Although the decay in time estimates of the semi-group generated by the linearized Boltzmann operator without forcing have been well established, there is no corresponding result for the case with general external force. This paper is mainly concerned with the optimal decay estimates on the solution operator in some weighted Sobolev spaces for the linearized Boltzmann equation with a time dependent external force. No time decay assumption is made on the force. The proof is based on both the energy method through the macro-micro decomposition and the <i>L</i> ^<i>p</i>-<i>L</i> ^<i>q</i> estimates from the spectral analysis. The decay estimates thus obtained are applied to the study on the global existence of the Cauchy problem to the nonlinear Boltzmann equation with time dependent external force and source. Precisely, for space dimension <i>n</i>3, the

In this paper, we discuss the waiting time phenomena for a class of non-Newtonian polytropic filtration equation with convection. According to the influence of the convection on the waiting time property, the convection is classified into three classes, that is, the strong convection, the mild convection and the weak convection. For different cases, the sufficient and necessary conditions on the initial data are given for the existence of waiting time respectively.

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In this paper we introduce our preliminary research results for segmentation and labeling of 3-dimensional microscopy neuron image. We segment each of stacked 2-dimensional image slices using a partial differential equation (PDE) based algorithm and project previous slice segmentation result to the next slide as an initialization condition. Then we label neurons using an efficient connected component labeling algorithm. We show sample results obtained from real neuron image data

Diffusion-generated motion by mean curvature is a simple algorithm for producing motion by mean curvature of a surface, in which the motion is generated by alternately diffusing and renormalizing a characteristic function. In this paper, we generalize diffusion-generated motion to a procedure that can be applied to the curvature motion of filaments, i.e., curves in <i>R</i> ^3, that may initially consist of a complex configuration of links. The method consists of applying diffusion to a complex-valued function whose values wind around the filament, followed by normalization. We motivate this approach by considering the essential features of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, which is a reaction-diffusion PDE that describes the formation and propagation of filamentary structures. The new algorithm naturally captures topological merging and breaking of filaments without fattening curves. We justify the new