Preen Gland-Secreted Alkanols Enhance Male Attractiveness in Parrots

The skin glands are widely used in pheromone production throughout the vertebrate worlds. Growing evidences show that birds also have chemical communication, but the uropygial (also called preen or oil) glands, serving as only specialized skin glands of birds, have no sex pheromones characterized. Here, by combining GC-MS analysis and bioassay, we show with the budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulatus, that birds can used the preen gland-secreted volatiles (a blend of octadecanol, nonadecanol and eicosanol for male budgerigars) spread over body plumage when preening to convey sex information. Here, we first report the avian pheromones derived from the uropyginal gland and suggests that the gland has broader implications than previously known (e.g. plumage waterproofing and reflectance in sexual behaviour of birds

On Weak Topology for Optimal Control of Switched Nonlinear Systems

Optimal control of switched systems is challenging due to the discrete nature of the switching control input. The embedding-based approach addresses this challenge by solving a corresponding relaxed optimal control problem with only continuous inputs, and then projecting the relaxed solution back to obtain the optimal switching solution of the original problem. This paper presents a novel idea that views the embedding-based approach as a change of topology over the optimization space, resulting in a general procedure to construct a switched optimal control algorithm with guaranteed convergence to a local optimizer. Our result provides a unified topology based framework for the analysis and design of various embedding-based algorithms in solving the switched optimal control problem and includes many existing methods as special cases

Hyper-accreting black hole as GRB central engine. I: Baryon loading in GRB jets

A hyper-accreting stellar-mass black hole has been long speculated as the best candidate of central engine of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Recent rich observations of GRBs by space missions such as Swift and Fermi pose new constraints on GRB central engine models. In this paper, we study the baryon loading processes of a GRB jet launched from a black hole central engine. We consider a relativistic jet powered by $\nu \bar\nu$-annihilation or by the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) mechanism. We consider baryon loading from a neutrino-driven wind from a neutrino-cooling-dominated accretion flow. For a magnetically dominated BZ jet, we consider neutron-drifting from the magnetic wall surrounding the jet and subsequent positron capture and proton-neutron inelastic collisions. The minumim baryon loads in both types of jet are calculated. We find that in both cases, a more luminous jet tends to be more baryon poor. A neutrino-driven "fireball" is typically "dirtier" than a magnetically dominated jet, while a magnetically dominated jet can be much cleaner. Both models have the right scaling to interpret the empirical $\Gamma-L_{\rm iso}$ relation discovered recently. Since some neutrino-driven jets have too much baryon loading as compared with the data, we suggest that at least a good fraction of GRBs should have a magnetically dominated central engine.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures; Accepted for publication in Ap

Unifying ultrafast demagnetization and intrinsic Gilbert damping in Co/Ni bilayers with electronic relaxation near the Fermi surface

The ability to controllably manipulate the laser-induced ultrafast magnetic dynamics is a prerequisite for future high speed spintronic devices. The optimization of devices requires the controllability of the ultrafast demagnetization time, , and intrinsic Gilbert damping, . In previous attempts to establish the relationship between and , the rare-earth doping of a permalloy film with two different demagnetization mechanism is not a suitable candidate. Here, we choose Co/Ni bilayers to investigate the relations between and by means of time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect (TRMOKE) via adjusting the thickness of the Ni layers, and obtain an approximately proportional relation between these two parameters. The remarkable agreement between TRMOKE experiment and the prediction of breathing Fermi-surface model confirms that a large Elliott-Yafet spin-mixing parameter is relevant to the strong spin-orbital coupling at the Co/Ni interface. More importantly, a proportional relation between and in such metallic films or heterostructures with electronic relaxation near Fermi surface suggests the local spin-flip scattering domains the mechanism of ultrafast demagnetization, otherwise the spin-current mechanism domains. It is an effective method to distinguish the dominant contributions to ultrafast magnetic quenching in metallic heterostructures by investigating both the ultrafast demagnetization time and Gilbert damping simultaneously. Our work can open a novel avenue to manipulate the magnitude and efficiency of Terahertz emission in metallic heterostructures such as the perpendicular magnetic anisotropic Ta/Pt/Co/Ni/Pt/Ta multilayers, and then it has an immediate implication of the design of high frequency spintronic devices

Thermodynamics of pairing transition in hot nuclei

The pairing correlations in hot nuclei $^{162}$Dy are investigated in terms of the thermodynamical properties by covariant density functional theory. The heat capacities $C_V$ are evaluated in the canonical ensemble theory and the paring correlations are treated by a shell-model-like approach, in which the particle number is conserved exactly. A S-shaped heat capacity curve, which agrees qualitatively with the experimental data, has been obtained and analyzed in details. It is found that the one-pair-broken states play crucial roles in the appearance of the S shape of the heat capacity curve. Moreover, due to the effect of the particle-number conservation, the pairing gap varies smoothly with the temperature, which indicates a gradual transition from the superfluid to the normal state.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Segmentation of ultrasound images of thyroid nodule for assisting fine needle aspiration cytology

The incidence of thyroid nodule is very high and generally increases with the age. Thyroid nodule may presage the emergence of thyroid cancer. The thyroid nodule can be completely cured if detected early. Fine needle aspiration cytology is a recognized early diagnosis method of thyroid nodule. There are still some limitations in the fine needle aspiration cytology, and the ultrasound diagnosis of thyroid nodule has become the first choice for auxiliary examination of thyroid nodular disease. If we could combine medical imaging technology and fine needle aspiration cytology, the diagnostic rate of thyroid nodule would be improved significantly. The properties of ultrasound will degrade the image quality, which makes it difficult to recognize the edges for physicians. Image segmentation technique based on graph theory has become a research hotspot at present. Normalized cut (Ncut) is a representative one, which is suitable for segmentation of feature parts of medical image. However, how to solve the normalized cut has become a problem, which needs large memory capacity and heavy calculation of weight matrix. It always generates over segmentation or less segmentation which leads to inaccurate in the segmentation. The speckle noise in B ultrasound image of thyroid tumor makes the quality of the image deteriorate. In the light of this characteristic, we combine the anisotropic diffusion model with the normalized cut in this paper. After the enhancement of anisotropic diffusion model, it removes the noise in the B ultrasound image while preserves the important edges and local details. This reduces the amount of computation in constructing the weight matrix of the improved normalized cut and improves the accuracy of the final segmentation results. The feasibility of the method is proved by the experimental results.Comment: 15pages,13figure