Energy plays an important role in the paradigm of sustainable development. Nowadays, energy consumption is one of the key factors to measure the development of a country. According to the IEO2010 Reference case report (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2010), world energy consumption will increase by 1.4 percent per year, from 495 quadrillion Btu in 2007 to 739 quadrillion Btu in 2035, as...

Fossil fuel depletion and attempts of global warming mitigation have motivated the development of biofuels. Several feedstock and transformation pathways into biofuel have been proposed as an alternative to usual fuels. Recently, microalgae have attracted a lot of attention because of the promise of reduced competition with food crop and lowered environmental impacts. Over the last years, sever...

This paper explores the effectiveness of an interaction model based on user-sketched line segments and curve segments, together known as sketch-lines. Directly sketching line segments on image slices, or curve segments on the surfaces of objects in volume rendered or surface rendered 3D data, is an effective means by which to quickly and simply transfer accurate information, such as position, o...

Over the last decade or so, there has been a wealth of social and natural scientific debate about the environmental consequences of contemporary consumption and there is, by now, something of a consensus. It is clear that lifestyles, especially in the West, will have to change if there is to be any chance of averting the long-term consequences of resource depletion, global warming, the loss of ...

Energy management is, nowadays, a subject of uttermost importance. Indeed, we are facing several problems like petroleum reserve depletion or earth global warming. Smart Grids, a new type of electrical grid which try to intelligently manage its components, are a possible answer to these issues. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are a good candidate for modelling and managing Smart Grids. In this contex...

We study serial distributed detection and fusion over noisy channels in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with bathtubshaped failure (BSF) rate of the sensors in this paper. In the previous work, we applied BSF rate to parallel topology and derived the Extension Log-likelihood Ration Test (ELRT) rule. Although ELRT is superior to traditional fusion rule without considering failed sensors, the det...

In part I of this paper (previous issue of Robotica) a dual stage system with the coarse and fine actuators is adopted to achieve sub-micron accuracy with a large working space for the proposed new three degree-of-freedom (DOF) miniaturized micro parallel mechanism with high mobility and one type of the architecture with vertical actuator locations in all three legs (C-VV type) among six possib...

A program for constructing nucleosome formation potential profile was applied for investigation of exons, introns, and repetitive sequences. The program is available at http://wwwmgs.bionet.nsc.ru/mgs/programs/recon/. We have demonstrated that introns and repetitive sequences exhibit higher nucleosome formation potentials than exons. This fact may be explained by functional saturation of exons ...

Details of a heat pump assisted solar water heating system, is briefly described. Refrigerants compromising of Fluorocarbons and Chlorofluorocarbons have been generally used as the working fluid. But due to its ozone depletion effect and high Global warming potential, they have been replaced by synthetic refrigerants such as R22, R134 etc. The heat pump utilizing such refrigerants has shown to ...

In this paper we propose a new algorithm for solving difficult largescale global optimization problems. We draw our inspiration from the well-known DIRECT algorithm which, by exploiting the objective function behavior, produces a set of points that tries to cover the most interesting regions of the feasible set. Unfortunately, it is well-known that this strategy suffers when the dimension of th...