Plasma igniter for internal combustion engine

An igniter for the air/fuel mixture used in the cylinders of an internal combustion engine is described. A conventional spark is used to initiate the discharge of a large amount of energy stored in a capacitor. A high current discharge of the energy in the capacitor switched on by a spark discharge produces a plasma and a magnetic field. The resultant combined electromagnetic current and magnetic field force accelerates the plasma deep into the combustion chamber thereby providing an improved ignition of the air/fuel mixture in the chamber

Climate-Induced Forest Dieback as an Emergent Global Phenomenon

An organized oral session at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in San Jose, Calif., posed this question: Is climate-induced drought stress triggering increasing rates and unusual patterns of forest die-off at a global scale? Twenty-nine researchers representing five continents reported on patterns, mechanisms, and projections of forest mortality

Global change-type drought-induced tree mortality: Vapor pressure deficit is more important than temperature per se in causing decline in tree health

Drought-induced tree mortality is occurring across all forested continents and is expected to increase worldwide during the coming century. Regional-scale forest die-off influences terrestrial albedo, carbon and water budgets, and landsurface energy partitioning. Although increased temperatures during drought are widely identified as a critical contributor to exacerbated tree mortality associated with "global-change-type drought", corresponding changes in vapor pressure deficit (D) have rarely been considered explicitly and have not been disaggregated from that of temperature per se. Here, we apply a detailed mechanistic soil-plant-atmosphere model to examine the impacts of drought, increased air temperature (+2°C or +5°C), and increased vapor pressure deficit (D; +1 kPa or +2.5 kPa), singly and in combination, on net primary productivity (NPP) and transpiration and forest responses, especially soil moisture content, leaf water potential, and stomatal conductance. We show that increased D exerts a larger detrimental effect on transpiration and NPP, than increased temperaturealone, with or without the imposition of a 3-month drought. Combined with drought, the effect of increased D on NPP was substantially larger than that of drought plus increased temperature. Thus, the number of days when NPP was zero across the 2-year simulation was 13 or 14 days in the control and increased temperature scenarios, but increased to approximately 200 days when D was increased. Drought alone increased the number of days of zero NPP to 88, but drought plus increased temperature did not increase the number of days. In contrast, drought and increased D resulted in the number of days when NPP = 0 increasing to 235 (+1 kPa) or 304 days (+2.5 kPa). We conclude that correct identification of the causes of global change-type mortality events requires explicit consideration of the influence of D as well as its interaction with drought and temperature. © 2013 The Authors

The critical amplifying role of increasing atmospheric moisture demand on tree mortality and associated regional die-off

Drought-induced tree mortality, including large-scale die-off events and increases in background rates of mortality, is a global phenomenon that can directly impact numerous earth system properties and ecosystem goods and services. Tree mortality is particularly of concern because of the likelihood that it will increase in frequency and extent with climate change. Recent plant science advances related to drought have focused on understanding the physiological mechanisms that not only affect plant growth and associated carbon metabolism, but also the more challenging issue of predicting plant mortality thresholds. Although some advances related to mechanisms of mortality have been made and have increased emphasis on interrelationships between carbon metabolism and plant hydraulics, notably few studies have specifically evaluated effects of increasing atmospheric demand for moisture on rates of tree death. In this opinion article we highlight the importance of considering the key risks of future large-scale tree die-off and other mortality events arising from increased VPD. Here we focus on mortality of trees, but our point about the importance of VPD is also relevant to other vascular plants

Nonuniform high-gamma (60-500 Hz) power changes dissociate cognitive task and anatomy in human cortex

High-gamma-band (\u3e60 Hz) power changes in cortical electrophysiology are a reliable indicator of focal, event-related cortical activity. Despite discoveries of oscillatory subthreshold and synchronous suprathreshold activity at the cellular level, there is an increasingly popular view that high-gamma-band amplitude changes recorded from cellular ensembles are the result of asynchronous firing activity that yields wideband and uniform power increases. Others have demonstrated independence of power changes in the low- and high-gamma bands, but to date, no studies have shown evidence of any such independence above 60 Hz. Based on nonuniformities in time-frequency analyses of electrocorticographic (ECoG) signals, we hypothesized that induced high-gamma-band (60-500 Hz) power changes are more heterogeneous than currently understood. Using single-word repetition tasks in six human subjects, we showed that functional responsiveness of different ECoG high-gamma sub-bands can discriminate cognitive task (e.g., hearing, reading, speaking) and cortical locations. Power changes in these sub-bands of the high-gamma range are consistently present within single trials and have statistically different time courses within the trial structure. Moreover, when consolidated across all subjects within three task-relevant anatomic regions (sensorimotor, Broca\u27s area, and superior temporal gyrus), these behavior- and location-dependent power changes evidenced nonuniform trends across the population. Together, the independence and nonuniformity of power changes across a broad range of frequencies suggest that a new approach to evaluating high-gamma-band cortical activity is necessary. These findings show that in addition to time and location, frequency is another fundamental dimension of high-gamma dynamics

What happens to fuels and fire potentials after drought-induced forest die-off?

Forest die-offs associated with drought and heat have recently occurred across the globe, raising concern that changes in fuels and microclimate accompanying die-off could affect subsequent fire behaviour. Despite widespread concern, little empirical data exist

Rangeland Responses to Predicted Increases in Drought Extremity

Rangeland managers actively focus on the potential to induce a shift in a site to an alternative state, but predicted changes in climate, particularly the likelihood of more extreme drought, necessitate reevaluating risks for alternative states. • Rangelands will differ in their susceptibility to undergo state changes due to climate change in general and for droughts of the future, in particular, which may be hotter. • Trees, shrubs, and grasses are expected to differ in their sensitivity to drought, with trees likely being most sensitive; this affects the likelihood for state changes in grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, and savannas. • Considering these differences can help rangeland managers deal with the challenges of increasing drought that is forecast to occur with climate change

DIDA: Distributed Indexing Dispatched Alignment

One essential application in bioinformatics that is affected by the high-throughput sequencing data deluge is the sequence alignment problem, where nucleotide or amino acid sequences are queried against targets to find regions of close similarity. When queries are too many and/or targets are too large, the alignment process becomes computationally challenging. This is usually addressed by preprocessing techniques, where the queries and/or targets are indexed for easy access while searching for matches. When the target is static, such as in an established reference genome, the cost of indexing is amortized by reusing the generated index. However, when the targets are non-static, such as contigs in the intermediate steps of a de novo assembly process, a new index must be computed for each run. To address such scalability problems, we present DIDA, a novel framework that distributes the indexing and alignment tasks into smaller subtasks over a cluster of compute nodes. It provides a workflow beyond the common practice of embarrassingly parallel implementations. DIDA is a cost-effective, scalable and modular framework for the sequence alignment problem in terms of memory usage and runtime. It can be employed in large-scale alignments to draft genomes and intermediate stages of de novo assembly runs. The DIDA source code, sample files and user manual are available through http://www.bcgsc.ca/platform/bioinfo/software/dida. The software is released under the British Columbia Cancer Agency License (BCCA), and is free for academic use