Accumulator, Transporter, Substrate, and Reactor: Multidimensional Perspectives and Approaches to the Study of Bark

Woody ecosystems have a relatively thin but aerially extensive and dynamic layer of bark that, like leaves, regulates material exchange at the interface of air, water, and biota. Through interception, retention, and leaching of materials and interactions with epiphytic communities, bark alters the chemistry and composition of water draining over its surface during precipitation. This mini-review explores different perspectives and approaches to the study of bark and what they reveal about the myriad ways bark surfaces influence the quality of sub-canopy precipitation. Observational studies conducted over the past five decades in the fields of environmental science, ecohydrology, epiphyte ecology, and microbiology demonstrate that bark is an accumulator, transporter, substrate, and reactor. Bark passively accumulates materials from the atmosphere, water, and canopies, and also serves as an active transport surface, exchanging materials laterally and longitudinally. In addition, bark substrates influence epiphyte diversity, composition, and distribution, which, in turn, affect material cycling. Bark surfaces are dynamic over time, changing in response to disturbances (e.g., insect outbreaks, aging, and tree death)—how such changes influence the chemical and elemental composition of throughfall and stemflow merits further study. Moving forward, integration of diverse perspectives and approaches is needed to elucidate the influence of bark surfaces on solute and particulate transport and cycling within woody ecosystems.

Pinching the cortex of live cells reveals thickness instabilities caused by myosin II motors

The cell cortex is a contractile actin meshwork, which determines cell shape and is essential for cell mechanics, migration, and division. Because its thickness is below optical resolution, there is a tendency to consider the cortex as a thin uniform two-dimensional layer. Using two mutually attracted magnetic beads, one inside the cell and the other in the extracellular medium, we pinch the cortex of dendritic cells and provide an accurate and time-resolved measure of its thickness. Our observations draw a new picture of the cell cortex as a highly dynamic layer, harboring large fluctuations in its third dimension because of actomyosin contractility. We propose that the cortex dynamics might be responsible for the fast shape-changing capacity of highly contractile cells that use amoeboid-like migration.

Joint optimization on resource allocation with coordinated scheduling-based transmission for interference handling in Femtocell networks

Background: The most challenging problem in femtocell networks is alleviating the Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) between the macro and femtocells while broadcasting the video streams in the Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). It degrades the spectral efficacy and throughput significantly. To alleviate this problem, a Joint dynamic Layer, Channel and Power assignment with Further enhanced ICI Coordination (JLCP-FeICIC) method was recommended to assign the resources within every User Equipments (UEs) and enhance the throughput in a two-tier HetNets. Nonetheless, it schedules only the Cell Range Expansion (CRE) UEs of femtocells while the center UEs are not assigned and so the fairness of Resource Block (RB) allocation is reduced. Objective: Therefore in this study, JLCP-FeICIC is further enhanced with the Coordinated Multipoint Transmission (CMT) method (JLCP-FeICIC-CMT) for maximizing the efficiency of the HetNetcenter UEs. Methods: In this method, RBs are assigned by a primary scheduler. Also, the UE is detected in every eNodeBs (eNBs) according to the determination of the interference from the adjacent cells. Then, the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) level is selected in all eNBs for UEs with and without the support of CMT according to the interference-free RB allocation. So, a higher level of spectral efficiency is achieved for corresponding RBs. Findings: Finally, the experimental results exhibit the JLCP-FeICIC-CMT achieves an increased efficacy than the JLCP-FeICIC.The efficiency is analyzed based on the average of Peak Singal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) per Femtocell UE (FUE), utility, monetary cost, and Playback Interruption Rate (PIR). Keywords: Femtocell network; HetNet; JLCPFeICIC; coordinated multipoint transmission; modulation and coding scheme

Pinching the cortex of live cells reveals thickness instabilities caused by Myosin II motors

The cell cortex is a contractile actin meshwork, which determines cell shape and is essential for cell mechanics, migration and division. Because the cortical thickness is below optical resolution, it has been generally considered as a thin uniform two-dimensional layer. Using two mutually attracted magnetic beads, one inside the cell and the other in the extracellular medium, we pinch the cortex of dendritic cells and provide an accurate and time resolved measure of its thickness. Our observations draw a new picture of the cell cortex as a highly dynamic layer, harboring large fluctuations in its third dimension due to actomyosin contractility. We propose that the cortex dynamics might be responsible for the fast shape changing capacity of highly contractile cells that use amoeboid-like migration.

Beam commissioning of the first compact proton therapy system with spot scanning and dynamic field collimation

Objectives: To describe the measurements and to present the results of the beam commissioning and the beam model validation of a compact, gantry-mounted, spot scanning proton accelerator system with dynamic layer-by-layer field collimation. Methods: We performed measurements of depth dose distributions in water, spot and scanned field size in air at different positions from the isocenter plane, spot position over the 20 × 20 cm2 scanned area, beam monitor calibration in terms of absorbed dose to water and specific field collimation measurements at different gantry angles to commission the system. To validate the beam model in the treatment planning system (TPS), we measured spot profiles in water at different depths, absolute dose in water of single energy layers of different field sizes and inversely optimised spread-out Bragg peaks (SOBP) under normal and oblique beam incidence, field size and penumbra in water of SOBPs, and patient treatment specific quality assurance in homogeneous and heterogeneous phantoms. Results: Energy range, spot size, spot position and dose output were consistent at all gantry angles with 0.3 mm, 0.4 mm, 0.6 mm and 0.5% maximum deviations, respectively. Uncollimated spot size (one sigma) in air with an air-gap of 10 cm ranged from 4.1 to 16.4 mm covering a range from 32.2 to 1.9 cm in water, respectively. Absolute dose measurements were within 3% when comparing TPS and experimental data. Gamma pass rates >98% and >96% at 3%/3 mm were obtained when performing 2D dose measurements in homogeneous and in heterogeneous media, respectively. Leaf position was within ±1 mm at all gantry angles and nozzle positions. Conclusions: Beam characterisation and machine commissioning results, and the exhaustive end-to-end tests performed to assess the proper functionality of the system, confirm that it is safe and accurate to treat patients. Advances in knowledge: This is the first paper addressing the beam commissioning and the beam validation of a compact, gantry-mounted, pencil beam scanning proton accelerator system with dynamic layer-by-layer multileaf collimation.

An Object Proxy-Based Dynamic Layer Replacement to Protect IoMT Applications

The Internet of medical things (IoMT) has become a promising paradigm, where the invaluable additional data can be collected by the ordinary medical devices when connecting to the Internet. The deep understanding of symptoms and trends can be provided to patients to manage their lives and treatments. However, due to the diversity of medical devices in IoMT, the codes of healthcare applications may be manipulated and tangled by malicious devices. In addition, the linguistic structures for layer activation in languages cause controls of layer activation to be part of program’s business logic, which hinders the dynamic replacement of layers. Therefore, to solve the above critical problems in IoMT, in this paper, a new approach is firstly proposed to support the dynamic replacement of layer in IoMT applications by incorporating object proxy into virtual machine (VM). Secondly, the heap and address are used to model the object and object evolution to guarantee the feasibility of the approach. After that, we analyze the influences of field access and method invocation and evaluate the risk and safety of the application when these constraints are satisfied. Finally, we conduct the evaluations by extending Java VM to validate the effectiveness of the proposal.

Dynamic Layer Aggregation for Neural Machine Translation with Routing-by-Agreement

With the promising progress of deep neural networks, layer aggregation has been used to fuse information across layers in various fields, such as computer vision and machine translation. However, most of the previous methods combine layers in a static fashion in that their aggregation strategy is independent of specific hidden states. Inspired by recent progress on capsule networks, in this paper we propose to use routing-by-agreement strategies to aggregate layers dynamically. Specifically, the algorithm learns the probability of a part (individual layer representations) assigned to a whole (aggregated representations) in an iterative way and combines parts accordingly. We implement our algorithm on top of the state-of-the-art neural machine translation model TRANSFORMER and conduct experiments on the widely-used WMT14 sh⇒German and WMT17 Chinese⇒English translation datasets. Experimental results across language pairs show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the strong baseline model and a representative static aggregation model.

Disorder raises the critical temperature of a cuprate superconductor

With the discovery of charge-density waves (CDWs) in most members of the cuprate high-temperature superconductors, the interplay between superconductivity and CDWs has become a key point in the debate on the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. Some experiments in cuprates point toward a CDW state competing with superconductivity, but others raise the possibility of a CDW-superconductivity intertwined order or more elusive pair-density waves (PDWs). Here, we have used proton irradiation to induce disorder in crystals of La1.875Ba0.125CuO4 and observed a striking 50% increase of Tc, accompanied by a suppression of the CDWs. This is in sharp contrast with the behavior expected of a d-wave superconductor, for which both magnetic and nonmagnetic defects should suppress Tc. Our results thus make an unambiguous case for the strong detrimental effect of the CDW on bulk superconductivity in La1.875Ba0.125CuO4. Using tunnel diode oscillator (TDO) measurements, we find indications for potential dynamic layer decoupling in a PDW phase. Our results establish irradiation-induced disorder as a particularly relevant tuning parameter for the many families of superconductors with coexisting density waves, which we demonstrate on superconductors such as the dichalcogenides and Lu5Ir4Si10.