A many-body dissipative particle dynamics with energy conservation study of droplets icing on microstructure surfaces

Droplets icing has important applications in real life. The icing process of droplets on microstructure is explored based on the MDPDE method in this study. Firstly, the correctness of the heat transfer model was verified by one-dimensional heat conduction simulation, and then the feasibility of the phase change model was verified by investigating the icing process of droplets. The influence of cold surface temperature, droplet volume and contact angle on freezing time of droplets was discussed, and it was found that the temperature of cold surfaces had a greater effect on freezing. We finally explored the influence of different microstructure surfaces on the icing of droplets, and results showed that the presence of microstructures greatly enhanced the anti-icing effect of the surface. In our research, the contact angle is a relatively large factor affecting the icing of droplets. In addition, it was discovered that the droplet had the strongest ability to delay freezing on the surface of triangle microstructures with a contact angle of 157.1°.

Generative Facial Prior for Large-Factor Blind Face Super-Resolution

Most existing face super-resolution (SR) methods are developed based on an assumption that the degradation is fixed and known (e.g., bicubic down sampling). However, these methods suffer a severe performance drop in various unknown degradations in real-world applications. Previous methods usually rely on facial priors, such as facial geometry prior or reference prior, to restore realistic face details. Nevertheless, low-quality inputs cannot provide accurate geometric priors while high-quality references are often unavailable, which limits the use of face super-resolution in real-world scenes. In this work, we propose GPLSR which used the rich priors encapsulated in the pre-trained face GAN network to perform blind face super-resolution. This generative facial priori is introduced into the face super-resolution process through channel squeeze-and-excitation spatial feature transformation layer (SE-SFT), which makes our method achieve a good balance between realness and fidelity. Moreover, GPLSR can restores facial details with single forward pass because of powerful generative facial prior information. Extensive experiment shows that when the magnification factor is 16, this method achieves better performance than existing techniques in both synthetic and real datasets.

The solar system data in the forthcoming Data Release 3 by the Gaia mission of ESA: a preview

<p>The Data Release 3 by the Gaia mission (ESA) will not only multiply by a large factor the volume of observations, but will also add more quality and complexity. With respect to DR2, that appeared in 2018. The number of asteroids with astrometry and photometry will be multiplied by a factor >10, and data will span a longer time interval. Also, for the first time a set of reflectance spectra for several thousand asteroids will be released. Some planetary satellites and candidate new asteroids will also be included. The improvement in volume, accuracy and variety of data will add new dimensions to the contribution of Gaia to asteroid science as this will probably be the most extensive and self consistent set of visible spectra available up to know. </p> <p>In this talk, we will mainly focus on the general properties of the asteroid data in DR3 (statistics on the sample) and on the improvement in astrometry with respect to DR2. Based on the results obtained from the exploitation of DR2, we will review the expected impact of DR3 in terms of improved orbits, Yarkovsky determination, prediction of asteroid occultations. The properties of asteroid spectra in DR3 will be presented in another contribution to this meeting by M. Delbo'. </p>

Sensitivity of biomass burning emissions estimates to land surface information

Emissions from biomass burning (BB) are a key source of atmospheric tracer gases that affect the atmospheric carbon cycle. We estimated four types of global BB emissions using a bottom-up approach and by combining the remote sensing products related to fire distribution with two aboveground biomass (AGB) and two land cover classification (LCC) distributions. The sensitivity of the estimates of BB emissions to the AGB and LCC data was evaluated using the carbon monoxide (CO) emissions associated with each BB estimate. We found a substantial spatial difference in CO emissions for both the AGB and LCC data, which resulted in a large (factor of approximately three) spread of estimates for the mean annual CO emissions. We simulated atmospheric CO variability using an atmospheric tracer transport model and the BB emissions estimates and compared it with ground-based and satellite observations. At ground-based observation sites during fire seasons, statistical comparisons indicated that the impact of differences in the BB emissions estimates on atmospheric CO variability was poorly defined in our simulations. However, when compared at the regional and global scales, the distribution of atmospheric CO concentrations in the simulations show substantial differences among the estimates of BB emissions. These results indicate that the estimates of BB emissions are highly sensitive to the AGB and LCC data.

Nesting ecology of the Pacific cicada killer, Sphecius convallis Patton (Hymenoptera, Crabronidae), in the Sonoran Desert

Factors affecting the ecology of a large population of Pacific cicada killers (Sphecius convallis) occupying a field of mine tailings in Ruby, AZ, were examined. Burrows were quite dense in certain areas around the periphery of the mine tailings, but were dispersed randomly within these areas. Approximately 1600 females (based on burrow counts) and 2500 males (based on mark-recapture) were recorded, yielding a total population estimate of 5000–6000 adults. Female wasps were able to dig much more rapidly in the mine tailings than their congeners S. speciosus in soils from PA, suggesting that the habitat suitability was a large factor in this robust population. Provisioning rate was comparatively slow, however, suggesting that cicada abundance in that year was not a contributor to the high population density. The presence of a sap-producing tree may have eased the energetic and thermoregulatory demands of the wasps. Although excavations revealed that the number of burrows and cells could easily maintain the population size, the lack of cicadas probably resulted instead in a population crash the following season.

About Dark Matter and Gravitation

A close inspection of Zwicky's seminal papers on the dynamics of galaxy clusters reveals that the discrepancy discovered between the dynamical mass and the luminous mass of clusters has been widely overestimated in 1933 as a consequence of several factors, among which the excessive value of the Hubble constant $H_0$, then believed to be about seven times higher than today's average estimate. Taking account, in addition, of our present knowledge of classical dark matter inside galaxies, the contradiction can be reduced by a large factor. To explain the rather small remaining discrepancy of the order of 5, instead of appealing to a hypothetic exotic dark matter, the possibility of a inhomogeneous gravity is suggested. This is consistent with the ``cosmic tapestry" found in the eighties by De Lapparent and her co-authors, showing that the cosmos is highly inhomogeneous at large scale. A possible foundation for inhomogeneous gravitation is the universally discredited ancient theory of Fatio de Duillier and Lesage on pushing gravity, possibly revised to avoid the main criticisms which led to its oblivion. This model incidentally opens the window towards a completely non-standard representation of cosmos, and more basically calls to develop fundamental investigation to find the origin of the large scale inhomogeneity in the distribution of luminous matter

On the angular momentum history of galactic discs

ABSTRACT The stellar mass, size, and rotational velocity of galactic discs all grow from redshift ∼2 to the present by amounts that are estimated from observationally derived scaling relations. The product of these three quantities, the angular momentum of stellar discs, is then estimated to grow by a remarkably large factor, between ∼20 and ∼50, whereas other evidences suggest a more moderate increase. This requires that the specific angular momentum of the accreted gas should systematically increase with time while remaining corotational with the disc over most of the last ∼10 Gyr. Thus, the baryonic gas vorticity of the circumgalactic medium appears to emerge as a major driver in galaxy evolution, and this Letter is meant to attract attention on the sheer size of the angular momentum increase and on the need to explore to which extent this can be observed in nature and/or in simulations.