It was empirically showed that seed size and life history correlate with the formation of a soil seed bank. Although no empirical data are available that indicate a close relationship between seed dormancy and the soil seed bank, dormancy has been considered essential to the formation of a soil seed bank. I have considered the formation of the soil seed bank and survival of seeds for more than a year in the soil, and the persistence and survival of the seed bank for more than 5 years. These periods were derived from the definition of a persistent seed bank and the criterion for seed banks of long-term persistence. Plant traits that are closely related to the formation or persistence of a seed bank and their relationships to dormancy were analysed using two pre-existing databases of seed longevity in soil and comparative ecology. The integrated database comprised 18 plant traits and seed bank formation or persistence data. This approach was used to identify more reliable general empirical rules. The results of a regression tree analysis and common statistical tests of plant traits indicated that only life history and seed size were closely related to seed bank formation, and dormancy was not essential for the formation and persistence of a seed bank. However, the contribution of dormancy differed slightly between dormancy types. Scarification or dry storage requirements to break dormancy slightly enhanced the formation and persistence of a seed bank, whereas a chilling requirement decreased the formation and persistence of a seed bank. In contrast, fluctuating temperature requirements clearly contributed to the formation and persistence of a seed bank.

Control systems for Autonomous mobile delivery robots have been described before. However, the control they provide is limited, leaving potential for serious errors. The current mobile robot systems concentrate on position accuracy and operational function but leave open management of safety hazards such as entering the dangerous and not intended areas as stairway. In order to increase the safety of the robot, it is as important to work with sensors installed in the external environment as the sensors installed on the robot. For this purpose, visible light communication (VLC) is a promising device to be used with the robot system. VLC creates an in-house GPS system by installing special LED lights that can replace standard lighting in key locations in the hospital. We have developed an in-hospital transportation robot, called HOSPI in which the control system has been enhanced by combining the navigational sensors of the robot and a VLC using installed lighting in the building. By using VLC, robots can obtain more information about the environment. As the first step for the practical application of VLC to robot system, we use VLC to overcome problems in conventional localization approaches, and to provide an additional line of defense in the case of catastrophic failures. This paper also describes experimental and actual operational results in detail of robots equipped, in an actual hospital, with the described process.

Most polymers solidify below a glass transition temperature (T g), which is important for the fabrication of polymeric materials. The glass transition dynamics (GTD) of polymers alters their physical properties and therefore the range of applications suitable for the particular materials. In this regard, most GTD studies were oriented to the thermodynamics of amorphous polymer systems, while little studies were known for semicrystalline polymers. Here, we focus on the glassy and crystalline properties of semicrystalline polymers such as poly(l-lactic acid) (PLLA) and envisage to control the nanostructure of free-standing PLLA ultrathin films (referred as “PLLA nanosheets”), via thermodynamic rearrangement of polymer chains entangled in a quasi-two-dimensional interface during the GTD process. The annealing process on the PLLA nanosheets (<100 nm thick) resulted in the formation of semicrystalline domains and microscopic apertures with polymer chains (∼100 nm in size). Such nanostructure surprisingly induced selective molecular permeability, which was controlled as a function of film thickness and inherent crystallinity. The present methodology demonstrates the direct conversion of thermodynamic properties of semicrystalline polymers into the functional nanostructured polymeric materials.

In this paper we give a new signature algorithm that allows for controlled changes to the signed data. The change operations we study are removal of subdocuments (redaction), pseudonymization, and gradual deidentification of hierarchically structured data. These operations are applicable in a number of practically relevant application scenarios, including the release of previously classified government documents, privacy-aware management of audit-log data, and the release of tables of health records. When applied directly to redaction, our algorithm improves on [18] by reducing significantly the overhead of cryptographic information that has to be stored with the original data.

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