Testing mechanisms of compensatory fitness of dioecy in a cosexual world

Questions: All else being equal, populations of dioecious species with a 50:50 sex ratio have only half the effective reproductive population size of bisexual species of equal abundance. Consequently, there is a need to explain how dioecious and bisexual species coexist. Increased mean individual seed mass, fecundity, and population density have all been proposed as attributes of unisexual individuals or populations that may contribute to the persistence or resilience of dioecious species. To date, no studies have compared sympatric dioecious and cosexual species with respect to all three components of fitness. In this study, we sought evidence for these compensatory advantages (higher seed mass, greater seed production per unit basal area, and higher population density) in dioecious species. Location: Five 20–25 ha forest dynamic plots spanning a latitudinal gradient in China, including two temperate, two subtropical, and one tropical forest. Methods: We used a phylogenetically corrected generalized linear modelling approach to assess the phylogenetic dependence and joint evolution of sexual system, seed mass and production, and ecological abundances among 48–333 species and 32,568–136,237 individuals per forest. Results: Across all five forests, we detected no consistent advantage for dioecious relative to sympatric cosexual species with respect to mean individual seed mass, seed production or the density of stems in any size class. Conclusions: Our study suggests that seed traits may provide compensatory mechanisms in some forests, but most often the coexistence of sexual systems cannot be explained by advantages of dioecy related to seed quality and demographic parameters. Future investigations of the factors that promote coexistence may increase our understanding by expanding the search to include attributes such as lifespan and tolerance or resistance to herbivores

In situ imaging of field emission from individual carbon nanotubes and their structural damage

©2002 American Institute of Physics. The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/80/856/1DOI:10.1063/1.1446994Field emission of individual carbon nanotubes was observed by in situ transmission electron microscopy. A fluctuation in emission current was due to a variation in distance between the nanotube tip and the counter electrode owing to a "head-shaking" effect of the nanotube during field emission. Strong field-induced structural damage of a nanotube occurs in two ways: a piece-by-piece and segment-by-segment pilling process of the graphitic layers, and a concentrical layer-by-layer stripping process. The former is believed owing to a strong electrostatic force, and the latter is likely due to heating produced by emission current that flowed through the most outer graphitic layers

Verification of gyrokinetic particle simulation of current-driven instability in fusion plasmas. I. Internal kink mode

The gyrokinetic toroidal code (GTC) capability has been extended for simulating internal kink instability with kinetic effects in toroidal geometry. The global simulation domain covers the magnetic axis, which is necessary for simulating current-driven instabilities. GTC simulation in the fluid limit of the kink modes in cylindrical geometry is verified by benchmarking with a magnetohydrodynamic eigenvalue code. Gyrokinetic simulations of the kink modes in the toroidal geometry find that ion kinetic effects significantly reduce the growth rate even when the banana orbit width is much smaller than the radial width of the perturbed current layer at the mode rational surface

Conditioning of BPM pickup signals for operations of the Duke storage ring with a wide range of single-bunch current

The Duke storage ring is a dedicated driver for the storage ring based oscillator free-electron lasers (FELs), and the High Intensity Gamma-ray Source (HIGS). It is operated with a beam current ranging from about 1 mA to 100 mA per bunch for various operations and accelerator physics studies. High performance operations of the FEL and gamma-ray source require a stable electron beam orbit, which has been realized by the global orbit feedback system. As a critical part of the orbit feedback system, the electron beam position monitors (BPMs) are required to be able to precisely measure the electron beam orbit in a wide range of the single-bunch current. However, the high peak voltage of the BPM pickups associated with high single-bunch current degrades the performance of the BPM electronics, and can potentially damage the BPM electronics. A signal conditioning method using low pass filters is developed to reduce the peak voltage to protect the BPM electronics, and to make the BPMs capable of working with a wide range of single-bunch current. Simulations and electron beam based tests are performed. The results show that the Duke storage ring BPM system is capable of providing precise orbit measurements to ensure highly stable FEL and HIGS operations

SKYPE: Top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window

© 2016 VLDB Endowment 21508097/16/03. As the prevalence of social media and GPS-enabled devices, a massive amount of geo-textual data has been generated in a stream fashion, leading to a variety of applications such as location-based recommendation and information dissemination. In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time top-k monitoring problem over sliding window of streaming data; that is, we continuously maintain the top-k most relevant geo-textual messages (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) for a large number of spatial-keyword subscriptions (e.g., registered users interested in local events) simultaneously. To provide the most recent information under controllable memory cost, sliding window model is employed on the streaming geo-textual data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study top-k spatial-keyword publish/ subscribe over sliding window. A novel system, called Skype (Top-k Spatial-keyword Publish/Subscribe), is proposed in this paper. In Skype, to continuously maintain top-k results for massive subscriptions, we devise a novel indexing structure upon subscriptions such that each incoming message can be immediately delivered on its arrival. Moreover, to reduce the expensive top-k re-evaluation cost triggered by message expiration, we develop a novel cost-based k-skyband technique to reduce the number of re-evaluations in a costeffective way. Extensive experiments verify the great effciency and effectiveness of our proposed techniques

Thermal stability of ultrahard polycrystalline diamond composite materials

Thermal stability of the ultrahard polycrystalline diamond (UHPCD) composite material developed by the reinforcement of the polycrystalline diamond (PCD) with chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond has been investigated in a flow of argon at 1200 °C. The indentation, Raman spectra and wear test have been performed to compare hardness, C–C structure and wear resistance of untreated and thermal treated UHPCD. It has been shown that the hardness of CVD diamond in UHPCD attains 133±7 GPa after high pressure and high temperature, while after thermal treatment the hardness decreases to 109±3 GPa, and the wear resistance of the thermal treated UHPCD decreases from 0.17 to 0.6 mg/km. The narrowing of full width at half maximum and shift of Raman peak to lower frequencies of CVD diamond in thermal treated UHPCD imply a decrease of crystal structural defects and compressive stresses, which results in a drop of the hardness of CVD diamond in a thermal treated UHPCD. The higher wear rate of thermal treated UHPCD is due to the lower hardness.Досліджено термічну стабільність надтвердого полікристалічного алмазного (UHPCD) композиційного матеріалу, отриманого армуванням полікристалічного алмазу після хімічного осадження (CVD) алмазу в потоці аргону при 1200 °C. Для порівняння твердості, C–C-структури і зносостійкості необробленого та термообробленого UHPCD було досліджено заглиблення індентора, спектри комбінаційного розсіювання та знос. Показано, що твердість CVD-алмазу в UHPCD досягає 133±7 ГПа після дії високого тиску і високої температури, а після термообробки зменшується до 109±3 ГПа, зносостійкість UHPCD після термообробки зменшується від 0,17 до 0,6 мг/км. Звуження напівширини і зсув піку комбінаційного розсіювання в область низьких частот CVD-алмазу в термообробленому UHPCD характеризує зменшення кристалічних структурних дефектів і напружень стиску, що призводить до зниження твердості CVD-алмазу в термообробленому UHPCD. Вища швидкість зносу термообробленого UHPCD пов’язана з більш низькою твердістю.Исследована термическая стабильность сверхтвердого поликристаллического алмазного (UHPCD) композиционного материала, полученного армированием поликристаллического алмаза после химического осаждения (CVD) алмаза в потоке аргона при 1200 °C. Для сравнения твердости, C–C-структуры и износостойкости необработанного и термообработанного UHPCD были исследованы глубина проникновения индентора, спектры комбинационного рассеяния и износ. Показано, что твердость CVD-алмаза в UHPCD достигает 133±7 ГПа после действия высокого давления и высокой температуры, а после термической обработки уменьшается до 109±3 ГПа, износостойкость после термической обработки UHPCD уменьшается от 0,17 до 0,6 мг/км. Сужение полуширины и сдвиг пика комбинационного рассеяния в область низких частот CVD- алмаза в термообработанном UHPCD характеризует уменьшение кристаллических структурных дефектов и напряжений сжатия, что приводит к снижению твердости CVD-алмаза в термообработанном UHPCD. Более высокая скорость износа термически обработанного UHPCD связана с более низкой твердостью

Top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window

© 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. With the prevalence of social media and GPS-enabled devices, a massive amount of geo-textual data have been generated in a stream fashion, leading to a variety of applications such as location-based recommendation and information dissemination. In this paper, we investigate a novel real-time top-k monitoring problem over sliding window of streaming data; that is, we continuously maintain the top-k most relevant geo-textual messages (e.g., geo-tagged tweets) for a large number of spatial-keyword subscriptions (e.g., registered users interested in local events) simultaneously. To provide the most recent information under controllable memory cost, sliding window model is employed on the streaming geo-textual data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study top-k spatial-keyword publish/subscribe over sliding window. A novel centralized system, called Skype (Top-kSpatial-keyword Publish/Subscribe), is proposed in this paper. In Skype, to continuously maintain top-k results for massive subscriptions, we devise a novel indexing structure upon subscriptions such that each incoming message can be immediately delivered on its arrival. To reduce the expensive top-k re-evaluation cost triggered by message expiration, we develop a novel cost-basedk-skyband technique to reduce the number of re-evaluations in a cost-effective way. Extensive experiments verify the great efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed techniques. Furthermore, to support better scalability and higher throughput, we propose a distributed version of Skype, namely DSkype, on top of Storm, which is a popular distributed stream processing system. With the help of fine-tuned subscription/message distribution mechanisms, DSkype can achieve orders of magnitude speed-up than its centralized version