The histomorphological structure of the male reproductive system of maize leaf weevil Tanymecus dilaticollis Gyllenhal, 1834 (Coleoptera: Curculionidae)

The histomorphology of the reproductive system and the germ cells has been useful to establish phylogenetic relationships in many insects. However, these elements remain little known in the Curculionidae. In this study, histomorphological structure of the male reproductive system of Tanymecus dilaticollis, which is economically important, is described, illustrated using stereomicroscopy, light microscopy, and scanning electron microscopy techniques, and discussed in relation to other Coleoptera species. Results showed that distinctive features of the male reproductive system of T. dilaticollis consist of a pair of yellowish testes, a pair of seminal vesicles, a pair of vasa deferentia, an ejaculatory duct, accessory glands, prostate glands, and aedeagus. Each testis is subdivided into two testicular follicles, enclosed by a peritoneal sheath. Each follicle of the mature testes is full sperm cysts with germ cells at various stages development of spermatogenesis. The testes have four types of germ cells (spermatogonia, spermatocytes, spermatids, and spermatozoa). They are occupied by the growth zone containing spermatogonia and spermatocytes, the maturation zone containing spermatids, while differentiation zone containing spermatozoa. There is a seminal vesicle at the center of each testis. Most mature sperms are stored in the seminal vesicle. Each testis is attached to the vas deferens by a stalk‐like seminal vesicle. In the distal part, vasa deferentia fuse with the ejaculatory duct. It is linked to the aedeagus. The provided results will contribute to the understanding of the reproductive cell biology of Curculionidae.     

Metal recognition of septapeptides via polypod molecular architecture

The understanding of the nature of recognition of inorganic materials by proteins is one of the core elements of and has profound implications in biological materials science and engineering. Using combinatorial display methods, a considerable number of short polypeptides have recently been selected with affinity to engineering materials. During these selections, more than several polypeptides are identified with binding specificity to a chosen inorganic material. Understanding the nature of surface recognition of materials by polypeptides is essential for rational design and biomimetic engineering of these inorganic-binding polypeptides for use as linkers, catalyzers, and growth modifiers in nanotechnology and nanobiotechnology. Although there may not be direct homology among the amino acids constituting the polypeptides, their function may come from conserved molecular architecture. Here we study crystallographic surface recognition of platinum metal-binding septapeptides by conformational analysis. We find that the septapeptides conform into certain molecular architectures containing multiple protrusions (polypods) that spatially match with the crystallographic metal surfaces. While the physical recognition may originate from how well the molecular polypods spatially match a given crystallographic surface, the degree of binding may be due to the reactive groups that form the polypods, e.g., charged or polar groups (e.g., hydroxyl and amine). These results are highly consistent with the experimental binding characteristics of the Pt binders with various degrees of affinities.     

The Advanced Video Information System: data structures and query processing

We describe how video data can be organized and structured so as to facilitate efficient querying. We develop a formal model for video data and show how spatial data structures, suitably modified, provide an elegant way of storing such data. We develop algorithms to process various kinds of video queries and show that, in most cases, the complexity of these algorithms is linear. A prototype system, called the Advanced Video Information System (AVIS), based on these concepts, has been designed at the University of Maryland.     

Mechanical properties of Al-60 Pct SiC<Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis> composites alloyed with Mg

In the present work, the effect of an Mg addition on the mechanical properties of the Al-60 vol pct SiCp composites were investigated by uniaxial compression, three-point bending, impact and wear tests (composite-metal and composite-abrasive types). The composites were produced by the pressure-infiltration technique. The composition of the Al matrix was varied between 0 and 8 pct Mg. The mean diameter of the SiC particles was 23 μm. Upon addition of Mg, Mg₂Si precipitated in the matrix and the amount of the porosity dramatically decreased. Mg-alloyed-matrix composites exhibited higher strength, lower toughness, and higher wear resistance than pure-Al-matrix composites. During composite-metal wear testing, wear progressed in two sequential periods (running-in and steady state). Weight loss during wear testing decreased with increasing Mg content of the matrix. The degree of improvement of abrasive resistance depended on the abrasive-grain size. Above 200 °C, the composite-abrasive wear resistance decreased with increasing test temperature for all materials.     

Query relaxation by structure and semantics for retrieval oflogical Web documents

Since the Web encourages hypertext and hypermedia document authoring (e.g., HTML or XML), Web authors tend to create documents that are composed of multiple pages connected with hyperlinks. A Web document may be authored in multiple ways, such as: (1) all information in one physical page, or (2) a main page and the related information in separate linked pages. Existing Web search engines, however, return only physical pages containing keywords. We introduce the concept of information unit, which can be viewed as a logical Web document consisting of multiple physical pages as one atomic retrieval unit. We present an algorithm to efficiently retrieve information units. Our algorithm can perform progressive query processing. These functionalities are essential for information retrieval on the Web and large XML databases. We also present experimental results on synthetic graphs and real Web data     

An event-based model for continuous media data on heterogeneous disk servers

Over the last few years, there has been intense work on the problem of retrieval of continuous media (CM) data from disk. However, no single unified framework exists within which such retrieval problems can be studied. In this paper, we first propose a formal model for CM data retrieval from heterogeneous disk servers. This model can be used to characterize CM data retrieval problems independently of how data is laid out on disk, and what objectives (e.g., minimize client delay, maximize buffer utilization, etc.) the system manager is interested in. We then show how using this formal model, we can neatly define what it means to optimally handle events that occur in movie-on-demand (MOD) systems. Examples of such events include new clients entering the system, old clients leaving the system, continuing clients doing pause, rewind and fast-forward operations. Multiple events may occur simultaneously and we show how such events trigger state transitions in the system. We then develop an algorithm called the QuickSOL algorithm that handles events occurring in MOD systems. This algorithm works in two phases: in the first phase, it quickly finds a way of handling as many of the events occurring at time t as possible. In the second phase, it optimizes the solution found in the first phase. The advantage is that the algorithm can be interrupted anytime after the first phase is completed. We report on experiments showing that QuickSOL works well in practice.     

CaXH3 (X = Mn,Fe, Co) perovskite-type hydrides for hydrogen storage applications

Hydrogen storage is one of the attractive research interests in recent years due to the advantages of hydrogen to be used as energy source. The studies on hydrogen storage applications focus mainly on investigation of hydrogen storage capabilities of newly introduced compounds. The present paper aims at characterization of CaXH₃ (X: Mn, Fe, or Co) perovskite-type hydrides for the first time to understand their potential contribution to the hydrogen storage applications. CaXH₃ compounds have been investigated by density functional theory studies to reveal their various characteristics and hydrogen storage properties. CaXH₃ compounds have been optimized in cubic crystal structure and the lattice constants of studied compounds have been obtained as 3.60, 3.50, and 3.48 Å for X: Mn, Fe, and Co compounds, respectively. The optimized structures have negative formation enthalpies pointing out that studied compounds are thermodynamically stable and could be synthesized experimentally. The gravimetric hydrogen storage densities of X: Mn, Fe, and Co compounds were found in as 3.09, 3.06, and 2.97 wt%, respectively. The revealed values for hydrogen storage densities indicate that CaXH₃ compounds may be potential candidates for hydrogen storage applications. Moreover, various mechanical parameters of interest compounds like elastic constants, bulk modulus, and Poisson's ratio have been reported throughout the study. These compounds were found mechanically stable with satisfying Born stability criteria. Further analyses based on Cauchy pressure and Pugh criterion, showed that they have brittleness nature and relatively hard materials. In addition, the electronic characteristics, band structures, and associated partial density of states of CaXH₃ hydrides have been revealed. The dynamic stability behavior of them was verified based on the phonon dispersion curves.     

Histological and ultrastructural features of the rectum in Poecilimon cervus Karabağ, 1950 (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae)

The morphology and ultrastructure of the rectum in Poecilimon cervus Karaba?, 1950 (Orthoptera, Tettigoniidae) were analyzed by light microscope, scanning (SEM) and transmission electron microscopes (TEM). The rectum is the final part of the digestive tract that plays an important role in water reabsorption in insects and so provides osmoregulation. In the transverse sections, six rectal pads and columnar epithelium can be distinguished. The cuticular intima lines the lumen at the apical side of the epithelium. In the cytoplasm, there are numerous mitochondria, some endocytic vesicles, secreting vesicles whose sizes differ according to the area in the cell, and a nucleus with globular in shape. With this study, we aimed to demonstrate the ultrastructure of the rectum of P. cervus and differences or similarities of with other species.     

Scalable Filtering of Multiple Generalized-Tree-Pattern Queries over XML Streams

An XML publish/subscribe system needs to filter a large number of queries over XML streams. Most existing systems only consider filtering the simple XPath statements. In this paper, we focus on filtering of the more complex Generalized-Tree-Pattern (GTP) queries. Our filtering mechanism is based on a novel Tree-of-Path (TOP) encoding scheme, which compactly represents the path matches for the entire document. First, we show that the TOP encodings can be efficiently produced via a shared bottom-up path matching. Second, with the aid of this TOP encoding, we can 1) achieve polynomial time and space complexity for post processing, 2) avoid redundant predicate evaluations, 3) allow an efficient duplicate-free and merge join-based algorithm for merging multiple encoded path matches and 4) simplify the processing of GTP queries. Overall our approach maximizes the sharing opportunity across queries by exploiting the suffix as well as prefix sharing. At the same time, our TOP encodings allow efficient post processing for GTP queries. Extensive performance studies show that our GFilter solution not only achieves significantly better filtering performance than state-of-the-art algorithms, but also is capable of efficiently filtering the more complex GTP queries.