<Emphasis Type="Italic">Sphagnum</Emphasis> Species Modulate their Phenolic Profiles and Mycorrhizal Colonization of Surrounding <Emphasis Type="Italic">Andromeda polifolia</Emphasis> along Peatland Microhabitats

Sphagnum mosses mediate long-term carbon accumulation in peatlands. Given their functional role as keystone species, it is important to consider their responses to ecological gradients and environmental changes through the production of phenolics. We compared the extent to which Sphagnum phenolic production was dependent on species, microhabitats and season, and how surrounding dwarf shrubs responded to Sphagnum phenolics. We evaluated the phenolic profiles of aqueous extracts of Sphagnum fallax and Sphagnum magellanicum over a 6-month period in two microhabitats (wet lawns versus dry hummocks) in a French peatland. Phenolic profiles of water-soluble extracts were measured by UHPLC-QTOF-MS. Andromeda polifolia mycorrhizal colonization was quantified by assessing the intensity of global root cortex colonization. Phenolic profiles of both Sphagnum mosses were species-, season- and microhabitat- dependant. Sphagnum-derived acids were the phenolics mostly recovered; relative quantities were 2.5-fold higher in S. fallax than in S. magellanicum. Microtopography and vascular plant cover strongly influenced phenolic profiles, especially for minor metabolites present in low abundance. Higher mycorrhizal colonization of A. polifolia was found in lawns as compared to hummocks. Mycorrhizal abundance, in contrast to environmental parameters, was correlated with production of minor phenolics in S. fallax. Our results highlight the close interaction between mycorrhizae such as those colonizing A. polifolia and the release of Sphagnum phenolic metabolites and suggest that Sphagnum-derived acids and minor phenolics play different roles in this interaction. This work provides new insight into the ecological role of Sphagnum phenolics by proposing a strong association with mycorrhizal colonization of shrubs.     

Geometric reasoning for mill-turn machining process planning

An integrated system to support both product and manufacturing process design should be such that (1) the part design can be evaluated and redesigned based on manufacturability analysis and (2) the manufacturing processes can be selected efficiently and flexibly exploiting product information provided by part design representations.

In this paper, we describe the feature-based geometric reasoning system for part modeling and process planning as applied to mill-turn machined parts. The feature recognition system based on convex decomposition and the mapping method to relate the negative feature volumes to machining process classes are applied to mill-turn parts. Also, the geometry-based machining precedence relations have been generated for various alternative machining feature decompositions. The above geometric information is input to mill-turn machining process planning to determine machining process sequences and assignment to multiple spindles and turrets.     

The First European Parabolic Flight Campaign with the Airbus A310 ZERO-G

Aircraft parabolic flights repetitively provide up to 23 seconds of reduced gravity during ballistic flight manoeuvres. Parabolic flights are used to conduct short microgravity investigations in Physical and Life Sciences and in Technology, to test instrumentation prior to space flights and to train astronauts before a space mission. The use of parabolic flights is complementary to other microgravity carriers (drop towers, sounding rockets), and preparatory to manned space missions on board the International Space Station and other manned spacecraft, such as Shenzhou and the future Chinese Space Station. After 17 years of using the Airbus A300 ZERO-G, the French company Novespace, a subsidiary of the ’Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales’ (CNES, French Space Agency), based in Bordeaux, France, purchased a new aircraft, an Airbus A310, to perform parabolic flights for microgravity research in Europe. Since April 2015, the European Space Agency (ESA), CNES and the ‘Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V.’ (DLR, the German Aerospace Center) use this new aircraft, the Airbus A310 ZERO-G, for research experiments in microgravity. The first campaign was a Cooperative campaign shared by the three agencies, followed by respectively a CNES, an ESA and a DLR campaign. This paper presents the new Airbus A310 ZERO-G and its main characteristics and interfaces for scientific experiments. The experiments conducted during the first European campaign are presented.     

A novel target detection algorithm combining foreground and background manifold-based models

This paper focuses on the detection of small objects—more precisely on vehicles in aerial images—on complex backgrounds such as natural backgrounds. A key contribution of the paper is to show that, in such situations, learning a target model and a background model separately is better than training a unique discriminative model. This contrasts with standard object detection approaches for which objects vs. background classifiers use the same model as well as the same types of visual features for both. The second contribution lies in the manifold learning approach introduced to build these models. The proposed detection algorithm is validated on the publicly available OIRDS dataset, on which we obtain state-of-the-art results.     

A verification framework for spatio-temporal consistency language with CCSL as a specification language

The Spatio-Temporal Consistency Language(STeC)is a high-level modeling language that deals natively with spatio-temporal behaviour,i.e.,behaviour relating to certain locations and time.Such restriction by both locations and time is of first importance for some types of real-time systems.CCSL is a formal specification language based on logical clocks.It is used to describe some crucial safety properties for real-time systems,due to its powerful expressiveness of logical and chronometric time constraints.We consider a novel verification framework combining STeC and CCSL,with the advantages of addressing spatio-temporal consistency of system behaviour and easily expressing some crucial time constraints.We propose a theory combining these two languages and a method verifying CCSL properties in STeC models.We adopt UPPAAL as the model checking tool and give a simple example to illustrate how to carry out verification in our framework.     

PMBP: PatchMatch Belief Propagation for Correspondence Field Estimation

PatchMatch (PM) is a simple, yet very powerful and successful method for optimizing continuous labelling problems. The algorithm has two main ingredients: the update of the solution space by sampling and the use of the spatial neighbourhood to propagate samples. We show how these ingredients are related to steps in a specific form of belief propagation (BP) in the continuous space, called max-product particle BP (MP-PBP). However, MP-PBP has thus far been too slow to allow complex state spaces. In the case where all nodes share a common state space and the smoothness prior favours equal values, we show that unifying the two approaches yields a new algorithm, PMBP, which is more accurate than PM and orders of magnitude faster than MP-PBP. To illustrate the benefits of our PMBP method we have built a new stereo matching algorithm with unary terms which are borrowed from the recent PM Stereo work and novel realistic pairwise terms that provide smoothness. We have experimentally verified that our method is an improvement over state-of-the-art techniques at sub-pixel accuracy level.     

Thermal effects on the enhanced ductility in non-monotonic uniaxial tension of DP780 steel sheet

To understand the material behavior during non-monotonic loading, uniaxial tension tests were conducted in three modes, namely, the monotonic loading, loading with periodic relaxation and periodic loading-unloadingreloading, at different strain rates (0.001/s to 0.01/s). In this study, the temperature gradient developing during each test and its contribution to increasing the apparent ductility of DP780 steel sheets were considered. In order to assess the influence of temperature, isothermal uniaxial tension tests were also performed at three temperatures (298 K, 313 K and 328 K (25 °C, 40 °C and 55 °C)). A digital image correlation system coupled with an infrared thermography was used in the experiments. The results show that the non-monotonic loading modes increased the apparent ductility of the specimens. It was observed that compared with the monotonic loading, the temperature gradient became more uniform when a non-monotonic loading was applied.