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The rooftop is a default location for photovoltaic solar panels and is often not enough to offset increasing building energy consumption. The vertical surface of urban buildings offers a prime location to harness solar energy. The overall goal of this research is to evaluate power production potentials and multi-functionalities of a 3D building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) facade system. The traditional BIPV which is laminated with window glass obscures the view-out and limits daylight penetration. Unlike the traditional system, the 3D solar module was configured to reflect the sun path geometry to maximize year-round solar exposure and energy production. In addition, the 3D BIPV façade offers multiple functionalities – solar regulations, daylighting penetration, and view-out, resulting in energy savings from heating, cooling, and artificial lighting load. Its ability to produce solar energy offsets building energy consumption and contributes to net-zero-energy buildings. Both solar simulations and physical prototyping were carried out to investigate the promises and challenges of the 3D BIPV façade system compared to a traditional BIPV system. With climate emergency on the rise and the need for clean, sustainable energy becoming ever more pressing, the 3D BIPV façade in this paper offers a creative approach to tackling the problems of power production, building energy savings, and user health and wellbeing. 

USB Power Delivery (USBPD) is a state-of-the-art charging protocol for advanced power supply. Thanks to its high volume of power supply, it has been widely adopted by consumer devices, such as smartphones and laptops, and has become the de facto USB charging standard in both EU and North America. Due to the low-level nature of charging and the complexity of the protocol, USBPD is often implemented as proprietary firmware running on a dedicated microcontroller unit (MCU) with a USBPD physical layer. Bugs within these implementations can not only lead to safety issues, e.g., over-charging, but also cause security issues, such as allowing attackers to reflash USBPD firmware. This paper proposes FUZZPD, the first black-box fuzzing technique with dual-role state guidance targeting off-the-shelf USBPD devices with closed-source USBPD firmware. FUZZPD only requires a physical USB Type-C connection to operate in a plug-n-fuzz fashion. To facilitate the black-box fuzzing of USBPD firmware, FUZZPD manually creates a dual-role state machine from the USBPD specification, which enables both state coverage and transitions from fuzzing inputs. FUZZPD further provides a multi-level mutation strategy, allowing for fine-grained state-aware fuzzing with intra- and inter-state mutations. We implement FUZZPD using a Chromebook as the fuzzing host and evaluate it against 12 USBPD mobile devices from 7 different vendors, 7 USB hubs from 7 different vendors, and 5 chargers from 5 different vendors. FUZZPD has found 15 unique bugs, 9 of which have been confirmed by the corresponding vendors. We additionally conduct a comparison between FUZZPD and multiple state-of-the-art black-box fuzzing techniques, demonstrating that FUZZPD achieves code coverage that is 40% to 3x higher than other solutions. We then compare FUZZPD with the USBPD compliance test suite from USBIF and show that FUZZPD can find 7 more bugs with 2x higher code coverage. FUZZPD is the first step towards secure and trustworthy USB charging. 

Abstract We analyze the cooling and feedback properties of 48 galaxy clusters at redshifts 0.4 < z < 1.3 selected from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) catalogs to evolve like the progenitors of massive and well-studied systems at z ∼ 0. We estimate the radio power at the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) location of each cluster from an analysis of Australia Telescope Compact Array data. Assuming that the scaling relation between the radio power and active galactic nucleus (AGN) cavity power P cav observed at low redshift does not evolve with redshift, we use these measurements in order to estimate the expected AGN cavity power in the core of each system. We estimate the X-ray luminosity within the cooling radius L cool of each cluster from a joint analysis of the available Chandra X-ray and SPT Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ) data. This allows us to characterize the redshift evolution of the P cav / L cool ratio. When combined with low-redshift results, these constraints enable investigations of the properties of the feedback–cooling cycle across 9 Gyr of cluster growth. We model the redshift evolution of this ratio measured for cool-core clusters by a log-normal distribution Log -  ( α + β z , σ 2 ) and constrain the slope of the mean evolution to β = −0.05 ± 0.47. This analysis improves the constraints on the slope of this relation by a factor of two. We find no evidence of redshift evolution of the feedback–cooling equilibrium in these clusters, which suggests that the onset of radio-mode feedback took place at an early stage of cluster formation. High values of P cav / L cool are found at the BCG location of noncool-core clusters, which might suggest that the timescales of the AGN feedback cycle and the cool core–noncool core transition are different. This work demonstrates that the joint analysis of radio, SZ, and X-ray data solidifies the investigation of AGN feedback at high redshifts. 

We investigate structural properties of massive galaxy populations in the central regions (< 0.7  r 500 ) of five very massive ( M 200  > 4 × 10 14   M ⊙ ), high-redshift (1.4 ≲  z  ≲ 1.7) galaxy clusters from the 2500 deg 2 South Pole Telescope Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect (SPT-SZ) survey. We probe the connection between galaxy structure and broad stellar population properties at stellar masses of log( M / M ⊙ ) > 10.85. We find that quiescent and star-forming cluster galaxy populations are largely dominated by bulge- and disk-dominated sources, respectively, with relative contributions being fully consistent with those of field counterparts. At the same time, the enhanced quiescent galaxy fraction observed in these clusters with respect to the coeval field is reflected in a significant morphology-density relation, with bulge-dominated galaxies already clearly dominating the massive galaxy population in these clusters at z  ∼ 1.5. At face value, these observations show no significant environmental signatures in the correlation between broad structural and stellar population properties. In particular, the Sersic index and axis ratio distribution of massive, quiescent sources are consistent with field counterparts, in spite of the enhanced quiescent galaxy fraction in clusters. This consistency suggests a tight connection between quenching and structural evolution towards a bulge-dominated morphology, at least in the probed cluster regions and galaxy stellar mass range, irrespective of environment-related processes affecting star formation in cluster galaxies. We also probe the stellar mass–size relation of cluster galaxies, and find that star-forming and quiescent sources populate the mass–size plane in a manner largely similar to their field counterparts, with no evidence of a significant size difference for any probed sub-population. In particular, both quiescent and bulge-dominated cluster galaxies have average sizes at fixed stellar mass consistent with their counterparts in the field. 

This study introduces an Augmented-Reality-based learning system that aims to support young students’ embodied learning in block-based programming activities where they learn computational concepts and create meaningful chunks of codes. Students are going to perform episode-embedded path-finding tasks, which are designed to practice their capacities of applying computational thinking in a reasonable manner to solve problems within different scenarios. Grounded on an embodied cognition approach, the AR integration creates a concrete and tangible environment for young students to understand abstract conceptual knowledge in an engaging and interactive way, with a close connection built between the real and virtual worlds. 

ABSTRACT We present MUSE spectroscopy, Megacam imaging, and Chandra X-ray emission for SPT-CL J0307-6225, a $z = 0.58$ major merging galaxy cluster with a large BCG-SZ centroid separation and a highly disturbed X-ray morphology. The galaxy density distribution shows two main overdensities with separations of 0.144 and 0.017 arcmin to their respective BCGs. We characterize the central regions of the two colliding structures, namely 0307-6225N and 0307-6225S, finding velocity derived masses of M200, N = 2.44 ± 1.41 × 1014M⊙ and M200, S = 3.16 ± 1.88 × 1014M⊙, with a line-of-sight velocity difference of |Δv| = 342 km s−1. The total dynamically derived mass is consistent with the SZ derived mass of 7.63 h$_{70}^{-1}$ ± 1.36 × 1014M⊙. We model the merger using the Monte Carlo Merger Analysis Code, estimating a merging angle of 36$^{+14}_{-12}$ ° with respect to the plane of the sky. Comparing with simulations of a merging system with a mass ratio of 1:3, we find that the best scenario is that of an ongoing merger that began 0.96$^{+0.31}_{-0.18}$ Gyr ago. We also characterize the galaxy population using Hδ and [O ii] λ3727 Å lines. We find that most of the emission-line galaxies belong to 0307-6225S, close to the X-ray peak position with a third of them corresponding to red-cluster sequence galaxies, and the rest to blue galaxies with velocities consistent with recent periods of accretion. Moreover, we suggest that 0307-6225S suffered a previous merger, evidenced through the two equally bright BCGs at the centre with a velocity difference of ∼674 km s−1.