Tensile testing grips are easily assembled under liquid nitrogen

Split-screw grips for tensile testing provide uniform loading on the specimen shoulders. Holes in the heads enable the screws and specimen to be threaded as an assembly into a grip body, closely controlled guides and seats afford positive seating, and precision machining of mating surfaces minimizes misalignment effects

Polystyrene cryostat facilitates testing tensile specimens under liquid nitrogen

Lightweight cryostat made of expanded polystyrene reduces eccentricity in a tensile system being tested under liquid nitrogen. The cryostat is attached directly to the tensile system by a special seal, reducing misalignment effects due to cryostat weight, and facilitates viewing and loading of the specimens

Test system accurately determines tensile properties of irradiated metals at cryogenic temperatures

Modified testing system determines tensile properties of irradiated brittle-type metals at cryogenic temperatures. The system includes a lightweight cryostat, split-screw grips, a universal joint, and a special temperature control system

Building an Artificial Intelligence to Learn Go

This research aims to study the AlphaGo project series, a group of artificial intelligences for playing the game ‘Go’, and develop and train an artificial intelligence through reinforcement learning to play the game Go as well. Go is a 2-player board game where players take turns placing black and white pieces on a 19X19-tiled board in an adjacent tile to a similarly colored piece. Various statistics will be collected to determine its capability in comparison to the go-playing projects of AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero (AGZ). Unlike the AlphaGo and AGZ projects, this research-developed artificial intelligence will attempt to play a much smaller board of size 9x9 due to the high level of complexity and the unavailability of the required computer power necessary to play at much higher board sizes. Although there are few graphical elements to this project, one element the user will have access to is the board state at each decision of the research-developed AI and its adversarial AI

A Distributive, Non-Destructive, Real-Time Approach to Snowpack Monitoring

This invention is designed to ascertain the snow water equivalence (SWE) of snowpacks with better spatial and temporal resolutions than present techniques. The approach is ground-based, as opposed to some techniques that are air-based. In addition, the approach is compact, non-destructive, and can be communicated with remotely, and thus can be deployed in areas not possible with current methods. Presently there are two principal ground-based techniques for obtaining SWE measurements. The first is manual snow core measurements of the snowpack. This approach is labor-intensive, destructive, and has poor temporal resolution. The second approach is to deploy a large (e.g., 3x3 m) snowpillow, which requires significant infrastructure, is potentially hazardous [uses a approximately equal to 200-gallon (approximately equal to 760-L) antifreeze-filled bladder], and requires deployment in a large, flat area. High deployment costs necessitate few installations, thus yielding poor spatial resolution of data. Both approaches have limited usefulness in complex and/or avalanche-prone terrains. This approach is compact, non-destructive to the snowpack, provides high temporal resolution data, and due to potential low cost, can be deployed with high spatial resolution. The invention consists of three primary components: a robust wireless network and computing platform designed for harsh climates, new SWE sensing strategies, and algorithms for smart sampling, data logging, and SWE computation

Usage analysis of system for theses acquisition and plagiarism detection

AbstractThe national project of The Central Register of the Theses has started in 2008. The project serves as an integrating system for acquisition, archiving and plagiarism detection of the theses from academic information systems of Slovak universities. The first phase of its development has been devoted to the tasks accompanying the processes of acquisition and archiving electronic versions of theses. The national character of the project requires unification of processes associated with theses writing, plagiarism detection and acquisition final versions of the theses from different universities in Slovak republic. The universities, like primary users of this system, have had to adapt their own processes associated with writing, acquisition and archiving of electronic versions of the theses. These inevitable changes have naturally raised many students’ and academic staff’s questions at universities. The same situation has happened at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra and has led to the development of the helpdesk designed for all stakeholders. The helpdesk has provided relevant and digestedly prepared tutorials and discussion forum about abovementioned changes. The activities of the users have been monitored for the purpose of their further processing and identification of the weaknesses of the theses writing, plagiarism detection and acquisition at the university level. The usage analysis of the presented helpdesk and the segmentation method of its users are discussed in detail in the paper. The segmentation method is based on the monitoring of the users’ activities in discussion forums, their searching techniques in available information sources and in posting questions about theses finalization, acquisition and archiving. The authors analyse some aspects of their behavior and discuss interesting findings of the usage analysis of the helpdesk. They give several recommendations for changes in the stakeholder awareness and in the structure of published information materials

Some Properties of DNA from Phage-Infected Bacteria

Replicating T5 or λ phage DNA has been labeled by adding tritiated thymidine for short periods to cultures of phage-infected Escherichia coli before isolation of intracellular DNA. Two procedures are described for separating T5 replicating DNA from DNA of intracellular phage particles. Both T5 and λ replicating DNA had the same bouyant density in cesium chloride as DNA from phage particles but sedimented faster when centrifuged in sucrose density gradients. The fast sedimentation did not appear to be caused by DNA protein or DNA-RNA complexes or by aggregation of DNA, but is probably due to DNA molecules of unusual structure. Experiments involving hydrodynamic shear and sucrose density gradient centrifugation at alkaline pH have suggested that with λ the replicating form of DNA is a linear molecule considerably longer than the DNA molecules of λ-phage particles. The constituent polynucleotide chains of λ but not T5 replicating DNA also appear to be longer than those of phage DNA