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Effect of ultrasonic pretreatment on aerobic/anoxic sludge digestion was investigated. In the first part of this study, the ultrasonic conditions for sludge pretreatment was optimized with orthogonal experiment for achieving better biological activity and disintegration of sludge, then the influence of sonication on the aerobic/anoxic digestibility was studied. The results revealed that the optimal ultrasonic condition is 28kHz, 0.15W/mL for 10 min. The aerobic/anoxic digestion was improved by sonication, using ultrasonic irradiation with optimal parameters, the VSS removal efficiency at the optimal conditions was increased by 20.30%, and digestion time was shorten by 8 d, compared to the control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is a fundamental process in bioinformatics in which phylogenetic tree reconstruction is an essential operation. Neighbor-Joining algorithm is the best approach to reconstruct phylogenetic tree with its less time and space costs. With the rapid increase of biological sequences, it will take many hours or even days to reconstruct phylogenetic tree because of the complex computing for multiple sequence alignment. In this paper, two mechanisms for parallelizing Neighbor-Joining algorithm are proposed based on CUDA to get higher performance of lower time and space costs. Data dependency is reduced by converting the running mode and dynamic multiple granularity mechanism is used to figure out imbalance guiding tree with lower rate of resources occupation and higher efficiency. The parallelization mechanisms have achieved average speedups of 18.6 for thousands of datasets as well as far genetic relationship datasets compared to the basic method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, the usage of the Terahertz (THz) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum has been investigated in the field of communications, medicine and biology. The evaluation of the THz wave performance in the applications requires supportive THz based devices such as emitter, detectors and filters. The efficient integration of the THz devices with the state of the art silicon based devices is limited by its typical diffraction limit (millimeters). In this abstract, a subwavelength Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPPs) based Bragg reflector is using Indium antimonide (InSb), Silicon-dioxide (SiO2) and Porous-SiO2, is proposed. The SPPs based wave propagation at THz allows the nanoscale realization of the THz based devices. The proposed plasmonic Bragg reflector utilizes the periodic changes of the dielectric material in the core layer, while InSb is used in the cladding layer. Finite Element Method (FEM) based simulations are used to demonstrate the working of the proposed subwavelength Bragg reflector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2007, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the Physical Activity and Location Measurement System (PALMS) project at the University of California, San Diego. Its mission is to advance exposure biology research by developing new methods of physical activity data capture and analysis from a geospatial perspective. A key early insight was that while exposure biology investigators often employ their own data analysis frameworks, many frameworks are conceptually similar. Forming a community based on common requirements and research directions, and serving that community with a common computing framework would, itself, be a major contribution to the NIH mission. This paper describes the PALMS Cyber infrastructure (CI), which comprises both the PALMS computing services and the exposure biology community it serves. By leveraging state of the art software architecture techniques, the PALMS CI is well positioned to serve the co evolution of a thriving research community and the computing systems that support it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]