Towards a Better Prediction of Cell Settling on Nanostructure Arrays—Simple Means to Complicated Ends

Vertical arrays of nanostructures (NSs) are emerging as promising platforms for probing and manipulating live mammalian cells. The broad range of applications requires different types of interfaces, but cell settling on NS arrays is not yet fully controlled and understood. Cells are both seen to deform completely into NS arrays and to stay suspended like tiny fakirs, which have hitherto been explained with differences in NS spacing or density. Here, a better understanding of this phenomenon is provided by using a model that takes into account the extreme membrane deformation needed for a cell to settle into a NS array. It is shown that, in addition to the NS density, cell settling depends strongly on the dimensions of the single NS, and that the settling can be predicted for a given NS array geometry. The predictive power of the model is confirmed by experiments and good agreement with cases from the literature. Furthermore, the influence of cell‐related parameters is evaluated theoretically and a generic method of tuning cell settling through surface coating is demonstrated experimentally. These findings allow a more rational design of NS arrays for the numerous exciting biological applications where the mode of cell settling is crucial.     

Effects of photoperiod and pair-feeding on lactation of cows fed corn or barley grain in total mixed rations

Effects of photoperiod and type of grain were assessed using 47 cows (wk 1; 59.5 d of lactation) exposed daily to 16 h of light (long day) and fed randomly one of two diets containing an equal amount of cracked corn or rolled barley. During wk 5, cows were assigned within each diet to long day and ad libitum feeding, short day (8 h of light: 2 h of dark: 2 h of light: 12 h of dark) and ad libitum feeding, or long day and ad libitum feeding (wk 5 to 8) followed by pair feeding with short day cows between wk 9 and 16. Milk composition was not affected by treatments. Between wk 9 and 16, long day cows fed for ad libitum consumption or pair fed produced 5 to 11% more milk than cows exposed to short day; feed intake of long day cows fed for ad libitum consumption was greater than short short day and long day cows pair fed cows. Milk yield and total feed intake were not affected by type of grain in the diet. In conclusion, long day photoperiod increased milk yield and feed intake.     

Approaches to resource reservation for migrating real-time sessions in future mobile wireless networks

This paper presents two novel frameworks for session admission control and resource reservation in the context of next generation mobile and cellular networks. We also devised a special scheme that avoids per-user reservation signaling overhead in order to meet scalability requirements needed for next generation multi-access networks. The first proposal, Distributed Call Admission Control with Aggregate Resource Reservation (VR), uses mobility prediction based on mobile positioning system location information and takes into account the expected bandwidth to be used by calls handing off to and from neighboring cells within a configurable estimation time window. In conjunction, a novel concept called virtual reservation has been devised to prevent per-user reservation. Our second proposal, Local Call Admission Control and Time Series-based Resource Reservation, takes into account the expected bandwidth to be used by calls handed off from neighboring cells based only on local information stored into the current cell a user is seeking admission to. To this end, we suggest the use of two time series-based models for predicting handoff load: the Trigg and Leach (TL), which is an adaptive exponential smoothing technique, and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) that uses the Box and Jenkins methodology. It is worth to emphasize that the use of bandwidth prediction based on ARIMA technique still exist for wireless networks. The novelty of our approach is to build an adaptive framework based on ARIMA technique that takes into account the measured handoff dropping probability in order to tuning the prediction time window size so increasing the prediction accuracy. The proposed schemes are compared through simulations with the fixed guard channel (GC) and other optimized dynamic reservation-based proposals present in the literature. The results show that our schemes outperform many others and that the simpler local proposal based on TL can grant nearly similar levels of handoff dropping probability as compared to those from more the complex distributed approach.     

EM pickup and scattering by a wire

This article treats pickup and scattering by a single wire in free space or over a ground plane. The wire may be uniform or nonuniform and infinite or finite. We only treat the case where wire radius is so small compared to a wavelength and the other problem dimensions that scattering by the wire is independent of azimuth. Solutions based directly on Maxwell's equations are compared with solutions based on the telegrapher's equations; for 1 mm radius Cu wire at 1 GHz, equilibrium CW currents as computed from the two models, for a uniform, infinite wire, differ by 6 dB. In general, the wire-current solutions are separated into a homogeneous part and a particular or driven part. The driven part couples and scatters fields, while,at least on an infinite wire in the far field, the homogeneous part does not     

Laser-produced plasma light source for extreme ultraviolet lithography

Pulsed Nd:YAG lasers have been developed to achieve high peak power and high pulse repetition rate. These systems are being used as drivers for laser-produced plasmas which efficiently convert the 1064-nm laser output to extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light at 13.5 nm for future microlithography systems. The requirements for laser-produced plasma EUV light sources and their integration in lithography tools for high-volume manufacturing are reviewed to establish the key design issues for high-power lasers and plasma targets. Xenon has been identified as a leading target material to realize the goals of intense EUV emission and clean operation. Recent progress in high-power diode-pumped Nd:YAG lasers and xenon targets for EUV generation is reviewed, showing that laser-produced plasma sources meet the needs for current EUV lithography development tools. Future directions to meet EUV source requirements for high-volume manufacturing tools are discussed.     

Self-assembled monolayers for electrode fabrication and efficient threshold voltage control of organic transistors with amorphous semiconductor layer

In this paper we show that thiolated self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) can be used to anchor source–drain gold electrodes on the substrate, leading to excellent electrical performances of the organic field-effect transistor (OFET) on a par with those using a standard electrode process. Using an amorphous semiconductor and a gate dielectric functionalized with SAMs bearing different dipole moments, we demonstrate that we can tune the threshold voltage alone, while keeping nearly unchanged the other electrical properties (hole carrier mobility, I_on/I_off ratio, subthreshold swing). This differs from previous studies for which SAMs functionalization induced significant changes in all the OFET electrical performances. This result opens doors to design organic circuits using reproducible amorphous semiconductor based OFETs for which only the threshold voltage can be tuned on demand.     

Bounded Tamper Resilience: How to Go Beyond the Algebraic Barrier

Related key attacks (RKAs) are powerful cryptanalytic attacks where an adversary can change the secret key and observe the effect of such changes at the output. The state of the art in RKA security protects against an a-priori unbounded number of certain algebraic induced key relations, e.g., affine functions or polynomials of bounded degree. In this work, we show that it is possible to go beyond the algebraic barrier and achieve security against arbitrary key relations, by restricting the number of tampering queries the adversary is allowed to ask for. The latter restriction is necessary in case of arbitrary key relations, as otherwise a generic attack of Gennaro et al. (TCC 2004) shows how to recover the key of almost any cryptographic primitive. We describe our contributions in more detail below. (1) We show that standard ID and signature schemes constructed from a large class of \(\Sigma \)-protocols (including the Okamoto scheme, for instance) are secure even if the adversary can arbitrarily tamper with the prover’s state a bounded number of times and obtain some bounded amount of leakage. Interestingly, for the Okamoto scheme we can allow also independent tampering with the public parameters. (2) We show a bounded tamper and leakage resilient CCA-secure public key cryptosystem based on the DDH assumption. We first define a weaker CCA-like security notion that we can instantiate based on DDH, and then we give a general compiler that yields CCA security with tamper and leakage resilience. This requires a public tamper-proof common reference string. (3) Finally, we explain how to boost bounded tampering and leakage resilience [as in (1) and (2) above] to continuous tampering and leakage resilience, in the so-called floppy model where each user has a personal hardware token (containing leak- and tamper-free information) which can be used to refresh the secret key. We believe that bounded tampering is a meaningful and interesting alternative to avoid known impossibility results and can provide important insights into the security of existing standard cryptographic schemes.     

An even magneto-optic effect: Linear polarization of the spectral thermal emission from ferromagnetic iron

The thermal spectral emission from ferromagnetic iron observed at normal incidence and with the magnetization parallel to its surface is partially linearly polarized. Measurements of the new even magneto-optic effect have been performed in the spectral range from 1.8 μm to 5 μm wave-length.     

Two Classes of Cosine-Modulated IIR/IIR and IIR/FIR NPR Filter Banks

This paper introduces two classes of cosine-modulated causal and stable filter banks (FBs) with near perfect reconstruction (NPR) and low implementation complexity. Both classes have the same infinite-length impulse response (IIR) analysis FB but different synthesis FBs utilizing IIR and finite-length impulse response (FIR) filters, respectively. The two classes are preferable for different types of specifications. The IIR/FIR FBs are preferred if small phase errors relative to the magnitude error are desired, and vice versa. The paper provides systematic design procedures so that PR can be approximated as closely as desired. It is demonstrated through several examples that the proposed FB classes, depending on the specification, can have a lower implementation complexity compared to existing FIR and IIR cosine-modulated FBs (CMFBs). The price to pay for the reduced complexity is generally an increased delay. Furthermore, two additional attractive features of the proposed FBs are that they are asymmetric in the sense that one of the analysis and synthesis banks has a lower computational complexity compared to the other, which can be beneficial in some applications, and that the number of distinct coefficients is small, which facilitates the design of FBs with large numbers of channels.