Oxygen defect chemistry for the reversible transformation of titanates for sizeable potassium storage

An oxygen-deficient loose-layered titanate (K(TiO1.875)4OH (LL-KTO)) is prepared to push the kinetic boundary and approached the thermodynamic limit for potassium-ion batteries.

Population receptive field estimates for motion-defined stimuli

The processing of motion changes throughout the visual hierarchy, from spatially restricted ‘local motion’ in early visual cortex to more complex large-field ‘global motion’ at later stages. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine spatially selective responses in these areas related to the processing of random-dot stimuli defined by differences in motion. We used population receptive field (pRF) analyses to map retinotopic cortex using bar stimuli comprising coherently moving dots. In the first experiment, we used three separate background conditions: no background dots (dot-defined bar-only), dots moving coherently in the opposite direction to the bar (kinetic boundary) and dots moving incoherently in random directions (global motion). Clear retinotopic maps were obtained for the bar-only and kinetic-boundary conditions across visual areas V1-V3 and in higher dorsal areas. For the global-motion condition, retinotopic maps were much weaker in early areas and became clear only in higher areas, consistent with the emergence of global-motion processing throughout the visual hierarchy. However, in a second experiment we demonstrate that this pattern is not specific to motion-defined stimuli, with very similar results for a transparent-motion stimulus and a bar defined by a static low-level property (dot size) that should have driven responses particularly in V1. We further exclude explanations based on stimulus visibility by demonstrating that the observed differences in pRF properties do not follow the ability of observers to localise or attend to these bar elements. Rather, our findings indicate that dorsal extrastriate retinotopic maps may primarily be determined by the visibility of the neural responses to the bar relative to the background response (i.e. neural signal-to-noise ratios) and suggests that claims about stimulus selectivity from pRF experiments must be interpreted with caution.

The curved kinetic boundary layer of active matter

A body submerged in active matter feels the swim pressure through a kinetic accumulation boundary layer on its surface.

Assessment and development of the gas kinetic boundary condition for the Boltzmann equation

Gas–surface interactions play important roles in internal rarefied gas flows, especially in micro-electro-mechanical systems with large surface area to volume ratios. Although great progress has been made to solve the Boltzmann equation, the gas kinetic boundary condition (BC) has not been well studied. Here we assess the accuracy of the Maxwell, Epstein and Cercignani–Lampis BCs, by comparing numerical results of the Boltzmann equation for the Lennard–Jones potential to experimental data on Poiseuille and thermal transpiration flows. The four experiments considered are: Ewart et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 584, 2007, pp. 337–356), Rojas-Cárdenas et al. (Phys. Fluids, vol. 25, 2013, 072002) and Yamaguchi et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 744, 2014, pp. 169–182; vol. 795, 2016, pp. 690–707), where the mass flow rates in Poiseuille and thermal transpiration flows are measured. This requires that the BC has the ability to tune the effective viscous and thermal slip coefficients to match the experimental data. Among the three BCs, the Epstein BC has more flexibility to adjust the two slip coefficients, and hence for most of the time it gives good agreement with the experimental measurements. However, like the Maxwell BC, the viscous slip coefficient in the Epstein BC cannot be smaller than unity but the Cercignani–Lampis BC can. Therefore, we propose to combine the Epstein and Cercignani–Lampis BCs to describe gas–surface interaction. Although the new BC contains six free parameters, our approximate analytical expressions for the viscous and thermal slip coefficients provide useful guidance to choose these parameters.