu)

Proteins from the kinesin-8 family promote microtubule (MT) depolymerization, a process thought to be important for the control of microtubule length in living cells. In addition to this MT shortening activity, kinesin 8s are motors that show plus-end directed motility on MTs. Here we describe a simple model that incorporates directional motion and destabilization of the MT plus end by kinesin 8. Our model quantitatively reproduces the key features of length-vs-time traces for stabilized MTs in the presence of purified kinesin 8, including length-dependent depolymerization. Comparison of model predictions with experiments suggests that kinesin 8 depolymerizes processively, i.e., one motor can remove multiple tubulin dimers from a stabilized MT. Fluctuations in MT length as a function of time are related to depolymerization processivity. We have also determined the parameter regime in which the rate of MT depolymerization is length dependent: length-dependent depolymerization occurs only when MTs are sufficiently short; this crossover is sensitive to the bulk motor concentration., Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures

We probe non-equilibrium properties of an active bacterial bath through measurements of correlations of passive tracer particles and the response function of a driven, optically trapped tracer. These measurements demonstrate violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem and enable us to extract the power spectrum of the active stress fluctuations. In some cases, we observe $1/\sqrt{\omega}$ scaling in the noise spectrum which we show can be derived from a theoretical model incorporating coupled stress, orientation, and concentration fluctuations of the bacteria., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted to Phys. Rev. Lett

We have measured a precessing superfluid vortex line, stretched from a wire to the wall of a cylindrical cell. By contrast to previous experiments with a similar geometry, the motion along the wall is smooth. The key difference is probably that our wire is substantially off center. We verify several numerical predictions about the motion, including an asymmetry in the precession signature, the behavior of pinning events, and the temperature dependence of the precession., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

We measure the interaction of a single superfluid vortex with surface irregularities. While vortex pinning in superconductors usually becomes weaker at higher temperatures, we find the opposite behavior. The pinning steadily increases throughout our measurement range, from 0.15Tc to over 0.5Tc. We also find that moving the other end of the vortex decreases the pinning, so we propose Kelvin waves along the vortex as a depinning mechanism., Comment: 5 figures; substantial revision including 2 new figures