30,473 research outputs found
Precision spectroscopy and density-dependent frequency shifts in ultracold Sr
By varying the density of an ultracold Sr sample from cm
to cm, we make the first definitive measurement of the
density-related frequency shift and linewidth broadening of the -
optical clock transition in an alkaline earth system. In addition, we
report the most accurate measurement to date of the Sr
optical clock transition frequency. Including a detailed analysis of systematic
errors, the frequency is () Hz.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. submitte
Negative Link Prediction in Social Media
Signed network analysis has attracted increasing attention in recent years.
This is in part because research on signed network analysis suggests that
negative links have added value in the analytical process. A major impediment
in their effective use is that most social media sites do not enable users to
specify them explicitly. In other words, a gap exists between the importance of
negative links and their availability in real data sets. Therefore, it is
natural to explore whether one can predict negative links automatically from
the commonly available social network data. In this paper, we investigate the
novel problem of negative link prediction with only positive links and
content-centric interactions in social media. We make a number of important
observations about negative links, and propose a principled framework NeLP,
which can exploit positive links and content-centric interactions to predict
negative links. Our experimental results on real-world social networks
demonstrate that the proposed NeLP framework can accurately predict negative
links with positive links and content-centric interactions. Our detailed
experiments also illustrate the relative importance of various factors to the
effectiveness of the proposed framework
Stiffness Optimized Multi-Robot Behavior Planning using Reduced Hessian Method
Stiffness is a critical weakness in robot-driven manufacturing. Following the idea of enhancing stiffness by physically coupling multiple robots, the cooperative behavior should be optimized. We present a reduced Hessian method to generate stiffness optimized placement and motion for coupled robots with given manufacturing processes. To improve efficiency the search space dimension of the optimization problem is reduced while the high-dimensional path and coupling constraints are satisfied in each iteration. By integrating a stiffness model in the optimization, cooperative behavior with stiffness enhancement is generated. The results are validated by experiments for both 7-axis and 6-axis robots with physical coupling
Enhancement of Friction between Carbon Nanotubes: An Efficient Strategy to Strengthen Fibers
Interfacial friction plays a crucial role in the mechanical properties of
carbon nanotube based fibers, composites, and devices. Here we use molecular
dynamics simulation to investigate the pressure effect on the friction within
carbon nanotube bundles. It reveals that the intertube frictional force can be
increased by a factor of 1.5 ~ 4, depending on tube chirality and radius, when
all tubes collapse above a critical pressure and when the bundle remains
collapsed with unloading down to atmospheric pressure. Furthermore, the overall
cross-sectional area also decreases significantly for the collapsed structure,
making the bundle stronger. Our study suggests a new and efficient way to
reinforce nanotube fibers, possibly stronger than carbon fibers, for usage at
ambient conditions.Comment: revtex, 5 pages, accepted by ACS Nano 10 Dec 200
A Memory Bandwidth-Efficient Hybrid Radix Sort on GPUs
Sorting is at the core of many database operations, such as index creation,
sort-merge joins, and user-requested output sorting. As GPUs are emerging as a
promising platform to accelerate various operations, sorting on GPUs becomes a
viable endeavour. Over the past few years, several improvements have been
proposed for sorting on GPUs, leading to the first radix sort implementations
that achieve a sorting rate of over one billion 32-bit keys per second. Yet,
state-of-the-art approaches are heavily memory bandwidth-bound, as they require
substantially more memory transfers than their CPU-based counterparts.
Our work proposes a novel approach that almost halves the amount of memory
transfers and, therefore, considerably lifts the memory bandwidth limitation.
Being able to sort two gigabytes of eight-byte records in as little as 50
milliseconds, our approach achieves a 2.32-fold improvement over the
state-of-the-art GPU-based radix sort for uniform distributions, sustaining a
minimum speed-up of no less than a factor of 1.66 for skewed distributions.
To address inputs that either do not reside on the GPU or exceed the
available device memory, we build on our efficient GPU sorting approach with a
pipelined heterogeneous sorting algorithm that mitigates the overhead
associated with PCIe data transfers. Comparing the end-to-end sorting
performance to the state-of-the-art CPU-based radix sort running 16 threads,
our heterogeneous approach achieves a 2.06-fold and a 1.53-fold improvement for
sorting 64 GB key-value pairs with a skewed and a uniform distribution,
respectively.Comment: 16 pages, accepted at SIGMOD 201
Changing characteristics of the water consumption structure in Nanjing city, Southern China
Understanding the changes in water consumption structure in order to take measures for demand control is very important for sustainable water resources management. In this study, using the Southern China area of Nanjing as an example, we employed the information entropy method to analyze the water consumption structure, as well as the grey incidence analysis to analyze synthetic incidence degree of the factors associated with agricultural, industrial, domestic, and ecological water consumption. The results show that the degree of balance among water consumption sectors has increased from 0.755 to 0.825 between 1993 and 2014. Gradual decrease of the relative proportion of a single water user structure in a water consumption system has made the utilization of water resources in Nanjing rational and diversified. The study identifies three stages of transformation of water structure in Nanjing, namely, a growth period from 1993 to 2002, an adjustment period from 2003 to 2010, and another growth period from 2011 to 2014. The synthetic incidence degree analysis indicates that adjustments of the agricultural and industrial water consumption as well as water saving measures are the main factors that affected water consumption structure in Nanjing. It is expected that the results obtained from this study will provide references to optimize the utilization of urban water resources
Cloning and molecular characterization of Triticum aestivum ornithine amino transferase (TaOAT) encoding genes
Background
Ornithine aminotransferase (OAT, EC:2.6.1.13), alternatively known as ornithine delta aminotransferase (δOAT), is a pyridoxal phosphate (PLP)-dependent enzyme involved in the conversion of ornithine into glutamyl-5-semi-aldehyde (GSA) and vice versa. Up till now, there has been no study on OAT in wheat despite the success of its isolation from rice, maize, and sorghum. This study focuses on identification and molecular characterization of OAT in wheat.
Results
In total, three homeologous OAT genes in wheat genome were found on chromosome group 5, named as TaOAT-5AL, TaOAT-5BL, and TaOAT-5DL. Sequence alignment between gDNA and its corresponding cDNA obtained a total of ten exons and nine introns. A phylogenetic tree was constructed and results indicated that OATs shared highly conserved domains between monocots and eudicots, which was further illustrated by using WebLogo to generate a sequence logo. Further subcellular localization analysis indicated that they functioned in mitochondria. Protein-protein interactions supported their role in proline biosynthesis through interactions with genes, such as delta 1-pyrroline-5-carboxylate synthetase (P5CS) and pyrroline-5-carboxylate reductase (P5CR), involved in the proline metabolic pathway. Promoter analysis exposed the presence of several stress responsive elements, implying their involvement in stress regulation. Expression profiling illustrated that TaOAT was highly induced in the wheat plants exposed to drought or salt stress condition. Upregulated expression of TaOATs was observed in stamens and at the heading stage. A potential role of TaOAT genes during floret development was also revealed. Furthermore, the transgenic plants overexpressing TaOAT showed enhanced tolerance to drought stress by increasing proline accumulation. In addition, salt tolerance of the transgenic plants was also enhanced.
Conclusion
TaOATs genes were involved in proline synthesis and nitrogen remobilization because they interacted with genes related to proline biosynthesis enzymes and arginine catabolism. In addition, TaOAT genes had a role in abiotic stress tolerance and a potential role in floret development. The results of this study may propose future research in the improvement of wheat resistance to abiotic stresses
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