As a molten alloy or any multi-component liquid is cooled and solidified the growing solid phase usually forms a porous matrix through which the residual liquid can flow. The reactive two-phase medium comprising the solid matrix and residual liquid is called a mushy layer. Buoyancy forces, owing primarily to compositional depletion as one or more of the components of the alloy are extracted to ...

Neocortical microcircuits of primary sensory cortices play prominent roles in processing peripheral input. The same cortical microcircuits are also spontaneously active, which profoundly influences sensory processing. In this issue of Neuron, Sakata and Harris compare spontaneous and sensory-evoked activity in rat primary auditory cortex, finding interesting similarities and important differences.

Feature-Oriented Programming (FOP) is an appropriate programming paradigm to implement program families and incremental designs. Beside numerous strengths in doing that FOP yields several drawbacks, especially regarding the ability to localize and modularize crosscutting concerns. This is exactly the strength of another prominent programming paradigm, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). In this ...

This document contains a brief overview of the JL compiler’s design (version 2) [4]. The compiler supports bounded parametric classes and interfaces, mixins, static virtual typing, deep conformance, constructor propagation, and the class flattening optimization. The intent of this document is to provide a basis for an implementation plan, so we provide the detail needed to gauge the development...