A continuum-microscopic method based on IRBFs and control volume scheme for viscoelastic fluid flows

A numerical computation of continuum-microscopic model for visco-elastic flows based on the Integrated Radial Basis Function (IRBF) Control Volume and the Stochastic Simulation Techniques (SST) is reported in this paper. The macroscopic flow equations are closed by a stochastic equation for the extra stress at the microscopic level. The former are discretised by a 1D-IRBF-CV method while the latter is integrated with Euler explicit or Predictor-Corrector schemes. Modelling is very efficient as it is based on Cartesian grid, while the integrated RBF approach enhances both the stability of the procedure and the accuracy of the solution. The proposed method is demonstrated with the solution of the start-up Couette flow of the Hookean and FENE dumbbell model fluids

Probing topology by "heating": Quantized circular dichroism in ultracold atoms

We reveal an intriguing manifestation of topology, which appears in the depletion rate of topological states of matter in response to an external drive. This phenomenon is presented by analyzing the response of a generic 2D Chern insulator subjected to a circular time-periodic perturbation: due to the system's chiral nature, the depletion rate is shown to depend on the orientation of the circular shake. Most importantly, taking the difference between the rates obtained from two opposite orientations of the drive, and integrating over a proper drive-frequency range, provides a direct measure of the topological Chern number of the populated band ($\nu$): this "differential integrated rate" is directly related to the strength of the driving field through the quantized coefficient $\eta_0\!=\!\nu /\hbar^2$. Contrary to the integer quantum Hall effect, this quantized response is found to be non-linear with respect to the strength of the driving field and it explicitly involves inter-band transitions. We investigate the possibility of probing this phenomenon in ultracold gases and highlight the crucial role played by edge states in this effect. We extend our results to 3D lattices, establishing a link between depletion rates and the non-linear photogalvanic effect predicted for Weyl semimetals. The quantized circular dichroism revealed in this work designates depletion-rate measurements as a universal probe for topological order in quantum matter.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures (including Sup. Mat.). Revised version, accepted for publicatio

A molecular perspective on the limits of life: Enzymes under pressure

From a purely operational standpoint, the existence of microbes that can grow under extreme conditions, or "extremophiles", leads to the question of how the molecules making up these microbes can maintain both their structure and function. While microbes that live under extremes of temperature have been heavily studied, those that live under extremes of pressure have been neglected, in part due to the difficulty of collecting samples and performing experiments under the ambient conditions of the microbe. However, thermodynamic arguments imply that the effects of pressure might lead to different organismal solutions than from the effects of temperature. Observationally, some of these solutions might be in the condensed matter properties of the intracellular milieu in addition to genetic modifications of the macromolecules or repair mechanisms for the macromolecules. Here, the effects of pressure on enzymes, which are proteins essential for the growth and reproduction of an organism, and some adaptations against these effects are reviewed and amplified by the results from molecular dynamics simulations. The aim is to provide biological background for soft matter studies of these systems under pressure.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

POLLUTION OF GROUNDWATER BY LEACHATE FROM DONG THANH LANDFILL DISPOSAL SITE

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Supporting User-Defined Functions on Uncertain Data

Uncertain data management has become crucial in many sensing and scientific applications. As user-defined functions (UDFs) become widely used in these applications, an important task is to capture result uncertainty for queries that evaluate UDFs on uncertain data. In this work, we provide a general framework for supporting UDFs on uncertain data. Specifically, we propose a learning approach based on Gaussian processes (GPs) to compute approximate output distributions of a UDF when evaluated on uncertain input, with guaranteed error bounds. We also devise an online algorithm to compute such output distributions, which employs a suite of optimizations to improve accuracy and performance. Our evaluation using both real-world and synthetic functions shows that our proposed GP approach can outperform the state-of-the-art sampling approach with up to two orders of magnitude improvement for a variety of UDFs. 1

Geographical distribution of selected and putatively neutral SNPs in Southeast Asian malaria parasites.

Loci targeted by directional selection are expected to show elevated geographical population structure relative to neutral loci, and a flurry of recent papers have used this rationale to search for genome regions involved in adaptation. Studies of functional mutations that are known to be under selection are particularly useful for assessing the utility of this approach. Antimalarial drug treatment regimes vary considerably between countries in Southeast Asia selecting for local adaptation at parasite loci underlying resistance. We compared the population structure revealed by 10 nonsynonymous mutations (nonsynonymous single-nucleotide polymorphisms [nsSNPs]) in four loci that are known to be involved in antimalarial drug resistance, with patterns revealed by 10 synonymous mutations (synonymous single-nucleotide polymorphisms [sSNPs]) in housekeeping genes or genes of unknown function in 755 Plasmodium falciparum infections collected from 13 populations in six Southeast Asian countries. Allele frequencies at known nsSNPs underlying resistance varied markedly between locations (F(ST) = 0.18-0.66), with the highest frequencies on the Thailand-Burma border and the lowest frequencies in neighboring Lao PDR. In contrast, we found weak but significant geographic structure (F(ST) = 0-0.14) for 8 of 10 sSNPs. Importantly, all 10 nsSNPs showed significantly higher F(ST) (P < 8 x 10(-5)) than simulated neutral expectations based on observed F(ST) values in the putatively neutral sSNPs. This result was unaffected by the methods used to estimate allele frequencies or the number of populations used in the simulations. Given that dense single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) maps and rapid SNP assay methods are now available for P. falciparum, comparing genetic differentiation across the genome may provide a valuable aid to identifying parasite loci underlying local adaptation to drug treatment regimes or other selective forces. However, the high proportion of polymorphic sites that appear to be under balancing selection (or linked to selected sites) in the P. falciparum genome violates the central assumption that selected sites are rare, which complicates identification of outlier loci, and suggests that caution is needed when using this approach

Hund's rule and metallic ferromagnetism

We study tight-binding models of itinerant electrons in two different bands, with effective on-site interactions expressing Coulomb repulsion and Hund's rule. We prove that, for sufficiently large on-site exchange anisotropy, all ground states show metallic ferromagnetism: They exhibit a macroscopic magnetization, a macroscopic fraction of the electrons is spatially delocalized, and there is no energy gap for kinetic excitations.Comment: 17 page