Large-scale and long-term monitoring of the thermal environments and adaptive behaviors in Chinese urban residential buildings

Indoor thermal environments in residential buildings vary due to differences in the outdoor climates, the envelope thermal properties of the buildings, the types of heating and cooling systems, and adaptive behaviors such as the operation of air conditioners and windows by dwellers. This study comprehensively investigated the thermal environments in 46 apartments in nine cities across five climate zones in China via on-site monitoring of the indoor air temperature, the relative humidity, and the air conditioner and window use for one year. The results demonstrate large variations in the thermal environments among the cities. During the heating period, the interior air in Urumqi and Shenyang was overheated (>24 °C) 43% and 59% of the time, respectively, while the indoor air temperature in Chongqing can be lower than 10 °C. As the outdoor climate became warmer, the temperature difference between indoors and outdoors decreased due to the increased window-opening duration. In summer, the indoor humidity ratio was higher than 12 g/kg for a long time in all cities except Urumqi. A clear linear positive correlation between the indoor and outdoor humidity ratios was identified until the indoor humidity reached 18 g/kg, which was due to the increased use of air conditioners. The results of this study provide an updated overall picture of the thermal environments in Chinese residential buildings

Taxonomy and phylogeny of mud owls (Annelida: Sternaspidae), including a new synonymy and new records from the Southern Ocean, North East Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean: challenges in morphological delimitation

Species delimitation in sternaspid polychaetes is currently based on the morphology of a limited suite of characters, namely characters of the ventro-caudal shield—a unique feature of the family. Sternaspid species description has increased rapidly in recent years; however, the validity of the shield as a diagnostic character has not been assessed through molecular means. This study performs the largest molecular taxonomy of Sternaspidae to date, using the nuclear gene 18S, and the mitochondrial genes 16S and cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) to assess phylogenetic relationships within the family, to reassess the placement of Sternaspidae within the wider polychaete tree and to investigate the effectiveness of the shield as a diagnostic morphological character. This study includes many new records and reports Sternaspis affinis Stimpson, 1864 from USA Pacific coastline and genetic connectivity between specimens identified as Sternaspis cf. annenkovae Salazar-Vallejo & Buzhinskaja, 2013 from off southeastern Australia and specimens identified as Sternaspis cf. williamsae Salazar-Vallejo & Buzhinskaja, 2013 from the northwestern Pacific. In addition, we investigate material identified as Sternaspis cf. scutata (Ranzani, 1817) in the English Channel and compare with S. scutata through both molecular and morphological means. We further perform a detailed morphological and molecular investigation of new sternaspid material collected from the Southern Ocean and Antarctic Peninsula and regard Sternaspis monroi Salazar-Vallejo, 2014 syn. n. as a junior synonym of Sternaspis sendalli Salazar-Vallejo, 2014, two species recently described from the region, raising questions concerning the validity of current morphological delimitation.© The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made

Quantum Black Holes from Cosmic Rays

We investigate the possibility for cosmic ray experiments to discover non-thermal small black holes with masses in the TeV range. Such black holes would result due to the impact between ultra high energy cosmic rays or neutrinos with nuclei from the upper atmosphere and decay instantaneously. They could be produced copiously if the Planck scale is in the few TeV region. As their masses are close to the Planck scale, these holes would typically decay into two particles emitted back-to-back. Depending on the angles between the emitted particles with respect to the center of mass direction of motion, it is possible for the simultaneous showers to be measured by the detectors.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Electronic and Structural Properties of a 4d-Perovskite: Cubic Phase of SrZrO3_3

First-principles density functional calculations are performed within the local density approximation to study the electronic properties of SrZrO$_3$, an insulating 4d-perovskite, in its high-temperature cubic phase, above 1400 K, as well as the generic 3d-perovskite SrTiO$_3$, which is also a d^0-insulator and cubic above 105 K, for comparison reasons. The energy bands, density of states and charge density distributions are obtained and a detailed comparison between their band structures is presented. The results are discussed also in terms of the existing data in the literature for both oxides.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease

Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease (KFD) is a benign and self-limited disorder, characterized by regional cervical lymphadenopathy with tenderness, usually accompanied with mild fever and night sweats. Less frequent symptoms include weight loss, nausea, vomiting, sore throat. Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease is an extremely rare disease known to have a worldwide distribution with higher prevalence among Japanese and other Asiatic individuals. The clinical, histopathological and immunohistochemical features appear to point to a viral etiology, a hypothesis that still has not been proven. KFD is generally diagnosed on the basis of an excisional biopsy of affected lymph nodes. Its recognition is crucial especially because this disease can be mistaken for systemic lupus erythematosus, malignant lymphoma or even, though rarely, for adenocarcinoma. Clinicians' and pathologists' awareness of this disorder may help prevent misdiagnsois and inappropriate treatment. The diagnosis of KFD merits active consideration in any nodal biopsy showing fragmentation, necrosis and karyorrhexis, especially in young individuals presenting with posterior cervical lymphadenopathy. Treatment is symptomatic (analgesics-antipyretics, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and, rarely, corticosteroids). Spontaneous recovery occurs in 1 to 4 months. Patients with Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease should be followed-up for several years to survey the possibility of the development of systemic lupus erythematosus

Mechanical Responses and Stress Fluctuations of a Supercooled Liquid in a Sheared Non-Equilibrium State

A steady shear flow can drive supercooled liquids into a non-equilibrium state. Using molecular dynamics simulations under steady shear flow superimposed with oscillatory shear strain for a probe, non-equilibrium mechanical responses are studied for a model supercooled liquid composed of binary soft spheres. We found that even in the strongly sheared situation, the supercooled liquid exhibits surprisingly isotropic responses to oscillating shear strains applied in three different components of the strain tensor. Based on this isotropic feature, we successfully constructed a simple two-mode Maxwell model that can capture the key features of the storage and loss moduli, even for highly non-equilibrium state. Furthermore, we examined the correlation functions of the shear stress fluctuations, which also exhibit isotropic relaxation behaviors in the sheared non-equilibrium situation. In contrast to the isotropic features, the supercooled liquid additionally demonstrates anisotropies in both its responses and its correlations to the shear stress fluctuations. Using the constitutive equation (a two-mode Maxwell model), we demonstrated that the anisotropic responses are caused by the coupling between the oscillating strain and the driving shear flow. We measured the magnitude of this violation in terms of the effective temperature. It was demonstrated that the effective temperature is notably different between different components, which indicates that a simple scalar mapping, such as the concept of an effective temperature, oversimplifies the true nature of supercooled liquids under shear flow. An understanding of the mechanism of isotropies and anisotropies in the responses and fluctuations will lead to a better appreciation of these violations of the FDT, as well as certain consequent modifications to the concept of an effective temperature.Comment: 15pages, 17figure

Quantum internet using code division multiple access

A crucial open problem in large-scale quantum networks is how to efficiently transmit quantum data among many pairs of users via a common data-transmission medium. We propose a solution by developing a quantum code division multiple access (q-CDMA) approach in which quantum information is chaotically encoded to spread its spectral content, and then decoded via chaos synchronization to separate different sender-receiver pairs. In comparison to other existing approaches, such as frequency division multiple access (FDMA), the proposed q-CDMA can greatly increase the information rates per channel used, especially for very noisy quantum channels.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure

Domain growth and aging scaling in coarsening disordered systems

Using extensive Monte Carlo simulations we study aging properties of two disordered systems quenched below their critical point, namely the two-dimensional random-bond Ising model and the three-dimensional Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass with a bimodal distribution of the coupling constants. We study the two-times autocorrelation and space-time correlation functions and show that in both systems a simple aging scenario prevails in terms of the scaling variable $L(t)/L(s)$, where $L$ is the time-dependent correlation length, whereas $s$ is the waiting time and $t$ is the observation time. The investigation of the space-time correlation function for the random-bond Ising model allows us to address some issues related to superuniversality.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, to appear in European Physical Journal

On the thermoelectricity of correlated electrons in the zero-temperature limit

The Seebeck coefficient of a metal is expected to display a linear temperature-dependence in the zero-temperature limit. To attain this regime, it is often necessary to cool the system well below 1K. We put under scrutiny the magnitude of this term in different families of strongly-interacting electronic systems. For a wide range of compounds (including heavy-fermion, organic and various oxide families) a remarkable correlation between this term and the electronic specific heat is found. We argue that a dimensionless ratio relating these two signatures of mass renormalisation contains interesting information about the ground state of each system. The absolute value of this ratio remains close to unity in a wide range of strongly-correlated electron systems.Comment: 15 pages, including two figure

Modern microwave methods in solid state inorganic materials chemistry: from fundamentals to manufacturing

No abstract available