High-throughput low-cost digital lickometer system for the assessment of licking behaviours in mice.

Background: Proper hydration is essential for maintaining health and supports various biological processes, including temperature regulation, immune function, nutrient delivery, and organ function. Visual assessment has traditionally been used to quantify liquid intake, although technological advances in optical and electrical sensors now offer higher accuracy and larger potential for automatic operation with millisecond precision and individual lick resolution.

New Method: We describe an inexpensive electronic sensor board to monitor mouse licking behavior.

Coral spawning patterns of across two Maldivian reef ecosystems.

Understanding patterns in coral reproductive biology at local and regional scales is crucial to elucidate our knowledge of characteristics that regulate populations and communities. The lack of published data on coral spawning patterns in the Maldives hinders our understanding of coral reproductive biology and limits our ability to assess shifts in reproductive phenology over time. Here we document baseline environmental cues, spawning patterns, exact timings and oocyte development of restored and wild inhabiting shallow water reefs, across two Maldivian atolls.

Genetic and Phenotypic Analysis of Shoot Apical and Floral Meristem Development.

The shoot apical and floral meristems (SAM and FM, respectively) of Arabidopsis thaliana contain reservoirs of self-renewing stem cells that function as sources of progenitor cells for organ formation during development. The primary SAM produces all the aerial structures of the adult plant, while the FMs generate the four types of floral organs. Consequently, aberrant SAM and FM activity can profoundly affect vegetative and reproductive plant morphology.

Generation of the isolated highly elliptically polarized attosecond pulse using the polarization gating technique: TDDFT approach.

This paper theoretically investigates the generation of isolated elliptically polarized attosecond pulses with a tunable ellipticity from the interaction of Cl molecule and a polarization-gating laser pulse. A three-dimensional calculation based on the time-dependent density functional theory is done. Two different methods are proposed for generating elliptically polarized single attosecond pulses.

Nonlinear All-Optical Coherent Generation and Read-Out of Valleys in Atomically Thin Semiconductors.

With conventional electronics reaching performance and size boundaries, all-optical processes have emerged as ideal building blocks for high speed and low power consumption devices. A promising approach in this direction is provided by valleytronics in atomically thin semiconductors, where light-matter interaction allows to write, store, and read binary information into the two energetically degenerate but non-equivalent valleys. Here, nonlinear valleytronics in monolayer WSe is investigated and show that an individual ultrashort pulse with a photon energy tuned to half of the optical band-gap can be used to simultaneously excite (by coherent optical Stark shift) and detect (by a rotation in the polarization of the emitted second harmonic) the valley population.