There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

[신간의 별자리x] 우리/미술, 그리고 ‘슬픔의 박물관’

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Fundamentals of Plasmonics.- Electromagnetics of Metals.- Surface Plasmon Polaritons at Metal / Insulator Interfaces.- Excitation of Surface Plasmon Polaritons at Planar Interfaces.- Imaging Surface Plasmon Polariton Propagation.- Localized Surface Plasmons.- Electromagnetic Surface Modes at Low Frequencies.- Applications.- Plasmon Waveguides.- Transmission of Radiation Through Apertures and Films.- Enhancement of Emissive Processes and Nonlinearities.- Spectroscopy and Sensing.- Metamaterials and Imaging with Surface Plasmon Polaritons.- Concluding Remarks.

/pdf/plasmonics-fundamentals-and-applications-4syb9877sr.pdf

Plasmonics: Fundamentals and Applications

Recent developments have greatly improved the sensitivity of optical sensors based on metal nanoparticle arrays and single nanoparticles. We introduce the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) sensor and describe how its exquisite sensitivity to size, shape and environment can be harnessed to detect molecular binding events and changes in molecular conformation. We then describe recent progress in three areas representing the most significant challenges: pushing sensitivity towards the single-molecule detection limit, combining LSPR with complementary molecular identification techniques such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and practical development of sensors and instrumentation for routine use and high-throughput detection. This review highlights several exceptionally promising research directions and discusses how diverse applications of plasmonic nanoparticles can be integrated in the near future.

Biosensing with plasmonic nanosensors

Micro-Raman techniques are used to acquire Raman spectra of a water-soluble porphyrin (meso-tetrakis(p-sulfonatophenyl)porphine) adsorbed onto smooth and roughened Ag electrodes. We combine such Ra...

Micro-Raman spectroscopy of meso-tetrakis(p-sulfonatophenyl)porphine at electrode surfaces

The acidophilic archaeons are a group of single-celled microorganisms that flourish in hot acid springs (usually pH 5.0, indicating that the densely packed OH-rich layer is a proton shelter. As strong evidence for the role of sugar coatings as proton barriers, this biomimetic study provides insight into evolutionary biology, and the results also could be expanded for the development of biocompatible anti-acid materials.

/pdf/a-proton-shelter-inspired-by-the-sugar-coating-of-4m6mt0aotd.pdf

A proton shelter inspired by the sugar coating of acidophilic archaea

Active development in new memory devices, such as non-volatile memories and high-bandwidth memories, brings heterogeneous memory systems (HMS) as a promising solution for implementing large-scale memory systems with cost, area, and power limitations. Typical HMS consists of a small-capacity high-performance memory and a large-capacity low-performance memory. Data placement on such systems plays a critical role in performance optimization. Existing efforts have explored coarse-grained data placement in applications with dense data structures; however, a thorough study of applications that are based on graph data structures is still missing. This work proposes ATMem—a runtime framework for adaptive granularity data placement optimization in graph applications. ATMem consists of a lightweight profiler, an analyzer using a novel m-ary tree-based strategy to identify sampled and estimated critical data chunks, and a high-bandwidth migration mechanism using a multi-stage multi-threaded approach. ATMem is evaluated in five applications on two HMS hardware, including the Intel Optane byte-addressable NVM and MCDRAM. Experimental results show that ATMem selects 5%-18% data to be placed on high-performance memory and achieves an average of 1.7×-3.4× speedup on NVM-DRAM and 1.2×-2.0× speedup on MCDRAM-DRAM, over the baseline that places all data on the large-capacity memory. On NVM-DRAM, ATMem achieves performance comparable to a full-DRAM system with as low as 9%-54% slowdown.

ATMem: adaptive data placement in graph applications on heterogeneous memories

Plant genome engineering mediated by various CRISPR-based tools requires specific protospacer adjacent motifs (PAMs), such as the well-performed NGG, NG, NNG, etc., to initiate the target recognition, which notably restricts the editable range of the plant genome. In this study, we thoroughly investigated the nuclease activity and the PAM preference of two structurally-engineered SpCas9 variants (SpG and SpRY) in transgenic rice. Our study shows that SpG nuclease favors NGD PAMs, albeit less efficiently than the previously described SpCas9-NG and that SpRY nuclease achieves efficient editing across a wide range of genomic loci, exhibiting a preference of NGD as well as NAN PAMs. Furthermore, SpRY-fused cytidine deaminase hAID*Δ and adenosine deaminase TadA8e were generated, respectively. These constructs efficiently induced C-to-T and A-to-G conversions in the target genes toward various non-canonical PAMs, including non-G PAMs. Remarkably, high-frequency self-editing events (indels and DNA fragments deletion) in the integrated T-DNA fragments as a result of the nuclease activity of SpRY were observed, whereas the self-editing of SpRY nickase-mediated base editor was quite low in transgenic rice lines. In conclusion, the broad PAM compatibility of SpRY greatly expands the targeting scope of CRISPR-based tools in plant genome engineering.

/pdf/spry-greatly-expands-the-genome-editing-scope-in-rice-with-t05pkrflf1.pdf

SpRY greatly expands the genome editing scope in rice with highly flexible PAM recognition

The pursuit of computational efficiency has led to the proliferation of throughput-oriented hardware, from GPUs to increasingly wide vector units on commodity processors and accelerators. This hardware is designed to efficiently execute data-parallel computations in a vectorized manner. However, many algorithms are more naturally expressed as divide-and-conquer, recursive, task-parallel computations. In the absence of data parallelism, it seems that such algorithms are not well suited to throughput-oriented architectures. This paper presents a set of novel code transformations that expose the data parallelism latent in recursive, task-parallel programs. These transformations facilitate straightforward vectorization of task-parallel programs on commodity hardware. We also present scheduling policies that maintain high utilization of vector resources while limiting space usage. Across several task-parallel benchmarks, we demonstrate both efficient vector resource utilization and substantial speedup on chips using Intel’s SSE4.2 vector units, as well as accelerators using Intel’s AVX512 units.

/pdf/efficient-execution-of-recursive-programs-on-commodity-ahrd6gnn32.pdf

Bin Ren

Papers

Micro-Raman spectroscopy of meso-tetrakis(p-sulfonatophenyl)porphine at electrode surfaces

A proton shelter inspired by the sugar coating of acidophilic archaea

ATMem: adaptive data placement in graph applications on heterogeneous memories

SpRY greatly expands the genome editing scope in rice with highly flexible PAM recognition

Efficient execution of recursive programs on commodity vector hardware