Short-Term Effects of Phosphorus Application on Phosphorus Content in Soil and Dominant Species under Ungrazed and Grazed Conditions in the Tibetan Plateau

Phosphorus (P) availability in soils is an important indicator for health and growth in plants. The available phosphorus (AP) content of alpine meadow soil in northern China is low. Previous studies of alpine meadow have reported that soil nutrient levels have been significantly improved after a 9-year enclosure (Wu et al. 2010b) whereas continuous grazing over 19 years reduced total P (TP) by 25% in a Leymus chinensis steppe (Li 2001). Many studies have shown that the application of P fertilizer can improve dry matter production and forage quality in cultivated grasslands (Shi et al. 2007). However, the benefits of applying P fertiliser to alpine meadow in terms of increases in soil AP content and P concentrations in plants in both grazed and ungrazed meadows are less well known. The objective of this study was to investigate the short-term effects of P application on the AP content in top soil and total P content in the foliage of dominant meadow plant species

StereoVoxelNet: Real-Time Obstacle Detection Based on Occupancy Voxels from a Stereo Camera Using Deep Neural Networks

Obstacle detection is a safety-critical problem in robot navigation, where stereo matching is a popular vision-based approach. While deep neural networks have shown impressive results in computer vision, most of the previous obstacle detection works only leverage traditional stereo matching techniques to meet the computational constraints for real-time feedback. This paper proposes a computationally efficient method that leverages a deep neural network to detect occupancy from stereo images directly. Instead of learning the point cloud correspondence from the stereo data, our approach extracts the compact obstacle distribution based on volumetric representations. In addition, we prune the computation of safety irrelevant spaces in a coarse-to-fine manner based on octrees generated by the decoder. As a result, we achieve real-time performance on the onboard computer (NVIDIA Jetson TX2). Our approach detects obstacles accurately in the range of 32 meters and achieves better IoU (Intersection over Union) and CD (Chamfer Distance) scores with only 2% of the computation cost of the state-of-the-art stereo model. Furthermore, we validate our method's robustness and real-world feasibility through autonomous navigation experiments with a real robot. Hence, our work contributes toward closing the gap between the stereo-based system in robot perception and state-of-the-art stereo models in computer vision. To counter the scarcity of high-quality real-world indoor stereo datasets, we collect a 1.36 hours stereo dataset with a Jackal robot which is used to fine-tune our model. The dataset, the code, and more visualizations are available at https://lhy.xyz/stereovoxelnet

A Life-Cycle Energy and Inventory Analysis of Adiabatic Quantum-Flux-Parametron Circuits

The production process of superconductive integrated circuits is complex and consumes significant amounts of resources and energy. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the environmental impact of this emerging technology. An attractive option for the next generation of superconductive technology is Adiabatic Quantum-Flux-Parametron (AQFP) devices. This study is the first to present a comprehensive process-based life-cycle assessment (LCA) and inventory analysis of AQFP integrated circuits. To generate relevant outcomes, we conduct a comparative LCA that included the bulk CMOS technology. The inventory analysis considered the manufacturing, assembly, and use phases of the circuits. To ensure a fair assessment, we choose the 32-bit AQFP RISC-V single-core processor as the reference functional unit and compare its performance with that of a CMOS counterpart. Our findings reveal that the AQFP processor consumes several orders of magnitude less energy during the use phase than its CMOS counterpart. Consequently, the total life cycle energy (which encompasses manufacturing and assembly energies) of AQFP integrated circuits improves at least by two orders of magnitude