BACKGROUND Plant leaves, as the main photosynthetic organs and the high energy converters among primary producers in terrestrial ecosystems, have attracted significant research attention. Leaf lifespan is an adaptive characteristic formed by plants to obtain the maximum carbon in the long-term adaption process. It determines important functional and structural characteristics exhibited in the e...

Object correlation and maneuver detection are persistent problems in space surveillance and space object catalog maintenance. This paper demonstrates the utility of using quadratic trajectory control cost, an analog to the trajectory L2-norm in control, as a distance metric with which to both correlate object tracks and detect maneuvers using Uncorrelated Tracks (UCTs), real-time sensor measure...

Although the optical microscope has been the main tool for observations of etched tracks in solid state nuclear track detectors for many years, there has been relatively little investigation about the optical characteristics of these tracks. This chapter describes the application of the ray tracing method to light propagation through these etched tracks. The method is shown to be able to reprod...

The Northern Hemisphere storm tracks have maximum intensity over the Pacific and Atlantic basins; their intensity is reduced over the continents downstream. Here, simulations with an idealized aquaplanet general circulation model are used to demonstrate that even without continents, storm tracks have a self-determined longitudinal length scale. Their length is controlled primarily by the planet...

1 The medical staff might not have to be represented here since they only enter what factors that should be monitored and so they can be seen as the same entity as the nurses' station.