An Interactive Design System of Free‐Formed Bamboo‐Copters

We present an interactive design system for designing free‐formed bamboo‐copters, where novices can easily design free‐formed, even asymmetric bamboo‐copters that successfully fly. The designed bamboo‐copters can be fabricated using digital fabrication equipment, such as a laser cutter. Our system provides two useful functions for facilitating this design activity. First, it visualizes a simulated flight trajectory of the current bamboo‐copter design, which is updated in real time during the user's editing. Second, it provides an optimization function that automatically tweaks the current bamboo‐copter design such that the spin quality—how stably it spins—and the flight quality—how high and long it flies—are enhanced. To enable these functions, we present non‐trivial extensions over existing techniques for designing free‐formed model airplanes [ UKSI14 ], including a wing discretization method tailored to free‐formed bamboo‐copters and an optimization scheme for achieving stable bamboo‐copters considering both spin and flight qualities.     

Linearized motion estimation for articulated planes

In this paper, we describe the explicit application of articulation constraints for estimating the motion of a system of articulated planes. We relate articulations to the relative homography between planes and show that these articulations translate into linearized equality constraints on a linear least-squares system, which can be solved efficiently using a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker system. The articulation constraints can be applied for both gradient-based and feature-based motion estimation algorithms and to illustrate this, we describe a gradient-based motion estimation algorithm for an affine camera and a feature-based motion estimation algorithm for a projective camera that explicitly enforces articulation constraints. We show that explicit application of articulation constraints leads to numerically stable estimates of motion. The simultaneous computation of motion estimates for all of the articulated planes in a scene allows us to handle scene areas where there is limited texture information and areas that leave the field of view. Our results demonstrate the wide applicability of the algorithm in a variety of challenging real-world cases such as human body tracking, motion estimation of rigid, piecewise planar scenes, and motion estimation of triangulated meshes.     

Hydroboration polymerization of dicyano compounds

Summary Hydroboration polymerization of various ,-dicyanoalkanes with thexylborane produced the corresponding poly(cyclodiborazane)s, that consist of boron-nitrogen four-membered rings. The structures of the obtained polymers were confirmed by spectroscopic analyses such as ¹H-, ¹¹B-NMR and IR spectra. From the result of thermogravimetric analysis of the polymer prepared from adiponitrile and thexylborane, 12% of the inorganic materials remained after heating at 900°C. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AEB03051 00003     

The recovery and recrystallization of cold rolled V-W-Ti alloys

Several V-W-Ti alloys with about 50% reduction in thickness by cold rolling were isochronally annealed at temperatures from 100 to 1100 °C. Hardness was measured after the annealing. By comparison with V4Cr4Ti and V4Ti alloys, the V6WTi alloy was found to begin recovery at a temperature about 100 °C higher, while the full recrystallization temperature was around 900 °C for all of the alloys. Hardness decreased successively above 500 °C in V8W, as is the case in pure V. Impurity induced hardening was observed around 300 °C only in the alloys without Ti. Precipitation and the interaction between interstitial impurities and dislocations were supposed to be the main contributors to the different recovery and recrystallization behaviors of the alloys.     

Change of fuel-to-cladding gap width with the burn-up in FBR MOX fuel irradiated to high burn-up

In order to study the dependence of the gap width change on the burn-up, the fuel-to-cladding gap widths were investigated by ceramography in a large number of FBR MOX fuel pins irradiated to high burn-up. The dependence of gap widths on the burn-up was closely connected with the formations of JOG (joint oxyde-gaine) and rim structure. The gap widths decreased gradually due to the fuel swelling until ∼30 GWd/t, but beyond this burn-up the dependence showed two different tendencies. With the increase of burn-up, the gap widths decreased due to the increase of fuel swelling in the low fuel temperature region where the rim structure was observed, but they increased in the high fuel temperature region where the JOG rich in Cs and Mo formed in the gap.     

Uterine Deletion of Bmal1 Impairs Placental Vascularization and Induces Intrauterine Fetal Death in Mice

Recently, it was demonstrated that the expression of BMAL1 was decreased in the endometrium of women suffering from recurrent spontaneous abortion. To investigate the pathological roles of uterine clock genes during pregnancy, we produced conditional deletion of uterine Bmal1 (cKO) mice and found that cKO mice could receive embryo implantation but not sustain pregnancy. Gene ontology analysis of microarray suggested that uterine NK (uNK) cell function was suppressed in cKO mice. Histological examination revealed the poor formation of maternal vascular spaces in the placenta. In contrast to WT mice, uNK cells in the spongiotrophoblast layer, where maternal uNK cells are directly in contact with fetal trophoblast, hardly expressed an immunosuppressive NK marker, CD161, in cKO mice. By progesterone supplementation, pregnancy could be sustained until the end of pregnancy in some cKO mice. Although this treatment did not improve the structural abnormalities of the placenta, it recruited CD161-positive NK cells into the spongiotrophoblast layer in cKO mice. These findings indicate that the uterine clock system may be critical for pregnancy maintenance after embryo implantation.     

Additive effects of methyl ammonium bromide or formamidinium bromide in methylammonium lead iodide perovskite solar cells using decaphenylcyclopentasilane

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Fabrication and characterization of methylammonium lead iodide perovskite solar cells incorporated with methylammonium bromide (MABr),...     

ProcDef: Local‐to‐global Deformation for Skeleton‐free Character Animation

Animations of characters with flexible bodies such as jellyfish, snails, and, hearts are difficult to design using traditional skeleton‐based approaches. A standard approach is keyframing, but adjusting the shape of the flexible body for each key frame is tedious. In addition, the character cannot dynamically adjust its motion to respond to the environment or user input. This paper introduces a new procedural deformation framework (ProcDef) for designing and driving animations of such flexible objects. Our approach is to synthesize global motions procedurally by integrating local deformations. ProcDef provides an efficient design scheme for local deformation patterns; the user can control the orientation and magnitude of local deformations as well as the propagation of deformation signals by specifying line charts and volumetric fields. We also present a fast and robust deformation algorithm based on shape‐matching dynamics and show some example animations to illustrate the feasibility of our framework.