The Exploration and Evaluation of Generating Affective 360∘^\circ Panoramic VR Environments Through Neural Style Transfer

Affective virtual reality (VR) environments with varying visual style can impact users' valence and arousal responses. We applied Neural Style Transfer (NST) to generate 360$^\circ$ VR environments that elicited users' varied valence and arousal responses. From a user study with 30 participants, findings suggested that generative VR environments changed participants' arousal responses but not their valence levels. The generated visual features, e.g., textures and colors, also altered participants' affective perceptions. Our work contributes novel insights about how users respond to generative VR environments and provided a strategy for creating affective VR environments without altering content

Institutional Export Barriers on Exporters from Emerging Markets: Evidence from China

The emerging markets have become the increasingly important trading nations in the global economy. Given its significance to practitioners and policymakers, export barriers has been the popular topic in the international business studies. However, research about export barriers caused by the local institutions are under developed, though institutional voids and institutional inefficiency are reported as the major determinants for business development in emerging markets. This paper aims to fill in this gap by exploring the institutional export barriers in emerging markets. Based on existing studies on export barriers and institutional perspective, a conceptual framework is initially developed by separating formal and informal institutional export barriers. Then three specific institutional export barriers are identified, including government policy, weak legal system and informal and personal networks. In the meanwhile, this paper sheds light on how the institutional export barriers are developed and obstruct exporting in emerging markets

From Haloes to Galaxies. II. The Fundamental Relations in Star Formation and Quenching

Star formation and quenching are two of the most important processes in galaxy formation and evolution. We explore in the local Universe the interrelationships among key integrated galaxy properties, including stellar mass $M_*$, star formation rate (SFR), specific SFR (sSFR), molecular gas mass $M_{\rm H_2}$, star formation efficiency (SFE) of the molecular gas and molecular gas to stellar mass ratio $\mu$. We aim to identify the most fundamental scaling relations among these key galaxy properties and their interrelationships. We show the integrated $M_{\rm H_2}$-SFR, SFR-$M_*$ and $M_{\rm H_2}$-$M_*$ relation can be simply transformed from the $\mu$-sSFR, SFE-$\mu$ and SFE-sSFR relation, respectively. The transformation, in principle, can increase or decrease the scatter of each relation. Interestingly, we find the latter three relations all have significantly smaller scatter than the former three corresponding relations. We show the probability to achieve the observed small scatter by accident is extremely close to zero. This suggests that the smaller scatters of the latter three relations are driven by a more fundamental physical connection among these quantities. We then show the large scatters in the former relations are due to their systematic dependence on other galaxy properties, and on star formation and quenching process. We propose the sSFR-$\mu$-SFE relation as the Fundamental Formation Relation (FFR), which governs the star formation and quenching process, and provides a simple framework to study galaxy evolution. Other scaling relations, including integrated Kennicutt-Schmidt law, star-forming main sequence and molecular gas main sequence, can all be derived from the FFR.STFC ER

Diminished temperature and vegetation seasonality over northern high latitudes

Global temperature is increasing, especially over northern lands (>50° N), owing to positive feedbacks1. As this increase is most pronounced in winter, temperature seasonality (ST)—conventionally defined as the difference between summer and winter temperatures—is diminishing over time2, a phenomenon that is analogous to its equatorward decline at an annual scale. The initiation, termination and performance of vegetation photosynthetic activity are tied to threshold temperatures3. Trends in the timing of these thresholds and cumulative temperatures above them may alter vegetation productivity, or modify vegetation seasonality (SV), over time. The relationship between ST and SV is critically examined here with newly improved ground and satellite data sets. The observed diminishment of ST and SV is equivalent to 4° and 7° (5° and 6°) latitudinal shift equatorward during the past 30 years in the Arctic (boreal) region. Analysis of simulations from 17 state-of-the-art climate models4 indicates an additional STdiminishment equivalent to a 20° equatorward shift could occur this century. How SV will change in response to such large projected ST declines and the impact this will have on ecosystem services5 are not well understood. Hence the need for continued monitoring6 of northern lands as their seasonal temperature profiles evolve to resemble thosefurther south.Lopullinen vertaisarvioitu käsikirjoitu

Rossby wave dynamics of the North Pacific extra-tropical response to El Niño: importance of the basic state in coupled GCMs

The extra-tropical response to El Nino in a "low" horizontal resolution coupled climate model, typical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report simulations, is shown to have serious systematic errors. A high resolution configuration of the same model has a much improved response that is similar to observations. The errors in the low resolution model are traced to an incorrect representation of the atmospheric teleconnection mechanism that controls the extra-tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) during El Nino. This is due to an unrealistic atmospheric mean state, which changes the propagation characteristics of Rossby waves. These erroneous upper tropospheric circulation anomalies then induce erroneous surface circulation features over the North Pacific. The associated surface wind speed and direction errors create erroneous surface flux and upwelling anomalies which finally lead to the incorrect extra-tropical SST response to El Nino in the low resolution model. This highlights the sensitivity of the climate response to a single link in a chain of complex climatic processes. The correct representation of these processes in the high resolution model indicates the importance of horizontal resolution in resolving such processes

From Haloes to Galaxies. III. The Gas Cycle of Local Galaxy Populations

In Dou et al. (2021), we introduced the Fundamental Formation Relation (FFR), a tight relation between specific SFR (sSFR), H2 star formation efficiency (SFEH2 ), and the ratio of H2 to stellar mass. Here we show that atomic gas H i does not follow a similar FFR as H2. The relation between SFEHI and sSFR shows significant scatter and strong systematic dependence on all of the key galaxy properties that we have explored. The dramatic difference between H i and H2 indicates that different processes (e.g., quenching by different mechanisms) may have very different effects on the H i in different galaxies and hence produce different SFEHI-sSFR relations, while the SFEH2 -sSFR relation remains unaffected. The facts that SFEH2 -sSFR relation is independent of other key galaxy properties, and that sSFR is directly related to the cosmic time and acts as the cosmic clock, make it natural and very simple to study how different galaxy populations (with different properties and undergoing different processes) evolve on the same SFEH2 -sSFR ∼ t relation. In the gas regulator model (GRM), the evolution of a galaxy on the SFEH2 -sSFR(t) relation is uniquely set by a single mass-loading parameter λnet,H2 . This simplicity allows us to accurately derive the H2 supply and removal rates of the local galaxy populations with different stellar masses, from star-forming galaxies to the galaxies in the process of being quenched. This combination of FFR and GRM, together with the stellar metallicity requirement, provide a new powerful tool to study galaxy formation and evolution.ERC STF

Liver-Targeting of Interferon-Alpha with Tissue-Specific Domain Antibodies

PMCID: PMC3581439This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Cold Gas in Massive Galaxies as a Critical Test of Black Hole Feedback Models

Black hole feedback has been widely implemented as the key recipe to quench star formation in massive galaxies in modern semi-analytic models and hydrodynamical simulations. As the theoretical details surrounding the accretion and feedback of black holes continue to be refined, various feedback models have been implemented across simulations, with notable differences in their outcomes. Yet, most of these simulations have successfully reproduced some observations, such as stellar mass function and star formation rate density in the local Universe. We use the recent observation on the change of neutral hydrogen gas mass (including both ${\rm H_2}$ and ${\rm HI}$) with star formation rate of massive central disc galaxies as a critical constraint of black hole feedback models across several simulations. We find that the predictions of IllustrisTNG agree with the observations much better than the other models tested in this work. This favors IllustrisTNG's treatment of active galactic nuclei - where kinetic winds are driven by black holes at low accretion rates - as more plausible amongst those we test. In turn, this also indirectly supports the idea that the massive central disc galaxy population in the local Universe was likely quenched by AGN feedback