Steady-state traffic flow on a ring road with up- and down- slopes

This paper studies steady-state traffic flow on a ring road with up- and down- slopes using a semi-discrete model. By exploiting the relations between the semi-discrete and the continuum models, a steady-state solution is uniquely determined for a given total number of vehicles on the ring road. The solution is exact and always stable with respect to the first-order continuum model, whereas it is a good approximation with respect to the semi-discrete model provided that the involved equilibrium constant states are linearly stable. In an otherwise case, the instability of one or more equilibria could trigger stop-and-go waves propagating in certain road sections or throughout the ring road. The indicated results are reasonable and thus physically significant for a better understanding of real traffic flow on an inhomogeneous road

Helicity hardens the gas

A screw generally works better than a nail, or a complicated rope knot better than a simple one, in fastening solid matter, but a gas is more tameless. However, a flow itself has a physical quantity, helicity, measuring the screwing strength of the velocity field and the degree of the knottedness of the vorticity ropes. It is shown that helicity favors the partition of energy to the vortical modes, compared to others such as the dilatation and pressure modes of turbulence; that is, helicity stiffens the flow, with nontrivial implications for aerodynamics, such as aeroacoustics, and conducting fluids, among others

Mutation breeding of Bacillus subtilis YTB4 with high yield of multienzyme complex

Helium-neon (He-Ne) laser irradiation is a highly efficient mutation breeding technology and is widely applied to various fields of biological science. Using Bacillus subtilis YTB4 with high yield of multienzyme complex as original strain, mutation breeding was carried out by He-Ne laser irradiation in this study. Based on the study of the strains’ survival rate and positive mutation frequency, the appropriate irradiation dose was determined. The mutant YTB4A was selected through see-through circle way and enzyme activity determination. Compared with the original strain the activities of cellulase, protease and amylase increased by 265.14, 35.42 and 172.78%, respectively. In addition, the hereditary stability test showed that the activities of multienzyme complex were stable and that there was no reverse mutation after 25 generations.Keywords: Bacillus subtilis, multienzyme complex, He-Ne laser, mutation, hereditary stabilit

Attribute-Aware Deep Hashing with Self-Consistency for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Image Retrieval

Our work focuses on tackling large-scale fine-grained image retrieval as ranking the images depicting the concept of interests (i.e., the same sub-category labels) highest based on the fine-grained details in the query. It is desirable to alleviate the challenges of both fine-grained nature of small inter-class variations with large intra-class variations and explosive growth of fine-grained data for such a practical task. In this paper, we propose attribute-aware hashing networks with self-consistency for generating attribute-aware hash codes to not only make the retrieval process efficient, but also establish explicit correspondences between hash codes and visual attributes. Specifically, based on the captured visual representations by attention, we develop an encoder-decoder structure network of a reconstruction task to unsupervisedly distill high-level attribute-specific vectors from the appearance-specific visual representations without attribute annotations. Our models are also equipped with a feature decorrelation constraint upon these attribute vectors to strengthen their representative abilities. Then, driven by preserving original entities' similarity, the required hash codes can be generated from these attribute-specific vectors and thus become attribute-aware. Furthermore, to combat simplicity bias in deep hashing, we consider the model design from the perspective of the self-consistency principle and propose to further enhance models' self-consistency by equipping an additional image reconstruction path. Comprehensive quantitative experiments under diverse empirical settings on six fine-grained retrieval datasets and two generic retrieval datasets show the superiority of our models over competing methods.Comment: Accepted by IEEE TPAM

Electrodynamics with violations of Lorentz and U(1) gauge symmetries and their Hamiltonian structure

This article aims to study the Lorentz/U(1) gauge symmetry-breaking electrodynamics in the framework of the Standard-Model Extension and analyze the Hamiltonian structure for the theory with a specific dimension $d\leq 4$ of Lorentz breaking operators. For this purpose, we consider a general quadratic action of the modified electrodynamics with Lorentz/gauge-breaking operators and calculate the number of independent components of the operators at different dimensions in gauge invariance and breaking. With this general action, we then analyze how the Lorentz/gauge symmetry-breaking can change the Hamiltonian structure of the theories by considering Lorentz/gauge-breaking operators with dimension $d\leq 4$ as examples. We show that the Lorentz-breaking operators with gauge invariance do not change the classes of the constraints of the theory and the number of the physical degrees of freedom of the standard Maxwell's electrodynamics. When the U(1) gauge symmetry-breaking operators are present, the theories in general lack first-class constraint and have one additional physical degree of freedom, compared to the standard Maxwell's electrodynamics.Comment: 13 pages; v2: version to be published in Chinese Physics