Global climate change not only leads to elevated seawater temperatures but also to episodic anomalously high or low temperatures lasting for several hours to days. Scleractinian corals are detrimentally affected by thermal fluctuations, which often lead to an uncoupling of their mutualism with Symbiodinium spp. (coral bleaching) and potentially coral death. Consequently, on many Caribbean reefs...

The approach of complex networks has provided one powerful tool to understand how proteins consistently fold into their native-state structures and the relevance of structure to their function. In this study, a coarse-grained complex network model called Protein Contact Network (PCN) is employed to study the unfolding process of SH3 domain, and the change of the network parameters associated wi...

Surface NO2 volume mixing ratio (VMR) at a specific time (13:45 Local time) (NO2 VMRST) and monthly mean surface NO2 VMR (NO2 VMRM) are estimated for the first time using three regression models with Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) data in four metropolitan cities in South Korea: Seoul, Gyeonggi, Daejeon, and Gwangju. Relationships between the surface NO2 VMR obtained from in situ measurement...

Lamb waves have been reported to be an efficient tool for non-destructive evaluations (NDE) for various application scenarios. However, accurate and reliable damage quantification using the Lamb wave method is still a practical challenge, due to the complex underlying mechanism of Lamb wave propagation and damage detection. This paper presents a Lamb wave damage quantification method using a le...

This paper presents an MPEG-2 compatible adaptive quantization algorithm that leads to the optimal encoding of I-frames in the sense of maximizing PSNR. It integrates three key features into a single Lagrangian optimization model: adaptive quantization including quantizer-change overhead consideration, coefficient thresholding, and a new coefficient amplitude reduction technique. Our results sh...

Recall that the “coefficient reduction” process reduces each μij to |μij | ≤ 1/2 without affecting the orthogonalized sequence and therefore without affecting the potential function. Once “coefficient reduction” has been performed, we check the second property. If there is some i with ‖bi+1‖ < 1 2‖b ∗ i ‖, we simply swap these two elements. This will change the orthogonalized vectors bi and b ∗...

Microwave coagulation therapy (MCT) has been employed mainly for treatment of small size tumors. In the treatment, thin microwave antenna is inserted into the tumor and microwave energy heats up the tumor up to at least 60 degrees C for generation of enough coagulated volume including the target tumor. During the microwave radiation, reflection coefficient of treatment antenna changes significa...