Motivated by the industrial manufacture of organic light-emitting-diode displays, we formulate and analyse a mathematical model for the evolution of a thin droplet in a shallow axisymmetric well of rather general shape both before and after touchdown that accounts for the spatially non-uniform evaporation of the fluid, perform physical experiments using three cylindrical wells with different small aspect ratios, and validate the mathematical model by comparing the present experimental results with the corresponding theoretical predictions for a cylindrical well.

Cahokia is the largest documented urban settlement in the pre-Columbian United States. Archaeological evidence suggests that the city, located near what is now East St. Louis, Illinois, began to rapidly expand starting around AD 1050. At its height, Cahokia extended across 1000 ha and included large plazas, timber palisade walls, and hundreds of monumental earthen mounds. Following several centuries of occupation, the city experienced a period of gradual abandonment from about AD 1200 to 1400. Here, we present geochemical data from a 1500-year-old sediment core from nearby Horseshoe Lake that records watershed impacts associated with the growth and decline of Cahokia. Sedimentary analysis shows a distinctive 24-cm-thick, gray, fine-grained layer formed between AD 1150 and 1220 and characterized by low carbonate δ13C, elevated sorbed metal concentrations, and higher organic matter δ15N. The deposition of this layer is contemporaneous with archaeological evidence of increased agricultural activity, earthen mound construction, and higher populations surrounding the lake. We hypothesize that these human impacts increased soil erosion, producing new sediment sources from deeper soil horizons, and shifted dissolved transport to the lake, producing lower carbonate δ13C values, higher concentrations of lead, copper, potassium, and aluminum, and increased δ15N, likely due to contributions of enriched nitrogen from sewage.

The strain relaxation of sputter-deposited epitaxial Fe on Cu(001)/MgO(001) was observed in-situ for coverages of I to 200 equivalent monolayers of Fe. Grazing incidence x-ray scattering (GIXS) with synchrotron radiation allowed the precise determination of the in-plane strain in the Fe film. The highest observed elastic strain for the Fe was -10.3% which is in agreement with the lattice parameter mismatch between Fe and Cu for both (001)- and {211}-oriented growth. In-plane rocking curves revealed a bifurcation of the Fe(110) and Fe(220) peaks which is due to the rotation of islands to reduce strain energy. The angle of rotation of these islands was found to depend upon the amount of strain relaxation that had occurred in each island, in agreement with a simple theory for strain relaxation via the creation of a misfit dislocation network. The absence of Fe(200) intensity at small Fe thicknesses, coupled with out-of-plane symmetric and pole figure scans, suggest that Fe islands are tilted out of the plane of the sample about the Fe<110> axes by an angle consistent with Fe{211}-oriented growth. At larger thicknesses Fe(001) growth becomes dominant.