To understand animal ecology, observation of wildlife in the natural habitat is essential, but particularly challenging underwater realm. Weakly electric fishes provide an excellent opportunity to overcome some these challenges because they generate organ discharges (EODs) sense their environment and communicate, which can be detected non-invasively. We tracked EOD swimming activity two species...

We report on experiments simulating chemical processes in early Earth’s atmosphere initiated by events with high-energy density, e.g. lightning or impact of extraterrestrial objects. Large-scale laser spark was created in the mixture of molecular gases (N2, H2O, CO or CO2) in the high-power laser laboratory PALS. Transient chemical composition was analyzed in-situ by optical emission spectrosco...

Abstract In-cylinder expansion of internal combustion engines based on Diesel or Otto cycles cannot be completely brought down to ambient pressure, causing a 20% theoretical energy loss. Several systems have been implemented recover and use this such as turbocharging, turbomechanical turbo-electrical compounding, the implementation Miller cycles. In all these cases however, amount recovered is ...

Apache Spark is an open-source cluster computing framework. It has emerged as the next generation big data processing engine, overtaking Hadoop MapReduce which helped ignite the big data revolution. Spark maintains MapReduce’s linear scalability and fault tolerance, but extends it in a few important ways: it is much faster (100 times faster for certain applications), much easier to program in d...

Upon activation, mammalian eggs release billions of zinc ions in an exocytotic event termed the "zinc spark." The zinc spark is dependent on and occurs coordinately with intracellular calcium transients, which are tightly associated with embryonic development. Thus, we hypothesized that the zinc spark represents an early extracellular physicochemical marker of the developmental potential of the...

Simulations of forced ignition of non-premixed laminar counterflow flames are used to study the effect of strain rate on ignition success. A one dimensional calculation is performed, using detailed methane chemical kinetics and treating the spark as an instantaneous heat release in an inert mixing layer. Ignition success depends on the mixture composition at the spark location, resulting in lea...

AIMS The cardiac ryanodine receptor (RyR) Ca(2+) release channel homotetramer harbours approximately 21 potentially redox-sensitive cysteine residues on each subunit and may act as a sensor for reactive oxygen species (ROS), linking ROS homeostasis to the regulation of Ca(2+) signalling. In cardiac myocytes, arrayed RyRs or Ca(2+) release units are packed in the close proximity of mitochondria,...

Guidelines for the development of software in safety-critical systems usually restrict programming languages, removing features that are unsafe and/or hard to thoroughly test and certify. There are also recommendations and demands in newer guidelines for the use of formal methods, as a way to achieve high assurance software. SPARK is a strict subset of Ada that was designed to have unambiguous ...