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With the advent of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies, there has been a spike in stud-ies involving scRNA-seq of several tissues across diverse species includingDrosophila. Although a fewdatabases exist for users to query genes of interest within the scRNA-seq studies, search tools that enableusers to find orthologous genes and their cell type-specific expression patterns across species are limited.Here, we built a new search database, DRscDB (https://www.flyrnai.org/tools/single_cell/web/), toaddress this need. DRscDB serves as a comprehensive repository for published scRNA-seq datasets forDrosophilaand relevant datasets from human and other model organisms. DRscDB is based on manualcuration ofDrosophilascRNA-seq studies of various tissue types andmore »their corresponding analogoustissues in vertebrates including zebrafish, mouse, and human. Of note, our search database provides mostof the literature-derived marker genes, thus preserving the original analysis of the published scRNA-seqdatasets. Finally, DRscDB serves as a web-based user interface that allows users to mine gene expressiondata from scRNA-seq studies and perform cell cluster enrichment analyses pertaining to variousscRNA-seq studies, both within and across species.« less

The cranium of Adalatherium hui, as represented in the holotype and only specimen (UA 9030), is only the second known for any gondwanatherian mammal, the other being that of the sudamericid Vintana sertichi. Both Adalatherium and Vintana were recovered from the Upper Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Maevarano Formation of northwestern Madagascar. UA 9030 is the most complete specimen of a gondwanatherian yet known and includes, in addition to the cranium, both lower jaws and a complete postcranial skeleton. Aside from Adalatherium and Vintana, gondwanatherians are otherwise represented only by isolated teeth and lower jaw fragments, belonging to eight monotypic genera from Latemore »Cretaceous and Paleogene horizons of Madagascar, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, South America, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Although the anterior part of the cranium is very well preserved in UA 9030, the posterior part is not. Nonetheless, comparable parts of the crania of Adalatherium and Vintana indicate some level of common ancestry through possession of several synapomorphies, primarily related to the bony composition, articular relationships, and features of the snout region. Overprinted on this shared morphology are a host of autapomorphic features in each genus, some unique among mammaliaforms and some convergent upon therian mammals. The cranium of Adalatherium is compared with the crania of other mammaliamorphs, particularly those of allotherians or purported allotherians (i.e., haramiyidans, euharamiyidans, multituberculates, Cifelliodon, and Megaconus). Particular emphasis is placed on several recently described forms: the enigmatic Cifelliodon from the Early Cretaceous of Utah and several new taxa of euharamiyidans from the Late Jurassic of China.« less

A significant challenge for future virtual reality (VR) applications is to deliver high quality-of-experience, both in terms of video quality and responsiveness, over wireless networks with limited bandwidth. This paper proposes to address this challenge by leveraging the predictability of user movements in the virtual world. We consider a wireless system where an access point (AP) serves multiple VR users. We show that the VR application process consists of two distinctive phases, whereby during the first (proactive scheduling) phase the controller has uncertain predictions of the demand that will arrive at the second (deadline scheduling) phase. We then develop amore »predictive scheduling policy for the AP that jointly optimizes the scheduling decisions in both phases. In addition to our theoretical study, we demonstrate the usefulness of our policy by building a prototype system. We show that our policy can be implemented under Furion, a Unity-based VR gaming software, with minor modifications. Experimental results clearly show visible difference between our policy and the default one. We also conduct extensive simulation studies, which show that our policy not only outperforms others, but also maintains excellent performance even when the prediction of future user movements is not accurate.« less

In this paper, we study how to support high-quality immer- sive multiplayer VR on commodity mobile devices. First, we perform a scaling experiment that shows simply replicating the prior-art 2-layer distributed VR rendering architecture to multiple players cannot support more than one player due to the linear increase in network bandwidth requirement. Second, we propose to exploit the similarity of background environment (BE) frames to reduce the bandwidth needed for prefetching BE frames from the server, by caching and reusing similar frames. We nd that there is often little sim- ilarly between the BE frames of even adjacent locations inmore »the virtual world due to a “near-object” e ect. We propose a novel technique that splits the rendering of BE frames between the mobile device and the server that drastically enhances the similarity of the BE frames and reduces the network load from frame caching. Evaluation of our imple- mentation on top of Unity and Google Daydream shows our new VR framework, Coterie, reduces per-player network requirement by 10.6X-25.7X and easily supports 4 players for high-resolution VR apps on Pixel 2 over 802.11ac, with 60 FPS and under 16ms responsiveness.« less

The nucleation and growth of cobalt (Co) on blanket Si with extremely thin Co seed was studied in the presence of furil dioxime (FD). Cyclic voltammetry (CV), chronoamperometry, and galvanostatic nucleation studies were conducted to understand the effects of FD on Co nucleation process. A potential dependent suppression effect was observed at low potential with a breakdown of the suppression at high potential, resulting in a hysteresis in CV. The potentiostatic current transient experiments showed that side reactions and adsorption process both greatly affected Co nucleation. A well-established model, which deconvolutes the individual contributions to the total current transient, wasmore »applied to fit the experimental curves. Progressive and instantaneous Co nucleation were observed across different FD concentrations and applied potentials. Galvanostatic studies further proved the suppression effect of FD and the effects on film morphology were studied at different conditions.

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