Yedoma Permafrost Genesis: Over 150 Years of Mystery and Controversy

Since the discovery of frozen megafauna carcasses in Northern Siberia and Alaska in the early 1800s, the Yedoma phenomenon has attracted many Arctic explorers and scientists. Exposed along coastal and riverbank bluffs, Yedoma often appears as large masses of ice with some inclusions of sediment. The ground ice particularly mystified geologists and geographers, and they considered sediment within Yedoma exposures to be a secondary and unimportant component. Numerous scientists around the world tried to explain the origin of Yedoma for decades, even though some of them had never seen Yedoma in the field. The origin of massive ice in Yedoma has been attributed to buried surface ice (glaciers, snow, lake ice, and icings), intrusive ice (open system pingo), and finally to ice wedges. Proponents of the last hypothesis found it difficult to explain a vertical extent of ice wedges, which in some cases exceeds 40 m. It took over 150 years of intense debates to understand the process of ice-wedge formation occurring simultaneously (syngenetically) with soil deposition and permafrost aggregation. This understanding was based on observations of the contemporary formation of syngenetic permafrost with ice wedges on the floodplains of Arctic rivers. It initially was concluded that Yedoma was a floodplain deposit, and it took several decades of debates to understand that Yedoma is of polygenetic origin. In this paper, we discuss the history of Yedoma studies from the early 19th century until the 1980s—the period when the main hypotheses of Yedoma origin were debated and developed.

Modeling Bitcoin plus Ethereum as an Open System of Systems of Public Blockchains to Improve Their Resilience against Intentional Risk

In this article, we model the two most market-capitalised public, open and permissionless blockchain implementations, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), as a System of Systems (SoS) of public blockchains. We study the concepts of blockchain, BTC, ETH, complex networks, SoS Engineering and intentional risk. We analyse BTC and ETH from an open SoS perspective through the main properties that seminal System of Systems Engineering (SoSE) references propose. This article demonstrates that these public blockchain implementations create networks that grow in complexity and connect with each other. We propose a methodology based on a complexity management lever such as SoSE to better understand public blockchains such as BTC and ETH and manage their evolution. Our ultimate objective is to improve the resilience of public blockchains against intentional risk: a key requirement for their mass adoption. We conclude with specific measures, based on this novel systems engineering approach, to effectively improve the resilience against intentional risk of the open SoS of public blockchains, composed of a non-inflationary money system, “sound money”, such as BTC, and of a world financial computer system, “a financial conduit”, such as ETH. The goal of this paper is to formulate a SoS that transfers digital value and aspires to position itself as a distributed alternative to the fiat currency-based financial system.

Scale Invariant Turbulence and Gibbs Free Energy in the Atmosphere

A method of calculating the Gibbs Free Energy (Exergy) for the Earth’s atmosphere using statistical multifractality — scale invariance - is described, and examples given of its application to the stratosphere, including a methodology for extension to aerosol particles. The role of organic molecules in determining the radiative transfer characteristics of aerosols is pointed out. These methods are discussed in the context of the atmosphere as an open system far from chemical and physical equilibrium, and used to urge caution in deploying “solar radiation management”.

Green Management Policies for Corporate Success

The concept arising from the relationship between organization, society, and environment is green management. Ensuring sustainability by redesigning business processes is a fundamental activity based on constantly and rapidly changing environmental conditions in an open system with the effect of globalization. Thus, designing future organizations will strengthen by applying environmental policies. One of the conditions to achieve corporate success is green management policies. Putting green management policies into practice is essential and valuable for the future vision of an organization. The organization will set its corporate goals and subgoals in line with this vision. Moreover, the organization will be able to increase competitive capacity by standing out amongst the competitors in favor of performance arising from these policy implementations. This study, for this purpose, scrutinized the contributions of green management policies to the success of organizations.

Acid dissolution of neodymium magnet Nd-Fe-B in different conditions

The separation of rare-earth elements (REE) from a neodymium magnet has been widely studied last year. During the research it was identified that the waste of computer hard disk contains 25.41 % neodymium, 64.09 % iron, and <<1 % boron. To further isolate rare-earth metals, the magnet was acidically dissolved in open and closed systems. In both methods of dissolution, concentrated nitric acid was used. The difference between these methods is the conditions of dissolution of magnet. The magnet was dissolved in a microwave sample preparation system at different temperatures and pressures in a closed system. In the open system, the acid dissolution of the magnet is conducted at room temperature. 0.2 g of the neodymium magnet sample was taken under two conditions, and the dissolution process in the closed system lasted 1 hour, and in the open system 30-40 minutes. The open system is a non-laborious, simple, and cheap method of dissolving the magnet by comparing both systems. Therefore, an open sample preparation system is used for further work. To remove the iron in the magnet, oxalic acid was used and REEs are precipitated as oxalates under both conditions. According to the result of the Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) method, it was identified that the neodymium and iron contents in the precipitate are 24.66 % and 0.06 %, respectively. This shows that the iron has almost completely passed to the filtrate

Transfer-tensor description of memory effects in open-system dynamics and multi-time statistics

The non-Markovianity of an arbitrary open quantum system is analyzed in reference to the multi-time statistics given by its monitoring at discrete times. On the one hand, we exploit the hierarchy of inhomogeneous transfer tensors, which provides us with relevant information about the role of correlations between the system and the environment in the dynamics. The connection between the transfer-tensor hierarchy and the CP-divisibility property is then investigated, by showing to what extent quantum Markovianity can be linked to a description of the open-system dynamics by means of the composition of 1-step transfer tensors only. On the other hand, we introduce the set of stochastic transfer tensor transformations associated with local measurements on the open system at different times and conditioned on the measurement outcomes. The use of the transfer-tensor formalism accounts for different kinds of memory effects in the multi-time statistics and allows us to compare them on a similar footing with the memory effects present in non-monitored non-Markovian dynamics, as we illustrate on a spin-boson case study.

Revisiting the Quantum Open System Dynamics of Central Spin Model

In this work, we revisit the theory of open quantum systems from the perspective of fermionic baths. Specifically, we concentrate on the dynamics of a central spin half particle interacting with a spin bath. We have calculated the exact reduced dynamics of the central spin and constructed the Kraus operators in relation to that. Further, the exact Lindblad type canonical master equation corresponding to the reduced dynamics is constructed. We have also briefly touched upon the aspect of non-Markovianity from the backdrop of the reduced dynamics of the central spin.Quanta 2021; 10: 55–64.