Psoroma capense and P. esterhuyseniae (Pannariaceae), two new alpine species from South Africa

The new species Psoroma capense and P. esterhuyseniae are described from four alpine localities in the Western Cape Province of South Africa and are the only known Psoroma species from Africa. The specimens were all collected from moist sites near watercourses, on cool and mostly south-facing cliffs. Psoroma capense resembles P. tenue in gross morphology but differs in the ascending thallus squamules, lack of secondary compounds and short-ellipsoid to ovoid ascospores. However, a phylogenetic analysis involving the markers ITS, nucLSU, mtSSU and Mcm7, comparing the only recent collection of P. capense with previously published sequences, shows that it belongs to the P. hypnorum lineage, with no known, closely related species. Psoroma esterhuyseniae resembles P. hypnorum but has subglobose to short-ellipsoid ascospores without apical perispore extensions. The two species are thought to have evolved from one or two long-distance dispersal events during the Pleistocene

High-fidelity 3D Human Digitization from Single 2K Resolution Images

High-quality 3D human body reconstruction requires high-fidelity and large-scale training data and appropriate network design that effectively exploits the high-resolution input images. To tackle these problems, we propose a simple yet effective 3D human digitization method called 2K2K, which constructs a large-scale 2K human dataset and infers 3D human models from 2K resolution images. The proposed method separately recovers the global shape of a human and its details. The low-resolution depth network predicts the global structure from a low-resolution image, and the part-wise image-to-normal network predicts the details of the 3D human body structure. The high-resolution depth network merges the global 3D shape and the detailed structures to infer the high-resolution front and back side depth maps. Finally, an off-the-shelf mesh generator reconstructs the full 3D human model, which are available at https://github.com/SangHunHan92/2K2K. In addition, we also provide 2,050 3D human models, including texture maps, 3D joints, and SMPL parameters for research purposes. In experiments, we demonstrate competitive performance over the recent works on various datasets.Comment: code page : https://github.com/SangHunHan92/2K2K, Accepted to CVPR 2023 (Highlight

Semiconductor Nanowires: A Platform for Exploring Limits and Concepts for Nano-Enabled Solar Cells

Over the past decade extensive studies of single semiconductor nanowire and nanowire array photovoltaic devices have explored the potential of these materials as platforms for a new generation of efficient and cost-effective solar cells. This feature review discusses strategies for implementation of semiconductor nanowires in solar energy applications, including advances in complex nanowire synthesis and characterization, fundamental insights from characterization of devices, utilization and control of the unique optical properties of nanowires, and new strategies for assembly and scaling of nanowires into diverse arrays that serve as a new paradigm for advanced solar cells.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

Time-resolved photoluminescence of the size-controlled ZnO nanorods

Size dependence of the time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) has been investigated for the ZnO nanorods fabricated by catalyst-free metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. The nanorods have a diameter of 35 nm and lengths in the range of 150 nm to 1.1 mum. The TRPL decay rate decreases monotonically as the length of the nanorods increases in the range of 150 to 600 nm. Decrease of the radiative decay rate of the exciton-polariton has been invoked to account for the results