New Flower Bed Design and Verification Supporting Horticultural Therapy Classes Based on Behavioral Observation

Horticultural therapy improves the elderly’s emotional and cognitive functions and also leads to their social participation and better overall health. We want to know about the problems of implementing horticultural therapy and how to improve it with the flower bed design. “House of Love” is a private nursing home in Taipei and had been the research base in this study. It was found that current horticultural classes heavily rely on teacher-centric and volunteer staff-assisted curricula, often not considering the specific physical and psychological needs the elderly usually face in classes. “Elderly Green” is a new design taking the requirements of horticultural classes in to consideration, providing for a maximum of flexibility under varying conditions by modulizing the flower bed. It allowed the elderly to do their gardening in a comfortable and less strenuous manner. “Elderly Green” is a centripetal flower bed design improved equally distributed care for each participant during class time and increased interaction among the elderly that reduces manpower needs

Vorticity wave interaction and exceptional points in shear flow instabilities

We establish a link between vorticity wave interaction and $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry breaking in shear flow instabilities. The minimal dynamical system for two coupled counter-propagating vorticity waves is shown to be a non-Hermitian system that exhibits a saddle-node exceptional point. The mechanism of phase-locking and mutual growth of vorticity waves is then related to the Krein collision and the breaking of $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry through the exceptional point. The key parameter that leads the system to spontaneous $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry breaking is the ratio between frequency detuning and coupling strength of the vorticity waves. The critical behavior near the exceptional point is described as a transition between phase-locking and phase-slip dynamics of the vorticity waves. The phase-slip dynamics lead to non-modal, transient growth of perturbations in the regime of unbroken $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry, and the phase-slip frequency $\Omega \propto |k-k_c|^{1/2}$ shares the same critical exponent with the phase rigidity of system eigenvectors. The results can be readily extended to the interaction of multiple vorticity waves with multiple exceptional points and rich transient dynamics.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figure

A Survey of Quantum Lyapunov Control Methods

The condition of a quantum Lyapunov-based control which can be well used in a closed quantum system is that the method can make the system convergent but not just stable. In the convergence study of the quantum Lyapunov control, two situations are classified: non-degenerate cases and degenerate cases. In this paper, for these two situations, respectively, the target state is divided into four categories: eigenstate, the mixed state which commutes with the internal Hamiltonian, the superposition state, and the mixed state which does not commute with the internal Hamiltonian state. For these four categories, the quantum Lyapunov control methods for the closed quantum systems are summarized and analyzed. Especially, the convergence of the control system to the different target states is reviewed, and how to make the convergence conditions be satisfied is summarized and analyzed.Comment: 1

Impacts of natural factors and farming practices on greenhouse gas emissions in the North China Plain : A meta-analysis

This work received support from the National Science and Technology Support Program (No. 2012BAD14B01), the National 948 Project (No. 2011-G30), and the Non-profit Research Foundation for Agriculture (201103039). Thanks are expressed to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Implicit Lyapunov Control for the Quantum Liouville Equation

A quantum system whose internal Hamiltonian is not strongly regular or/and control Hamiltonians are not full connected, are thought to be in the degenerate cases. The most actual quantum systems are in these degenerate cases. In this paper, convergence problems of the multi-control Hamiltonians closed quantum systems in the degenerate cases are solved by introducing implicit function perturbations and choosing an implicit Lyapunov function based on the average value of an imaginary mechanical quantity. For the diagonal and non-diagonal target states, respectively, control laws are designed. The convergence of the control system is proved, and an explicit design principle of the imaginary mechanical quantity is proposed. By using the proposed method, the multi-control Hamiltonians closed quantum systems in the degenerate cases can converge from any initial state to an arbitrary target state unitarily equivalent to the initial state in most cases. Finally, numerical simulations are studied to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method. The problem solved in this paper about the state transfer from any initial state to arbitrary target state of the quantum systems in degenerate cases approaches a big step to the control of actual systems. Keywords: perturbations, Lyapunov control, degenerate, convergence, non-diagonal target stat

A phage-displayed peptide recognizing porcine aminopeptidase N is a potent small molecule inhibitor of PEDV entry

Three phage-displayed peptides designated H, S and F that recognize porcine aminopeptidase N (pAPN), the cellular receptor of porcine transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) were able to inhibit cell infection by TGEV. These same peptides had no inhibitory effects on infection of Vero cells by porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV). However, when PEDV, TGEV and porcine pseudorabies virus were incubated with peptide H (HVTTTFAPPPPR), only infection of Vero cells by PEDV was inhibited. Immunofluorescence assays indicated that inhibition of PEDV infection by peptide H was independent of pAPN. Western blots demonstrated that peptide H interacted with PEDV spike protein and that pre-treatment of PEDV with peptide H led to a higher inhibition than synchronous incubation with cells. These results indicate direct interaction with the virus is necessary to inhibit infectivity. Temperature shift assays demonstrated that peptide H inhibited pre-attachment of the virus to the cells