Design of Self-sustainable Wireless Sensor Networks with Energy Harvesting and Wireless Charging

Energy provisioning plays a key role in the sustainable operations of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Recent efforts deploy multi-source energy harvesting sensors to utilize ambient energy. Meanwhile, wireless charging is a reliable energy source not affected by spatial-temporal ambient dynamics. This article integrates multiple energy provisioning strategies and adaptive adjustment to accomplish self-sustainability under complex weather conditions. We design and optimize a three-tier framework with the first two tiers focusing on the planning problems of sensors with various types and distributed energy storage powered by environmental energy. Then we schedule the Mobile Chargers (MC) between different charging activities and propose an efficient, 4-factor approximation algorithm. Finally, we adaptively adjust the algorithms to capture real-time energy profiles and jointly optimize those correlated modules. Our extensive simulations demonstrate significant improvement of network lifetime ( ), increase of harvested energy (15%), reduction of network cost (30%), and the charging capability of MC by 100%.

Palaeoproteomic analyses of dog palaeofaeces reveal a preserved dietary and host digestive proteome

The domestic dog has inhabited the anthropogenic niche for at least 15 000 years, but despite their impact on human strategies, the lives of dogs and their interactions with humans have only recently become a subject of interest to archaeologists. In the Arctic, dogs rely exclusively on humans for food during the winter, and while stable isotope analyses have revealed dietary similarities at some sites, deciphering the details of provisioning strategies have been challenging. In this study, we apply zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) and liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry to dog palaeofaeces to investigate protein preservation in this highly degradable material and obtain information about the diet of domestic dogs at the Nunalleq site, Alaska. We identify a suite of digestive and metabolic proteins from the host species, demonstrating the utility of this material as a novel and viable substrate for the recovery of gastrointestinal proteomes. The recovered proteins revealed that the Nunalleq dogs consumed a range of Pacific salmon species (coho, chum, chinook and sockeye) and that the consumed tissues derived from muscle and bone tissues as well as roe and guts. Overall, the study demonstrated the viability of permafrost-preserved palaeofaeces as a unique source of host and dietary proteomes.

Cloud Computing as the Next Utility

Cloud computing has become the dominant provisioning model for IT services. This research adopts the provider's perspective to explore profitable service provisioning strategies: industrialization and standardization vs. service individualization. Based on a survey and expert interviews among cloud service providers, the authors identify that focusing on service individualization does not pay off for cloud service providers. Instead, cloud service providers should adopt industrialization and automation. Even more, they find that exploitation mechanisms of organizational learning significantly improve the cloud service profitability.

Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus

Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.

Relationship satisfaction mediates the association between perceived partner mate retention strategies and relationship commitment

This study investigated whether relationship satisfaction mediates the association between own and perceived partner mate-retention strategies and commitment. One hundred and fifty individuals (Mage = 23.87, SDage = 7.28; 78.7% women) in a committed relationship participated in this study. We found an association between perceived partner mate-retention strategies and commitment and that relationship satisfaction mediated this link. Similarly, we found that relationship satisfaction also mediated the association between individuals’ own cost-inflicting strategies and commitment. Specifically, perceived partner benefit-provisioning strategies are positively associated with commitment through increased relationship satisfaction and, conversely, both perceived partner and own cost-inflicting strategies are negatively associated with commitment through decreased relationship satisfaction. Additionally, we observed that relationship satisfaction moderated the association between perceived partner cost-inflicting strategies and participants’ own frequency of cost-inflicting strategies. That is, participants’ cost inflicting strategies are associated with their partner’s cost inflicting strategies, such that this association is stronger among individuals with higher relationship satisfaction. The current research extends previous findings by demonstrating that the association between perceived partner and own mate-retention strategies and commitment is mediated by relationship satisfaction. Additionally, we showed that an individual’s expression of mate retention is associated with their perception of the strategies displayed by their partner, which also depends on relationship satisfaction.