Opto-Thermal Characterization of Plasmon and Coupled Lattice Resonances in 2-D Metamaterial Arrays

Growing population and climate change inevitably requires longstanding dependency on sustainable sources of energy that are conducive to ecological balance, economies of scale and reduction of waste heat. Plasmonic-photonic systems are at the forefront of offering a promising path towards efficient light harvesting for enhanced optoelectronics, sensing, and chemical separations. Two-dimensional (2-D) metamaterial arrays of plasmonic nanoparticles arranged in polymer lattices developed herein support thermoplasmonic heating at off-resonances (near infrared, NIR) in addition to regular plasmonic resonances (visible), which extends their applicability compared to random dispersions. Especially, thermal responses of 2-D arrays at coupled lattice resonance (CLR) wavelengths were comparable in magnitudes to their counterparts at plasmon wavelengths. Opto-thermal characterization of 2-D arrays was conducted with a white light irradiation in the current work. Finite element analysis involving a three-dimensional (3-D) COMSOL model mimicked the heat transfer and average temperature increases in these systems at plasmon resonances with a ≤ 0.5 % discrepancy at the absorbed, extinguished power of the radiation. All-optical, mesoscopic characterization of 2-D arrays involving trichromatic particle analysis allowed detailed investigation of effects of particle populations and ordering on the optical signals of plasmon and CLR in addition to indicating a critical point of emergence for CLR. Overall, engineering these thermoplasmonic metamaterials for enhanced optothermal dissipation at visible to near-IR radiation supports their rapid implementation into emerging sustainable energy and healthcare systems

Challenges and barriers faced by women in accessing justice against obstetric violence

The progress of any nation exclusively depends on the societal status of women. Just about one half of the global population comprise of women. Women have always been sufferers of abuse by male dominated society. Men require being oriented about their sense of duty towards women and women wishes to be empowered. The position remains the same everywhere. In a country like India woman is worshipped as goddess and on the other hand she is being subjected to oppression, suppression, exploitation and ill-treated by the male dominated society. The United Nations report states that “woman constitutes half of the world population, perform nearly 2/3 of works hours, receive one tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-hundredth percent of the world’s property.” There are many probable retort to the problem of violence against women and a range of legal doctrines in which violent behavior come into sight as an issue. A wholesome legal response to crime against women might require a significantly restructured legal framework with a new approach solely for the rationale of dealing with violence against women in all its forms. “Obstetric violence” refers to acts categorized as physically or psychologically violent in the process of child birth. Obstetric care submits to the most basic maternal care. It deals itself with the concern of a woman during pregnancy, childbirth and the post-partum blues. This also involves providing information regarding the pregnancy, child birth and post-partum blues. Indian Public Health Standards guides ‘emergency obstetric care’ as an essential service at every government health care center. Most of the findings have decorated the situation of obstetric care in the government health facilities to be of very poor quality and the major concern of maternal mortality. Legal intervention must ensure women’s reproductive rights for better implementation and monitoring of schemes and to push the government to consider reproductive rights as a part of human rights in its realization

Perspectives on the Terrestrial Organic Matter Transport and Burial along the Land-Deep Sea Continuum: Caveats in Our Understanding of Biogeochemical Processes and Future Needs

The natural carbon cycle is immensely intricate to fully understand its sources, fluxes and the processes that are responsible for their cycling in different reservoirs and their balances on a global scale. Anthropogenic perturbations add another dimension to such a complex cycle. Therefore, it is necessary to update the global carbon cycle by combining both natural and anthropogenic sources, fluxes and sinks along the land-sea continuum to assess whether these terms are currently in balance or not. Here, we review the export and it burial rates of terrestrial organic carbon in the oceans to understand the issue of missing terrigenous carbon by comparing data- and model-based estimates of terrestrial carbon fluxes. Our review reveals large disparities between field-based data and model output in terms of dissolved and particulate organic carbon/matter (OC/OM) fluxes and their ratios, especially for Oceania and Arctic rivers, suggesting the need of additional investigations in these regions to refine terrestrial OC export budget. Based on our budgeting of global sources and sinks of OC with updated estimates of marine productivity and terrestrial OM burial rate, we find that the marginal sediments are key burial sites of terrestrial OM, which is consistent with earlier views of Berner (1982) and Hedges and Keil (1995). While about 60‒80% of TOM is remineralized in the margins, the estimated budget further reveals the ocean derived OM is efficiently remineralized than that of terrestrial OM, emphasizing the need of further improvements of carbon burial estimation in the marine realm. When we look back in the past, higher terrestrial OC burial (by ~50%) in the deep ocean during the glacials than during the interglacials suggests the subdued role of continental margins and an efficient transfer of OM from the shelf to deep sea in glacials. Based on the review of terrestrial and marine OM burial, we suggest some critical regions/ways that need to be investigated/addressed further, identification of new biogeochemical proxies and their grouping to better constrain the global carbon cycle along the land-deep sea continuum in future

Source of sediments and response of clay minerals, organic matter and metals to fluctuating environmental conditions in western Bay of Bengal

535-553  The sediment cores collected along three transects off the Mahanadi, Godavari and Krishna rivers were analyzed for spatial and temporal variations in grain size, clay minerals, total organic carbon (TOC), total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), calcium carbonate, and selected metals (Al, Fe, Ti, Mn, Zn) to understand the provenance of sediments and the role of monsoons and dissolved oxygen in the preservation of organic elements and metals in recent past. Illite was the dominant mineral off Mahanadi and smectite off Godavari and Krishna that indicated their different sources, viz., felsic and mafic rocks, respectively. The high Fe/Al and Ti/Al content in shallow areas off Godavari and Krishna may have been added from the leaching of Red Beds and mafic rocks respectively. The TOC/TN molar ratio was above 8.00 in most samples that indicated the supply of organic matter from terrestrial sources. The sediment with less carbonate and organic matter revealed low biological productivity in the study area.   The relatively higher sand, elevated S/I+C ratio and metal content in the surface sediments and the lower section in majority of the cores indicated intensified rainfall and high runoff that brought increased oxygenated fresh water along with the higher metal influx. The reduced concentration of Mn/Al along with low S/I+C ratio and higher TOC and TN values in the 15 cm to 5 cm section in the cores off Godavari revealed weak rainfall which turned the water anoxic, as the available oxygen was consumed by the planktons. Under intensified OMZ, Mn/Al got depleted in reducing conditions and TOC, TN was better preserved

Reducing End-User Burden in Everyday Data Organization.

As digital data permeates every aspect of our daily life, more and more end-users are organizing their everyday data electronically. In fact, end-users are already used to managing their personal data such as contact books and calendars in electronic devices. Meanwhile, the desire for organizing more information into the computer is expanding for a broader group of users. For example, a scientist may need to regularly manage a substantial amount of science data on his desktop. However, to organize such everyday data is challenging for these end-users, because they have limited knowledge about data schema, which is key to data management tasks such as database design, data transformation and data integration. While the user is struggling with these schema tasks, various cognitive and operational burdens emerge. First, when designing her data collection, the user has the burden to abstract her mental model of her real-life data into a reasonable schema design. Moreover, when incorporating external data sources, there is a burden to understand the source semantics and a burden to transform the data from those sources into the user's own data collection. Meanwhile, if the user wants to filter the data, she has the burden to understand and specify the selection condition. Finally, when existing sources are update, there is a burden to understand and fuse these updates. This dissertation introduces various approaches to help the end-user reduce these burdens. To ease the design pain, the dissertation proposes a system with a next-generation spreadsheet for the end-user to easily design and evolve her schema. To facilitate incorporation of external data sources, a sample-driven schema mapping approach is introduced so that the user can freely provide sample instances in her own collection and the system will automatically deduce the desired schema mapping from the sources to the collection. In a similar flavor, this dissertation proposes an approach to facilitate the user in specifying selection conditions via example data points she wants to select. Finally, to help the user incorporate source data updates into her data collection, the dissertation proposes a technique to incrementally update the integrated data using previous integration results.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99778/1/eql_1.pd

Ligand selectivity in stabilising tandem parallel folded G-quadruplex motifs in human telomeric DNA sequences

Biophysical studies of ligand interactions with three human telomeric repeat sequences (d(AGGG(TTAGGG)n, n = 3, 7 and 11)) show that an oxazole-based ‘click’ ligand, which induces parallel folded quadruplexes, preferentially stabilises longer telomeric repeats providing evidence for selectivity in binding at the interface between tandem quadruplex motifs

Dataset of characteristic remanent magnetization and magnetic properties of early Pliocene sediments from IODP Site U1467 (Maldives platform)

This data article describes data of magnetic stratigraphy and anisotropy of isothermal remanent magnetization (AIRM) from "Magnetic properties of early Pliocene sediments from IODP Site U1467 (Maldives platform) reveal changes in the monsoon system" [1]. Acquisition of isothermal magnetization on pilot samples and anisotropy of isothermal remanent magnetization are reported as raw data; magnetostratigraphic data are reported as characteristic magnetization (ChRM).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio