Industrial and technological change and increased urbanization has altered the face of nature. And nature is being consumed in the production of material goods. Environmental crises such as the condition of Lake Urumieh in north western Iran demonstrates that unregulated use of the natural environment disrupts ecosystems that threaten the survival of plant species, animals and humans. Environme...

A new evolutionary programming algorithm (NEP) using the non-uniform mutation operator instead of Gaussian or Cauchy mutation operators is proposed. NEP has the merits of “long jumps” of the Cauchy mutation operator at the early stage of the algorithm and “fine-tunings” of the Gaussian mutation operator at the later stage. Comparisons with the recently proposed sequential and parallel evolution...

Communication networks shared by sellsh users are considered and modeled as nonco-operative repeated games. Each user is interested only in optimizing its own performance by controlling the routing of its load. We investigate the existence of a Nash equilibrium point (NEP) that achieves the system-wide optimum cost. The existence of a subgame-perfect NEP that not only achieves the system-wide o...

Light availability is an important factor driving primary productivity in benthic ecosystems, but in situ and remote sensing measurements of light quality are limited for coral reefs and seagrass beds. We evaluated the productivity responses of a patch reef and a seagrass site in the Lower Florida Keys to ambient light availability and spectral quality. In situ optical properties were character...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by the accumulation of β-amyloid peptide (Aβ) in the brain because of an imbalance between Aβ production and clearance. Neprilysin (NEP) is the most important Aβ-degrading enzyme in the brain. Thus, researchers have explored virus-mediated NEP gene delivery. However, such strategies may entail unexpected risks, and thus exploration of a new possibility ...

Future actively cooled space-borne observatories for the far-infrared, loosely defined as a 1--10 THz band, can potentially reach sensitivity limited only by background radiation from Universe. This will result in an increase observing speed of many orders magnitude. A spectroscopic instrument on such observatory requires large arrays detectors with expressed noise equivalent power NEP = 3 $\ti...

We present the characterization of commercial tunnel diode low-level microwave power detectors at room and cryogenic temperatures. The sensitivity as well as the output voltage noise of the tunnel diodes is measured as functions of the applied microwave power. We highlight strong variations of the diode characteristics when the applied microwave power is higher than a few microwatts. For a diod...

Abstract Nanomechanical spectroscopy (NMS) is a recently developed approach to determine optical absorption spectra of nanoscale materials via mechanical measurements. It based on measuring changes in the resonance frequency membrane resonator vs. photon energy incoming light. This method direct measurement absorption, which has practical advantages compared common approaches. In case two-dimen...

Abstract High-performance terahertz wave detectors at room temperature are still urgently required for a wide range of applications. The available technologies, however, plagued by low sensitivity, narrow spectral bandwidth, complicated structure, and high noise equivalent power (NEP). Here, we have demonstrated Weyl semimetal surface plasmon-enhanced high-performance which based on microdisk a...

With the advent of large submillimeter telescopes at high, dry sites, the atmospheric background noise in a moderate bandwidth can be low enough to challenge the ability of instrument designers to produce su ciently low noise bolometers to be background limited. We compare the predictions for the noise power of a bolometer observing through an emissive atmosphere, considering the e ect of atmos...