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The prehistory of electrets is not known yet, but it is quite likely that the electrostatic charging behavior of amber (Greek: τò ηλεκτρoν, i.e., “electron”) already was familiar to people in ancient cultures (China, Egypt, Greece, etc.), before the Greek philosopher and scientist Thales of Miletus (6th century BCE)-or rather his disciples and followers-reported it in writing (cf. Figure 1). More than two millennia later, William Gilbert (1544–1603), the physician of Queen Elizabeth I, coined the term “electric” in his book De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (1600) for dielectric materials that attract like amber and that included sulfur and glass [1]. The second half of the 18th century saw the invention of the electrophorus or electrophore [2], a capacitive electret device, in 1762 by Johan Carl Wilcke (1732–1796).
We present a new numerical algorithm to solve the recently derived equations of two-moment cosmic ray hydrodynamics (CRHD). The algorithm is implemented as a module in the moving mesh AREPO code. Therein, the anisotropic transport of cosmic rays (CRs) along magnetic field lines is discretized using a path-conservative finite volume method on the unstructured time-dependent Voronoi mesh of AREPO. The interaction of CRs and gyroresonant Alfven waves is described by short time-scale source terms in the CRHD equations. We employ a custom-made semi-implicit adaptive time stepping source term integrator to accurately integrate this interaction on the small light-crossing time of the anisotropic transport step. Both the transport and the source term integration step are separated from the evolution of the magnetohydrodynamical equations using an operator split approach. The new algorithm is tested with a variety of test problems, including shock tubes, a perpendicular magnetized discontinuity, the hydrodynamic response to a CR overpressure, CR acceleration of a warm cloud, and a CR blast wave, which demonstrate that the coupling between CR and magnetohydrodynamics is robust and accurate. We demonstrate the numerical convergence of the presented scheme using new linear and non-linear analytic solutions.
We consider a sequential cascade of molecular first-reaction events towards a terminal reaction centre in which each reaction step is controlled by diffusive motion of the particles. The model studied here represents a typical reaction setting encountered in diverse molecular biology systems, in which, e.g. a signal transduction proceeds via a series of consecutive 'messengers': the first messenger has to find its respective immobile target site triggering a launch of the second messenger, the second messenger seeks its own target site and provokes a launch of the third messenger and so on, resembling a relay race in human competitions. For such a molecular relay race taking place in infinite one-, two- and three-dimensional systems, we find exact expressions for the probability density function of the time instant of the terminal reaction event, conditioned on preceding successful reaction events on an ordered array of target sites. The obtained expressions pertain to the most general conditions: number of intermediate stages and the corresponding diffusion coefficients, the sizes of the target sites, the distances between them, as well as their reactivities are arbitrary.
Both ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are discharging ice into the ocean. In many regions along the coast of the ice sheets, the icebergs calve into a bay. If the addition of icebergs through calving is faster than their transport out of the embayment, the icebergs will be frozen into a melange with surrounding sea ice in winter. In this case, the buttressing effect of the ice melange can be considerably stronger than any buttressing by mere sea ice would be. This in turn stabilizes the glacier terminus and leads to a reduction in calving rates. Here we propose a simple parametrization of ice melange buttressing which leads to an upper bound on calving rates and can be used in numerical and analytical modelling.
Due to their electrically polarized air-filled internal pores, optimized ferroelectrets exhibit a remarkable piezoelectric response, making them suitable for energy harvesting. Expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) ferroelectret films are laminated with two fluorinated-ethylene-propylene (FEP) copolymer films and internally polarized by corona discharge. Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS)-coated spandex fabric is employed for the electrodes to assemble an all-organic ferroelectret nanogenerator (FENG). The outer electret-plus-electrode double layers form active device layers with deformable electric dipoles that strongly contribute to the overall piezoelectric response in the proposed concept of wearable nanogenerators. Thus, the FENG with spandex electrodes generates a short-circuit current which is twice as high as that with aluminum electrodes. The stacking sequence spandex/FEP/ePTFE/FEP/ePTFE/FEP/spandex with an average pore size of 3 mu m in the ePTFE films yields the best overall performance, which is also demonstrated by the displacement-versus-electric-field loop results. The all-organic FENGs are stable up to 90 degrees C and still perform well 9 months after being polarized. An optimized FENG makes three light emitting diodes (LEDs) blink twice with the energy generated during a single footstep. The new all-organic FENG can thus continuously power wearable electronic devices and is easily integrated, for example, with clothing, other textiles, or shoe insoles.
Analysis of protrusion dynamics in amoeboid cell motility by means of regularized contour flows
(2021)
Amoeboid cell motility is essential for a wide range of biological processes including wound healing, embryonic morphogenesis, and cancer metastasis. It relies on complex dynamical patterns of cell shape changes that pose long-standing challenges to mathematical modeling and raise a need for automated and reproducible approaches to extract quantitative morphological features from image sequences. Here, we introduce a theoretical framework and a computational method for obtaining smooth representations of the spatiotemporal contour dynamics from stacks of segmented microscopy images. Based on a Gaussian process regression we propose a one-parameter family of regularized contour flows that allows us to continuously track reference points (virtual markers) between successive cell contours. We use this approach to define a coordinate system on the moving cell boundary and to represent different local geometric quantities in this frame of reference. In particular, we introduce the local marker dispersion as a measure to identify localized membrane expansions and provide a fully automated way to extract the properties of such expansions, including their area and growth time. The methods are available as an open-source software package called AmoePy, a Python-based toolbox for analyzing amoeboid cell motility (based on time-lapse microscopy data), including a graphical user interface and detailed documentation. Due to the mathematical rigor of our framework, we envision it to be of use for the development of novel cell motility models. We mainly use experimental data of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum to illustrate and validate our approach. <br /> Author summary Amoeboid motion is a crawling-like cell migration that plays an important key role in multiple biological processes such as wound healing and cancer metastasis. This type of cell motility results from expanding and simultaneously contracting parts of the cell membrane. From fluorescence images, we obtain a sequence of points, representing the cell membrane, for each time step. By using regression analysis on these sequences, we derive smooth representations, so-called contours, of the membrane. Since the number of measurements is discrete and often limited, the question is raised of how to link consecutive contours with each other. In this work, we present a novel mathematical framework in which these links are described by regularized flows allowing a certain degree of concentration or stretching of neighboring reference points on the same contour. This stretching rate, the so-called local dispersion, is used to identify expansions and contractions of the cell membrane providing a fully automated way of extracting properties of these cell shape changes. We applied our methods to time-lapse microscopy data of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum.
We use ultrafast x-ray diffraction to investigate the effect of expansive phononic and contractive magnetic stress driving the picosecond strain response of a metallic perovskite SrRuO3 thin film upon femtosecond laser excitation. We exemplify how the anisotropic bulk equilibrium thermal expansion can be used to predict the response of the thin film to ultrafast deposition of energy. It is key to consider that the laterally homogeneous laser excitation changes the strain response compared to the near-equilibrium thermal expansion because the balanced in-plane stresses suppress the Poisson stress on the picosecond timescale. We find a very large negative Grüneisen constant describing the large contractive stress imposed by a small amount of energy in the spin system. The temperature and fluence dependence of the strain response for a double-pulse excitation scheme demonstrates the saturation of the magnetic stress in the high-fluence regime.
In order to explain the variance of the solar rotation law during the activity minima and maxima, the angular momentum transport by rotating magnetoconvection is simulated in a convective box penetrated by an inclined azimuthal magnetic field. Turbulence-induced kinetic and magnetic stresses and the Lorentz force of the large-scale magnetic background field are the basic transporters of angular momentum. Without rotation, the sign of the magnetic stresses naturally depends on the signs of the field components as positive (negative) B theta B phi transport the angular momentum poleward (equatorward). For fast enough rotation, however, the turbulence-originated Reynolds stresses start to dominate the transport of the angular momentum flux. The simulations show that positive ratios of the two meridional magnetic field components to the azimuthal field reduce the inward radial as well as the equatorward latitudinal transport, which result from hydrodynamic calculations. Only for B theta B phi>0 (generated by solar-type rotation laws with an accelerated equator) does the magnetic-influenced rotation at the solar surface prove to be flatter than the nonmagnetic profile together with the observed slight spin-down of the equator. The latter phenomenon does not appear for antisolar rotation with polar vortex as well as for rotation laws with prevailing radial shear.
We investigate a diffusion process with a time-dependent diffusion coefficient, both exponentially increasing and decreasing in time, D(t)=D-0(e +/- 2 alpha t). For this (hypothetical) nonstationary diffusion process we compute-both analytically and from extensive stochastic simulations-the behavior of the ensemble- and time-averaged mean-squared displacements (MSDs) of the particles, both in the over- and underdamped limits. Simple asymptotic relations derived for the short- and long-time behaviors are shown to be in excellent agreement with the results of simulations. The diffusive characteristics in the presence of ageing are also considered, with dramatic differences of the over- versus underdamped regime. Our results for D(t)=D-0(e +/- 2 alpha t) extend and generalize the class of diffusive systems obeying scaled Brownian motion featuring a power-law-like variation of the diffusivity with time, D(t) similar to t(alpha-1). We also examine the logarithmically increasing diffusivity, D(t)=D(0)log[t/tau(0)], as another fundamental functional dependence (in addition to the power-law and exponential) and as an example of diffusivity slowly varying in time. One of the main conclusions is that the behavior of the massive particles is predominantly ergodic, while weak ergodicity breaking is repeatedly found for the time-dependent diffusion of the massless particles at short times. The latter manifests itself in the nonequivalence of the (both nonaged and aged) MSD and the mean time-averaged MSD. The current findings are potentially applicable to a class of physical systems out of thermal equilibrium where a rapid increase or decrease of the particles' diffusivity is inherently realized. One biological system potentially featuring all three types of time-dependent diffusion (power-law-like, exponential, and logarithmic) is water diffusion in the brain tissues, as we thoroughly discuss in the end.
A symmetry-breaking mechanism is investigated that creates bistability between fully and partially synchronized states in oscillator networks. Two populations of oscillators with unimodal frequency distribution and different amplitudes, in the presence of weak global coupling, are shown to simplify to a modular network with asymmetrical coupling. With increasing the coupling strength, a synchronization transition is observed with an isolated fully synchronized state. The results are interpreted theoretically in the thermodynamic limit and confirmed in experiments with chemical oscillators.