A method for predicting solar cell current- voltage curve characteristics as a function of incident solar intensity and cell temperature

Computer program derived from linear equations used for predicting silicon solar cell current voltage curve characteristics as function of incident solar intensity and cell temperatur

Promoting Healthy Families and Communities for Boys and Young Men of Color

This report talks about boys and young men of color who are at risk for poor health and developmental outcomes beginning at birth and persisting through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. As a result of household poverty and residence in segregated neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, they are disproportionately bombarded by environmental threats -- often without the benefits of supportive systems of prevention, protection, and care. This exposure to chronic stress undermines cognitive, social-emotional, and regulatory human development as well as the immune system. The parents of boys and young men of color are similarly affected, which affects boys directly in utero and interferes with their parents' abilities to promote their health and development and to protect them from harm as they mature

Local consequences of applying international norms: differences in the application of forest certification in northern Sweden, northern Finland, and northwest Russia

Forest certification, developed in the early 1990s, is a process in which independent assessors grant use of the certification label to producers who meet certain environmental and social criteria set for their forest products. This label was quickly seen to offer a market advantage and to signal corporate social and environmental responsibility. This paper focuses on international norms pertaining to environmental and indigenous rights, as manifested in cases of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)- and Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC)-compatible certification, and how these norms have been applied domestically and perceived locally in different states. Case studies are drawn from northern Sweden, northern Finland, and three regions in northwest Russia. The studies illustrate that the choice and implementation of certification type depend considerably on national infrastructure and market characteristics and result in substantial differences in the impact that international norms have at the local leve

An evaluation of photovoltaic devices for future spacecraft power demands

Cadmium sulfide and dendritic silicon cells for photovoltaic power systems of spacecraf

Scientific Visualization Using the Flow Analysis Software Toolkit (FAST)

Over the past few years the Flow Analysis Software Toolkit (FAST) has matured into a useful tool for visualizing and analyzing scientific data on high-performance graphics workstations. Originally designed for visualizing the results of fluid dynamics research, FAST has demonstrated its flexibility by being used in several other areas of scientific research. These research areas include earth and space sciences, acid rain and ozone modelling, and automotive design, just to name a few. This paper describes the current status of FAST, including the basic concepts, architecture, existing functionality and features, and some of the known applications for which FAST is being used. A few of the applications, by both NASA and non-NASA agencies, are outlined in more detail. Described in the Outlines are the goals of each visualization project, the techniques or 'tricks' used lo produce the desired results, and custom modifications to FAST, if any, done to further enhance the analysis. Some of the future directions for FAST are also described

Metamaterials for light rays: ray optics without wave-optical analog in the ray-optics limit

Volumes of sub-wavelength electromagnetic elements can act like homogeneous materials: metamaterials. In analogy, sheets of optical elements such as prisms can act ray-optically like homogeneous sheet materials. In this sense, such sheets can be considered to be metamaterials for light rays (METATOYs). METATOYs realize new and unusual transformations of the directions of transmitted light rays. We study here, in the ray-optics and scalar-wave limits, the wave-optical analog of such transformations, and we show that such an analog does not always exist. Perhaps, this is the reason why many of the ray-optical possibilities offered by METATOYs have never before been considered.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, references update

Happier People Live More Active Lives: Using Smartphones to Link Happiness and Physical Activity.

Physical activity, both exercise and non-exercise, has far-reaching benefits to physical health. Although exercise has also been linked to psychological health (e.g., happiness), little research has examined physical activity more broadly, taking into account non-exercise activity as well as exercise. We examined the relationship between physical activity (measured broadly) and happiness using a smartphone application. This app has collected self-reports of happiness and physical activity from over ten thousand participants, while passively gathering information about physical activity from the accelerometers on users' phones. The findings reveal that individuals who are more physically active are happier. Further, individuals are happier in the moments when they are more physically active. These results emerged when assessing activity subjectively, via self-report, or objectively, via participants' smartphone accelerometers. Overall, this research suggests that not only exercise but also non-exercise physical activity is related to happiness. This research further demonstrates how smartphones can be used to collect large-scale data to examine psychological, behavioral, and health-related phenomena as they naturally occur in everyday life.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UBhave project (Ubiquitous and Social Computing for Positive Behaviour Change, Grant ID: EP/I032673/1))This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Public Library of Science via https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.016058

The EMPIRE Survey: Systematic Variations in the Dense Gas Fraction and Star Formation Efficiency from Full-Disk Mapping of M51

We present the first results from the EMPIRE survey, an IRAM large program that is mapping tracers of high density molecular gas across the disks of nine nearby star-forming galaxies. Here, we present new maps of the 3-mm transitions of HCN, HCO+, and HNC across the whole disk of our pilot target, M51. As expected, dense gas correlates with tracers of recent star formation, filling the "luminosity gap" between Galactic cores and whole galaxies. In detail, we show that both the fraction of gas that is dense, f_dense traced by HCN/CO, and the rate at which dense gas forms stars, SFE_dense traced by IR/HCN, depend on environment in the galaxy. The sense of the dependence is that high surface density, high molecular gas fraction regions of the galaxy show high dense gas fractions and low dense gas star formation efficiencies. This agrees with recent results for individual pointings by Usero et al. 2015 but using unbiased whole-galaxy maps. It also agrees qualitatively with the behavior observed contrasting our own Solar Neighborhood with the central regions of the Milky Way. The sense of the trends can be explained if the dense gas fraction tracks interstellar pressure but star formation occurs only in regions of high density contrast.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, ApJL accepte

Quantifying non-star formation associated 8um dust emission in NGC 628

Combining Ha and IRAC images of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 628, we find that between 30-43% of its 8um dust emission is not related to recent star formation. Contributions from dust heated by young stars are separated by identifying HII regions in the Ha map and using these areas as a mask to determine the 8um dust emission that must be due to heating by older stars. Corrections are made for sub-detection-threshold HII regions, photons escaping from HII regions and for young stars not directly associated to HII regions (i.e. 10-100 Myr old stars). A simple model confirms this amount of 8um emission can be expected given dust and PAH absorption cross-sections, a realistic star-formation history, and the observed optical extinction values. A Fourier power spectrum analysis indicates that the 8um dust emission is more diffuse than the Ha emission (and similar to observed HI), supporting our analysis that much of the 8um-emitting dust is heated by older stars. The 8um dust-to-Ha emission ratio declines with galactocentric radius both within and outside of HII regions, probably due to a radial increase in disk transparency. In the course of this work, we have also found that intrinsic diffuse Ha fractions may be lower than previously thought in galaxies, if the differential extinction between HII regions and diffuse regions is taken into account.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, accepted in Ap