Magnetic field waves at Uranus

The proposed research efforts funded by the UDAP grant to the BRI involve the study of magnetic field waves associated with the Uranian bow shock. This is a collaborative venture bringing together investigators at the BRI, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). In addition, other collaborations have been formed with investigators granted UDAP funds for similar studies and with investigators affiliated with other Voyager experiments. These investigations and the corresponding collaborations are included in the report. The proposed effort as originally conceived included an examination of waves downstream from the shock within the magnetosheath. However, the observations of unexpected complexity and diversity within the upstream region have necessitated that we confine our efforts to those observations recorded upstream of the bow shock on the inbound and outbound legs of the encounter by the Voyager 2 spacecraft

A Novel IoT Based Positioning and Shadowing System for Dementia Training.

A rapid increase in the number of patients with dementia, particularly memory decline or impairment, has led to the loss of self-care ability in more individuals and increases in medical and social costs. Numerous studies, and clinical service experience, have revealed that the intervention of nonpharmacological management for people with dementia is effective in delaying the degeneration caused by dementia. Due to recent rapid developments in information and communications technology, many innovative research and development and cross-domain applications have been effectively used in the dementia care environment. This study proposed a new short-term memory support and cognitive training application technology, a "positioning and shadowing system," to delay short-term memory degeneration in dementia. Training courses that integrate physical and digital technologies for the indoor location of patients with dementia were constructed using technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy, fingerprint location algorithm, and short-range wireless communication. The Internet of Things was effectively applied to a clinical training environment for short-term memory. A pilot test verified that the results demonstrated learning effects in cognitive training and that the system can assist medical personnel in training and nursing work. Participants responded with favorable feedback regarding course satisfaction and system usability. This study can be used as a reference for future digital smart cognitive training that allows observation of the performance of patients with dementia in activities of daily living

On the medication distribution system for home health care through convenience stores, lockers, and home delivery.

Medication distribution service can be delivered based on a combination of home delivery and customer pickup. That is, medications are delivered either to customers' homes directly or to the pickup facilities (e.g. lockers) close to customers' homes. In Taiwan, there are more than 11,000 convenience stores that provide a 24-h service for customers to pick up the ordered items from e-commerce, which is unique to the world. In the medication distribution system, convenience stores can provide a unique opportunity for customers to more conveniently collect medications at stores, and also can reduce the operating cost for a logistics company providing the medication delivery service. Therefore, this work proposes a medication distribution system through convenience stores, lockers, and home delivery. Under this system, this work investigates how to simultaneously determine employment of convenience store chains, the convenience store locations to be visited, locations of lockers, vehicle routes for convenience stores and lockers, and vehicle routes for customers' homes, so that the total operating cost is minimized. This work further proposes a genetic algorithm to solve the medication distribution problem. Through simulation, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to solve the problem efficiently

Toll-like receptor 3 activation is required for normal skin barrier repair following UV damage.

UV damage to the skin leads to the release of noncoding RNA (ncRNA) from necrotic keratinocytes that activates Toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3). This release of ncRNA triggers inflammation in the skin following UV damage. Recently, TLR3 activation was also shown to aid wound repair and increase the expression of genes associated with permeability barrier repair. Here, we sought to test whether skin barrier repair after UVB damage is dependent on the activation of TLR3. We observed that multiple ncRNAs induced expression of skin barrier repair genes, that the TLR3 ligand Poly (I:C) also induced expression and function of tight junctions, and that the ncRNA U1 acts in a TLR3-dependent manner to induce expression of skin barrier repair genes. These observations were shown to have functional relevance as Tlr3-/- mice displayed a delay in skin barrier repair following UVB damage. Combined, these data further validate the conclusion that recognition of endogenous RNA by TLR3 is an important step in the program of skin barrier repair

Project Report No. 67, A Whole-Stand Growth and Yield Model for Unmanaged Loblolly and Slash Pine Plantations in East Texas

The amount of forestland in east Texas has been estimated at 11.8 million acres, with approximately 2.5 million acres classified as pine plantations. The majority of these plantations are owned by forest industry (71 percent), while non-industrial private forest landowners represent the next largest shareholder (23 percent). Pine plantations are typically managed to produce timber, so information is needed to make informed management decisions. Growth is one piece of information that managers often rely upon in their decision-making process. The purpose of this paper is to develop an updated whole-stand growth and yield model for unmanaged loblolly and slash pine plantations in east Texas that improves upon the whole-stand model of Coble (2009). Specifically, this updated model includes a new equation to predict average stand diameter as well as an improved survival function

Entropy production and equilibration in Yang-Mills quantum mechanics

The Husimi distribution provides for a coarse grained representation of the phase space distribution of a quantum system, which may be used to track the growth of entropy of the system. We present a general and systematic method of solving the Husimi equation of motion for an isolated quantum system, and we construct a coarse grained Hamiltonian whose expectation value is exactly conserved. As an application, we numerically solve the Husimi equation of motion for two-dimensional Yang-Mills quantum mechanics (the x-y model) and calculate the time evolution of the coarse grained entropy of a highly excited state. We show that the coarse grained entropy saturates to a value that coincides with the microcanonical entropy corresponding to the energy of the system.Comment: 23 pages, 23 figure

Kinetics of TiSi2 formation by thin Ti films on Si

Silicide formation with Ti deposited on single crystal Si and Ti deposited on amorphous Si layers sequentially without breaking the vacuum was investigated using backscattering spectrometry and glancing-angle x-ray diffraction. For Ti deposited on amorphous Si, TiSi2 was formed with a rate proportional to (time)^1/2 and an activation energy of 1.8±0.1 eV. For Ti deposited on single crystal Si, the reaction rate was slower and the silicide layer was nonuniform in thickness. We attribute the difference in behavior to the presences of interfacial impurities in the case where Ti was deposited on single crystal Si

Andromeda's Parachute: A Bright Quadruply Lensed Quasar at z=2.377

We present Keck Cosmic Web Imager spectroscopy of the four putative images of the lensed quasar candidate J014709+463037 recently discovered by Berghea et al. (2017). The data verify the source as a quadruply lensed, broad absorption-line quasar having z_S = 2.377 +/- 0.007. We detect intervening absorption in the FeII 2586, 2600, MgII 2796, 2803, and/or CIV 1548, 1550 transitions in eight foreground systems, three of which have redshifts consistent with the photometric-redshift estimate reported for the lensing galaxy (z_L ~ 0.57). By virtue of their positions on the sky, the source images probe these absorbers over transverse physical scales of ~0.3-21 kpc, permitting assessment of the variation in metal-line equivalent width W_r as a function of sight-line separation. We measure differences in W_r,2796 of <40% across all sight-line pairs subtending 7-21 kpc, suggestive of a high degree of spatial coherence for MgII-absorbing material. W_r,2600 is observed to vary by >50% over the same scales across the majority of sight-line pairs, while CIV absorption exhibits a wide range in W_r,1548 differences of ~5-80% within transverse distances less than ~3 kpc. J014709+463037 is one of only a handful of z > 2 quadruply lensed systems for which all four source images are very bright (r = 15.4-17.7 mag) and are easily separated in ground-based seeing conditions. As such, it is an ideal candidate for higher-resolution spectroscopy probing the spatial variation in the kinematic structure and physical state of intervening absorbers.Comment: Submitted to ApJL. 9 pages, 3 figures. Uses aastex61 forma