In the last decade, our understanding of rice domestication has improved by new archaeological findings using advanced analytical techniques such as morphological and morphometric analyses on rice grains, spikelet bases and phytoliths, and ancient DNA analysis on rice remains. Previous studies have considered the size of rice bulliform phytoliths as a proxy for tracking the domestication process. These phytoliths are often abundant and well preserved in sediments, and their shape is under the control of numerous genes, which may shift toward larger sizes by genetic mutation in domestication. Therefore, it has been assumed that the bulliforms of domesticated rice are usually larger than those of wild ones; however, morphometric data supporting this assumption are lacking in the literature, thereby requiring additional evidence to test its veracity. In this study, the vertical and horizonal lengths of bulliform phytoliths were measured in four rice species (domesticated Oryza sativa and wild Oryza rufipogon, Oryza officinalis, and Oryza meyeriana) from different regions of southern China. We found that the bulliform morphometric data of wild and domesticated rice overlapped and that there was no statistically significant difference between them. Therefore, bulliform size could not be used as a diagnostic indicator to distinguish domesticated rice from wild species and is a supporting rather than conclusive proxy for determining the domesticated status of rice in archaeological research. We further found that larger rice bulliform sizes likely occurred at the locations with higher temperature, precipitation, and water levels, indicating hydrothermal environment is an alternative factor influencing the size of rice bulliform phytoliths. For further archaeological use of an increasing size trend of bulliform phytoliths to reveal the process of rice domestication, we present some suggestions for controlling the influence of hydrothermal factors. Even so, the combination of bulliform phytolith size with other established criteria is strongly suggested to provide precise identification of wild and domesticated rice in future research.
Ion transport through nanopores is a process of fundamental significance in nature and in engineering practice. Over the past decade, it has been found that the ion conductivity in nanopores could be drastically enhanced and different mechanisms have been proposed to explain this observation. To date, most reported studies have been carried out with relatively dilute electrolytes while ion transport in nanopores under high electrolyte concentrations (>1 M) has been rarely explored. Through systematic experimental and atomistic simulation studies with NaCl solutions, here we show that at high electrolyte concentrations, ion mobility in small nanopores could be significantly reduced from the corresponding bulk value. Subsequent molecular dynamics studies indicate that in addition to the low mobility of surface-bound ions in the Stern layer, enhanced pairing and collisions between partially dehydrated ions of opposite charges also make important contributions to the reduced ion mobility. Furthermore, we show that the extent of mobility reduction depends on the association constant between cations and anions in different electrolytes with a more drastic reduction for a larger association constant.
SUMMARYA fourth-order compact ÿnite di erence scheme on the nine-point 2D stencil is formulated for solving the steady-state Navier-Stokes=Boussinesq equations for two-dimensional, incompressible uid ow and heat transfer using the stream function-vorticity formulation. The main feature of the new fourth-order compact scheme is that it allows point-successive overrelaxation (SOR) or point-successive underrelaxation iteration for all Rayleigh numbers Ra of physical interest and all Prandtl numbers Pr attempted. Numerical solutions are obtained for the model problem of natural convection in a square cavity with benchmark solutions and compared with some of the accurate results available in the literature.
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