Illusion optics: The optical transformation of an object into another object

We propose to use transformation optics to generate a general illusion such that an arbitrary object appears to be like some other object of our choice. This is achieved by using a remote device that transforms the scattered light outside a virtual boundary into that of the object chosen for the illusion, regardless of the profile of the incident wave. This type of illusion device also enables people to see through walls. Our work extends the concept of cloaking as a special form of illusion to the wider realm of illusion optics.Comment: Including a paper and its auxiliary materia

Toxic Megacolon and Perforated Fungal Diverticulitis due to Mucor indicus Infection in a Patient with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia

Introduction: Intestinal zygomycosis is a rare infection by the fungi zygomycetes that have little intrinsic pathogenicity in normal hosts and mainly affects immune compromised patients. Mucor indicus is a rare, emerging cause of intestinal zygomycosis with only 8 reported cases in English literature since 1986.Presentation of Case: We reported an unusual case of toxic megacolon, fungal diverticulitis with perforation and liver abscesses caused by Mucor indicus in a patient with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), B-lymphoid blast crisis and pancytopenia. The patient was treated with total colectomy and aggressive systemic anti-fungal regimens consisting of amphotericin, caspofungin and posaconazole. However, his fungal abscess in the liver persisted after colectomy, which was confirmed by liver biopsy at four months after total colectomy. His CML and B-lymphoid blast crisis was successfully treated with hyper-CVAD plus dasatinib and had been in complete remission. The patient was alive and continued to have stable fungal infection in the liver based on CT scan at 32 months after total colectomy, for which he has been on posaconazole monotherapy.Conclusions: Mucor indicus may cause a rare invasive zygomycosis that tends to involve gastrointestinal tract and to disseminate to the liver

catena-Poly[[{2-[(2-hy­droxy­eth­yl)imino­meth­yl]-6-meth­oxy­phenolato}copper(II)]-μ-thio­cyanato]

In the title thio­cyanate-bridged polynuclear copper(II) complex, [Cu(C10H12NO3)(NCS)]n, the Cu atom is five-coordinated in a square-pyramidal geometry, with one phenolato O, one imino N and one hy­droxy O atom of a Schiff base ligand and one thio­cyanato N atom defining the basal plane, and with one thio­cyanato S atom occupying the apical position. In the crystal structure, pairs of adjacent complex mol­ecules are linked through inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds into dimers. The dimers are further linked via Cu⋯S inter­actions, forming two-dimensional layers parallel to the bc plane

Estimation of the Incubation Period and the Serial Interval of COVID-19 in Chongqing, China

In December 2019, the initial case of COVID-19's disease appeared in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. But it soon caused an outbreak in Chongqing as well. Reasonable estimates for the incubation period distribution and the serial interval distribution would provide timely information to guide intervention policy for the government of Chongqing. We collect individual information from Chongqing Center for Disease Control and Prevention(CQCDC). We use doubly interval-censored data to estimate the incubation period and the serial interval for confirmed cases exposed to COVID-19 during incubation period,the mean incubation period is estimated to be 7.5(6.6-8.6,95% CI) days and the mean serial interval is estimated to be 6.1 (5.0-7.5,95% CI) days. The analysis result show that COVID-19 could spread in the incubation period,which may complicate quarantine work. The implementation of control measures is indispensable in reducing the spread of asymptomatic incubation period in high-risk population

SMURF: Spatial Multi-Representation Fusion for 3D Object Detection with 4D Imaging Radar

The 4D Millimeter wave (mmWave) radar is a promising technology for vehicle sensing due to its cost-effectiveness and operability in adverse weather conditions. However, the adoption of this technology has been hindered by sparsity and noise issues in radar point cloud data. This paper introduces spatial multi-representation fusion (SMURF), a novel approach to 3D object detection using a single 4D imaging radar. SMURF leverages multiple representations of radar detection points, including pillarization and density features of a multi-dimensional Gaussian mixture distribution through kernel density estimation (KDE). KDE effectively mitigates measurement inaccuracy caused by limited angular resolution and multi-path propagation of radar signals. Additionally, KDE helps alleviate point cloud sparsity by capturing density features. Experimental evaluations on View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4DRadSet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of SMURF, outperforming recently proposed 4D imaging radar-based single-representation models. Moreover, while using 4D imaging radar only, SMURF still achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art 4D imaging radar and camera fusion-based method, with an increase of 1.22% in the mean average precision on bird's-eye view of TJ4DRadSet dataset and 1.32% in the 3D mean average precision on the entire annotated area of VoD dataset. Our proposed method demonstrates impressive inference time and addresses the challenges of real-time detection, with the inference time no more than 0.05 seconds for most scans on both datasets. This research highlights the benefits of 4D mmWave radar and is a strong benchmark for subsequent works regarding 3D object detection with 4D imaging radar

The NIM Inertial Mass Measurement Project

An inertial mass measurement project, which is expected to precisely measure the Planck constant, $h$, for possible comparisons with known gravitational mass measurement projects, e.g., the watt balance and the Avogadro project, is being carried out at the National Institute of Metrology, China. The principle, apparatus, and experimental investigations of the inertial mass measurement are presented. The prototype of the experiment and the Planck constant with relative uncertainty of several parts in $10^{4}$ have been achieved for principle testing.Comment: 9pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measuremen