No abstract

There are various factors that affect soil electrical conductivity (EC) measurements, including soil texture, soil water content, cation exchange capacity (CEC) and others. Temperature is an important environmental variable, and different models can be used to correct for its effect on EC measurements and standardize the measurements to 25°C. It is relevant to analyze these models and to determine whether they are consistent with each other. Some models were wrongly cited. We found that the exponential model of Sheets and Hendrickx as corrected by Corwin and Lesch in 2005 performs the best. The ratio model also performs well between 3°C and 47°C.

Origami-based designs refer to the application of the ancient art of origami to solve engineering problems of different nature. Despite being implemented at dimensions that range from the nano to the meter scale, origami-based designs are always defined by the laws that govern their geometrical properties at any scale. It is thus not surprising to notice that the study of their applications has become of cross-disciplinary interest. This article aims to review recent origami-based applications in engineering, design methods and tools, with a focus on research outcomes from 2015 to 2020. First, an introduction to origami history, mathematical background and terminology is given. Origami-based applications in engineering are reviewed largely in the following fields: biomedical engineering, architecture, robotics, space structures, biomimetic engineering, fold-cores, and metamaterials. Second, design methods, design tools, and related manufacturing constraints are discussed. Finally, the article concludes with open questions and future challenges.

No abstract

Rigid origami is seen as a fundamental model in many self-folding machines. A key issue in designing origami is the rigid/nonrigid foldability. The kinematic and foldability of Kresling origami, which is based on an origami pattern of the vertex with six creases, are studied in this paper. The movement of the single-vertex is first discussed. Based on the quaternion method, the loop-closure equation of the vertex with six creases is obtained. Then, the multitransformable behavior of the single vertex is investigated. Furthermore, the rigid foldability of origami patterns with multivertex is investigated with an improved dual quaternion method, which is based on studying the folding angle and the coordinates of all vertices. It can be found that the Kresling cylinder is not rigidly foldable.

Linear mixed models (LMMs) are widely used for heritability estimation in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In standard approaches to heritability estimation with LMMs, a genetic relationship matrix (GRM) must be specified. In GWAS, the GRM is frequently a correlation matrix estimated from the study population's genotypes, which corresponds to a normalized Euclidean distance kernel. In this paper, we show that reliance on the Euclidean distance kernel contributes to several unresolved modeling inconsistencies in heritability estimation for GWAS. These inconsistencies can cause biased heritability estimates in the presence of linkage disequilibrium (LD), depending on the distribution of causal variants. We show that these biases can be resolved (at least at the modeling level) if one adopts a Mahalanobis distance-based GRM for LMM analysis. Additionally, we propose a new definition of partitioned heritabilitythe heritability attributable to a subset of genes or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) -using the Mahalanobis GRM, and show that it inherits many of the nice consistency properties identified in our original analysis. Partitioned heritability is a relatively new area for GWAS analysis, where inconsistency issues related to LD have previously been known to be especially pernicious.

No abstract

Creep and relaxation characteristics of stem for rice seedlings grown in plastic cell tray were studied by static tensile testing, in order to determine the relationship between characteristic parameters (rheological model parameters, stress components and strain components) and test levels (stress levels and strain levels). Rice seedling stem specimen used in the test was 40 mm in length. And the applied test values for the creep and relaxation test ranged from 1.0-3.0 MPa and 1.5%-3.5%, respectively, each for 5 levels. The results indicated that elastic modulus in the creep and relaxation model was not affected by test levels. However, except that viscosity coefficient η kv was a constant and η m1 decreased with the increase of test levels, other viscosity coefficient and rheological time nonlinearly increased as the test levels increased. And strain components in the creep model and stress components in the relaxation model significantly increased as the test levels increased.