Localization of individual mullaway (Argyrosomus japonicus) within a spawning aggregation and their behaviour throughout a diel spawning period

Mulloway (Argyrosomus japonicus) are a soniferous member of the Sciaenidae. During summer in the Swan River of Western Australia, individuals form spawning aggregations in turbid waters around high tide, during late afternoon and early evening. Mulloway produce pulsed vocalizations that are characteristic of the species and to an extent of individuals. Crepuscular passive acoustic recordings of vocalizing mulloway were collected from a four-hydrophone array during March 2008. Arrival-time differences proved the most robust technique for localization. Corroboration of fish position was observed in relative energy levels of calls, surface-reflected path differences, and relative range of successive calls by individuals. Discrete vocal characteristics of the tone-burst frequency and sound-pressure levels assisted the determination of caller identification. Calibration signals were located within a mean distance of 3.4 m. Three-dimensional locations, together with error estimates, were produced for 213 calls during a sample 4-min period in which 495 calls were audible. Examples are given of the movement and related errors for several fish successfully tracked from their vocalizations. Localization confirmed variations in calling rates by individuals, calling altitudes, and the propensity to vary call structure significantly over short periods, hitherto unreported in this species

Testing the Prototype Spiral Magnetic Filter

o Fleenor Mfg. is a small family-owned company based in Pella, Iowa. They look for unique problems to solve in the agricultural, construction, forestry, mining, and utility vehicle markets. Fleenor Mfg. It manufactures a wide variety of filters and hydraulic components. Their customers range from individuals to large scale companies such as John Deere. o Our client has a patent-pending design for a spiral magnetic filter to filter out contaminants from various types of fluid. Fleenor Manufacturing needed data to prove the effectiveness of the filter. o Fleenor Mfg. Needed data to be able to prove to companies interested in the product that it efficiently filters contaminate particles out of hydraulic fluid. If successful, the spiral magnetic filter has the possibility to be marketed to companies to use on hydraulic equipment. o Baseline testing of the stand and testing of a standard sieve filter was completed to prepare the next team that will take over this projec

Design and Manufacture of a Prototype for a Spiral Magnetic Array Filter

• Fleenor Manufacturing has a patent-pending spiral filter that uses a patented magnetic array to remove magnetic particles from hydraulic fluid • Fleenor needs experimental data to prove the effectiveness of the filter in controlled condition

T-cell libraries allow simple parallel generation of multiple peptide-specific human T-cell clones

Isolation of peptide-specific T-cell clones is highly desirable for determining the role of T-cells in human disease, as well as for the development of therapies and diagnostics. However, generation of monoclonal T-cells with the required specificity is challenging and time-consuming. Here we describe a library-based strategy for the simple parallel detection and isolation of multiple peptide-specific human T-cell clones from CD8+ or CD4+ polyclonal T-cell populations. T-cells were first amplified by CD3/CD28 microbeads in a 96U-well library format, prior to screening for desired peptide recognition. T-cells from peptide-reactive wells were then subjected to cytokine-mediated enrichment followed by single-cell cloning, with the entire process from sample to validated clone taking as little as 6 weeks. Overall, T-cell libraries represent an efficient and relatively rapid tool for the generation of peptide-specific T-cell clones, with applications shown here in infectious disease (Epstein–Barr virus, influenza A, and Ebola virus), autoimmunity (type 1 diabetes) and cancer

Terrain-aided navigation for long-range AUVs in dynamic under-mapped environments

Deploying long‐range autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) mid‐water column in the deep ocean is one of the most challenging applications for these submersibles. Without external support and speed over the ground measurements, dead‐reckoning (DR) navigation inevitably experiences an error proportional to the mission range and the speed of the water currents. In response to this problem, a computationally feasible and low‐power terrain‐aided navigation (TAN) system is developed. A Rao‐Blackwellized Particle Filter robust to estimation divergence is designed to estimate the vehicle's position and the speed of water currents. To evaluate performance, field data from multiday AUV deployments in the Southern Ocean are used. These form a unique test case for assessing the TAN performance under extremely challenging conditions. Despite the use of a small number of low‐power sensors and a Doppler velocity log to enable TAN, the algorithm limits the localisation error to within a few hundreds of metres, as opposed to a DR error of 40 km, given a 50 m resolution bathymetric map. To evaluate further the effectiveness of the system under a varying map quality, grids of 100, 200, and 400 m resolution are generated by subsampling the original 50 m resolution map. Despite the high complexity of the navigation problem, the filter exhibits robust and relatively accurate behaviour. Given the current aim of the oceanographic community to develop maps of similar resolution, the results of this study suggest that TAN can enable AUV operations of the order of months using global bathymetric models

Fabrication and transfer printing based integration of free-standing GaN membrane micro-lenses onto semiconductor chips

We demonstrate the back-end integration of optically broadband, high-NA GaN micro-lenses by micro-assembly onto non-native semiconductor substrates. We developed a highly parallel process flow to fabricate and suspend micron scale plano-convex lens platelets from 6" Si growth wafers and show their subsequent transfer-printing integration. A growth process targeted at producing unbowed epitaxial wafers was combined with optimisation of the etching volume in order to produce flat devices for printing. Lens structures were fabricated with 6 − 11 μm diameter, 2 μm height and root-mean-squared surface roughness below 2 nm. The lenses were printed in a vertically coupled geometry on a single crystalline diamond substrate and with m-precise placement on a horizontally coupled photonic integrated circuit waveguide facet. Optical performance analysis shows that these lenses could be used to couple to diamond nitrogen vacancy centres at micron scale depths and demonstrates their potential for visible to infrared light-coupling applications

Detectors for the James Webb Space Telescope Near-Infrared Spectrograph I: Readout Mode, Noise Model, and Calibration Considerations

We describe how the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Near-Infrared Spectrograph's (NIRSpec's) detectors will be read out, and present a model of how noise scales with the number of multiple non-destructive reads sampling-up-the-ramp. We believe that this noise model, which is validated using real and simulated test data, is applicable to most astronomical near-infrared instruments. We describe some non-ideal behaviors that have been observed in engineering grade NIRSpec detectors, and demonstrate that they are unlikely to affect NIRSpec sensitivity, operations, or calibration. These include a HAWAII-2RG reset anomaly and random telegraph noise (RTN). Using real test data, we show that the reset anomaly is: (1) very nearly noiseless and (2) can be easily calibrated out. Likewise, we show that large-amplitude RTN affects only a small and fixed population of pixels. It can therefore be tracked using standard pixel operability maps.Comment: 55 pages, 10 figure