On the monitoring of surface displacement in connection with volcano reactivation in Tenerife, Canary Islands, using space techniques

Geodetic volcano monitoring in Tenerife has mainly focused on the Las Cañadas Caldera, where a geodetic micronetwork and a levelling profile are located. A sensitivity test of this geodetic network showed that it should be extended to cover the whole island for volcano monitoring purposes. Furthermore, InSAR allowed detecting two unexpected movements that were beyond the scope of the traditional geodetic network. These two facts prompted us to design and observe a GPS network covering the whole of Tenerife that was monitored in August 2000. The results obtained were accurate to one centimetre, and confirm one of the deformations, although they were not definitive enough to confirm the second one. Furthermore, new cases of possible subsidence have been detected in areas where InSAR could not be used to measure deformation due to low coherence. A first modelling attempt has been made using a very simple model and its results seem to indicate that the deformation observed and the groundwater level variation in the island may be related. Future observations will be necessary for further validation and to study the time evolution of the displacements, carry out interpretation work using different types of data (gravity, gases, etc) and develop models that represent the island more closely. The results obtained are important because they might affect the geodetic volcano monitoring on the island, which will only be really useful if it is capable of distinguishing between displacements that might be linked to volcanic activity and those produced by other causes. One important result in this work is that a new geodetic monitoring system based on two complementary techniques, InSAR and GPS, has been set up on Tenerife island. This the first time that the whole surface of any of the volcanic Canary Islands has been covered with a single network for this purpose. This research has displayed the need for further similar studies in the Canary Islands, at least on the islands which pose a greater risk of volcanic reactivation, such as Lanzarote and La Palma, where InSAR techniques have been used already

Thermally driven spin injection from a ferromagnet into a non-magnetic metal

Creating, manipulating and detecting spin polarized carriers are the key elements of spin based electronics. Most practical devices use a perpendicular geometry in which the spin currents, describing the transport of spin angular momentum, are accompanied by charge currents. In recent years, new sources of pure spin currents, i.e., without charge currents, have been demonstrated and applied. In this paper, we demonstrate a conceptually new source of pure spin current driven by the flow of heat across a ferromagnetic/non-magnetic metal (FM/NM) interface. This spin current is generated because the Seebeck coefficient, which describes the generation of a voltage as a result of a temperature gradient, is spin dependent in a ferromagnet. For a detailed study of this new source of spins, it is measured in a non-local lateral geometry. We developed a 3D model that describes the heat, charge and spin transport in this geometry which allows us to quantify this process. We obtain a spin Seebeck coefficient for Permalloy of -3.8 microvolt/Kelvin demonstrating that thermally driven spin injection is a feasible alternative for electrical spin injection in, for example, spin transfer torque experiments

Comparison of different techniques for characterizing the diesel injector internal dimensions

[EN] The geometry of certain parts of diesel injectors is key to the injection, atomization and fuel-air mixing phenomena. Small variations on the geometrical parameters may have a strong influence on the aforementioned processes. Thus, OEMs need to assess their manufacturing tolerances, whereas researchers in the field (both experimentalists and modelers) rely on the accuracy of a certain metrology technique for their studies. In the current paper, an investigation of the capability of different experimental techniques to determine the geometry of a modern diesel fuel injector has been performed. For this purpose, three main elements of the injector have been evaluated: the control volume inlet and outlet orifices, together with the nozzle orifices. While the direct observation of the samples through an optical microscope is only possible for the simplest pieces, both Computed Tomography Scanning and the visualization of silicone molds technique have proven their ability to characterize the most complex internal shapes corresponding to the internal injector elements. Indeed, results indicate that the differences observed among these methodologies for the determination of the control volume inlet orifice diameter and the nozzle orifice dimensions are smaller than the uncertainties related to the experimental techniques, showing that they are both equally accurate. This implies that the choice of a given technique for the particular application of determining the geometry of diesel injectors can be done on the basis of availability, intrusion and costs, rather than on its accuracy.This work was partly sponsored by "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad", of the Spanish Government, in the frame of the Project "Estudio de la interaccion chorro-pared en condiciones realistas de motor", Reference TRA2015-67679-c2-1-R.Salvador, FJ.; Gimeno, J.; De La Morena, J.; Carreres, M. (2018). Comparison of different techniques for characterizing the diesel injector internal dimensions. Experimental Techniques. 42(5):467-472. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40799-018-0246-1S467472425Mobasheri R, Peng Z, Mostafa S (2012) Analysis the effect of advanced injection strategies on engine performance and pollutant emissions in a heavy duty DI-diesel engine by CFD modeling. Int J Heat Fluid Flow 33(1):59–69Dhar A, Agarwal AK (2015) Experimental investigations of the effect of pilot injection on performance, emissions and combustion characteristics of Karanja biodiesel fuelled CRDI engine. Energy Convers Manag 93:357–366Mohan B, Yang W, Chou SK (2013) Fuel injection strategies for performance improvement and emissions reduction in compression ignition engines—a review. Renew Sust Energ Rev 28(x):664–676Petrovic V, Bracanovic Z, Grozdanic B, Petrovic S, Sazhin S, Knezevic D (2015) The design of a full flow dilution tunnel with a critical flow venturi for the measurement of diesel engine particulate emission. FME Trans 43(2):99–106Ilić Z, Rasuo B, Jovanović M, Janković D (2013) Impact of changing quality of air/fuel mixture during flight of a piston engine aircraft with respect to vibration low frequency spectrum. FME Trans 41(1):25–32Luján JM, Tormos B, Salvador FJ, Galgar K (2009) Comparative analysis of a DI diesel engine fuelled with biodiesel blends during the European MVEG-A cycle: Preliminaru study I. Biomass & Bioenergy 33(6–7):941–947Postrioti L, Mariani F, Battistoni M (2012) Experimental and numerical momentum flux evaluation of high pressure diesel spray. Fuel 98:149–163Payri R, Salvador FJ, Gimeno J, Venegas O (2016) A technique to match the refractive index of different diesel fuels with the refractive index of transparent materials to improve the experimental visualization. Exp Tech 40(1):261–269Duran SP, Porter JM, Parker TE (2015) Ballistic imaging of diesel sprays using a picosecond laser: characterization and demonstration. Appl Opt 54(7):1743Payri R, Salvador FJ, Gimeno J et al (2011) Flow regime effects on non-cavitating injection nozzles over spray behavior. Int J Heat Fluid Flow 32(1):273–284Koukouvinis P, Gavaises M, Li J, Wang L (2016) Large Eddy simulation of diesel injector including cavitation effects and correlation to erosion damage. Fuel 175:26–39Som S, Aggarwal SK (2010) Effects of primary breakup modeling on spray and combustion characteristics of compression ignition engines. Combust Flame 157(6):1179–1193Salvador FJ, De la Morena J, Martínez-López J, Jaramillo D (2017) Assessment of compressibility effects on internal nozzle flow in diesel injectors at very high injection pressures. Energy Convers Manag 132:221–230Salvador FJ, Gimeno J, de la Morena J, Martí-Aldaraví P (2012) Using one-dimensional modelling to analyze the influence of the use of biodiesels on the dynamic behaviour of solenoid-operated injectors in common rail systems: Results of the simulation and discussion. Energy Convers Manag 54(1):122–132Taghavifar H, Khalilarya S, Jafarmadar S, Baghery F (2016) 3-D numerical consideration of nozzle structure on combustion and emission characteristics of DI diesel injector. Appl Math Model 40(19–20):8630–8646Edelbauer W (2017) Numerical simulation of cavitating injector flow and liquid spray break-up by combination of Eulerian–Eulerian and volume-of-fluid methods. Comput Fluids 144:19–33Salvador FJ, Carreres M, Jaramillo D, Martínez-López J (2015) Comparison of microsac and VCO diesel injector nozzles in terms of internal nozzle flow characteristics. Energy Convers Manag 103:284–299Salvador FJ, Martínez-López J, Romero JV, Roselló MD (2013) Study of the influence of the needle eccentricity on the internal flow in diesel injector nozzles by computational fluid dynamics calculations. Int J Comput Math 91, no. June:24–31Payri R, Salvador FJ, Carreres M, De la Morena J (Apr. 2016) Fuel temperature influence on the performance of a last generation common-rail diesel ballistic injector. Part II: 1D model development, validation and analysis. Energy Convers Manag 114:376–391Salvador FJ, Hoyas S, Novella R, Martinez-López J (2011) Numerical simulation and extended validation of two-phase compressible flow in diesel injector nozzles. Proc Inst Mech Eng Part-D-J Automob Eng 225(D4):545–563Satkoski C, Shaver G (2011) Piezoelectric fuel injection: pulse-to-pulse coupling and flow rate estimation. IEEE/ASME Trans Mechatron 16(4):627–642Ferrari A, Mittica A (2016) Response of different injector typologies to dwell time variations and a hydraulic analysis of closely-coupled and continuous rate shaping injection schedules. Appl Energy 169:899–911Payri R, Salvador FJ, Gimeno J, De la Morena J (2011) Analysis of diesel spray atomization by means of a near-nozzle field visualization technique. At Sprays 21(9):753–774Li T, Moon S, Sato K, Yokohata H (Feb. 2017) A comprehensive study on the factors affecting near-nozzle spray dynamics of multi-hole GDI injectors. Fuel 190:292–302Yu W, Yang W, Zhao F (2017) Investigation of internal nozzle flow, spray and combustion characteristics fueled with diesel, gasoline and wide distillation fuel (WDF) based on a piezoelectric injector and a direct injection compression ignition engine. Appl Therm Eng 114:905–920Salvador FJ, Carreres M, Crialesi-Esposito M, Plazas AH (2017) Determination of critical operating and geometrical parameters in diesel injectors through one dimensional modelling, design of experiments and an analysis of variance. Proc Inst Mech Eng Part D J Automob EngMacian V, Bermúdez V, Payri R, Gimeno J (2003) New technique for determination of internal geometry of a diesel nozzle with the use of silicone methodology. Exp Tech 27, no April:39–43Piano A, Millo F, Postrioti L, Biscontini G, Cavicchi A, and Pesce FC, (2016) “Numerical and experimental assessment of a solenoid common-rail injector operation with advanced injection strategies,” SAE Int J Engines 9(1)Mitroglou N, Lorenzi M, Santini M, Gavaises M (2016) Application of X-ray micro-computed tomography on high-speed cavitating diesel fuel flows. Exp Fluids 57(11):1–14Kastengren AL, Tilocco FZ, Powell CF, Manin J, Pickett LM, Payri R, Bazyn T (2012) Engine combustion network (ECN): measurements of nozzle geometry and hydraulic behavior. At Sprays 22(12):1011–1052Otsu N (1979) A threshold selection method from gray-level histograms. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern 9(1):62–6

Phase diagram of bismuth in the extreme quantum limit

Elemental bismuth provides a rare opportunity to explore the fate of a three-dimensional gas of highly mobile electrons confined to their lowest Landau level. Coulomb interaction, neglected in the band picture, is expected to become significant in this extreme quantum limit with poorly understood consequences. Here, we present a study of the angular-dependent Nernst effect in bismuth, which establishes the existence of ultraquantum field scales on top of its complex single-particle spectrum. Each time a Landau level crosses the Fermi level, the Nernst response sharply peaks. All such peaks are resolved by the experiment and their complex angular-dependence is in very good agreement with the theory. Beyond the quantum limit, we resolve additional Nernst peaks signaling a cascade of additional Landau sub-levels caused by electron interaction

JSENet: Joint Semantic Segmentation and Edge Detection Network for 3D Point Clouds

Semantic segmentation and semantic edge detection can be seen as two dual problems with close relationships in computer vision. Despite the fast evolution of learning-based 3D semantic segmentation methods, little attention has been drawn to the learning of 3D semantic edge detectors, even less to a joint learning method for the two tasks. In this paper, we tackle the 3D semantic edge detection task for the first time and present a new two-stream fully-convolutional network that jointly performs the two tasks. In particular, we design a joint refinement module that explicitly wires region information and edge information to improve the performances of both tasks. Further, we propose a novel loss function that encourages the network to produce semantic segmentation results with better boundaries. Extensive evaluations on S3DIS and ScanNet datasets show that our method achieves on par or better performance than the state-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation and outperforms the baseline methods for semantic edge detection. Code release: https://github.com/hzykent/JSENetComment: Accepted to ECCV 2020, supplementary materials include

Cytokinesis in bloodstream stage Trypanosoma brucei requires a family of katanins and spastin

Microtubule severing enzymes regulate microtubule dynamics in a wide range of organisms and are implicated in important cell cycle processes such as mitotic spindle assembly and disassembly, chromosome movement and cytokinesis. Here we explore the function of several microtubule severing enzyme homologues, the katanins (KAT80, KAT60a, KAT60b and KAT60c), spastin (SPA) and fidgetin (FID) in the bloodstream stage of the African trypanosome parasite, Trypanosoma brucei. The trypanosome cytoskeleton is microtubule based and remains assembled throughout the cell cycle, necessitating its remodelling during cytokinesis. Using RNA interference to deplete individual proteins, we show that the trypanosome katanin and spastin homologues are non-redundant and essential for bloodstream form proliferation. Further, cell cycle analysis revealed that these proteins play essential but discrete roles in cytokinesis. The KAT60 proteins each appear to be important during the early stages of cytokinesis, while downregulation of KAT80 specifically inhibited furrow ingression and SPA depletion prevented completion of abscission. In contrast, RNA interference of FID did not result in any discernible effects. We propose that the stable microtubule cytoskeleton of T. brucei necessitates the coordinated action of a family of katanins and spastin to bring about the cytoskeletal remodelling necessary to complete cell divisio

Stabilisation of β-Catenin Downstream of T Cell Receptor Signalling

The role of TCF/β-catenin signalling in T cell development is well established, but important roles in mature T cells have only recently come to light.Here we have investigated the signalling pathways that are involved in the regulation of β-catenin in primary human T cells. We demonstrate that β-catenin expression is upregulated rapidly after T cell receptor (TCR) stimulation and that this involves protein stabilisation rather than an increase in mRNA levels. Similar to events in Wnt signalling, the increase in β-catenin coincides with an inhibition of GSK3, the kinase that is required for β-catenin degradation. β-catenin stabilisation in T cells can also be induced by the activation of PKC with phorbol esters and is blocked by inhibitors of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) and phospholipase C (PKC). Upon TCR signalling, β-catenin accumulates in the nucleus and, parallel to this, the ratio of TCF1 isoforms is shifted in favour of the longer β-catenin binding isoforms. However, phosphorylated β-catenin, which is believed to be inactive, can also be detected and the expression of Wnt target genes Axin2 and dickkopf is down regulated.These data show that in mature human T cells, TCR signalling via PI3K and PKC can result in the stabilisation of β-catenin, allowing β-catenin to migrate to the nucleus. They further highlight important differences between β-catenin activities in TCR and Wnt signalling

Autophagy and Apoptosis Have a Role in the Survival or Death of Stallion Spermatozoa during Conservation in Refrigeration

Apoptosis has been recognized as a cause of sperm death during cryopreservation and a cause of infertility in humans, however there is no data on its role in sperm death during conservation in refrigeration; autophagy has not been described to date in mature sperm. We investigated the role of apoptosis and autophagy during cooled storage of stallion spermatozoa. Samples from seven stallions were split; half of the ejaculate was processed by single layer centrifugation, while the other half was extended unprocessed, and stored at 5°C for five days. During the time of storage, sperm motility (CASA, daily) and membrane integrity (flow cytometry, daily) were evaluated. Apoptosis was evaluated on days 1, 3 and 5 (active caspase 3, increase in membrane permeability, phosphatidylserine translocation and mitochondrial membrane potential) using flow cytometry. Furthermore, LC3B processing was investigated by western blotting at the beginning and at the end of the period of storage. The decrease in sperm quality over the period of storage was to a large extent due to apoptosis; single layer centrifugation selected non-apoptotic spermatozoa, but there were no differences in sperm motility between selected and unselected sperm. A high percentage of spermatozoa showed active caspase 3 upon ejaculation, and during the period of storage there was an increase of apoptotic spermatozoa but no changes in the percentage of live sperm, revealed by the SYBR-14/PI assay, were observed. LC3B was differentially processed in sperm after single layer centrifugation compared with native sperm. In processed sperm more LC3B-II was present than in non-processed samples; furthermore, in non-processed sperm there was an increase in LC3B-II after five days of cooled storage. These results indicate that apoptosis plays a major role in the sperm death during storage in refrigeration and that autophagy plays a role in the survival of spermatozoa representing a new pro-survival mechanism in spermatozoa not previously described

Adverse Events of Extracorporeal Ultrasound-Guided High Intensity Focused Ultrasound Therapy

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is considered to be an alternative to surgery. Extracorporeal ultrasound-guided HIFU (USgFU) has been clinically used to treat solid tumors. Preliminary trials in a small sample of a Western population suggested that this modality was safe. Most trials are performed in China thereby providing comprehensive data for understanding the safety profile. The aim of this study was to evaluate adverse events of USgFU therapy.Clinical data were searched in 2 Chinese databases. Adverse events of USgFU were summarized and compared with those of magnetic resonance-guided HIFU (MRgFU; for uterine, bone or breast tumor) and transrectal ultrasound-guided HIFU (for prostate cancer or benign prostate hyperplasia). USgFU treatment was performed using 7 types of device. Side effects were evaluated in 13262 cases. There were fewer adverse events in benign lesions than in malignant lesions (11.81% vs. 21.65%, p<0.0001). Rates of adverse events greatly varied between the disease types (0-280%, p<0.0001) and between the applied HIFU devices in both malignant (10.58-44.38%, p<0.0001) and benign lesions (1.67-17.57%, p<0.0001). Chronological analysis did not demonstrate a decrease in the rate of adverse events. Based upon evaluable adverse events, incidences in USgFU were consistent with those in MRgFU or transrectal HIFU. Some side effects frequently occurred following transrectal HIFU were not reported in USgFU. Several events including intrahepatic metastasis, intraoperative high fever, and occlusions of the superior mesenteric artery should be of particular concern because they have not been previously noted. The types of adverse events suggested that they were ultrasonic lesions.The frequency of adverse events depended on the location of the lesion and the type of HIFU device; however, side effects of USgFU were not yet understood. USgFU did not decrease the incidence of adverse events compared with MRgFU

Effect of paper quality on the response rate to a postal survey: A randomised controlled trial. [ISRCTN32032031]

BACKGROUND: Response rates to surveys are declining and this threatens the validity and generalisability of their findings. We wanted to determine whether paper quality influences the response rate to postal surveys METHODS: A postal questionnaire was sent to all members of the British Society of Gynaecological Endoscopy (BSGE). Recipients were randomised to receiving the questionnaire printed on standard quality paper or high quality paper. RESULTS: The response rate for the recipients of high quality paper was 43/195 (22%) and 57/194 (29%) for standard quality paper (relative rate of response 0.75, 95% CI 0.33–1.05, p = 0.1 CONCLUSION: The use of high quality paper did not increase response rates to a questionnaire survey of gynaecologists affiliated to an endoscopic society