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The known effects of thermodynamics and aerosols can well explain the thunderstorm activity over land, but fail over oceans. Here, tracking the full lifecycle of tropical deep convective cloud clusters shows that adding fine aerosols significantly increases the lightning density for a given rainfall amount over both ocean and land. In contrast, adding coarse sea salt (dry radius > 1 μm), known as sea spray, weakens the cloud vigor and lightning by producing fewer but larger cloud drops, which accelerate warm rain at the expense of mixed-phase precipitation. Adding coarse sea spray can reduce the lightning by 90% regardless of fine aerosol loading. These findings reconcile long outstanding questions about the differences between continental and marine thunderstorms, and help to understand lightning and underlying aerosol-cloud-precipitation interaction mechanisms and their climatic effects.

This study describes general methods for the enantioselective syntheses of pharmaceutically relevant 1-aryl-2-heteroaryl- and 1,2-diheteroarylcyclopropane-1-carboxylates through dirhodium tetracarboxylate-catalysed asymmetric cyclopropanation of vinyl heterocycles with aryl- or heteroaryldiazoacetates. The reactions are highly diastereoselective and high asymmetric induction could be achieved using either ( R )-pantolactone as a chiral auxiliary or chiral dirhodium tetracarboxylate catalysts. For meta - or para -substituted aryl- or heteroaryldiazoacetates the optimum catalyst was Rh 2 ( R-p -Ph-TPCP) 4 . In the case of ortho -substituted aryl- or heteroaryldiazoacetates, the optimum catalyst was Rh 2 ( R -TPPTTL) 4 . For a highly enantioselective reaction with the ortho -substituted substrates, 2-chloropyridine was required as an additive in the presence of either 4 Å molecular sieves or 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP). Under the optimized conditions, the cyclopropanation could be conducted in the presence of a variety of heterocycles, such as pyridines, pyrazines, quinolines, indoles, oxadiazoles, thiophenes and pyrazoles.

We consider an unconstrained tangential Dirichlet boundary control problem for the Stokes equations with an $ L^2 $ penalty on the boundary control.  The contribution of this paper is twofold.  First, we obtain well-posedness and regularity results for the tangential Dirichlet control problem on a convex polygonal domain.  The analysis contains new features not found in similar Dirichlet control problems for the Poisson equation; an interesting result is that the optimal control has higher local regularity on the individual edges of the domain compared to the global regularity on the entire boundary.  Second, we propose and analyze a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method to approximate the solution.  For convex polygonal domains, our theoretical convergence rate for the control is optimal with respect to the global regularity on the entire boundary.  We present numerical experiments to demonstrate the performance of the HDG method.

Thermal rectification is an exotic thermal transport phenomenon which allows heat to transfer in one direction but block the other. We demonstrate an unusual dual-mode solid-state thermal rectification effect using a heterogeneous “irradiated-pristine” polyethylene nanofiber junction as a nanoscale thermal diode, in which heat flow can be rectified in both directions by changing the working temperature. For the nanofiber samples measured here, we observe a maximum thermal rectification factor as large as ~50%, which only requires a small temperature bias of <10 K. The tunable nanoscale thermal diodes with large rectification and narrow temperature bias open up new possibilities for developing advanced thermal management, energy conversion and, potentially thermophononic technologies.