Selective and sensitive detection of CO gas by In2O3 thick film gas sensors

This study aims to provide a better fundamental understanding of the gas sensing mechanism of In2O3 gas sensors. In the present work In2O3 powder has been derived by calcinations of In2S3 powder prepared by flux method. Thick film of In2O3 has been deposited utilizing a relatively simple and low cost screen printing technique and characterized by scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. In2O3 thick film exhibits much higher sensitivity to CO at 150 °C. The corresponding sensitivity is 10.2 with good selectivity, and the response and recovery times are 6 and 14 s, respectively. The results indicate that the In2O3 thick film can be used to fabricate high performance CO sensors

Selective and sensitive detection of CO gas by In2O3 thick film gas sensors

877-880This study aims to provide a better fundamental understanding of the gas sensing mechanism of In2O3 gas sensors. In the present work In2O3 powder has been derived by calcinations of In2S3 powder prepared by flux method. Thick film of In2O3 has been deposited utilizing a relatively simple and low cost screen printing technique and characterized by scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. In2O3 thick film exhibits much higher sensitivity to CO at 150 °C. The corresponding sensitivity is 10.2 with good selectivity, and the response and recovery times are 6 and 14 s, respectively. The results indicate that the In2O3 thick film can be used to fabricate high performance CO sensors

Electrochemical synthesis and characterization of cubic magnetite nanoparticle in aqueous ferrous perchlorate medium

Abstract Electrochemical synthesis of cubic magnetite nanoparticle (MNP) in ferrous perchlorate aqueous medium and its spectral investigations have been carried out. The structural property of MNP is evidenced by X-ray diffraction pattern shows the characteristic peaks. Further the vibrational frequencies of MNP are evaluated using FT-IR and Raman spectroscopic techniques. UV–visible spectroscopic studies show the possibility of surface plasmon resonance effect. The cubic structure of MNP has been confirmed by transmission electron microscope (TEM) technique and it is also evidenced by scanning electron microscope (SEM). The as-synthesized MNP shows superparamagnetic property which is confirmed by the vibrating sample magnetometer, hence it could be useful for synthesis of very ultra superparamagnetic iron oxide solution (VUSPIO) for cancer treatment

Population Structure of Aleurites Moluccana Willd in the Tour Bajuin Waterfall Tanah Laut

South Kalimantan has a diverse flora, this can be seen from the many diverse types of trees.Growing human populations, it also increases the demand for availability of land for settlements that cause a reduction in forest green areas impact the decline of biodiversity especially Aleurites moluccana Willd plant in South Kalimantan forests. The purpose of this research is to assess the population structure of Aleurites moluccana Willd In The Tour Bajuin Waterfall Tanah Laut. The method used was survey method 10 m x 10 m quadrant for the seedling, sapling, pole and tree, systematically in region 1 at the top of the waterfall Bajuin and region 2 under the waterfall Bajuin each 500 m x 250 m quadrant. Results research population structure of Aleurites moluccana Willd in region 1 density of seedling 96 ind/Ha, sapling 60 ind/Ha, pole 44 ind/Ha and tree 64 ind/Ha, while in region 2 density of seedling 260 ind/Ha, sapling 144 ind/ha, pole 116 ind/ha and tree 228 ind/ha. In region 1 and region 2 number of young individu much more older individual thus forming the wide base of the pyramid, show the population is growing

Human brain shows recurrent non-canonical microRNA editing events enriched for seed sequence with possible functional consequence

RNA editing is a post-transcriptional modification, which can provide tissue-specific functions not encoded in DNA. Adenosine-to-inosine is the predominant editing event and, along with cytosine-to-uracil changes, constitutes canonical editing. The rest is non-canonical editing. In this study, we have analysed non-canonical editing of microRNAs in the human brain. We have performed massively parallel small RNA sequencing of frontal cortex (FC) and corpus callosum (CC) pairs from nine normal individuals (post-mortem). We found 113 and 90 unique non-canonical editing events in FC and CC samples, respectively. More than 70% of events were in the miRNA seed sequence—implicating an altered set of target mRNAs and possibly resulting in a functional consequence. Up to 15% of these events were recurring and found in at least three samples, also supporting the biological relevance of such variations. Two specific sequence variations, C-to-A and G-to-U, accounted for over 80% of non-canonical miRNA editing events—and revealed preferred sequence motifs. Our study is one of the first reporting non-canonical editing in miRNAs in the human brain. Our results implicate miRNA non-canonical editing as one of the contributing factors towards transcriptomic diversity in the human brain

Inferring spatial source of disease outbreaks using maximum entropy

Mathematical modeling of disease outbreaks can infer the future trajectory of an epidemic, allowing for making more informed policy decisions. Another task is inferring the origin of a disease, which is relatively difficult with current mathematical models. Such frameworks, across varying levels of complexity, are typically sensitive to input data on epidemic parameters, case counts, and mortality rates, which are generally noisy and incomplete. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a maximum entropy framework that fits epidemiological models, provides calibrated infection origin probabilities, and is robust to noise due to a prior belief model. Maximum entropy is agnostic to the parameters or model structure used and allows for flexible use when faced with sparse data conditions and incomplete knowledge in the dynamical phase of disease-spread, providing for more reliable modeling at early stages of outbreaks. We evaluate the performance of our model by predicting future disease trajectories based on simulated epidemiological data in synthetic graph networks and the real mobility network of New York State. In addition, unlike existing approaches, we demonstrate that the method can be used to infer the origin of the outbreak with accurate confidence. Indeed, despite the prevalent belief on the feasibility of contact-tracing being limited to the initial stages of an outbreak, we report the possibility of reconstructing early disease dynamics, including the epidemic seed, at advanced stages

Tuning the Level of Concurrency in Software Transactional Memory: An Overview of Recent Analytical, Machine Learning and Mixed Approaches

Synchronization transparency offered by Software Transactional Memory (STM) must not come at the expense of run-time efficiency, thus demanding from the STM-designer the inclusion of mechanisms properly oriented to performance and other quality indexes. Particularly, one core issue to cope with in STM is related to exploiting parallelism while also avoiding thrashing phenomena due to excessive transaction rollbacks, caused by excessively high levels of contention on logical resources, namely concurrently accessed data portions. A means to address run-time efficiency consists in dynamically determining the best-suited level of concurrency (number of threads) to be employed for running the application (or specific application phases) on top of the STM layer. For too low levels of concurrency, parallelism can be hampered. Conversely, over-dimensioning the concurrency level may give rise to the aforementioned thrashing phenomena caused by excessive data contention—an aspect which has reflections also on the side of reduced energy-efficiency. In this chapter we overview a set of recent techniques aimed at building “application-specific” performance models that can be exploited to dynamically tune the level of concurrency to the best-suited value. Although they share some base concepts while modeling the system performance vs the degree of concurrency, these techniques rely on disparate methods, such as machine learning or analytic methods (or combinations of the two), and achieve different tradeoffs in terms of the relation between the precision of the performance model and the latency for model instantiation. Implications of the different tradeoffs in real-life scenarios are also discussed

A contact-based social network of lizards is defined by low genetic relatedness among strongly connected individuals

Author version made available in accordance with the Publisher's policy, after an embargo period of 24 months from the date of publication. © 2015. Licensed under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Social organization is widespread; even largely solitary species must organize themselves to enable contacts with mates and reduce competition with conspecifics. Although the forms of social structure can be subtle in solitary species, understanding the factors that influence them may be important for understanding how different forms of social organization evolved. We investigated the influence of genetic relatedness and spatial structure on social associations in a solitary living Australian scincid lizard, Tiliqua rugosa. We derived the genetic relatedness of 46 lizards from analysis of genotypes at 15 microsatellite DNA loci, and described social networks from GPS locations of all the lizards every 10 min for 81 days during their main activity period of the year. We found that connected male dyads were significantly more related than expected by chance, whereas connected male–female and female–female dyads had lower relatedness than expected. Among neighbouring male–male and male–female dyads, the strongest social relationships were between lizards that were the least related. Explanations of this pattern may include the avoidance of inbreeding in male–female dyads, or the direction of aggressive behaviour towards less related individuals in male–male dyads. Observed social associations (inferred through synchronous spatial proximity) were generally lower than expected from null models derived from home range overlap, and many close neighbours did not make social contact. This supports our hypothesis for the presence of deliberate avoidance between some neighbouring individuals. We suggest that lizards can discriminate between different levels of relatedness in their neighbours, directing their social interactions towards those that are less related. This highlights differences in how social associations are formed between species that are solitary (where associations form between unrelated conspecifics) and species that maintain stable social groups structured by kinship.Our sleepy lizard research was funded by the Australian Research Council

Observational Evidence for the Effect of Amplification Bias in Gravitational Microlensing Experiments

Recently Alard\markcite{alard1996} proposed to detect the shift of a star's image centroid, $\delta x$, as a method to identify the lensed source among blended stars. Goldberg & Wo\'zniak\markcite{goldberg1997} actually applied this method to the OGLE-1 database and found that 7 out of 15 events showed significant centroid shifts of $\delta x \gtrsim 0.2$ arcsec. The amount of centroid shift has been estimated theoretically by Goldberg.\markcite{goldberg1997} However, he treated the problem in general and did not apply it to a particular survey or field, and thus based his estimates on simple toy model luminosity functions (i.e., power laws). In this paper, we construct the expected distribution of $\delta x$ for Galactic bulge events by using the precise stellar LF observed by Holtzman et al.\markcite{holtzman1998} using HST. Their LF is complete up to $M_I\sim 9.0$ ($M_V\sim 12$), corresponding to faint M-type stars. In our analysis we find that regular blending cannot produce a large fraction of events with measurable centroid shifts. By contrast, a significant fraction of events would have measurable centroid shifts if they are affected by amplification-bias blending. Therefore, Goldberg & Wo\'zniak's measurements of large centroid shifts for a large fraction of microlensing events confirms the prediction of Han and Alard that a large fraction of Galactic bulge events are affected by amplification-bias blending.Comment: total 15 pages, including 6 figures, and no Table, submitted to ApJ on Apr 26 1998, email [email protected]