A Short-Armed Troodontid Dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia and Its Implications for Troodontid Evolution

BACKGROUND: The Troodontidae represents one of the most bird-like theropod groups and plays an important role in our understanding of avian origins. Although troodontids have been known for over 150 years, few known derived troodontid specimens preserve significant portions of both the forelimb and the hindlimb. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here, we report a new troodontid taxon, Linhevenator tani gen. et sp. nov., based on a partial, semi-articulated skeleton recovered from the Upper Cretaceous Wulansuhai Formation of Wulatehouqi, Inner Mongolia, China. L. tani has an unusual combination of primitive and derived character states, though our phylogenetic analysis places it in a derived clade within the Troodontidae. As a derived taxon, L. tani has a dromaeosaurid-like pedal digit II, and this species also possesses a humerus that is proportionally much shorter and more robust than those of most other troodontids. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: The combination of features present in Linhevenator indicates a complex pattern of character evolution within the Troodontidae. In particular, the discovery of Linhevenator suggests that derived troodontids have independently evolved a highly specialized pedal digit II and have significantly shortened the forelimb over the course of their evolution

A Fractal Model for the Maximum Droplet Diameter in Gas-Liquid Mist Flow

Distribution characteristics of liquid droplet size are described using the fractal theory for liquid droplet size distribution in gas-liquid mist flow. Thereby, the fractal expression of the maximum droplet diameter is derived. The fractal model for maximum droplet diameter is obtained based on the internal relationship between maximum droplet diameter and the droplet fractal dimension, which is obtained by analyzing the balance between total droplet surface energy and total gas turbulent kinetic energy. Fractal model predictions of maximum droplet diameter agree with the experimental data. Maximum droplet diameter and droplet fractal dimension are both found to be related to the superficial velocity of gas and liquid. Maximum droplet diameter decreases with an increase in gas superficial velocity but increases with an increase in liquid superficial velocity. Droplet fractal dimension increases with an increase in gas superficial velocity but decreases with an increase in liquid superficial velocity. These are all consistent with the physical facts

Manual discrimination of force

Optimal design of human-machine interfaces for teleoperators and virtual-environment systems which involve the tactual and kinesthetic modalities requires knowledge of the human's resolving power in these modalities. The resolution of the interface should be appropriately matched to that of the human operator. We report some preliminary results on the ability of the human hand to distinguish small differences in force under a variety of conditions. Experiments were conducted on force discrimination with the thumb pushing an interface that exerts a constant force over the pushing distance and the index finger pressing against a fixed support. The dependence of the sensitivity index d' on force increment can be fit by a straight line through the origin and the just-noticeable difference (JND) in force can thus be described by the inverse of the slope of this line. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) was measured by varying the a priori probabilities of the two alternatives, reference force and reference force plus an increment, in one-interval, two-alternative, forced-choice experiments. When plotted on normal deviate coordinates, the ROC's were roughly straight lines of unit slope, thus supporting the assumption of equal-variance normal distributions and the use of the conventional d' measure. The JND was roughly 6-8 percent for reference force ranging from 2.5 to 10 newtons, pushing distance from 5 to 30 mm, and initial finger-span from 45 to 125 mm. Also, the JND remained the same when the subjects were instructed to change the average speed of pushing from 23 to 153 mm/sec. The pushing was terminated by reaching either a wall or a well, and the JND's were essentially the same in both cases

Establishment and assessments of a new model for the postoperative fatigue syndrome by major small intestinal resection in rats

Objective. Postoperative fatigue syndrome (POFS) is a general and main complication after surgery. However, there is no stable and standardized animal model for POFS. The aim of the present study was to establish a rodent model of POFS by small intestinal resection, with POFS evaluated by acknowledged physical and behavioral methods. Material and Methods. Forty-two Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into four groups according to the length of a "middle" small intestinal resection: 0% (sham group; i.e., laparotomy alone), 10%, 40% and 70% groups, with corresponding lengths of small intestinal resections. Following surgery, the general state of health was evaluated. Tail suspension test, open field test and Morris water maze test were used to evaluate the degree of POFS. Serum albumin, transferrin, prealbumin and fibronectin were measured to assess the nutritional status, and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and malondialdehyde (MDA) were also measured. Results. As compared with the other three groups, the 70% small intestinal resection group showed the worst general state of health, decreased strength of the tail suspension test and decreased score of Morris water maze test (p < 0.05) after operation. All rats in whom the small intestinal resection was done demonstrated a certain degree of malnutrition and behavior of depression, and the 70% resection group had the lowest levels of transferrin, prealbumin and fibronectin as compared with the other groups (p < 0.05), as well as decreased SOD and increased MDA in serum (p < 0.05). Conclusions. Resection of 70% of the small intestine resulted in typical characteristics of POFS. As this procedure is simple, stable and easily reproducible, it may serve as a model for research on POFS

Joint constraint on the jet structure from the short GRB population and GRB 170817A

The nearest GRB 170817A provided an opportunity to probe the angular structure of the jet of this short gamma-ray burst (SGRB), by using its off-axis observed afterglow emission. It is investigated that whether the afterglow-constrained jet structures can be consistent with the luminosity of the prompt emission of GRB 170817A. Furthermore, by assuming that all SGRBs including GRB 170817A have the same explosive mechanism and jet structure, we apply the different jet structures into the calculation of the flux and redshfit distributions of the SGRB population, in comparison with the observational distributions of the Swift and Fermi sources. As a result, it is found that the single-Gaussian structure can be basically ruled out, whereas the power-law and two-Gaussian models can in principle survive.Comment: 9 pages,6 figure

Community-based Message Opportunistic Transmission

Mobile Social Networks (MSNs) is a kind of opportunistic networks, which is composed of a large number of mobile nodes with social characteristic. Up to now, the prevalent communitybased routing algorithms mostly select the most optimal social characteristic node to forward messages. But they almost don\u27t consider the effect of community distribution on mobile nodes and the time-varying characteristic of network. These algorithms usually result in high consumption of network resources and low successful delivery ratio if they are used directly in mobile social networks. We build a time-varying community-based network model, and propose a community-aware message opportunistic transmission algorithm (CMOT) in this paper. For inter-community messages transmission, the CMOT chooses an optimal community path by comparing the community transmission probability. For intra-community in local community, messages are forwarded according to the encounter probability between nodes. The simulation results show that the CMOT improves the message successful delivery ratio and reduces network overhead obviously, compared with classical routing algorithms, such as PRoPHET, MaxProp, Spray and Wait, and CMTS

Secondary Impact of Manganese on the Catalytic Properties of Nitrogen-Doped Graphene in the Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

Catalysts play a key role in hydrogen production as green energy carriers. We show herein for the first time that manganese impurities in graphene can improve the catalytic activity of synthesized N‐doped graphene (NG) for the hydrogen evolution reaction in acid media by influencing the ratio of different N‐functionalities. A 122 mV improvement in the overpotential was found following the Mn impregnation of graphene. Transmission electron microscopy images confirmed the formation of manganese oxide nanoparticles on the NG sheets. X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy revealed structural alteration in favor of higher quantities of quaternary and pyrrolic nitrogen functionalities, from approximately 37 % in NG to 84 % in the Mn‐inserted‐doped graphene catalyst. This enhanced catalytic performance, based on density functional theory calculations in the literature, was attributed to an increase in the number of active sites with higher activity

Volumetric Wireframe Parsing from Neural Attraction Fields

The primal sketch is a fundamental representation in Marr's vision theory, which allows for parsimonious image-level processing from 2D to 2.5D perception. This paper takes a further step by computing 3D primal sketch of wireframes from a set of images with known camera poses, in which we take the 2D wireframes in multi-view images as the basis to compute 3D wireframes in a volumetric rendering formulation. In our method, we first propose a NEural Attraction (NEAT) Fields that parameterizes the 3D line segments with coordinate Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), enabling us to learn the 3D line segments from 2D observation without incurring any explicit feature correspondences across views. We then present a novel Global Junction Perceiving (GJP) module to perceive meaningful 3D junctions from the NEAT Fields of 3D line segments by optimizing a randomly initialized high-dimensional latent array and a lightweight decoding MLP. Benefitting from our explicit modeling of 3D junctions, we finally compute the primal sketch of 3D wireframes by attracting the queried 3D line segments to the 3D junctions, significantly simplifying the computation paradigm of 3D wireframe parsing. In experiments, we evaluate our approach on the DTU and BlendedMVS datasets with promising performance obtained. As far as we know, our method is the first approach to achieve high-fidelity 3D wireframe parsing without requiring explicit matching.Comment: Technical report; Video can be found at https://youtu.be/qtBQYbOpVp

‘Wanheibao’: A new polyploid late-season table grape with muscat flavor

Research Not

The impact of industrial solid wastes on heavy metal solidification/stabilization of Magnesium Potassium Phosphate

In order to examine the impact of admixture amount on the heavy metal solidification/stabilization effect of Magnesium Potassium Phosphate cement (MKPC), industrial dusts, iron ore tailings and slag were added into Magnesium Potassium Phosphate containing 5g/kg of heavy metals at the ratios of 0, 5%, 10%, 20% and 30% respectively. Mixtures were firstly conserved for 1d, 7d, 15d and 28d respectively at conditions of 20±1℃ and humidity ≥95%. Then, Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) method was adopted to measure the leaching concentrations of solidified heavy metal ions, and to examine the impact of admixtures on MKPC solidified heavy metals. The results showed that admixtures at the ratio of 30% would reduce the strength of solidified heavy metals by approximately 70%, while extension of conservation time would improve the strength so as to meet the requirements of landfill processing. After conserving the samples containing 30% of admixtures for 28d, the ion concentration of Zn, Cu and Pb detected by TCLP method were lower than the TCLP standard regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It shows that MKPC can be mixed with an appropriate amount of admixtures and conserved for a certain period of time before heavy metal solidification/stabilization