Glow-Discharge Enhanced Permeation of Oxygen Through Silver

The permeation of oxygen through Ag0.05Zr over the temperature range of 300-650°C under glow-discharge conditions has been studied and compared to the permeation of thermally dissociated molecular oxygen. A low-energy dc glow-discharge in O2 has been employed which produced approximately 10% atoms. The permeation rate during the glow discharge was found to be much higher (a factor of ∼10) than without the glow discharge. The small fraction of oxygen atoms generated appears to dominate the permeation because of much higher solution probabilities. Below 500°C, the activation energy for the permeation with glow discharge was found to be 15.5 kcal/mol compared to 22.0 kcal/mol without glow discharge (molecular oxygen). Above 500°C, the enhanced permeation with glow discharge gradually diminishes with increasing temperature and approaches that observed without the glow discharge at high temperature; the reason for this is primarily because of the thermal instability of the supersaturated high-pressure interface where atoms recombine and desorb back into the gas phase

Multiple Locus Variable number of tandem repeat Analysis : a molecular genotyping tool for Paenibacillus larvae

American Foulbrood, caused by Paenibacillus larvae, is the most severe bacterial disease of honey bees (Apis mellifera). To perform genotyping of P.larvae in an epidemiological context, there is a need of a fast and cheap method with a high resolution. Here, we propose Multiple Locus Variable number of tandem repeat Analysis (MLVA). MLVA has been used for typing a collection of 209 P.larvae strains from which 23 different MLVA types could be identified. Moreover, the developed methodology not only permits the identification of the four Enterobacterial Repetitive Intergenic Consensus (ERIC) genotypes, but allows also a discriminatory subdivision of the most dominant ERIC type I and ERIC type II genotypes. A biogeographical study has been conducted showing a significant correlation between MLVA genotype and the geographical region where it was isolated

Gender Difference and Employees\u27 Cybersecurity Behaviors

Security breaches are prevalent in organizations and many of the breaches are attributed to human errors. As a result, the organizations need to increase their employees\u27 security awareness and their capabilities to engage in safe cybersecurity behaviors. Many different psychological and social factors affect employees\u27 cybersecurity behaviors. An important research question to explore is to what extent gender plays a role in mediating the factors that affect cybersecurity beliefs and behaviors of employees. In this vein, we conducted a cross-sectional survey study among employees of diverse organizations. We used structural equation modelling to assess the effect of gender as a moderator variable in the relations between psychosocial factors and self-reported cybersecurity behaviors. Our results show that gender has some effect in security self-efficacy (r=-0.435,

SQUARE: Strategic Quantum Ancilla Reuse for Modular Quantum Programs via Cost-Effective Uncomputation

Compiling high-level quantum programs to machines that are size constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum bits) and time constrained (i.e. limited number of quantum operations) is challenging. In this paper, we present SQUARE (Strategic QUantum Ancilla REuse), a compilation infrastructure that tackles allocation and reclamation of scratch qubits (called ancilla) in modular quantum programs. At its core, SQUARE strategically performs uncomputation to create opportunities for qubit reuse. Current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers and forward-looking Fault-Tolerant (FT) quantum computers have fundamentally different constraints such as data locality, instruction parallelism, and communication overhead. Our heuristic-based ancilla-reuse algorithm balances these considerations and fits computations into resource-constrained NISQ or FT quantum machines, throttling parallelism when necessary. To precisely capture the workload of a program, we propose an improved metric, the "active quantum volume," and use this metric to evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm. Our results show that SQUARE improves the average success rate of NISQ applications by 1.47X. Surprisingly, the additional gates for uncomputation create ancilla with better locality, and result in substantially fewer swap gates and less gate noise overall. SQUARE also achieves an average reduction of 1.5X (and up to 9.6X) in active quantum volume for FT machines.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure

An integrated study of urban microclimates in Chongqing, China: historical weather data, transverse measurement and numerical simulation

Chongqing is the largest central-government-controlled municipality in China, which is now under going a rapid urbanization. The question remains open: What are the consequences of such rapid urbanization in Chongqing in terms of urban microclimates? An integrated study comprising three different research approaches is adopted in the present paper. By analyzing the observed annual climate data, an average rising trend of 0.10◦C/decade was found for the annual mean temperature from 1951 to 2010 in Chongqing,indicating a higher degree of urban warming in Chongqing. In addition, two complementary types of field measurements were conducted: fixed weather stations and mobile transverse measurement. Numerical simulations using a house-developed program are able to predict the urban air temperature in Chongqing.The urban heat island intensity in Chongqing is stronger in summer compared to autumn and winter.The maximum urban heat island intensity occurs at around midnight, and can be as high as 2.5◦C. In the day time, an urban cool island exists. Local greenery has a great impact on the local thermal environment.Urban green spaces can reduce urban air temperature and therefore mitigate the urban heat island. The cooling effect of an urban river is limited in Chongqing, as both sides of the river are the most developed areas, but the relative humidity is much higher near the river compared with the places far from it

Thermodynamic efficiency of information and heat flow

A basic task of information processing is information transfer (flow). Here we study a pair of Brownian particles each coupled to a thermal bath at temperature $T_1$ and $T_2$, respectively. The information flow in such a system is defined via the time-shifted mutual information. The information flow nullifies at equilibrium, and its efficiency is defined as the ratio of flow over the total entropy production in the system. For a stationary state the information flows from higher to lower temperatures, and its the efficiency is bound from above by $\frac{{\rm max}[T_1,T_2]}{|T_1-T_2|}$. This upper bound is imposed by the second law and it quantifies the thermodynamic cost for information flow in the present class of systems. It can be reached in the adiabatic situation, where the particles have widely different characteristic times. The efficiency of heat flow|defined as the heat flow over the total amount of dissipated heat|is limited from above by the same factor. There is a complementarity between heat- and information-flow: the setup which is most efficient for the former is the least efficient for the latter and {\it vice versa}. The above bound for the efficiency can be [transiently] overcome in certain non-stationary situations, but the efficiency is still limited from above. We study yet another measure of information-processing [transfer entropy] proposed in literature. Though this measure does not require any thermodynamic cost, the information flow and transfer entropy are shown to be intimately related for stationary states.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur

Polymer based silver nanocomposites as versatile solid film and aqueous emulsion SERS substrates

Nanocomposites containing Ag nanoparticles (average diameter similar to 11 nm) dispersed in poly(tertbutylacrylate) were prepared by in situ polymerization via miniemulsions and constitute active and versatile SERS substrates. The use of this synthetic strategy enables the dual use of the final composites as SERS substrates, both as aqueous emulsions and as cast films, shown here by several measurements using thiosalicylic acid as the testing analyte. The main advantage of these types of materials is related to the potential to scale up and the widespread use of handy substrates, using technology already available. This requires homogeneous composite substrates with SERS activity and this was demonstrated here by means of confocal Raman microscopy. Finally, a series of experiments were carried out on Ag/polymer nanocomposites submitted to temperature variations below and above the polymer glass transition temperature (T(g)) in order to conclude about the effect of temperature processing conditions on the composites' SERS activity.FCT- SFRH/BD/66460/2009FCT- SFRH/BPD/66407/2009FCT- PTDC/QUI/67712/ 2006RNME-Pole UA-FCT Project REDE/1509/RME/200