Dust devils are convective vortices rendered visible by lofted dust, and may be a significant means of injecting dust into the atmosphere, on both Earth and Mars. The fraction of vortices that are dust-laden is not well-understood, however. Here we report a May/June 2013 survey on a Nevada desert playa using small stations that record pressure and solar flux with high time resolution (2 Hz): th...

Observations of distant supernovae show that the light of supernovae Ia is dimmer than it would be in a decelerating universe. Several effects might be responsible for this phenomenon: cosmological constant, evolution of supernovae, selection bias, gravitational lensing, intergalactic dust, and influence of inhomogeneous distribution of matter on light propagation. All of these effects but the ...

Despite that OLED screen has been increasingly adopted in smartphones to save power; screen is still one of the most energy-consuming modules in smartphones. Techniques such as local dimming are proposed to further reduce the power consumption of OLED screen, but it is hard to decide which part of the screen could be dimmed, and it often results in compromised user experience. Intuitively, when...

Escape behaviors have been studied in zebrafish by neuroscientists seeking cellular-level descriptions of neural circuits but few studies have examined vertical swimming during escapes. We analyzed three-dimensional swimming paths of zebrafish larvae during visually-evoked and auditory-evoked escapes while the fish were in a cubical tank with equal vertical and lateral range. Visually evoked es...

This study assesses and evaluates the 40-year (1980–2019) Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research Applications v.2 (MERRA-2) surface solar radiation (SSR) as well its interdecadal changes (Δ(SSR)) against high quality reference measurements from 1397 Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA) 73 Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) stations. The is innovative since MERRA-2 has never been ...

The local dimming backlight technique enables liquid crystal display to present images with high contrast ratio and low power consumption. Considering that it is more important to make sure a high quality of the displayed image when reducing the power consumption, therefore, in this paper the new algorithm chooses RPSNR (the peak signal-to-noise ratio) =30 as the lowest standard to guarantee th...

Energy-constrained slot-amplitude modulation (ECSAM) enables light dimming, eliminates flicker and constrains the peak optical power while providing robust communication links. However, complexity of maximum-likelihood (ML) based ECSAM receiver increases exponentially with required spectral efficiency. This paper provides a comprehensive performance evaluation for indoor visible (VLC) channel m...