By Horatio Clare
From the slums of Cape city to the palaces of Algiers, via Pygmy villages the place pineapples develop wild, to the Gulf of Guinea the place the ocean blazes with oil flares, throughout continents and fourteen nations - this epic trip is not anything to swallows, they do it two times a yr. yet for Horatio Clare, author and birdwatcher, it's the day trip of a life-time.
Along the way in which he discovers outdated empires and glossy tribes, a witch-doctor's recipe for stewed swallow, explains find out how to shuttle with out cash or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident regarding 3 Spanish squaddies and a tiny orange puppy. via trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and 3 ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, the place hundreds of thousands roost in February, to a barn in Wales, the place a couple nest in might.
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Extra info for A Single Swallow: Following An Epic Journey From South Africa To South Wales
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Since the total entropy change is negative, DStot ¼ DSconf þ DSsovlent < 0, there is a transition temperature T m ¼ DHbond =DStot beyond which the free enthalpy change DG becomes positive. Hence, the coiled configuration is the favored equilibrium structure above this critical temperature. The driving force for the formation of the helical structure can be expressed by a parameter a ðDHbond À TDStot Þ=ðÀ2kB TÞ. Positive a means that the formation of the a-helix is thermodynamically favored. Its growth by one unit leads to a decrease of the free enthalpy by DG ¼ À2akB T.
6. In comparison to these values, common polymers such as polyethylene can be described with persistence lengths of less than 1 nm. Therefore, the stiffer biopolymers such as DNA or fibrous proteins of the cytoskeleton are also called semiflexible polymers. The high persistence length of these biopolymers is one essential advantage for their application as building blocks for manufacturing microscopic machine systems or as templates for electronic circuitries. The bend persistence length provides also a measure for Young’s modulus E of the polymer chain.
24). Also in this case, weak hydrogen bonds (between the complementary bases) are responsible for the helix stability. The helix is the stable phase at low temperature. When DNA melts, the hydrogen bonds between the bases break. At the same time, the disruption of the base stacks is connected with loss of favorable van der Waals attraction and dipole–dipole interactions. The gain of energy due to reduced Coulomb interaction of the negatively charged backbones is smaller than the energy increase of the above-mentioned interactions.