We report on the cosmic ray mass composition measured by the Telescope Array Low-energy Extension (TALE) hybrid detector. The TALE detector consists of a fluorescence detector (FD) station with 10 FD telescopes located at the Telescope Array (TA) Middle Drum FD Station (itself made up of 14 FD telescopes), and a surface detector (SD) array of scintillators. The array consists of 40 SDs with 400 m spacing and 40 SDs with 600 m spacing. In this paper, we present results on the measurement of the depth of shower maxima (Xmax) in the energy range from 1016.5 eV to 1018.5 eV collected over five years of the TALE hybrid detector. The Xmax distributions were analyzed and compared with Monte Carlo simulations of proton, helium, nitrogen, and iron primaries, using the QGSJet II-04 hadronic interaction model. Our results indicate that the elongation rate of the mean Xmax, which is defined as the slope of KXmaxi versus cosmic ray energy, exhibits a break around 1017 eV. Up to this energy, the composition becomes increasingly heavy, characterized by a growing dominance of heavy nuclei and a steadily decreasing fraction of light primaries. Beyond this energy, the proton fraction increases significantly with energy. These findings suggest a transition from Galactic to extra-Galactic cosmic ray sources around the so-called second knee.
Spherical cameras with 360 degrees field of view are widely used in virtual reality and robotics. A typical spherical camera consists of two fisheye cameras facing opposite directions, each covering more than a hemisphere. In such a setup, the distance between the viewpoints of the two fisheye cameras is very small. Consequently, the parameters necessary for synthesizing panoramic views from the two fisheye cameras can be reduced to the intrinsic parameters of each fisheye camera and the relative rotation between them. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised method for panoramic image generation using such dual-fisheye 360 degrees cameras. Our network employs a shared encoder with dedicated output heads to estimate intrinsic parameters (focal length and distortion coefficients) and a pose network to estimate the relative rotation between the two fisheye cameras. A differentiable projection module then synthesizes a panoramic image from the fisheye pair. This end-to-end framework requires no ground truth or manual annotations, leveraging the overlapping regions between fisheye images on the sphere. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Noncovalent interactions such as hydrogen bonds and pi-pi interactions are involved in the stabilization of three-dimensional structures and specific molecular recognition. We have recently developed the Negative Fragmentation Approach (NFA) to evaluate noncovalent interactions quantitatively, using quantum chemical calculations. Although NFA is effective for small and medium-sized systems, its direct application to large macromolecules such as proteins demands further refinement. Here, we extended the original NFA to evaluate noncovalent interactions in proteins by combining it with the ONIOM method. The NFA-ONIOM scheme was applied to a hydrogen bond between triangle(5)-3-ketosteroid isomerase and equilenin, an analogue of the intermediate.
In official promotional videos and media press, the malicious cut-out editing of content to misrepresent the speaker's intended meaning has long been recognized as a problem of misinformation/disinformation. This issue of selective cut-out editing has gained increasing attention, particularly in the context of the growing need for fact-checking mechanisms. Consequently, there is a strong demand for technical approaches to counteract propaganda strategies that exploit partial multimedia content extraction. However, cut-out editing is also an essential technique for compressing lengthy content into highlights or summaries, making outright regulation of such actions impractical. This study proposes a framework that applies cut-and-paste editing to official video releases, permitting clipping some segments and concatenating them while preventing malicious edits without undermining editorial discretion. By employing semantic analysis to identify potentially exploitable segments and their contextual or meaning-based relationships, the approach restricts intentional misrepresentative cut-and-paste editing. The resulting restricted version is then published as the original content, offering a defensive strategy against such manipulations.
This paper present a development of new multivariate optimal stopping problems which associated the discrete time or continuous time stochastic processes with a fractional reward criterion. By applying the established reasoning approach in mathematical programming theory, the existence of an optimal stopping time for these problems will be established by assuming certain regularity conditions on the stochastic processes.
