Plastids are multifunctional, pleomorphic organelles of purported endosymbiotic origin that in plants and green algae display a characteristic double membrane envelope (Wise, 2007). All plastids originate fromcolorless proplastids, and a simple pigmentation-based classification distinguishes chloroplasts from other plastids by the presence of chlorophyll, chromoplasts by the predominance of oth...

The central purpose of the research is to support the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) Quieter Pavement Research Program, which has as its goals and objectives the identification of quieter, safer asphalt pavement surfaces. The research conforms with Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) guidance provided to state departments of transportation (DOTs) that conduct tire/pavement...

Automated detection of pavement boundaries is an important enabling technology in a number of intelligent vehicle applications. Many state of art systems for detecting and tracking pavement boundaries use a priori shape models to describe the appearance of these boundaries. Several types of shape models have been employed, and the model choice is usually made from the standpoint of accommodatin...

Hagfish (Eptatretus burgeri) are agnathous and are the earliest vertebrates still in existence. Pavement cells adjacent to the mitochondria-rich cells show orthogonal arrays of particles (OAPs) in the gill of hagfish, a known ultrastructural morphology of aquaporin (AQP) in mammalian freeze-replica studies, suggesting that an AQP homolog exists in pavement cells. We therefore cloned water chann...

This study uses the two-fluid model for traffic flow, to examine driver behavior during both wet and dry pavement conditions and various times of the day. It was found that parameters in the two-fluid model known to be strongly affected by driver behavior (particularly driver aggressiveness) were statistically different between wet pavement and dry pavement conditions. The results confirmed tha...

1. Introduction The quality standards for transportation infrastructure have evolved considerably over the last three decades. The data accuracy requirements to support road management have decreased from tens of meters to a few decimeters with annual update rates. Roads are prioritized for maintenance and treatment as a result of pavement inspections. The cost of frequent, comprehensive inspec...

Coal-tar-based sealcoat products, widely used in the central and eastern U.S. on parking lots, driveways, and even playgrounds, are typically 20-35% coal-tar pitch, a known human carcinogen that contains about 200 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) compounds. Research continues to identify environmental compartments-including stormwater runoff, lake sediment, soil, house dust, and most recen...

With the advancement of 3D line laser imaging technology (“3D technology”, hereafter for the sake of brevity), high-resolution 3D transverse profile data (“3D data”, hereafter for the sake of brevity), has gained widespread interest from researchers, industry and highway agencies and has been used for collecting pavement surface distresses. However, the study of data characteristics, e.g. data ...

Pavement cracks are important information for evaluating the road condition and conducting the necessary road maintenance. In this paper, we develop CrackTree, a fully-automatic method to detect cracks from pavement images. In practice, crack detection is a very challenging problem because of (1) low contrast between cracks and the surrounding pavement, (2) intensity inhomogeneity along the cra...

In determining certain infrastructure rehabilitation needs, it is sometimes important to consider user perceptions along with physical measures of infrastructure condition. Pavement roughness is one such case. A critical determinant of public satisfaction, user perception of pavement roughness can potentially play a critical role in the allocation of resources to competing highway resurfacing p...