Frontiers Of Today Research Articles

Knocking the Stability of Solar Cells with Fluorescent Protein Donors upon Rationalizing Design, Integration, and Mechanism

AbstractThough photon‐induced electron donor features of fluorescent proteins (FPs) in solution suggest them as excellent photosensitizers, their poor stability upon device fabrication/operation is the today's frontier. This relates to their immediate denaturation in water‐free/less environments: inorganic/organic device interfaces and/or organic solvent surroundings. This study provides a fresh solution with a family of hybrid FPs, in which the peripheral carboxylic groups of archetypal FPs ‐superfolder green fluorescent protein (sfGFP) and mCherry‐ are transformed into alkoxysilane groups, enabling a straightforward integration with surprising stabilities over months in devices – arbitrary n/p‐type semiconducting metal oxide/FP/organic‐solvent electrolyte interfaces – attributed to the formation of an ion‐silica shell around the FP. This further allowed to understand the charge injection mechanism applying steady‐state/time‐resolved spectroscopy on different FP‐variants with key single‐point aromatic amino acid mutations at the chromophore nearest, revealing the electron‐donor hopping pathway via the initial loop of the strand β7. Finally, devices with state‐of‐the‐art solar‐to‐energy conversion efficiencies that are stable >2,000 h under operation nicely outperform the prior‐art stability of a few seconds/minutes in FP‐based solar cells. Hence, this work solves the integration/stability issues which blocking the application of FP‐based sensitizer, as well provides a solid understanding of their photo‐induced electron transfer mechanism.

Experimental Research on the Noise Characteristics of the Output Field of the Optical Filter Cavity

Precision measurement is an important direction of today's frontier scientific research. Using lasers to achieve high-precision target measurement has become an important way to improve measurement accuracy, which can be applied in various fields. However, for a certain application, the measurement accuracy will directly depend on the noise level of the laser source. Most applications require that the measurement frequency band is concentrated in the audio frequency band. In order to obtain a low-noise laser source with shot noise limited in the applied frequency band, active and/or passive noise reduction are the usual choice, i.e., active feedback control and filter cavity technique, and so on. Therefore, noise analysis and suppression techniques are the main concern of the precision measurement. The optical filter cavity acts as an optical low-pass filter, which can effectively suppress high-frequency noise beyond its linewidth. In this work, we found that the intensity noise of the output field of an optical filter cavity is higher than the noise floor of the laser. The main sources of noise are analyzed through experiments:(1) excess noise introduced by cavity length locking; (2) laser phase and pointing noises coupled to the intensity one by the cavity. To cancel the excess noise as much as possible, we optimize the feedback control loop by measuring the open-loop and closed-loop transfer functions of the MC, combined with the critical proportionality method. All the control loop are homemade, and the PID is designed with a FPGA board for expediently achieving a noise reduction up to 30 dB at the audio frequency. Then the control loop is optimized as the best condition without introducing the excess noise. Compared with the free-running laser, MC filters out the high-frequency noise, meanwhile converts the phase noise and pointing noise of input field into the intensity noise of the output field. Therefore, the power noise spectrum in the audio segment is still higher than that of the input optical field itself. In the future, an active control loop will be applied to suppress the noise power. The experimental results provide the basic means for applied research such as feedback control loop noise analysis, which will promote the development of precision measurement to higher measurement accuracy.

Significance of Transportation Network Models in Emergency Planning of Cities

Transportation network models within the framework of operations research have been established as one of the emerging field of research frontiers in today's very disastrous life and dense traffic system. The discrete as well as continuous flow over time models have been widely considered by social, engineering and applied scientists with wide varieties of real-life problems, like rush hour traffic and traffic management at the time of any disaster. Among the PPRR classification issues, the concentration will be given within the planning approach with transportation networks for urban cities. We present the models and solution strategies of the transportation networks that are dynamic in nature and directly apply in rush hour traffic or human-made or natural disasters in the urban cities. The difficulty levels of the varieties of algorithms, efficiencies of their solution software and the significance of the obtained solutions for the betterment of modern city plan are discussed with wide spectrum of model diversity. Among many others, we illustrate, also supporting with a case study, the impact of recent Nepal Earthquake 2015 and the meaningfulness of effective evacuation planning for saving the property and people in urban city like, Kathmandu, valley. The high performance of the technique of lane reversals in transportation or evacuation networks which has already been adopted a lot in practice, but has been analytically studied only recently are focused in this paper. Adopted this dynamic transportation strategy, the flow in the transportation can be doubled, the time can be saved significantly and many transportation arcs can be utilized for logistic supports or for emergency vehicles whenever necessary. Improved results are presented and the importance of integrated models dependent on time and vehicles is explored. The optimal solution thus obtained with contraflow, logistic supports and facility location at appropriate positions of transportation network proves the significance of these models in emergency planning.

Frontiers of Commodification: State Lands and Their Formalization

Formal property rights are integral to contemporary global- and national-scale land transactions, and prerequisite to international institutions’ recognition of any state, private, or nonprofit land holdings. We argue that state lands constitute today's frontiers for capitalist expansion. Using cases from Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Indonesia, we show how practices, institutions, and laws that expunge local rights and claims to land and replace them with state rights have been fundamental to the creation of “new” frontiers. We argue that historical formalizations of state land created the enabling conditions for today's large-scale, international, and national acquisitions of land, in ways that were unanticipated at the time of state acquisition.

A GLANCE AT THE MOVE FROM COMPLEMENTARY ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE (CAM) TO INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM (UK), UNITED STATES (US), AND WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO)’S HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS

Today's medical world has gained a growing appeal towards CAM/TM which can be seen in the strategies of US in the form of establishing National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy (WHCCAMP) at the White House, the annual increase of integration of CAM classical education in UK’s colleges and medical schools beside conventional medicine and strategies of WHO about the CAM. In this article we take a glance at some of the main strategies and programs of UK, US and WHO in the field of CAM/TM as examples of advanced modern medical system and their trend towards CAM/TM. 1-Increase of CAM/TM education integration in the medical education systems up to 60% (UK). 2-Emphasis of need to evaluate widely used CAM treatments for safety, efficacy and effectiveness by the use of modern experiments and clinical trials and presentation of credible data to curious public (NIH). 3-The need to train, encourage, and support of skilled investigators in both CAM and conventional medical academic communities and facilitating research, training, education and communication for interdisciplinary integration thus moving from CAM towards integrating medicine (WHO). With respect to the trend seen in medically advance countries, and considering that TIM is one of the oldest and richest branches of CAM/TM, in order to avoid falling behind the frontiers of today’s medicine which is now incorporating CAM/TM into its infrastructure, we propose that the IR of Iran must institute research, education, and therapy of TIM into the IRI health care delivery system.

Review: Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature by Michael R. Redclift

Review: Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature By Michael R. Redclift Reviewed by Ryder W. Miller San Francisco, USA Michael R. Redclift. Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 237 pp. ISBN: 0-262-68160-9 (paper). $US23.00 In Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature, Michael R. Redclift, a Professor of International Environmental Policy and Head of the Environment, Society, Politics Research Group in the Department of Geography at King's College, London, seeks to set the discourse about nature and society on a different course. Redclift addresses three problems: discussion of the links between the environment and society; the problem in establishing how physical space is culturally assimilated; and the need to question the one-sided discussion of the environment as a socially constructed object” (p. vii). To do so, the book examines five frontier case studies: common-pool resource management in the Spanish Pyrenees Mountains, European settlement on the forest frontier in nineteenth-century Canada, conflicts over land and water resources in coastal Ecuador, Mayan civil unrest in the Yucatan peninsula, and the encroachment of tourism on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Redclift develops a broad definition of the frontier: Frontiers are not simply existing physical and social boundaries; they are increasingly located at the outer reaches of modernity, in cyberspace as well as real space, in new genetic materials as well as in the embodied cultural forms. Frontiers are also the products of peoples' imagination, of geography, culture, and space (p.208). Much of Redclift's work focuses on the fieldwork he conducted in Spanish speaking countries, but he also draws upon a rich body of historical, theoretical, and philosophical work on the subject. Here one will find stories of the conflicts between indigenous peoples and the encroachment of western society. Global forces find marketable resources in the natural environment which change the areas that gave meaning to native peoples. At stake is cultural survival as well as the preservation of the natural environment. The narratives covered invoke dualisms in the conceptualization of civil society and nature such as frontier/civilization, community/markets, commodity/conservation and conservation/tourism. The objective was to examine not only the history through which the frontier has been colonized and settled, but also the way in which this history has been imagined, committed to memory, or written about (p. 47). Redclift argues that the frontiers of today, which include undeveloped areas with contested natural resources and indigenous peoples, require a different understanding Electronic Green Journal , Issue 26, Spring 2008 ISSN: 1076-7975

On the efficient evaluation of Fourier patterns for nanoparticles and clusters

Samples made of an isotropically oriented ensemble of atomic clusters or structures that are not large crystals (i.e. extended less than 10 periods in each direction) are at the frontier of today's material science and chemistry. Examples are nanoparticles, nanotubes, amorphous matter, polymers, and macromolecules in suspension. For such systems the computation of powder diffraction patterns (which may provide an efficient characterization) is to be performed the hard way, by summing contributions from each atom pair. This work deals with performing such computation in the most practical and efficient way. Three main points are developed: how to encode the enormous array of interatomic distances (which increase as the square or higher powers of the cluster diameter) to a much smaller array of equispaced values on a coarse grid (whose size increases linearly with the diameter); how to perform a fast computation of the diffraction pattern from this equispaced grid; how to optimize the grid step to obtain an arbitrarily small error on the computed diffraction pattern. Theory and examples are jointly developed and presented.

Soybeans, Development and Conservation on the Amazon Frontier

Bolivia's rate of deforestation throughout the 1990s was among the most rapid anywhere in the Amazon Basin. This drastic clearing stood in sharp contrast to the relatively slow rates of landscape change that had prevailed in previous decades. This article reviews the models used for explaining deforestation, and argues that the new context of globalization, structural adjustment, regional integration and rapid technological change contributed to accelerated forest cutting during the 1990s. The author suggests that many environmental policy approaches developed during the 1970s and 1980s no longer address the current clearing situation effectively, and that today's frontiers differ profoundly from previous ones. The widely held idea that intensive production per se reduces forest destruction may not be valid on tropical agro-industrial frontiers, such as the soybean zones of Bolivia and Brazil.

In search of effective text input interfaces for off the desktop computing

It is generally recognized that today's frontier of HCI research lies beyond the traditional desktop computers whose GUI interfaces were built on the foundation of display—pointing device—full keyboard. Many interface challenges arise without such a physical UI foundation. Text writing—ranging from entering URLs and search queries, filling forms, typing commands, to taking notes and writing emails and chat messages—is one of the hard problems awaiting for solutions in off-desktop computing. This paper summarizes and synthesizes a research program on this topic at the IBM Almaden Research Center. It analyzes various dimensions that constitute a good text input interface; briefly reviews related literature; discusses the evaluation methodology issues of text input; presents the major ideas and results of two systems, ATOMIK and SHARK; and points out current and future directions in the area from our current vantage point.

A Ricardo-Sraffa Paradigm Comparing Gains from Trade in Inputs and Finished Goods

Here is how the 1817 Ricardo comparative advantage trade benefit analysis has to be modified to take account of post-1960 Sraffian benefits from capital-using technologies. By bringing J. S. Mill's demand model up to date in terms of its implicit geometric-mean money-metric utility, specific measurements for real net national product are calculated to partition sources of welfare gains (from output enhancements and taste-preference accommodations) in scenarios of (1) trade between equals, (2) trade between poor and rich nations, and (3) for biased inventions that enable a poor country to take over production of items in which formerly the rich place enjoyed comparative advantage. History of economic doctrine is mined to advance today's frontier of scientific knowledge—a forward-looking function for “Whig history.”

Studying and Measuring the Plate Motions and Earthquakes Using Pulsar Observations

1 Plate Motions and Earthquakes Modern space technology such as very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), satellite laser ranging (SLR) and global positioning system (GPS) opens a new way to measure and study the earth’s motions with high accuracy. It is one of the frontiers of today’s earth sciences to use these space technologies to learn plate-scale tectonics, kinematics and dynamics. During the 1980s, the NASA Program in Crustal Dynamics succeeded in

The age of electronic messages

What are the frontiers of today's communications technology? The Age of Electronic Messages explains the scientific principles on which this technology is based and explores its capabilities and limitations, its risks and benefits. In straightforward language accompanied by numerous illustrations, Truxal describes the communications technology that has become such an integral part of today's work and leisure. He provides accounts of the bar codes used in supermarkets and the postal system of the way signals are described in terms of frequencies and in digital form of hearing and audio systems, of radio and navigation, of medical imaging, and of television broadcasting and narrowcasting. Unlike other books on the subject, The Age of Electronic Messages takes into account the sociology of the new communications technology as well as its mathematical and physical underpinnings. John Truxal is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Technology and Society at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The Age of Electronic Messages is included in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation sponsored series, the New Liberal Arts.

AIEE District meeting program to cover electrical frontiers of today

AIEE District meeting program to cover electrical frontiers of today

Casework with the Aging—Today's Frontier

Casework with the Aging—Today's Frontier