Eptesicus fuscus is typical of temperate zone bats in that both sexes undergo marked seasonal changes in behavior, endocrine status, and reproductive status. Acoustic communication plays a key role in many seasonal behaviors. For example, males emit specialized vocalizations during mating in the fall, and females use different specialized vocalizations to communicate with infants in late spring. Bats of both sexes use echolocation for foraging during times of activity, but engage in little sound-directed behavior during torpor and hibernation in winter. Auditory processing might be expected to reflect these marked seasonal changes. To explore the possibility that seasonal changes in hormonal status could drive functional plasticity in the central auditory system, we examined responses of single neurons in the inferior colliculus throughout the year. The average first-spike latency in females varied seasonally, almost doubling in spring compared to other times of year. First-spike latencies in males remained relatively stable throughout the year. Latency jitter for both sexes was higher in winter and spring than in summer or fall. Females had more burst responders than other discharge patterns throughout the year whereas males had more transient responders at all times of year except fall, when burst responses were the predominant type. The percentage of simple discharge patterns (sustained and transient) was higher in males than females in the spring and higher in females than males in the fall. In females, the percentage of shortpass duration-tuned neurons doubled in summer and remained elevated through fall and early winter. In males, the percentage of shortpass duration-tuned cells increased in spring and the percentage of bandpass duration-tuned cells doubled in the fall. These findings suggest that there are clear seasonal changes in basic response characteristics of midbrain auditory neurons in Eptesicus, especially in temporal response properties and duration sensitivity. Moreover, the pattern of changes is different in males and females, suggesting that hormone-driven plasticity adjusts central auditory processing to fit the characteristics of vocalizations specific to seasonal behavioral patterns.
This paper describes benchmark calculations for the APR1400 nuclear reactor performed using the high-fidelity deterministic whole-core simulator MPACT compared to reference solutions generated by the Monte Carlo code McCARD. The methodology presented in this paper is a common approach in the field of nuclear reactor analysis, when measured data are not available for comparison, and may be more broadly applied in other simulation applications of energy systems. The benchmark consists of several problems that span the complexity of single pins to a hot full power cycle depletion. Overall, MPACT shows excellent agreement compared to the reference solutions. MPACT effectively predicts the reactivity for different geometries and several temperature and boron conditions. The largest deviation from McCARD occurs for cold zero conditions in which the fuel, moderator, and cladding are all 300 K. Possible reasons for this are discussed. Excluding these cases, the ρ reactivity difference from McCARD is consistently below 100 pcm. For single fuel pin problems, the highest error of 151 pcm occurs for the lowest fuel enrichment of 1.71 wt.% UO2, indicating possible, albeit small, enrichment bias in MPACT’s cross-section library. Furthermore, MOC and spatial mesh parametric studies indicate that default meshing parameters and options yield results comparable to finely meshed cases. Additionally, there is very good agreement of the radial and axial power distributions. RMS radial pin and assembly power differences for all cases are at or below 0.75%, and all RMS axial power differences are below 1.65%. These results are comparable to previous results from the VERA progression problems benchmark and meet generally accepted accuracy criteria for whole-core transport codes.
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