Real‐time Animation of Sand‐Water Interaction

Recent advances in physically‐based simulations have made it possible to generate realistic animations. However, in the case of solid‐fluid coupling, wetting effects have rarely been noticed despite their visual importance especially in interactions between fluids and granular materials. This paper presents a simple particle‐based method to model the physical mechanism of wetness propagating through granular materials; Fluid particles are absorbed in the spaces between the granular particles and these wetted granular particles then stick together due to liquid bridges that are caused by surface tension and which will subsequently disappear when over‐wetting occurs. Our method can handle these phenomena by introducing a wetness value for each granular particle and by integrating those aspects of behavior that are dependent on wetness into the simulation framework. Using this method, a GPU‐based simulator can achieve highly dynamic animations that include wetting effects in real time.     

Evidence of chromosome 9 origin of the euchromatic variant band within 9qh

Fluorescence in-situ hybridization studies using a whole chromosome 9 painting probe were performed on three individuals from two different families, who carry a chromosome 9 variant with an extra band within the elongated 9qh region. The results confirm the euchromatic nature of the extra band, and provide evidence that it is of chromosome 9 origin. This variant band, which may not be very rare, thus possibly results from a duplication of a segment of 9qh plus band p12 or part of band q21.     

On the absolute stability of sampled-data systems: The "Indirect control" case

A study is made of the problem of absolute stability or "Lur'e problem" in the case of a sampled-data control system containing one integrator in the loop. By the second method of Liapunov, a frequency-domain inequality is obtained which is shown to be a sufficient condition for the absolute stability of the class of systems under investigation. This inequality improves inequalities of similar type which have been obtained by means of the Popov approach.     

GPU-based Fast Ray Casting for a Large Number of Metaballs

Metaballs are implicit surfaces widely used to model curved objects, represented by the isosurface of a density field defined by a set of points. Recently, the results of particle‐based simulations have been often visualized using a large number of metaballs, however, such visualizations have high rendering costs. In this paper we propose a fast technique for rendering metaballs on the GPU. Instead of using polygonization, the isosurface is directly evaluated in a per‐pixel manner. For such evaluation, all metaballs contributing to the isosurface need to be extracted along each viewing ray, on the limited memory of GPUs. We handle this by keeping a list of metaballs contributing to the isosurface and efficiently update it. Our method neither requires expensive precomputation nor acceleration data structures often used in existing ray tracing techniques. With several optimizations, we can display a large number of moving metaballs quickly.