Many nearby stars are surrounded by a bright ring or disk of cold dust. Our calculations show that these disks and rings of dust are signposts of recent planet formation. Bright rings appear because dust associated with the formation of a planet absorbs and scatters light from the central star. The calculations explain the rings observed so far and predict that all nascent solar systems have du...

We developed the first Monte-Carlo code for threedimensional self-consistent continuum radiative transfer calculations. The density structure of the dust configuration (disk/envelope/molecular cloud core) can be chosen arbitrarily as well as the number, configuration, and radiation parameters of the stars inside this configuration. Binaries and multiple stellar systems (with or without disks ar...

Coulomb cluster is a phenomenon in classical physics which is under substantial amount of attention. These clusters are characterized by the strong electrostatic interaction of highly charged particle trapped within an external confining potential. Examples of such systems include ion traps and quantum dots. Investigation in this area had been further encouraged in the past few decades with the...

People with physical disabilities have ranked object retrieval as a high-priority task for assistive robots. We have developed Dusty, a teleoperated mobile manipulator that fetches objects from the floor and delivers them to users at a comfortable height. In this paper, we first demonstrate the robot's high success rate (98.4%) when autonomously grasping 25 objects considered being important by...

A dusty plasma system containing Boltzmann-distributed electrons, non-thermal ions, and mobile charge fluctuating negative dust has been considered. The nonlinear propagation of the dust-acoustic (DA) waves in such a dusty plasma has been investigated by employing the reductive perturbation method. It has been found that the dust charge fluctuation is a source of dissipation, and is responsible...

We present results on number counts of Extremely Red Objects (EROs) in a 2850 arcmin 2 near-infrared survey performed in European Large Area ISO Survey (ELAIS) fields at K < 17.5. Counts of EROs are extended to brighter levels than available previously, giving 0.002 ± 0.001arcmin −2 at K < 16.5 and consistent numbers with literature values at fainter magnitudes. Photometric redshifts from HYPER...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is responsible for significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. We evaluated the characteristics of stable COPD patients in the pulmonology clinics of seven Asian cities and also evaluated whether the exposure to biomass fuels and dusty jobs were related to respiratory symptoms, airflow limitation, and quality of life in t...

This work reports on the recent advances in the continuum approach to dusty gas flow modeling through isotropic porous structures. This approach has received considerable attention over the last half century due to the need to develop dusty gas flow models capable of describing natural and industrial transport phenomena, including subsurface transport of dissolved or suspended particulates, des...