The merge areas of freeway work zones include relatively significant safety hazards that have continuously led to urgent safety issues to be solved by the management departments. In order to make up for the cumbersome process of independent identification of rear-end collision and lane change collision on complex road sections, an appropriate identification method of traffic conflicts in the merge area of freeway work zone was explored, this study collected vehicle running tracking data from the merge areas of multiple work zones, using an unmanned aerial vehicle video technique. Based on an inter-frame difference method and the principle of a spatio-temporal context visual tracking algorithm, the vehicles were detected and tracked, and the coordinate data of the vehicles in continuous motion were parsed using MATLAB extension tools. Based on the behavior characteristics of vehicle conflict avoidance, a new identification method for evading severe traffic conflicts is proposed according to the initial velocity, acceleration and accident rate of section traffic. Then, a statistical analysis was performed on the spatial distribution characteristics of the traffic conflicts in typical merge areas. The impacts of the road conditions in work zones, vehicle factors, and traffic flow factors on the traffic conflicts were analyzed. A binomial logistic model was established to identify the main influencing factors. The results show that in the merge area of the freeway work zone, there are serious traffic conflicts between vehicles in the following two situations: (Ⅰ) v∈[7,13.5] m/s and a∈[-3.96,-0.65]m/s2; and (Ⅱ) v∈[13.5,24.3] m/s, and a∈[-3.96,-1.57] m/s2. The probabilities of serious traffic conflicts in the first and last 25 m of the merge area are greater than those in the other sections. The smaller the space between the upstream work zone and the merge area, the greater the probability of serious traffic conflicts between vehicles. When the average vehicle speed is relatively high, the probability of serious conflicts is the highest, i.e., by a multiple of 5.95 from the baseline. Moreover, the probability of serious conflicts between vehicles is higher for larger vehicles, i.e., 4.765 times that for small vehicles. The research results can serve as a reference for freeway management departments to improve the safety levels of merge areas during road work. For example, the probability of serious conflicts can be effectively reduced by setting up reasonable speed limit signs in the work zone, increasing the spacing between work zone and merge area, and appropriately diverting large vehicles.

The scope of this work was part of our previous research on Pulsed Power Plasma Stimulation Technique. Electromagnetic fields generated during a pulsed power plasma discharge were simulated using a finite element method in the COMSOL RF module. The field distributions were calculated during and after the pulse. The current paper takes advantage of prior work measuring and modeling the current distribution in the plasma arc. Agreement with laboratory experimental measurements provides support for extension of the model to reservoir scale. The validated model was used to quantify the signal attenuation level in different medium environment.

A enantioselective tandem transformation concerning asymmetric allylic decarboxylative addition and cyclization of N-nosylimines with vinylethylene carbonates (VECs) in the presence of [Rh(C2H4)2Cl]2, chiral sulfoxide-N-olefin tridentate ligand has been developed. The reaction of VECs with various substituted N-nosylimines proceeded smoothly under mild conditions, giving highly functionalized oxazolidine frameworks in good to high yields with good to excellent enantioselectivity.

Plastic flow in body-centered cubic (bcc) alloys is governed by the thermally-activated screw dislocation motion. In bcc interstitial solid solutions, solute diffusion can occur at very fast rates owing to low migration energies and solute concentrations. Under mechanical loading, solutes may move on the same or similar time scale as dislocations glide, even at low temperatures, potentially resulting in very rich co-evolution processes that may have important effects in the overall material response. It is therefore important to accurately quantify the coupling between interstitial impurities and dislocations, so that larger-scale models can correctly account for their (co)evolution. In this paper, we use electronic structure calculations to obtain the energetics of oxygen diffusion under stress and its interaction energy with screw dislocation cores in bcc tungsten. We find that oxygen atoms preferentially migrate from tetrahedral to tetrahedral sites with an energy of 0.2 eV. This energy couples only weakly to hydrostatic and deviatoric deformations, with activation volumes of less than $0.02$ and $0.2b^3$, respectively. The strongest effect is found for the inelastic interaction between O atoms and screw dislocation cores, which leads to attractive energies on the order of 1.5 eV and a structural transformation of the screw dislocation core from an `easy' to a `hard' core configuration

Aborycin is a type I lasso peptide with a stable interlocked structure, offering a favorable framework for drug development. The aborycin biosynthetic gene cluster gul from marine sponge-associated Streptomyces sp. HNS054 was cloned and integrated into the chromosome of S. coelicolor hosts with different copies. The 3-copy gul-integration strains S. coelicolor M1346::3gul showed better production than one-copy or 2-copy gul-integration strains, and the total titer reached approximately 10.4 mg/L, i.e., 2.1 times that of the native strain. Then, five regulatory genes, phoU (SCO4228), wblA (SCO3579), SCO1712, orrA (SCO3008) and gntR (SCO1678), which were reported to have negative effects on secondary metabolism, were further knocked out from the M1346::3gul genome by CRISPR/Cas9 technology. While the ΔSCO1712 mutant showed a significant decrease (4.6 mg/L) and the ΔphoU mutant showed no significant improvement (12.1 mg/L) in aborycin production, the ΔwblA, ΔorrA and ΔgntR mutations significantly improved the aborycin titers to approximately 23.6 mg/L, 56.3 mg/L and 48.2 mg/L, respectively, which were among the highest heterologous yields for lasso peptides in both Escherichia coli systems and Streptomyces systems. Thus, this study provided important clues for future studies on enhancing antibiotic production in Streptomyces systems.

Aromatic azo compounds have -N=N- double bonds as well as larger π electron conjugation system, which endows aromatic azo compounds with wide applications in the fields of functional materials. The properties of aromatic azo compounds are closely related to the substituents on their aromatic rings. However, traditional synthesis methods, such as the coupling of diazo salts, have a great limitation on the structural design of aromatic azo compounds. Therefore, many scientists have devoted their efforts to developing new synthetic methods. Moreover, recent advances in the synthesis of aromatic azo compounds led to the improvement of design and preparation of light-response materials at molecular level. This review summarizes the important synthetic progress of aromatic azo compounds in recent years, with an emphasis on the pioneering contribution of functional nanomaterials in the field.

We report a prebiotically relevant solution to the N1-ribosylation of pyrimidine nucleobases, a well-known challenge in the RNA World hypothesis. It is found that the presence of metal cations and clay mineral enables the previously unachievable direct ribosylation of uracil, providing by far the highest yield. Spectroscopy and chromatography analyses confirmed the formation of ribosylated uracil. The method can also be extended to the ribosylation of 2-pyrimidinone. These findings are also compatible with the metal-doped-clay model developed by our lab for the unified route of the selection of ribose and subsequent syntheses of nucleotide and RNA.

The Danxia landform area of Jingbian Wave Valley is located in the central part of Ordos Basin. The near-red Danxia landform consisting of sandstone in this area is a new discovery in geological circles at home and abroad, and its depositional age and genesis remain a hot topic of discussion at present. As the material basis for its development, red sandstone is of great importance to the in-depth study on its formation date and origin. The paper explores the origin, tectonic significance and paleogeographic pattern of the red sandstone through field geological investigation and zircon U-Pb dating analysis of the red sandstone of the Luohe Formation. The results show that the original materials of the red sandstone was formed in three main age intervals, 252~456 Ma, 1657~2084 Ma, and 2129~2538 Ma, and regional tectonothermal events in the origin area during the three periods were recorded, among which the events in Mesoproterozoic and Paleoproterozoic periods were the most active. The comparative analysis of zircon U-Pb age spectra shows that for the sediment of red sandstone, the early origin is near-origin and late origin is distant-origin. The main origin areas in the study area are the Xingmeng orogenic belt, the North China massif and the Alashan massif; the vertical section reflects that the origin area has the strongest erosion and transport in the upper deposition period, the smallest erosion and transport in the middle deposition period, and the moderate erosion and transport in the lower deposition period. With origins system dominated by the northern origins and the paleogeographic pattern of multi-period and cyclonic, the area mainly experienced four tectonic movement cycles, such as Wutai, Lvliang, Caledon and Haixi.

Cordyceps sinensis is one rare medicinal fungus produced in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Its quality and price varies hugely with different habitat, and its numerous substitutes have sprung up in functional food markets. This paper aims to discriminate the geographic origin of wild C. sinensis and its substitutes via the element analyzer-isotope ratio mass spectrometry and gas chromatography-isotope ratio mass spectrometry. The δ¹³C values of major fatty acids in the lipids of Cordyceps sinensis are characterized unanimously by the variation relation C_18:0 ﹤ C_18:2 ≈ C_16:0 ﹤ C_18:1; while their fluctuation intervals are notably different between those of neutral and polar lipids. The comparative analysis of the δ¹³C ratios of major fatty acids in lipids of Cordyceps sinensis suggests that the δ¹³C patterns may be sensitive potential indicators to discriminate its geographical origin. The δ¹³C values of individual major fatty acids of lipids from the cultivated stromata of Cordyceps militaris (SCM), the fermented mycelia of Hirsurella sinensis (FMH) and Paecilomyces epiali (FMP) range from −31.2‰ to −29.7‰, −16.9‰ to −14.3‰, and −26.5‰ to −23.9‰, respectively. Their δ¹³C pattern of individual major fatty acids may be used as a potential indicator to discriminate the products of natural C. sinensis and its substitutes.

Increasing attention has been paid to the potential probiotic effects of Latilactobacillus sakei. To explore the genetic diversity of L. sakei, 14 strains isolated from different niches (feces, fermented kimchi and meat products) and 54 published strains were compared and analyzed. The results showed that the average genome size and GC content of L. sakei were 1.98Mb and 41.22%, respectively. Its core genome mainly encodes translation and transcription, amino acid synthesis, glucose metabolism and defense functions. L. sakei has an open pan-genomic characteristics, and its pan-gene curve shows an upward trend. L. sakei has open pan-genome feature, and its pan-genome curve is on the rise. The genetic diversity of L. sakei is mainly reflected in carbohydrate utilization, antibiotic tolerance, and immune/competition-related factors, such as clustering regular interval short palindromic repeat sequence (CRISPR)-Cas. The CRISPR system is mainly IIA type, and a few are IIC types. This work provides a basis for the study of this species.

Electroactive microorganisms have received a lot of interest in the field of environmental engineering and biotechnology because of their extracellular electron transfer (EET) capability of energy recovery and environmental remediation. However, the low efficiency of EET remains a barrier to its practical implementation. This review presents an introduction to EET, followed by addressing strategies for enhancing EET through different approaches including enhancing EET by mediator materials, external electricity, photo, and magnetism as well as integrated strategies, that is, the combination of multiple means to promote extracellular electron transport and improve the performance of microbial electrochemical systems. Finally, the challenges, perspectives, and new directions for EET enhancement will be discussed.

Auto checkout has received more and more attention in recent years and this system automatically generates a shopping bill by identifying the picture of the products purchased by the customers. However, the system is challenged by the domain adaptation problem, where each image of the training set contains only one commodity, whereas the test set is a collection of multiple commodities. The existing solution to this problem is to resynthesize the training images to enhance the training set. Then the composite images are rendered using CycleGAN to make the image distribution of the training set and the test set more similar. However, we find that the detection boxes given by the ground truth of the common dataset contain a large part of the background area, the area will affect the training process as noise. To solve this problem, we propose a mask data priming method. Specifically, we redo the large scale Retail Product Checkout (RPC) dataset and add segmentation annotation information to each item in the training set image based on the original dataset using pixel-level annotation. Secondly, a new network structure is proposed in which we train the network using joint learning of detectors and counters, and fine-tune the detection network by filtering out suitable images from the test set. Experiments on the RPC dataset have shown that our method yields better results. we used an approach that reached 81.87% compared to 56.68% for the baseline approach which demonstrates that pixel-level information helps to improve the detection results of the network.

Based on acoustic fluid elements, dynamic analysis was performed on liquid sloshing modes and liquid-filled containers considering the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) effect. The liquid sloshing modes in two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) containers were analyzed, and the results were compared with liquid sloshing modes measured in tests and theoretically calculated modes. This thus verifies correctness of the simulation method based on acoustic fluid elements. Cylindrical liquid-filled containers with different water levels were subjected to modal analysis and dynamic and time-historical analysis. Results show that the finite element analysis (FEA) based on acoustic fluid elements can accurately simulate liquid sloshing modes in liquid-filled containers and vibration characteristics of these containers with different liquid levels. The vibration frequency of liquid-filled containers declines obviously with rising liquid level. The liquid level significantly affects distributions of the maximum displacement, maximum acceleration, and maximum von Mises stress on the sidewall of liquid-filled containers. Numerical simulations based on acoustic fluid elements provides an effective and reliable method for dynamic analysis of liquid-filled containers considering the FSI effect.

A rapid and efficient method using an alkyl functionalized magnetic nanoparticles-based extraction technique combined with Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography was developed for the detection of trace amounts of polycystic aromatic hydrocarbons in tea leaves. As a popular coating for chromatographic column packing materials, C18-alkyl has been demonstrated to be effective in separating polycystic aromatic hydrocarbons. And the magnetism of the nanomaterials accelerates the extraction process while their high surface ratio enables desirable dispersity in the sample matrix. Meanwhile, the adsorbents can be washed and reused 30 times without compromise on recovery, which greatly reduced the budget. The effects of various parameters were investigated and optimized, and the recoveries for five analytes were in the range of 84.8–103.7%. The reproducibility rate of intra-day and inter-day were below 7.1% and 11.3% respectively. The limits of detection and limits of quantification ranged from 1.69–9.97 ng g-1 and 5.12–30.21 ng g-1, indicating satisfactory sensitivity. Thus, the proposed methodology is rapid, highly efficient, and economical, and it expands the application of magnetic cleanup approaches in complex food matrices.

Biomineralization has become a research hotspot and attracted widespread attention in the field of carbonate sedimentology. In this study, Bacillus licheniformis DB1-9 was used to induce the calcium carbonate precipitation at different magnesium calcium molar ratios in the laboratory to further explore the biomineralization mechanism. Phylogenetic tree shows that the bacteria belongs to Bacillus licheniformis species. The ammonia and carbonic anhydrase can be released by this bacteria, resulting in the pH increase, and the carbonic anhydrase can also promote the hydration reaction of carbon dioxide and subsequently produce the bicarbonate and carbonate ions to elevate the supersaturation of calcium carbonate in the liquid culture medium to facilitate the precipitation of carbonate minerals. The calcites have a shape of rhombohedron, dumbell, and elongation, and aragonite often appears in the form of mineral aggregates, besides that there are also the spherical and the fusiform minerals. FTIR result shows there are some organic functional groups, such as C-O-C and C=O, beside of the characteristic peaks of the calcite and the aragonite, indicating that microbial metabolism is closely related to the mineral formation. The superthin slices of the bacteria analyzed by HRTEM, SAED, EDS and STEM show that the surface and EPS can adsorb a large number of calcium ions and magnesium ions and EPS may act as the nucleation sites, what’s more, the intracellular nanometer-scale sphere areas show the amorphous structures, and the intracellular calcium ions and magnesium ions suggeste that they can be transported from the outside to inside the cell by diffusion along the concentration grade from high to low. This study may provide some references to further understand the biomineralization mechanism induced by microorganisms in the laboratory and the field, and also helps to explore the reason of the transition of calcite sea to aragonite sea in the geological history.

Consumer preference for products made from transgenic technology has been widely studied, yet few studies exist exploring the factors influencing producers’ adoption of transgenic technology. Based on field surveys in Chinese provinces of Shanxi, Henan and Shandong, we employed a gambling experiment to capture producers’ risk preferences by estimating their risk aversion coefficients. We further estimated producers’ risk amplification and risk perception of GM technology. Using ordered logit model and Poisson model we identified the major factors influencing producers’ adoption of transgenic technology. We found the factors impacted the decision of producers from different regions in different ways. The results showed that over 60% of participants amplified the risk of transgenic crops. When there was potential risk, producers might not be rational even if they had high level of knowledge and cognition about the technology. Our results shed light on government policies aiming to increase the adoption of new technologies by producers.

Graphite carbon nitride (g-C3N4) supported PtNi alloy nanoparticles (NPs) were fabricated via a facile and simple impregnation and chemical reduction method and explored their catalytic performance towards hydrogen evolution from ammonia borane (AB). Interestingly, the resultant Pt_0.5Ni₀.5/g-C₃N₄ catalyst affords superior performance, including 100% conversion, 100% H₂ selectivity, yielding the extraordinary initial total turnover frequency (TOF) of 250.8 mol_H2 min^-1 (mol_Pt)^-1 for hydrogen evolution from AB at 10 °C, a relatively low activation energy of 38.09 kJ mol⁻¹, and a remarkable reusability (at least 10 times), which surpass most of the noble metal heterogeneous catalysts. This notably improved activity is attributed to the charge interaction between PtNi NPs and g-C₃N₄ support. Especially, the nitrogen-containing functional groups on g-C₃N₄, serving as the anchoring sites for PtNi NPs, may be beneficial for becoming a uniform distribution and decreasing the particle size for the NPs. Our work not only provides a cost-effective route for constructing high-performance catalysts towards the hydrogen evolution of AB but also prompts the utilization of g-C₃N₄ in energy fields.

Colorectal liver metastases (CRLM) patients combined with hepatic lymph node metastases was a negative prognostic factor associated with outcomes. Up to now, there was still lack of a reliable method to identify the status of hepatic lymph nodes. The aim of this study was to investigate the predictive ability of mono-exponential, bi-exponential, and stretched-exponential diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) models to distinguish between benign and malignant hepatic lymph nodes in CRLM patients who underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy prior to surgery. In total, 97 CRLM patients with pathologically proved hepatic lymph node status were included. Various quantitative parameters, including the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) from mono-exponential model, D, D*, and f derived from intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) model, as well as DDC and α from stretched-exponential model (SEM), were measured. Multivariate analysis revealed that the pre- treatment DDC value and the short diameter of the largest lymph node after treatment were independent predictors of metastatic hepatic lymph nodes. A nomogram combining these two factors demonstrated excellent performance in distinguishing between benign and malignant lymph nodes in CRLM patients, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.873. Therefore, the nomogram can serve as a preoperative assessment tool for determining the status of hepatic lymph nodes and aiding in the decision-making process for surgical treatment in CRLM patients.

Quantitative and qualitative fuzzy measures have been proposed to hesitant fuzzy sets (HFSs) from different points. However, few of the existing HFSs fuzzy measures refer to the grey relational analysis (GRA) theory. Actually, the GRA theory is very useful in the fuzzy measure domain, which has been developed for such the intuitionistic fuzzy sets. Therefore, in this paper, we apply the GRA theory to the HFSs and interval-valued hesitant fuzzy sets (IVHFS) domain. We propose the HFSs grey relational degree, HFSs slope grey relational degree, HFSs synthetic grey relational degree and IVHFSs grey relational degree, which describe the closeness, the variation tendency and both the closeness and variation tendency of HFSs and closeness of IVHFSs, respectively, greatly enriching the fuzzy measures of HFSs. Furthermore, with the help of the TOPSIS method, we develop the grey relational based MADM methodology to solve the HFSs and IVHFSs MADM problems. Finally, combined with two practical MADM examples about energy policy selection with HFSs information and emergency management evaluation with IVHFSs information, we obtain the most desirable decision results, and compared with the previous methods, the validity, effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed grey relational degree for HFSs and IVHFSs are demonstrated in detail.

This experiment aimed to investigate the impact of malic acid (MA) and citric acid (CA) on the nutritional composition, fermentation quality, rumen degradation rate, and microbial diversity of a mixture of apple pomace and corn protein powder during ensiling. The experiment used apple pomace and corn protein powder as raw materials, with four groups: control group (CON), malic acid treatment group (MA, 10g/kg), citric acid treatment group (CA, 10g/kg), and citric acid + malic acid treatment group (MA, 10g/kg + CA, 10g/kg), subjected to mixed ensiling for 60 days. The results indicated: (1) Compared to the CON group, the crude protein content significantly increased in the MA, CA, and MA+CA groups (p < 0.05), with the highest content observed in the MA+CA group. The addition of MA and CA effectively reduced the water-soluble carbohydrate (WSC) content (p < 0.05). Simultaneously, the CA group showed a decreasing trend in NDFom and hemicellulose content (p = 0.08; p = 0.09). (2) Compared to the CON group, the pH significantly decreased in the MA, CA, and MA+CA groups (p < 0.01), and the three treatment groups exhibited a significant increase in lactic acid and acetic acid content (p < 0.01). The quantity of lactic acid bacteria increased significantly (p < 0.01), with the MA+CA group showing a more significant increase than the MA and CA groups (p < 0.05). (3) Compared to the CON group, the in situ dry matter disappearance (ISDMD) significantly increased in the MA, CA, and MA+CA groups (p < 0.05). All three treatment groups showed highly significant differences in in situ crude protein disappearance (ISCPD) compared to the CON group (p < 0.01). (4) Good's Coverage for all experimental groups was greater than 0.99, meeting the conditions for subsequent sequencing. Compared to the CON group, the Shannon index significantly increased in the CA group (P < 0.01), and the Simpson index increased significantly in the MA group (p < 0.05). However, there was no significant difference in the Chao index among the three treatment groups and the CON group (p > 0.05). At the genus level, the abundance of Lentilactobacillus in the MA, CA, and MA+CA groups was significantly higher than in the control group (p < 0.05). PICRUSt prediction results indicated that the metabolic functional microbial groups in the CA and MA treatment groups were significantly higher than in the CON group (p < 0.05), suggesting that the addition of MA or CA could reduce the loss of nutritional components such as protein and carbohydrates in mixed ensilage. In conclusion, the addition of malic acid and citric acid to a mixture of apple pomace and corn protein powder during ensiling reduces nutritional losses, improves fermentation quality and rumen degradation rate, enhances the diversity of the microbial community in ensiled feed, and improves microbial structure. The combined addition of malic acid and citric acid demonstrates a superior effect.

Prunus tenella is a rare and precious relict plant in China. It is an important genetic resource for almond improvement and an indispensable material in ecological protection and landscaping. However, the research of molecular breeding and genetic evolution has been severely restricted, due to the lack of genome information. In this investigation, we created a chromosome-level genomic pattern of P. tenella, 231Mb in length with a contig N50 of 18.1 Mb by Hi-C techniques and high-accuracy PacBio HiFi sequencing. The present assembly predicted 32088 protein-coding genes, and an examination of the genome assembly indicated that 94.7% among all assembled transcripts were alignable to the genome assembly; most (97.24%) were functionally annotated. By phylogenomic genome comparison, we found that P. tenella is an ancient group that diverged approximately 13.4 million years ago (Mya) from 13 additional closely related species and about 6.5 Mya from the cultivated almond. Collinearity analysis revealed that P. tenella is highly syntenic and has high sequence conservation with almond and peach. However, this species also exhibit many presence/absence variants. Moreover, a large inversion at the 7,588 kb position of chromosome 5 was observed, which may have a significant association with phenotypic traits. Lastly, population genetic structure analysis in eight different populations indicated a high genetic differentiation among the natural distribution of P. tenella. This high-quality genome assembly provides critical clues and comprehensive information for the systematic evolution, genetic characteristics, and functional gene research of P. tenella. Moreover, it provides a valuable genomic resource for in-depth study in protecting, developing, and utilizing P. tenella germplasm resources.

The three-dimensional morphology of frictional sub-surfaces holds significant importance for studying tribological issues. However, the uniformity of horizontal datum in 3D scanning is limited for curved surfaces, resulting in the inability to obtain accurate contour characterization parameters from the scanning results. This study aims to address this issue by constructing regular surface equations and normalizing the 3D profiler scanning results. By fitting the data, a "plane" surface representative of the surface features is obtained, and the paper demonstrates this approach on the surface morphology of different worn parts in the frictional area of spherical bearings located in the specific environment of the Three Gorges gate. The results indicate that the obtained "plane" effectively reconstructs the three-dimensional morphology map of the regular surface. Moreover, this reconstructed plane not only clearly illustrates the surface characteristics but also provides the foundation for analyzing the wear mechanism.

In this paper, the effects on the rheological properties, particle size distribution, and fluorescence properties of red wine were investigated under microwave irradiation, and the mechanism of the effects of microwave irradiation on the sensory properties of red wine was discussed. The results showed that the effect of microwave on the rheological properties in red wine could be fitted by the Power-law model and Carson model, through the analysis of the rheological constants, yield stress, and viscosity coefficient of wine, it was found that microwave treatment could improve leg phenomenon and thickening effect by the change of rheological properties; the particle size distribution in wine indicated that microwave irradiation did change the particle size distribution through friction effect and oxidative polymerization, resulting in the wine’s visual effect and mouthfeel; the wine quality could be improved by enhancing the fluorescence intensity under different microwave conditions, which meant that microwave technology could speed up the formation of fluorescent substances, such as the polymerization of flavan-3-ols. In conclusion, microwave treatment could modify the sensory characteristics of wine, and further provide the theoretical basis for the application of microwave in winemaking.

As an implementation of inverse Radon transform, the Second-order Divided-difference Back Projection (SDBP) technique has been proposed in this paper, by which the accurate CT reconstruction can be theoretically realized. A computational model for CT reconstruction filter expressions has been derived on the basis of SDBP technique. The method reveals the correlation between the convolution kernel for data restoration and the filter expression. By substituting kernel functions into the computational model, the amplitude sequences of a variety of filters can be calculated. On the proposed filter construction method, the decomposition form of filters has been discovered, where a series of basic filters have been acquired. The properties of any filter depend on the decomposed basic filters. Basic filters can be used to compose filters in actual needs.

The fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae), is a notorious migratory pest. After invading China in 2019, the species has established as a year-round breeding population in most of the southern provinces. The area of winter corn in this region has been increasing due to the huge demand of fresh corn consumption which is potentially at risk from this invasive, although S. frugiperda growth and development under changing climate in this region is unclear, particularly the rising temperature during night period. Here we used highest daily temperatures of 27℃, 24℃, 20℃ and night temperatures that were 2℃, 4℃, 6℃ lower giving three daily temperature treatments reflective of winter conditions; GroupⅠ: 27-21℃, 27-23℃, 27-25℃, Group Ⅱ: 24-18℃, 24-20℃, 24-22℃, and Group Ⅲ: 20-14℃, 20-16℃, 20-18℃; to evaluate the effect of increasing night temperature on growth and development of S. frugiperda. Results show that the survival rate of larvae and pupae significantly declined with the daily temperature declining and the night temperature range increasing. Significant developmental effects were observed in all day-night temperature treatment, except for adults, with significant interaction effects for all stages except egg and generation time. Development rate accelerated along with the increasing daily temperature and night temperature, except for the intermediate treatments (Group Ⅱ). The uniformity of pupation and emergence times are higher in high daily temperatures and night temperature. Predictions of FAW development and warnings to local farmers need to be adjusted to take into account the more rapid development. These results will support decision makers to develop long-term management strategies for FAW in southern China.

Tourism sustainability is a significant approach to forming a synergistic model of industry and ecology in ecologically vulnerable areas. Scientifically detecting the effect mechanism of tourism development (TDI) on eco-environment resilience (ERI) is important in achieving regional social-ecological system sustainability. Empirical exploration is conducted on the levels of TDI and ERI in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) to study the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of TDI's effect on ERI. The results indicate a significant growth in TDI in the YREB, with the formation of tourist clusters around Shanghai and Chongqing as the core. Although ERI typically exhibits a declining trend, the rate of decline has notably slowed, forming a "high at the sides and low in the middle" spatial pattern. TDI and ERI are spatially dependent in the YREB, with predominantly high-high (HH) and low-high (LH) clusters in Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu. Conversely, upstream regions with strong eco-environmental foundations exhibit low-low (LL) and high-low (HL) clusters. In general, TDI promotes ERI, but there is significant spatiotemporal heterogeneity in the YREB. Positive impact regions are expanding, while negative impact regions are shrinking. These results could provide scientific evidence for differentiated classification and control policies in the YREB.

This experiment was conducted to study the effects of Cyfluthrin (Cy) exposure on neurobehaviour, hippocampal tissue and synaptic plasticity in Wistar rats. First, high-dose Cy exposure can cause nerve injury with symptoms such as deficits in learning and memory ability, spatial exploration and autonomic motor ability. Moreover, it was found that medium- and high-dose Cy exposure can cause disordered energy metabolism in hippocampal cells and an abnormal release of the neurotransmitter Glu. Second, pathological brain sections showed that the middle and high doses of Cy caused deformation, reduction and disorder of hippocampal pyramidal cells, a decrease in the number of Nissl bodies, pyknosis of the hippocampal cell nuclear membrane and serious damage to organelles, indicating that exposure to these doses of Cy may cause hippocampal tissue damage in rats. Third, with the increase in exposure dose, the morphological changes in hippocampal synapses were more obvious, including blurred synaptic spaces, decreased synaptic vesicles and a decreased number of synapses. Moreover, the expression levels of the key synaptic proteins PSD-95 and SYP also decreased in a dose-dependent manner, indicating obvious synaptic damage. Finally, the study found that medium and high doses of Cy could upregulate the expression of A2AR in the hippocampus, and the expression levels of inflammatory factors and apoptosis-related proteins increased in a dose-dependent manner. Moreover, the expression of A2AR mRNA was correlated with neurobehavioural indicators, inflammatory factors, synaptic plasticity factors and apoptosis factors, suggesting that Cy may cause nerve damage in rats and has a close relationship with A2AR.

Echinococcus granulosus is a harmful cestode parasite which could cause Cystic Echinococcosis in humans, various livestock species and wild animals. Calmodulin (CaM), a Ca²⁺ sensor protein, is widely expressed in eukaryotes and mediates a variety of cellular signaling activities. In our study, the CaM in Echinococcus granulosus (rEgCaM) was successfully cloned and the molecular and biochemical characterizations of rEgCaM were identified. The results showed that rEgCaM was a highly conserved calcium-binding protein, consisting of 149 amino acids. Immunoblot analysis revealed that rEgCaM could be identified using E. granulosus infected sheep serum. The usage of rEgCaM as antigen was evaluated by indirect ELISA which exhibited a high sensitivity of 90.3% but low specificity (47.1%). rEgCaM was mainly located in the tegument tissues and parenchymal region of protoscoleces, the tegument and inner body of adult worm and predominantly expressed in the germinal layer. The mRNA expression of rEgCaM in PSCs were gradually decreased with the increase death of PSCs. In electrophoretic mobility tests and ANS assays, rEgCaM showed a typical calcium-binding protein characteristics. This is the first report on CaM from E. granulosus and rEgCaM is considered to be involved in some important biological function of E. granulosus as a calcium-binding protein.

Mn3O4 /graphene nanosheets (GNS) composites serve as very excellent electrode materials for supercapacitors. They can fully combine the advantages of two materials such as graphene and metal oxide. Meanwhile, they can improve not only the specific energy and specific power of the materials, but also the cyclic stability of the materials. The results of the cyclic voltammetry and constant current charge discharge test on the composite electrode material have shown that the Mn3O4 /GNS powder sample has good capacitive performance. When the scanning rate is 5~50mV, the specific capacity retention rate of the composite electrode is 80.3% and 88% respectively. Mn3O4 nanoparticles, with the highest ratio of network coated GNS, exhibit a specific capacitance value of 957.6 F g−1 at a current density of 2 A g−1 in 1 M Na2SO4 solution. Besides, its network structure demonstrates high specific capacity and multiplying performance.

Previous investigations have illuminated the significant association between the gut microbiome and a broad spectrum of health conditions, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and psychiatric disorders. Evidence from certain studies suggests that dysbiosis of the gut microbiota may play a role in the etiology of obesity and diabetes. Moreover, it is acknowledged that dietary habits, pharmacological interventions, psychological stress, and other exogenous factors can substantially influence the gut microbial composition. For instance, a diet rich in fiber has been demonstrated to increase the population of beneficial bacteria, whereas the consumption of antibiotics can reduce these advantageous microbial communities. In light of the established correlation between the gut microbiome and various pathologies, strategically altering the gut microbial profile represents an emerging therapeutic approach. This can be accomplished through the administration of probiotics or prebiotics, which aim to refine the gut microbiota and, consequently, mitigate the manifestations of associated diseases. The present manuscript evaluates recent literature on the relationship between gut microbiota and metabolic syndrome published over the past three years and anticipates future directions in this evolving field.

With a highly efficient optical absorption capability, bismuth selenide (Bi2Se3) nanomaterial can be used as an outstanding photothermal agent for anti-tumor treatment and shows promise in the field of nanotechnology-based biomedicine. However, little research has been done on the relevant mechanism underlying the photothermal killing effect of Bi2Se3 nanomaterial. Herein, the photothermal effects of Bi2Se3 nanoparticles on A549 cells were explored with emphasis put on autophagy. Firstly, we characterized the structure and physicochemical property of the synthesized Bi2Se3 and confirmed their excellent photothermal conversion efficiency (35.72%), photostability, biocompatibility and ability of photothermal killing on A549 cells. Enhanced autophagy was detected in Bi2Se3-exposed cells under an 808 nm laser. Consistently, an elevated expression ratio of LC3-II to LC3-I, a marker of autophagy occurrence, was induced in Bi2Se3-exposed cells upon NIR irradiation. Meanwhile, the expression of cleaved-PARP was increased in the irradiated cells dependently on the exposure concentrations of Bi2Se3 nanoparticles. Pharmacological inhibition of autophagy by 3-methyladenine (3-MA) further strengthened the photothermal killing effect of Bi2Se3. Meanwhile, stress-related signaling pathways including p38 and SAPK/JNK were activated coupled with the attenuated PI3K/Akt signaling. Our study figures out that autophagy and the activation of stress-related signaling pathways were involved in the photothermal killing of cancerous cells by Bi2Se3, which provides a more understanding of photothermal nanomaterials.

Abnormal connections in brain networks of healthy people always bring the problems of cognitive impairments and degeneration of specific brain circuits, which may finally result in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Exploring the development of the brain from normal controls (NC) to AD is an essential part of human research. Although connections changes have been found in the development, the connection mechanism that drives these changes remain incompletely understood. The purpose of this study is to explore the connection changes in brain networks in the process from NC to AD, and uncover the underlying connection mechanism that shapes the topologies of AD brain networks. In particular, we propose a model named MINM from the perspective of topology-based mutual information to achieve our aim. MINM concerns the question of estimating the connection probability between two cortical regions with the consideration of both the mutual information of their observed network topologies and their Euclidean distance in anatomical space. In addition, MINM considers establishing and deleting connections, simultaneously, during the networks modeling from the stage of NC to AD. Experiment results show that MINM is sufficient to capture an impressive range of topological properties of real brain networks such as characteristic path length, network efficiency, and transitivity, and it also provides an excellent fit to the real brain networks in degree distribution compared to experiential models. Thus, we anticipate that MINM may explain the connection mechanism for the formation of the brain network organization in AD patients.

As the lifespan of porous asphalt pavement extends, it invariably experiences performance degradation and an increase in tire/pavement noise compared with the original surface when it is newly built. To understand the medium-term performance of porous asphalt pavement during service and reveal the influence of different pavement performance indicators on tire/pavement noise generation, a seven-year continuous observation and data analysis study was conducted. Porous asphalt with different designed material parameters was taken into account, including thin-layer porous asphalt overlay with a maximum nominal aggregate size of 10mm (PUC-10), porous asphalt with a maximum nominal aggregate size of 13mm (PAC-13), and a two-layer porous asphalt incorporating both PUC-10 and PAC-13 (PUC-10+PAC-13). Using automated pavement technology testing equipment, key performance indexes, including damage rate (DR), rut depth (RD), international roughness index (IRI), and sideway force coefficient (SFC), were measured and calculated. The on-board sound intensity (OBSI) method was used to test noise levels in three types of porous asphalt pavement structures and on a dense graded easy compact asphalt concrete (ECA) for comparison. The progressions of the medium-term performances were analyzed according to the measured results. The correlations between tire/pavement noise levels and testing speed, testing lane, pavement structure, and road condition indicators were investigated by regression. The research results revealed that the DR and SFC of the three types of porous asphalt pavement displayed more significant attenuation in the service period, while the IRI and RD showed small changes. Among them, the SFC demonstrated significant attenuation over the first 4 years, decreasing between 13.8% and 17.0%. From the 3-7 years of operation, the transverse crack disease in porous asphalt pavement progressed rapidly. The three porous asphalt pavement structures tested exhibited commendable noise reduction capabilities. Compared to ECA, the OBSI noise levels of these structures were lower by 2.09 dB, 1.53 dB, and 2.88 dB, respectively. Compared to other pavement condition indicators, RD had a more significant impact on the OBSI value of the PUC-10 porous asphalt pavement. For the PUC-10+PAC-13 porous asphalt pavement, there was a significant linear relationship between the OBSI value and SFC, mainly due to polishing of the coarse aggregate surface. It leads to a decrease of the micro-texture, which lies in increasing tire/pavement noise at high-frequency ranges and decreasing SFC. This study will have guiding significance for the research of the attenuated law and durability improvement of porous asphalt tire/pavement noise.

This paper has designed a four-channel wide dynamic microwave rectifier circuit for the shortcomings of uneven output voltage of each branch of the multi-channel rectification technology. A voltage-doubling rectifier circuit with identical structure was used in each branch. The four rectifier branches shared the same load at the output terminal, allowing the rectifier circuit to have an RF-DC conversion efficiency greater than 50% over the input power range from 12mW to 274mW, widened by 274% compared to a single channel. Not only the advantages of multi-channel technology with wide dynamics were retained, but also the output voltage was highly consistent and could be directly output in parallel without complex power electronics conversion.

Silicon carbide single crystal (SiC) has been widely used in the field of power devices, while it is difficult to fabricate ultra-flat surface by traditional manufacturing technologies due to its difficult-to-machine property. This paper investigates the interaction process during femtosecond laser ablation of crystalline silicon carbide based on the two-temperature model simulation and experimental study. The findings reveal that parameters such as laser pulse energy, scanning interval, and defocus amount exert significant influence on ablation depth, roughness, and surface morphology. The femtosecond laser proves effective in removing surface defects from cut SiC substrates, albeit resulting in increased surface roughness. However, subsequent polishing treatment of the laser-ablated silicon carbide surface can mitigate this roughness, underscoring the feasibility of laser surface ablation for silicon carbide single crystals.

For paramagnetic and elastic materials in the presence of quasi-static magnetic field, there is correspondingly quasi-static magnetic pressure, in contrast to the radiational electromagnetic pressure associated with electromagnetic momentum density. A thermodynamic pressure demagnetization is demonstrated. For the elastic dielectrics in the presence of quasi-static electrical field, its dual effect can be easily obtained by variable transformation.

The need for cross-modal retrieval (CMR) among users is growing because of the swift advancements in computer vision and natural language processing. Promoting home operating systems is greatly aided by the openKylin home operating system. It is focused on enhancing the functionality of the operating system with safe and dependable operating technologies. Practical implications abound for integrating computer vision research into home operating systems. A multimodal retrieval approach based on openKylin is presented to improve the usability of text search graphs, audio, and video. The overview of pertinent domestic and international research is the main topic of this article. This technological advancement. It then offers details on the design, implementation procedure, and final implementation outcomes for demonstration. The works of natural operations show that this strategy has excellent accuracy and performance.

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) with unique structures from marine animals show intriguing pharmacological activities and negligible biological risks, providing more options for us to explore safer agents. Swim bladder is a tonic food and folk medicine, and its GAGs show good anticoag-ulant activity. In this study, two GAGs SJG-1.0 and GMG-1.0 have been extracted and isolated from the swim bladder of Sphyraena jello and Gadus morhua. The physicochemical properties, pre-cise structural characteristics, and anticoagulant activities of these GAGs were determined. The analysis results of the SJG-1.0 and GMG-1.0 showed that they were chondroitin sulfate (CS)/dermatan sulfate (DS) hybrid chains with molecular weights of 109.32 kDa and 123.13 kDa, respectively. They were mainly composed of the repeating disaccharide unit of -{IdoA-α1,3-GalNAc4S-β1,4-}- (DS-A). The DS-B disaccharide unit of -{IdoA2S-α1,3-GalNAc4S-β1,4-}- also existed in both SJG-1.0 and GMG-1.0. SJG-1.0 had a higher proportion of CS-O disaccharide unit -{-GlcA-β1,3-GalNAc-β1,4-}-, while GMG-1.0 contained higher proportion of CS-E disaccha-ride unit -{-GlcA-β1,3-GalNAc4S6S-β1,4-}-. The disaccharide compositions of the GAGs varied in a species-specific manner. Anticoagulant activity assay revealed that both SJG-1.0 and GMG-1.0 had potent anticoagulant activity, which can significantly prolong activated partial thrombosis time. GMG-1.0 also can prolong the thrombin time. SJG-1.0 showed no intrinsic tenase inhibition ac-tivity, while GMG-1.0 can obviously inhibit intrinsic tenase with EC50 of 58 nM. Their significantly different anticoagulant activities may be due to their different disaccharide structural units and proportions. These findings suggested that the swim bladder CS/DS hybrid chains with well-defined structure may be safer anticoagulants with low bleeding risk.

The energy E takes the place of the gravitational mass m_G to produce gravity [1]. We wonder whether the inertial mass m_i in the inertial force is also replaced by E. The experiments to measure the inertial force and weight of a carrier are presented. Now we can test the principle of equivalence and study foundations of physics in condensed matter.

Large scale cropland erosion rates mapping and dynamic monitoring are critical for agricultural planning but extremely challenging. In this study, by using field investigation data collected from 20,155 land parcels in 2,781 sample units in the National Soil Erosion Survey, land use change data for two decades from the National Land Use/Cover Database of China (NLUD-C), we proposed a new point to surface approach to quantitatively assess long-term cropland erosion based on the CSLE model and non-homogeneous voting. The results show that cropland in Yunnan suffers from serious problem with unsustainable mean soil erosion rate of 40.47t/(ha·a) and erosion ratio of 70.11%, which are significantly higher than those of other land types. Engineering control measures (ECMS) have a profound impact on reducing soil erosion, soil erosion rate of cropland with and without ESMs differs by more than five times. Over the past two decades, the cropland area in Yunnan continues to decrease, with a net reduction of 7461.83 km2 and a ratio of −10.55%, which causes corresponding 0.32×108 t (12.12% ) decrease in cropland soil loss. We also quantified the impact of different LUCC scenarios on cropland erosion, and extraordinarily high variability was found in soil loss in different basins and periods. Conversion from cropland to forest contributes the most to cropland erosion reduction, while conversion from grassland to cropland contributes 56.18% of the increase in soil erosion. Considering the current speed of cropland regulation, it is the sharp reduction in land area that leads to cropland erosion reduction rather than treatments. The dilemma between the Grain for Green Policy and Cropland Protecting Strategy in mountainous areas should be treated carefully with shared understanding and collaborations from different roles.

The survey findings reveal that rivers worldwide carry an annual sediment load of 15 billion tons into the sea, and the Yellow River basin alone contributes 1.6 billion tons of sand. Therefore, understanding the science of wind and sand in the Yellow River is crucial to ensuring the safe development of similar basins across China and the world. This study examines the midstream wind and sand area of the Xiliugou tributary, a part of the upper Yellow River. The researchers used a stepped sand collector combined with an anemometer to measure the sand transport flux at 0-50 cm height on various underlying surfaces of the basin. Then, they estimated the amount of wind and sand entering the Yellow River using a function model based on the measured factors. Furthermore, the team analyzed the particle size composition of wind-eroded sand to better understand the principles of wind and sand erosion and accumulation in the basin. The results of the study show that the sand transport flux per unit area varies significantly across different underlying surfaces. Moreover, the contribution of moving sandy land, semi-fixed sand, and fixed sand to wind and sand deposition in the Yellow River basin was 77.08%, 15.30%, and 7.62%, respectively. The vertical change of sand transport rate on the basin's surface demonstrates that the total sand transport rate is an exponential function of wind speed. Based on this relationship, the researchers estimated that the total annual average wind and sand entering the Yellow River basin via the Xiliugou tributary is approximately 8.09×105t. Due to the basin's unique geography and sand source, the particle size composition of wind-eroded sand differs between the east and west sides of the river channel. On the west side, desert sand, mainly fine sand, and very fine sand constitutes the sand source. Conversely, on the east side, sand collected in the riverbed by secondary wind erosion is the primary sand source. Furthermore, human activities have disturbed the grain composition, mainly comprising powder and clay particles. This phenomenon, known as "wind-blown mud and water-washed sand," is evident in this geographical unit. In conclusion, the Yellow River basin still faces significant ecological security hazards. Understanding the coupling relationship between desert-basin-sand and wind is the foundation for effectively controlling wind and sand flow into the Yellow River basin.

The majority of existing numerical simulations of the effect of bridge piers on water movement are based on a limited number of bridge piers at a laboratory scale. Furthermore, some 2D numerical simulations for actual bridge projects have deficiencies, including the use of overly large mesh sizes and an inadequate treatment of bridge piers. In this study, we compare three methods of structural mesh encryption, suspension mesh, and nonstructural mesh based on Delft3D, and apply the optimization scheme to a real bridge project. It is demonstrated that optimal results can be achieved by utilising a grid size comparable to the pier diameter (Dp) in the region away from the piers. In the vicinity of the piers, the grid cell size should be no larger than 1/9 Dp. The suspended grid technique (DD Boundary) can yield results consistent with those obtained using a full-area high-resolution grid, provided that the total number of grids can be reduced and the computational time is considerably reduced. In this study, the unstructured mesh (Deflt3D Flexible Mesh) scheme was unable to capture the oscillations of the wake flow behind the bridge piers. However, the application of the optimized scheme in bridge engineering has demonstrated its practical value. The findings of this study on mesh resolution and suspension mesh scheme can be applied to the Delft3D software and are also useful for other numerical simulation work.

Legume-rhizobial symbiosis leads to to the formation of root nodules, where rhizobia reside and develop into bacteroids to reduce nitrogen into ammonium for plant growth, which leaves an opening question as how plant immunity is attenuated in nodules in the presence of large number of foreign bacteria. In Medicago truncatula, mutation in NAD1 (Nodules with Activated Defense 1) only produces necrotic nodules with overactivated immunity, indicating NAD1 is an indispensable component required for suppressing immunity in nodules. In this study, a dual RNA-seq transcriptomic technology was performed to extensively analyze gene expressions in nad1-1 mutant nodules. We indenifited 89 DEGs in symbiotic nitrogen fixation and 89 DEGs in immunity in Medicago truncatula at 10 dpi. Simultaneously, we indenifited 27 DEGs in fix and nif genes in Sinorhizobium meliloti. Then we identified 56 DEGs related to stress, including ROS, NO, and NCR, most of which were upregulated in Sinorhizobium meliloti. Our analyses of nitrogen fixation-defective plant nad1-1 mutants with overactivated defense indicate that host use plant immunity to control massive bacterial colonization during early and late symbiotic stages. Our findings provide insight into the function of NAD1 in improvement or inhibition of plant immune response to maintain symbiosis during rhizobial endosymbiosis.

With the rapid development of earth observation, satellite navigation, mobile communication and other technologies, the order of magnitude of the spatial data we acquire and accumulate is increasing, and higher requirements are put forward for the application and storage of spatial data. Under this circumstance, a new form of spatial data organization emerged-the global discrete grid. This form of data management can be used for the efficient storage and application of large-scale global spatial data, which is a digital multi-resolution the geo-reference model that helps to establish a new model of data association and fusion. It is expected to make up for the shortcomings in the organization, processing and application of current spatial data. There are different types of grid system according to the grid division form, including global discrete grids with equal latitude and longitude, global discrete grids with variable latitude and longitude, and global discrete grids based on regular polyhedrons. However, there is no accuracy evaluation index system for remote sensing images expressed on the global discrete grid to solve this problem. This paper is dedicated to finding a suitable way to express remote sensing data on discrete grids, and establishing a suitable accuracy evaluation system for modeling remote sensing data based on hexagonal grids to evaluate modeling accuracy. The results show that this accuracy evaluation method can evaluate and analyze remote sensing data based on hexagonal grids from multiple levels, and the comprehensive similarity coefficient of the images before and after conversion is greater than 98%, which further proves that the availability hexagonal grid-based remote sensing data of remote sensing images. And among the three sampling methods, the image obtained by the nearest interpolation sampling method has the highest correlation with the original image.

Reducing the hardness of hard water is of great concern nowadays due to some adverse effects on water pipes, boilers and soap consumption. Using the method of biomineralization to precipitate calcium and magnesium ions to become carbonate minerals was one of the most important innovations for reducing the hardness of hard water. The present study sought to explore the physical and chemical conditions of carbonates bio-precipitation and the potential use of Bacillus licheniformis SRB2 strain (GenBank: KM884945.1) isolated from sludge sample of Moshui River (Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China) in reducing the hardness of hard waters by the induction of carbonate minerals. In this study, B. licheniformis SRB2 strain was identified based on the morphological, biochemical and 16S rDNA gene sequence homology analysis. The carbonate minerals induced by B. licheniformis bacteria in the liquid culture medium with 3% NaCl and Mg/Ca molar ratio of 0, 6, 8, 10 and 12 were investigated. The culture medium was inoculated with the bacterial liquid seed was set as the experimental group and the other culture medium was inoculated with the same volume of distilled water was set as the control group. The mineral phases, micromorphologies, and crystal structures were analyzed using X-ray powder diffraction, scanning electron microscope, energy dispersive X-ray detector, high resolution transmission electron microscopy and selected area electron diffraction. The bacterial concentrations and pH values of the solution were measured by a spectrophotometer and a pH meter, respectively. The urease secreted by B. licheniformis SRB2 was found to greatly increase the pH values of the liquid medium, which favored the formation of calcium carbonate.As a result, Mg²⁺ and Ca²⁺ ion concentrations decreased greatly due to the biomineralization of calcium carbonate and nesquehonite minerals in the presence of B. licheniformis SRB2 bacterium. There were only few calcium carbonates and no nesquehonite minerals in the control groups. It was also found that the minerals of nesquehonite induced by B. licheniformis SRB2 had a phenomenon of preferred orientation. What was more, even though Mg²⁺ ions inhibited the precipitation of Ca²⁺ ions, but under the action of B. licheniformis SRB2 bacteria, the inhibition effect was significantly declined. The bio-precipitation of calcium carbonate and nesquehonite minerals may represent a new method of pretreatment for the hardness reduction of hard water. The accomplished study is of certain interest for interpretation of the carbonates biomineralization in natural environment, and maybe also has a certain application value in the former processing of hard water

We suppose that a Cooper pair (CP) will experience a damping force exerted by the condensed matter. A Langevin equation of a CP in two dimensional condensed matter is established. Following a method similar to Nelson's stochastic mechanics, generalized Schr\"{o}dinger equation of a CP in condensed matter is derived. If the CPs move with a constant velocity, then the corresponding direct current (DC) electrical conductivity can be calculated. Therefore, a Drude like formula of resistivity of CPs is derived. We suppose that the damping coefficient of CPs in two dimensional cuprate superconductors is a linear function of temperature. Then the resistivity and scattering rate of CPs turn out to be also linear-in-temperature. The origin of linear-in-temperature resistivity and Planckian dissipation in cuprate superconductors may be the linear temperature dependence of the damping coefficient of CPs.

Periodontitis is a progressive and inflammatory oral disease and results in the damage of the supporting tissues of teeth. Peroxiredoxin6 (PRDX6) is an antioxidant enzyme and has been identified as a regulator in redox balance. This study aimed to investigate whether PRDX6 could protect human gingival fibroblasts (HGFs) from lipopolysaccharide (LPS) induced inflammation and its mechanisms. Here, both inflamed and non-inflamed human gingival tissues were collected to assess the expression of PRDX6 and NRF2 by Immunohistochemistry and Western blotting. Furthermore, HGFs were stimulated with LPS, MJ33 (PRDX6 phospholipase A2 inhibitor), or ML385 (NRF2 inhibitor). The expression levels of inflammatory cytokines were measured by RT-qPCR and ELISA, and reactive oxygen species (ROS) was detected using DCFH-DA. PRDX6 was downregulated in inflamed gingival tissues. In HGFs, LPS induced inflammatory cytokines and ROS was upregulated in PRDX6 knockdown cells. Furthermore, co-treatment with MJ33 alleviated LPS-induced inflammatory cytokines and ROS, while inhibiting NRF2 upregulated those in HGFs. Therefore, this study provided a new mechanistic insight that PRDX6, regulated by the NRF2 signaling, alleviates LPS- induced periodontitis in human gingival fibroblasts.

The utilization for water resource has been of great concern to human life. To assess the natural water system in Kangding County, the integrated methods of hydrochemcial analysis, multivariate statistics and geochemical modelling were conducted on surface water, groundwater and thermal water samples. Surface water and groundwater were dominated by Ca-HCO₃ type, while thermal water belonged to Ca-HCO₃ and Na-Cl type. The analyzing results concluded the driving factors that affect hydrochemical components. Following the results of the combined assessments, hydrochemcial process was controlled by the dissolution of carbonate and silicate minerals with slight influence from anthropogenic activity. The mixing model of groundwater and thermal water was calculated using silica-enthalpy method, yielding cold-water fraction of 0.56-0.79 and estimated reservoir temperature of 130-199 ^oC, respectively. δD and δ¹⁸O isotopes suggested surface water, groundwater and thermal springs were of meteoric origin. Thermal water should have deep circulation through the Xianshuihe fault zone, while groundwater flows through secondary fractures where it recharges with thermal water. Those analytical results were used to construct a hydrological conceptual model, providing a better understanding of the natural water system in Kangding County.

Desert ecosystem occupies an important position in the composition of global biodiversity. The Tarim Basin locates in south Xinjiang of China and has the world 's second largest mobile desert, the Taklamakan Desert. As an endemic species in this region, Phrynocephalus forsythii has been demonstrated with potential high extinction risk to climate change. In order to understand the overall genetic status and provide accordant conservation strategies of the species, we investi-gated the genetic diversity and population structure of P. forsythii from 15 sites in the Tarim Basin using 21 highly polymorphic microsatellite markers. We found significant genetic structure across the study region. We also revealed generally low levels of gene flow between the 25 sites, sug-gesting individual dispersal and migration may be restricted within populations. In addition, geographical distance and ambient temperature might be important factors in explaining the observed genetic structure. Our results will provide scientific basis for the future protection of P. forsythii in this area, as well as an important reference for the conservation and management of biodiversity in desert ecosystems.

This paper is based on the concept of absolute airspace and its local absolute stationary reference system proposed by the author, on the premise of abandoning space concept and the relativity principle of relativity theory, It is proposed that general relativity and special relativity can be unified into Simple and practical a space-time transformation theory which fully includes other basic physical principles of relativity. And the unified and simple expression of the time transformation effect is proved and deduced. By comparing with the theoretical derivation and checking calculation of Hafele-Keating experiment in an ideal state, It is proved that the expression of time transformation effect proposed in this paper is completely correct. Compared with the theory of relativity, the calculation is simpler and more accurate. The paper also puts forward two checking prediction of physical cases about the time transformation effect, which are left for the capable competent unit or individual to verify in practice.

The paper suggests that the physical priciple of special relativity's space-time transformation effect is wrong, Uniform linear motion without acceleration does not exist objectively, nor does its same reference frames. Therefore, it is inferred that the space-time transformation effect of special relativity is caused by the acceleration of moving objects, special relativity is only a part of general relativity, not a theoretical system that exists independently from general relativity. The corresponding mathematical demonstration and calculation verification are carried out, and the result proves that the inference of the paper is correct. At the same time, it further explains that the concept of absolute airspace is correct. Special relativity has serious errors in the concept of space, the principle of relativity and the physical principle of space-time transformation effect. Therefore, it is necessary to make a series of revisions to the theory of relativity and to reinterpret some related physical problems.

The thesis proposes a argument that a mass point moving in a horizontal circle on the Earth's surface can generate a radial centrifugal force of the Earth's center of mass, thus realizing an unconventional anti-gravity path. And through the theoretical analysis of the difference in the distribution of gravitational acceleration at different latitudes caused by the rotation of the earth, and the centrifugal force of a mass point moving in a horizontal circle on the earth's surface is analyzed, the validity of the argument is demonstrated. At the same time, the paper puts forward two possible basic principles, and makes theoretical analysis and demonstration. Conceive of the concrete experimental verification of principle two is proposed. Four technical schemes for antigravity ascent are proposed and basic analysis is made. On the premise of not fully considering the practical technical ability, it is theoretically proved that three of them have realistic operability and development potential. In theory, this paper opens up a different way of anti-gravity for human beings, which will bring new ideas and prospects for human beings to get rid of the bondage of gravity.

In this paper, the Hafele‐Keating experiment and the geostationary orbit satellite of related physics problems of are analyzed and discussed in detail. If researchers read the paper and think about it, It will be found that the Hafele‐Keating experiment and the geostationary satellite problem prove that some of the core ideas and theories of relativity are seriously wrong. Isnʹt that a very serious problem in physics? Canʹt this cause the academic circles to pay great attention to it? Isnʹt this worthy of in‐depth analysis and research? The core of the paper is to point out that there are problems with the space concept and the reference system theory of classical physics and relativity, And that would bring up a whole host of physics problems. It takes a concerted effort from the academic community, Do furtherin‐depth analysis and research. Strive forthe further discovery and perfection of physics theory.

Appetitive traits have been associated with eating behaviors and weight in youth. However, the relationships among adults have received less attention. In this study, we measured appetitive traits among 520 female college students from a University in eastern Chinese using the Chinese translated Adults Eating Behavior Questionnaire (C-AEBQ) and found that two food approach traits (food enjoyment and emotional over-eating) were positively while two food avoidance traits (slowness in eating and satiety responsiveness) were negatively associated with BMI. Individual trait was differentially associated with eating behaviors. Specifically, a positive correlation was found between food responsiveness and higher frequency of selecting delivery food, spicy food, and sugared beverage; conversely, satiety responsiveness was associated with higher frequency of skipping meals. Using latent profile analysis, participants were classified into four appetitive patterns: food approacher, food approacher with emotional under-eating, food avoider, and food avoider with emotional over-eating. Food avoiders had significant lower BMI and higher proportion of underweight than other three patterns. Compared to food approacher, food avoiders had higher frequency of skipping breakfast, and food avoiders with emotional over-eating had higher frequency of skipping both breakfast and lunch. No significant differences were observed in food choice and dieting behavior among four appetitive patterns. The findings suggested a correlation between an individual’s appetitive pattern and eating behaviors among female college students, those with food avoidance patterns are more likely to have irregular meals, which may contribute to their low BMI. The findings provide valuable insights for female college students to cultivate a healthy eating behavior and sustain a healthy body weight.

Adipose tissue composition contributes greatly to the quality and nutritional value of meat. Transcriptomic and lipidomic techniques were used to investigate the molecular mechanism of fat deposition difference among Ningxiang, Berkshire and F1 pigs. Transcriptomic analysis identified 680, 592 and 380 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) by comparing the groups of Ningxiang pigs vs Berkshire pigs, Berkshire pigs vs F1 pigs, Ningxiang pigs vs F1 pigs. Lipidomic analysis screened 423, 252, and 50 significantly changed lipids (SCLs) by comparing the groups of Ningxiang pigs vs Berkshire pigs, Berkshire pigs vs F1 pigs, Ningxiang pigs vs F1 pigs. Lycine, serine and threonine metabolism pathway, fatty acid biosynthesis and metabolism related pathways were siginificant enriched in the groups of Berkshire pigs vs Ningxiang pigs and Berkshire pigs vs F1 pigs. The DEGs (PHGDH, LOC110256000) and the SCLs (Phosphatidylserines) may have a great impact on lycine, serine and threonine metabolism pathway. Moreover, the DEGs (FASN, ACACA, CBR4, SCD, ELOV6, HACD, CYP3A46, CYP2B22, GPX1, GPX3) and the SCLs (palmitoleic acid, linoleic acid, arachidonic acid, icosadienoic acid) play important role in fatty acid biosynthesis and metabolism. Thus, the fat deposition difference among Ningxiang, Berkshire and F1 pigs may be caused by the difference of the expression pattern of key genes in multiple enrichment KEGG pathways. The research presented multiple lipids that were potentially available biological indicator and screened key genes that were potentially gene targets for molecular design breeding. The research also explored the molecular mechanisms of fat deposition difference among Ningxiang, Berkshire and F1 pigs and provides insight into the selection of backfat thickness and fat composition of adipose tissue for future breeding strategies.

The recyclable paper based on photochromic materials not only reduces the pollution in the paper manufacture process, but also reduces the pollution caused by the use of ink, which receives wide attention. In this paper, a serial of PMoA-PWA/ZnO/PVP hybrid films which had different ratio of PMoA/PWA was prepared by the ultrasonic composite method. The results indicated that the hybrid film prepared when the ratio of PMoA to PWA was 3 had the best photochromic performance. In this system, ZnO was the photosensitizer while PMoA/PWA was the chromophore. The photochromic mechanism of PMoA-PWA/ZnO/PVP hybrid film was based on the photogenerated electron transfer mechanism. ZnO generated photoelectron under the excitation of visible light, then PMoA and PWA obtained the photoelectron and produced photoreduction reaction to generate heteropolyblue. The visible light photochromic paper was prepared by loaded PMoA-PWA/ZnO/PVP hybrid film (A3) on A4 paper. Application test showed that the prepared paper had extremely stable, excellent and reversible visible light photochromic properties, whether it was printing patterns or words and could replace the ordinary paper to realize the reuse of paper.

This paper describes the formulations for viscoplasticity of metals based on the Chaboche and Delobelle model. The implementations of the viscoplastic models were detailed herein and then implemented via user subroutines for material models (UMAT) in ABAQUS. Two typical metals, i.e., 316 Stainless Steel and Zircaloy-4, were chosen as examples and their viscoplastic behaviors were captured. Numerical simulations are compared to reported experiments to validate the models and the UMAT codes. Typical viscoplastic behaviors of both metals, such as stress relaxation and creep, were captured well against available experiments. We publicize all the data and codes via: https://github.com/XJTU-Zhou-group/ABAQUS_UMAT_316ss_Zr4.

SOC stock (SOCS) changes caused by land use changes are still unclear, and understanding this response is essential for many environmental policies and land management practices. In this study, we investigated the temporal-spatial and vertical distribution characteristics of SOCS on the Western Sichuan Plateau (WSP) using the sparrow search algorithm-random forest regression (SSA-RFR) models with excellent model applicability and accuracy. The temporal-spatial varia-tions in the SOCS were modeled using 1080 soil samples and a set of nine environmental covariates. We analyzed the effect of land use changes on the SOCS on the WSP. The total SOCS increased by 18.03 Tg C from 1990 to 2020. The results of this study confirmed that the SOCS in the study area has increased significantly since 2010, with an increase of 27.88 Tg C compared to the total SOCS in 2010. We found that the spatial distribution of the SOCS increased from southeast to northwest, and the vertical distribution of the SOCS in the study area decreased with increasing soil depth. Forest and grassland are the main sources of SOCS, the total SOCS in the forest and grassland accounted for 37.53 and 59.39% of the total SOC pool in 2020, respectively. Expansion of the wetlands, forest, and grassland areas could increase SOCS in the study area.

Trace metals can enter some natural regions with low human disturbance from atmospheric circulation, but little information is available regarding how the canopy can retained trace metals. Therefore, a representative sub-alpine spruce plantation was selected to investigate the net throughfall fluxes of eight trace metals (Fe, Mn, Cu, Zn, Al, Pb, Cd and Cr) of closed canopy and gap-edge canopy from August 2015 to July 2016. Over a one-year observational period, the annual fluxes of Al, Zn, Fe, Mn, Cu, Cd, Cr and Pb were 7.29 kg·ha^-1, 2.30 kg·ha^-1, 7.02 kg·ha^-1, 0.16 kg·ha^-1, 0.19 kg·ha^-1, 0.06 kg·ha^-1, 0.56 kg·ha^-1 and 0.24 kg·ha^-1, respectively, in the deposited precipitation. The annual net throughfall fluxes of these trace metals were 1.73 kg·ha^-1, 0.9 kg·ha^-1, 1.68kg·ha^-1, -0.032 kg·ha^-1, 0.04 kg·ha^-1, 0.018 kg·ha^-1, 0.093 kg·ha^-1 and 0.087kg·ha^-1, respectively, in the gap-edge canopy and -1.6 kg·ha^-1, 1.13 kg·ha^-1, 1.65 kg·ha^-1, -0.10 kg·ha^-1, 0.05 kg·ha^-1, 0.03 kg·ha^-1, 0.26 kg·ha^-1 and 0.15 kg·ha^-1, respectively, in the closed canopy. The closed canopy displayed a greater filter effect on the trace metals from precipitation than did the gap-edge canopy in the sub-alpine forest. In the rainy season, the net filtering ratio of trace metals ranged from -66%-89% in the closed canopy and from -52% to 25% in the gap-edge canopy. However, the net filtering ratio of all trace metals was greater than 50% in the closed canopy in the snowy season. Therefore, the results suggested that the most trace metals moving through the forest canopy are taken up rather than by rainfall leaching; moreover, the closed canopy can efficiently take up trace metals in the snowy season.

Natural montane peatlands generally are not a significant source of nitrous oxide (N₂O) due to environment limitation including phosphorus (P) scarcity and temperature lowness. Phosphorus enrichment and warming caused by global change are altering this limitation, likely to increase the source function of N₂O. However, the combined effects of P addition and warming on N₂O fluxes and biotic/abiotic factor in peatlands are still uncertain. To address this, we investigated the long-term (12 yrs) effects of P addition (5 and 10 kg ha^-1 yr^-1) and its interaction with warming on N₂O fluxes in a peatland. The results showed that although long-term P addition did not significantly affect the source/sink function of N₂O in the peatland, it stimulated enzyme activities, promoted peat decomposition. However, warming amplified the effect of P addition to increase N₂O emissions by stimulating enzyme activities and changing soil stoichiometry, even turned the peatland into a significant source of N₂O with an emission of approximate 100 g m^-2 during the growing season. Our study suggests that P enrichment under the current background of global warming will enhance the possibility of strong N₂O emissions in montane peatlands, which may increase the risk to further aggravate global warming.

The phycobilisomes (PBS) of cyanobacteria and red algae are the primary light-harvesting an-tennas, absorbing solar energy and transporting it to photosynthetic reaction centres with ex-traordinary efficiency and rate. The mechanism of energy transfer in PBS should be investigated in conjunction with biological structural information, as the functions of proteins result from structures. Here, we report the energy transfer study in PBS from a thermophilic cyanobacte-rium Thermosynechococcus vulcanus NIES 2134 (T. 2134), with the Cryo-EM model resolved at near-atomic-resolution recently. The time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy of PBS with the sub-picosecond resolution was discovered at 77K. Deconvolution of the fluorescence decay curve was then used to reveal the energy transfer channels and the associated transfer rates. Expert for the fluorescence lifetimes of terminal emitters, four time-components, i.e., 9 ps, 13 ps, 23 ps, and 55 ps, were recognised in the energy transfer in PBS. The energy transfer dynamics in PBS were further analysed by combining the cryo-EM structure and the spectral property. The findings aid our understanding of the energy transfer mechanisms in PBS.

The gravitational charge should be the energy instead of mass. This modification will lead to some different results and the experiments to test are also presented. Especially, we propose a scheme to achieve the negative energy and gravitational repulsive force in the lab.

Small peptides (SPs), ranging from 5 to 100 amino acids, play integral roles in plants due to their diverse functions. Despite their low abundance and small molecular weight, SPs intricately regulate critical aspects of plant life, including cell division, growth, differentiation, flowering, fruiting, maturation, and stress responses. As vital mediators of intercellular signaling, SPs have garnered significant attention in plant biology research. This comprehensive review delves into SPs' structure, classification, and identification, providing a detailed understanding of their significance. Additionally, we summarize recent findings on the biological functions and signaling pathways of prominent SPs that regulate plant growth and development. The review also offers a forward-looking perspective on future research directions in peptide signaling pathways.

Water pollution, intensified by the release of hard-to-degrade pollutants, poses severe threats to ecosystems, human health, and economic development. The existing advanced oxidation processes often involve high operational costs and may result in secondary pollution, highlighting the necessity for innovative and more sustainable solutions. To address these challenges, our study introduces a cost-effective and eco-friendly corona discharge barrier plasma discharger for wastewater treatment. Through the central composite design/response surface methodology, a high decolorization rate of 98% of methylene blue (MB) within 10 minutes was achieved by optimizing parameters such as pH and voltage. Furthermore, the mechanisms of the generation of reactive oxygen species via this device was discussed in detail and the degradation pathways of MB were described. Moreover, this device is also very energy-efficient, with a low energy density and electrical energy per order of 0.15 watt/mL and 5.79 kWh/m³/order, respectively. In conclusion, the plasma discharger developed in this study provides a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable solution for dye wastewater treatment. This research contributes significantly to the advancement of sustainable dye wastewater management practices, offering an innovative method that meets both environmental and economic objectives.

Marine soft corals are prolific sources of various natural products that have served as a wealthy reservoir of diverse chemical scaffolds for new drug leads. The genus Litophyton contains almost 100 species but only a small part of them had been classified and chemically investigated, which calls for more attentions from the global researchers. In the current work, 109 secondary metabolites have been discussed based on published data from 1975 to July, 2023, covering a period of near five decades. The studied species of the genus Litophyton inhabited various tropical and temperate regions and afforded a variety of biologically active natural products such as terpenes, steroids, alkaloids, and lipids. A wide spectrum of pharmacological effects of these compounds had been evaluated, including cytotoxic, anti-HIV, antibacterial, antifungal, anti-malarial, antifeedant, molluscicidal, PTP1B inhibitory, and insect growth inhibitory activities. This review aims to provide an up-to-date literature survey and comprehensive insight into chemical structures, taxonomical distributions, and biological activities of the reported metabolites from the title genus whenever available.

Predicting and evaluating the vitality level of public spaces of urban design is crucial before new construction and renewal, especially for developing countries, to avoid failures like "ghost neighborhood" and reduce resource waste. However, existing assessment methods for the urban vitality are either static and ignore changes in the time dimension, or rely on historical big data and are unable to predict unbuilt projects. This study combines previous methods and crowds’ characteristics observation in public space, puts forward the crowd-frequency hypothesis and constructs an algorithm, and establishes a time-dimensional urban vitality dynamic prediction model. Taking the Rundle Mall neighborhood in Adelaide, Australia, as an example, the effec-tiveness of the prediction model was proved through on-site observation sampling comparative verification method. In addition, the decision tree model was used to conduct machine learning on the case data, and a set of algorithm programs were obtained that can directly input some basic information to obtain the urban vitality level (high-medium-low) in a certain period. It can be used as a tool to support the design and decision-making processes of urban planners and government officials, providing a low-cost way to achieve sustainable urban vitality construction of late-developing cities directly.

：Non-Euclidean data, such as social networks, and citation relationships between documents, has node information and structural information. Graph Convolutional Network(GCN) can automatically learn node features and association information between nodes. The core ideology of the graph convolutional network is to aggregate node information by using edge information, thereby generating a new node feature. In the process of updating node features, there are two core influencing factors. One is the number of neighboring nodes of the central node, the other is the contribution of the neighboring nodes to the central node. Due to the previous GCN methods not simultaneously considering the numbers and different contributions of neighboring nodes to the central node, we design the Adaptive Attention Mechanism(AAM). To further enhance the representational capability of the model, we utilize Multi-Head Graph Convolution(MHGC). Finally, we adopt cross-entropy(CE) loss function to describe the difference between the predicted results of node categories and the ground truth (GT). Combined with backpropagation, this ultimately achieves accurate node classification. Based on AAM, MHGC and CE, we contrive the novel Graph Adaptive Attention Network (GAAN). Experiments show that the classification accuracy has achieved outstanding performances on Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed datasets.

The existing segmentation-based scene text detection methods mostly need complicated post-processing, and the post-processing operation is separated from the training process, which greatly reduces the detection performance. The previous method, DBNet successfully simplified post-processing and integrated the post-processing into a segmentation network. However, the training process of the model took a long time for 1200 epochs and the sensitivity to texts of various scales was lacking, leading to some text instances being missed. Considering the above two problems, we design the text detection Network with Binarization of Hyperbolic Tangent(HTBNet). First of all, we propose Binarization of Hyperbolic Tangent (HTB), optimized along with which, the segmentation network can expedite the initial convergent speed by reducing the amount of epochs from 1200 to 600. Because features of different channels in the same scale feature map focus on the information of different regions in the image, to better represent the important features of all objects in the image, we devise the Multi-Scale Channel Attention(MSCA). Meanwhile considering that multi-scale objects in the image cannot be simultaneously detected, we propose a novel module named Fused Module with Channel and Spatial(FMCS), which can fuse the multi-scale feature maps from channel and spatial dimension. Finally we adopt cross entropy as the loss function, which measures the difference between predicted values and ground truths. The experimental results show that HTBNet compared with lightweight models has achieved competitive performance and speed on Total-Text(F-measure:86.0%, FPS:30) and MSRA-TD500 (F-measure:87.5%, FPS:30).

The quantified residence time distribution (RTD) provides a numerical characterization of mixing in the continue casting tundish, thus allowing the engineer to better understand the metallurgical performance of the reactor. This paper describes a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modelling study for analyzing the flow pattern and the residence time distribution in a five-strand tundish. Two passive scalar transport equations are applied to separately calculate the E-curve and F-curve in the tundish. The numerical modelling results are compared to the water modelling results for the validation of the mathematical model. The volume fraction of different flow regions (plug, mixed and dead) and the intermixing time during the ladle changeover are calculated to study the effects of the flow control device (FCD) on the tundish performance. The result shows that a combination of the U-baffle with deflector holes and the turbulence inhibitor has three major effects on the flow characteristics in the tundish: i) reduce the extent of the dead volume; ii) evenly distribute the liquid streams to each strand and iii) shorten the intermixing time during the ladle changeover operation.

The degree of ore rock fragmentation of mine blasting is an important index for evaluating the effect of engineering blasting. In order to study the effect of millisecond delayed blasting on the internal fragmentation of the ore rock, LS-DYNA numerical simulation software was used to obtain the damage characteristics of the ore rock in the blasting area using the RHT model. The Mohr-Coulomb strength damage criterion was applied to analyze the internal stress state of the ore rock, and the effects of 25ms, 50ms and 75ms delay time conditions on ore rock fragmentation were studied. The results show that, within a certain range of delay time, the degree of rock fragmentation increases with the increase of delay time. The stress state in the ore rock due to blasting is strengthened with the increase of delay time in the direction of the blast hole, which shows that the stress concentration is strengthened from the excavation face to the interior of the ore rock. The damage and the degree of fragmentation show a characteristic relationship of 25ms＜50ms＜75ms, which is verified by carrying out blasting experiments on site.

Ginkgolic acids (GA) have been reported to exhibit anticancer properties, however, the mechanisms remain unclear. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms of GA C13:0 that was isolated from Ginkgo biloba exocarp (GBE) for anti-proliferation, pro-apoptosis and anti-migration effects in human MCF-7 and mouse 4T-1 breast cancer cells. The cytotoxic effect, apoptosis induction and migration inhibition were measured using MTT, TUNEL and Wound healing assays. The expression of mRNA and protein were determined using qPCR and Western blot. Our results showed that no cytotoxicity was found at concentrations of C13:0 below 100µM. The effects of GA C13:0 was further demonstrated by up-regulation of the Bax/Bcl-2 apoptosis pathway and the expression of Apaf-1 protein in the mitochondria. In addition, GA C13:0 also suppressed cell migration and epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) with the increase of E-cadherin expression accompanied by the decrease of Snail, MMP-2, MMP-9 and Vimentin expression. Moreover, GA C13:0 induced cytochrome P450 (CYP) 1B1 expression in aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) pathway. Notably, the up-regulation of CYP1B1 also might play a pivotal regulatory role in mitochondrial and EMT pathways in MCF-7 and 4T-1 cells. Our results may have implications for the development of anticancer agents containing GA as functional additives.

Smart air filters are beneficial to provide highly efficient particle removal, treat multiple contaminants simultaneously and conserve energy during air filtration processes. Herein, a type of self-supporting smart air filter (SSSAF) was fabricated by sandwiching the VOC-responsive PZT/PVDF electrospun membrane with two metal mesh electrodes. Besides the high filtration efficiency for sub-micron particles, the SSSAF showed good responses to pressure drop in the range of 0 to 500 Pa via the electroactivity of PZT/PVDF membrane. In addition, the SSSAF achieved VOC sensing function via the swelling properties of PZT/PVDF membrane in organic vapors, demonstrated by its signal to 50 to 200 ppm ethanol gases. The SSSAF based nanogenerator was employed to harvest wind energy, which was further applied to inhibit bacterial growth without the need of additional power input. The results provide new insight into development of all-in-one smart air filters.

Nowadays, it is highly desired to develop highly active and humidity resistive ozone decomposition catalyst to eliminate the ozone contaminant, one of the primary pollutants in air. In this work, a series of Cu2S hollow structured materials are rapidly synthesized using different structured Cu2O templates. The Cu2S from porous Cu2O shows the highest ozone catalytic decomposition efficiency of >95% to 400 ppm ozone with a weight hourly space velocity of 480,000 cm3g-1h-1 in dry air. Importantly, the conversion still keeps >85% in a high relative humidity of 90%. The mechanism is explored by diffusive reflectance infrared spectroscopy which shows the decomposition intermediate of O22-, and the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals the dual active site of both Cu and S. All these results show the effective decomposition of ozone by Cu2S especially in harsh environments, promising for active ozone elimination.

Ionizing radiation exposure can cause damage to diverse tissues and organs, with the hematopoietic system being the most sensitive. However, limited information is available regarding the radiosensitivity of various hematopoietic cell populations in the bone marrow due to the high heterogeneity of the hematopoietic system. In this study, we observed that granulocyte-macrophage progenitors, hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells and B cells within the bone marrow showed the highest sensitivity, exhibiting a rapid decrease in cell numbers following irradiation. Nonetheless, neutrophils, natural killer (NK) cells, T cells, and dendritic cells demonstrated a certain degree of radioresistance, with neutrophils exhibiting the most pronounced resistance. By employing single-cell transcriptome sequencing, we investigated the early responsive genes in various cell types following irradiation, revealing that distinct gene expression profiles emerged between radiosensitive and radioresistant cells. In B cells, radiation exposure led to a specific upregulation of genes associated with mitochondrial respiratory chain complexes, suggesting a connection between these complexes and cell radiosensitivity. In neutrophils, radiation exposure resulted in fewer gene alterations, indicating their potential for distinct mechanisms in radiation resistance. Collectively, this study provides insights into the molecular mechanism for the heterogeneity of radiosensitivity among the various bone marrow hematopoietic cell populations.

This article presents a comprehensive framework for valuing financial instruments subject to credit risk. In particular, we focus on the impact of default dependence on asset pricing, as correlated default risk is one of the most pervasive threats in financial markets. We analyze how swap rates are affected by bilateral counterparty credit risk, and how CDS spreads depend on the trilateral credit risk of the buyer, seller, and reference entity in a contract. Moreover, we study the effect of collateralization on valuation, since the majority of OTC derivatives are collateralized. The model shows that a fully collateralized swap is risk-free, whereas a fully collateralized CDS is not equivalent to a risk-free one.

The intense motion of a ship can greatly impacts the comfort of crew members and the safety of the vessel. Therefore, accurately estimating and predicting ship attitudes has become an important issue. This paper introduces the latest development in functional deep learning model called DeepOnet. It takes wave height as input and ship motion as output, using a cause-to-result prediction approach. The modeling data used in this study is sourced from publicly available experimental data from the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research. Firstly, parameters system tuning was conducted for the neural network's hyperparameters to determine the appropriate combination of parameters. Secondly, the DeepOnet model for wave height and multi-degree-of-freedom motion was established, and the influence of increasing time steps on prediction accuracy was examined. Finally, a comparison was made between the DeepOnet model and the classical time series model LSTM. It was found that the DeepOnet model had a 10-fold improvement in accuracy for roll and heave attitudes. Moreover, as the forecast duration increased, the advantage of DeepOnet showed a trend of strengthening. As a functional prediction model, DeepOnet provides a new promising tool for very short-term prediction of ship motion.

In (Semigroup Forum 77: 325-338, 2008) Mahmoudi M. and Renshaw J. solved a study that covers of cyclic $S$-acts over monoids. This article is an attempt to initiate the covers of finitely generated $S$-acts. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a monoid to have the properties that $n$-generated $S$-acts have strongly flat covers, Condition $(P)$ covers and projective covers. The main conclusions extend some known results. We show also that Condition $(P)$ covers of finitely generated $S$-acts are not unique, unlike the situation for strongly flat covers. Additionally, we demonstrate that the property of Enochs' $\mathcal{X}$-precover of $S$-act $A$, where $\mathcal{X}$ denotes a class of $S$-acts that are closed under isomorphisms.

After the end of colonial rule in 1997, the Hong Kong education system has been experiencing a policy reform on Senior Secondary Education (NSS) Curriculum commenced in September 2009 aiming to educate students as globalized Hong Kong citizens for the Western. Although previous scholars argued that it is hard to differentiate between domestic values and the Western values in account of curriculum development (Sewpaul, 2007), this study demonstrates an analysis using the dichotomy to investigate how local curriculum, especially in the post-colonial areas, embrace both the Western values and domestic values. Using content analysis on the NSS curriculum guides, this article evaluates the influence of the Western values and Chinese values in the NSS curriculum through investigating: (1) how the Western values and Chinese values was incorporated into the curriculum throughout its development (2) why some values are more significantly highlighted in the curriculum guide. Findings include that more Chinese values are involved in the curriculum documents. This may be because of the upholding of domestic values as a post-colonial city. The Western values which are academically related are greatly incorporated into the local curriculum.

Fire is a common natural disturbance in forest ecosystems and plays an important role in subsequent vegetation patterns. Based on the spatial sequence method instead of the time successional sequence method, this study selected burned areas in different locations in the Anning River Basin, which contains typical dry valleys. Quadrat surveys and quantitative classification were used to identify the vegetation classification, distribution pattern, and environmental interpretation during the natural restoration process after forest fire. The results showed that: (1) the vegetation community in the early stage of natural recovery after forest fire disturbance could be divided into seven community types, and Quercus guyavaefolia H. Leveille (Qg) was the dominant species in the community; (2) vegetation samples could be divided into five ecological types, and the classification and distribution pattern of community types in this region changed most obviously with altitude; and (3) detrended correspondence analysis could clearly classify vegetation community types, and detrended canonical correspondence analysis could well reveal the relationships between species and environmental factors. This study provides a scientific basis guiding the restoration of ecosystem structural stability and biodiversity in burned areas.

In this paper, the sol−gel method was used to synthesize powders of LaMnO3 (LMO), La0.85Ca0.15MnO3 (LCM), and La0.85Sr0.15MnO3 (LSM). We investigated the impact of substituting Ca and Sr at the A−site on the perovskite crystal structure and electrochemical capabilities of LMO. LCM retained its orthogonal structure in comparison to the parent LMO components, whereas LSM transitioned to a rhombic structure. At 0.5 A/g, the specific capacitance of LCM and LSM electrodes is 185.5 F/g and 248 F/g, respectively.The specific capacitance of LCM was more three times than that of the LMO electrode. Among the three samples (LMO, 22.25 m2 g−1; LSM, 31.56 m2 g−1), the LCM sample exhibited the highest specific surface area of 38.79 m2 g−1. The charge transfer resistances of the LMO, LCM, and LSM are 0.48 Ω, 0.36 Ω, and 0.38 Ω, correspondingly. The LCM electrode exhibits the greatest capacitance performance due to its more refined morphology, increased concentration of oxygen vacancy, and more complete utilization of the perovskite bulk structure. The above results demonstrate that Ca or Sr substitution of A−site compounds has great potential for supercapacitor applications.

Saliency detection in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image is a difficult problem. This paper proposed a multitask saliency detection (MSD) model for the saliency detection task of SAR image. Firstly, we extract four features of SAR image as the input of the MSD model, which include the intensity, orientation, uniqueness and global contrast. Then, the saliency map is generated by the multitask sparsity pursuit (MTSP) which integrates the multiple features collaboratively. Subjective and objective evaluation of the MSD model verifies its effectiveness. Based on the saliency maps of the source images, an image fusion method is proposed for the SAR and color optical image fusion. The experimental results of real data show the proposed image fusion method is superior to the presenting methods in terms of several universal quality evaluation indexes, as well as in the visual quality. The salient areas in the SAR image can be highlighted and the spatial and spectral details of color optical image can also be preserved in the fusion result.

This paper considers the Hermitian solutions of a new system of commutative quaternion matrix equations, we establish both necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions. Furthermore, we derive an explicit general expression when it is solvable. To illustrate our main findings, we present two numerical algorithms and examples in this paper.

In this paper, we study the well-posedness and asymptotics of a one-dimensional thermoelastic laminated beam system either with or without structural damping, where the heat conduction is given by Fourier's law effective in the rotation angle displacements. We show that the system is well-posed by using Lumer-Philips theorem, and prove that the system is exponentially stable if and only if the wave speeds are equal, by using the perturbed energy method and Gearhart-Herbst-Prüss-Huang theorem. Furthermore, we show that the system with structural damping is polynomially stable provided that the wave speeds are not equal, by using the second-order energy method.

The robust control of high precision electromechanical systems, such as micropositioners, is challenging in terms of the inherent high nonlinearity, the sensitivity to external interference, and the complexity of accurate identification of the model parameters. To cope with these problems, this work investigates a disturbance observer-based deep reinforcement learning control strategy to realize high robustness and precise tracking performance. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential as optimal control scheme, however, its application in micropositioning systems is still rare. Therefore, embedded with the integral differential compensator (ID), deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is utilized in this work with the ability to not only decrease the state error but also improves the transient response speed. In addition, an adaptive sliding mode disturbance observer (ASMDO) is proposed to further eliminate the collective effect caused by the lumped disturbances. The sterling performance is revealed with intensive tracking simulation experiments and demonstrates the improvement in the accuracy and response time of the controller.

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is a cutting-edge biomedical imaging modality, providing detailed anatomical and functional information about the area beneath the skin surface. Its light energy deposition is such that PAI typically provides clear images of the skin with high signal-to-noise ratios. Specifically, the rich optical contrast of PAI allows biological information related to lesion growth, malignancy, treatment response, and prognosis to be seen. Given its significant advantages and emerging role in imaging skin lesions, we summarize and comment on representative studies of skin PAI, such as the guidance of skin cancer biopsies and surgical excisions, and the accurate diagnosis of psoriasis. We conclude with our insights about the clinical significance of skin PAI, showing how its use to identify biological characteristics in lesion microenvironments allows early diagnosis and prognosis of disease.

Spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) are the only primitive spermatogonial cells in males that can naturally transmit genetic information to their offspring and replicate throughout their lives. Phospholipase D family member 6 (PLD6) has recently been found to be a surface marker for SSCs in mice and boars; however, it has not been validated in cattle. The results of RT-PCR and qRT-PCR found that the relative expression of PLD6 gene in the testicular tissues of 2-year-old Simmental calves was significantly higher than that of 6-month-old calves. Immunofluorescent staining further verified the expression of PLD6 protein in bovine spermatogenic cells like germ cell marker VASA. Based on multiple bioinformatic databases, PLD6 is a conservative protein which has high homology with mouse Q5SWZ9 protein. It is closely involved in the normal functioning of the reproductive system. Molecular dynamics simulation analyzed the binding of PLD6 as a phospholipase to cardiolipin (CL), and PLD6-CL complex showed high stability. The protein interaction network analysis showed that there is a significant relationship between PLD6 and piRNA binding protein. PLD6 acts as an endonuclease and participates in piRNA production. In addition, PLD6 in bovine and mouse testes has a similar expression pattern with the spermatogonium-related genes VASA and PIWIL2. In conclusion, these analyses imply that PLD6 has a relatively high expression in bovine testes and could be used as a biomarker for spermatogenic cells including SSCs.

We suppose that vacuum is filled with a kind of continuously distributed matter which may be called the $\Omega(1)$ substratum, or the electromagnetic aether. Suppose that the time scale of a macroscopic observer is very large compares to the the Maxwelllian relaxation time of the $\Omega(1)$ substratum. Thus, the macroscopic observer concludes that the $\Omega(1)$ substratum behaves like a Newtonian-fluid. Inspired by H. A. Lorentz, we speculate that electric charges may be extremely small hard spherical sources or spherical sinks with finite radii. Based on the spherical source and spherical sink model of electric charges, we derive Coulomb's law of interactions between static electric charges in vacuum. Further, we derive a reduced form of the Lorentz's force law for static electric charges in vacuum.

Numerous dynamic and complicated processes characterize development from the oocyte to the embryo. However, given the importance of functional transcriptome profiles, long non-coding RNAs, single-nucleotide polymorphisms, and alternative splicing during embryonic development, the effect that these features have on the blastomeres of 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-cell, and morula stages of development have not been studied. Here, we conducted a scRNA-seq survey of cells from sheep from the oocyte to the blastocyst developmental stages. We then carried out experiments to identify and functionally analyze the transcriptome profiles, long non-coding RNAs, single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and alternative splicing (AS). We founded that between the oocyte and zygote groups significantly down-regulated genes and the second-largest change in gene expression occurred between the 8- and 16-cell stages. We used various methods to construct a profile to characterize cellular and molecular features and systematically analyze the related GO and KEGG profile of cells of all stages from the oocyte to the blastocyst. This large-scale, single-cell atlas provides key cellular information and will likely assist clinical studies in improving preimplantation genetic diagnosis.

Construction using earth materials demonstrates ecological sustainability using locally sourced natural materials and environmentally friendly demolition methods. In this study, the environmental impact of adding cement to soil materials for rammed-earth farmhouse construction in rural China was investigated and comparatively simulated using the One Click LCA database, focusing on the conflict between sustainability objectives and the practical aspects of cement addition. By analyzing how the addition of cement aligns with local construction practices and by addressing the debate surrounding the inclusion of cement in rammed earth construction, our objective is to provide insights into achieving a balance between the environmental impact and the pragmatic considerations of using cement in earthen building practices. Three local structure scenarios are evaluated via simulations: a cement-stabilized rammed earth wall, a fired brick wall, and a localized reinforced concrete frame structure. The quantitative environmental impacts are assessed, and the qualitative differences in adaptation, economic sustainability, and other factors are examined in the context of present-day development in rural China. The results show that the use of cement-stabilized rammed earth wall-supported structures is associated with higher embodied carbon emissions compared to structures supported by reinforced concrete frames and enclosed by brick walls; however, these emissions are lower than those for brick wall-supported structures, while effectively meeting the structural requirements. In addition, the use of cement-stabilized earth for perimeter walls simplifies material management and disposal throughout the building's life cycle, and the cost-effectiveness of cement has been found to be substantially greater than that of reinforced concrete frames and brick structures, improving economic viability and social acceptability, especially among low-income communities in rural areas.

Aiming at the problems of inaccurate segmentation of long object and information loss of small object in real-time semantic segmentation algorithm, this paper proposes a lightweight multi-branch real-time semantic segmentation network based on BiseNetV2. The new auxiliary branch makes full use of spatial details and context information to cover the long object in the field of view. Meanwhile, in order to ensure the inference speed of the model, the asymmetric convolution is used in each stage of the auxiliary branch to design a structure with low computational complexity. In the multi-branch fusion stage, the alignment and fusion module is designed to provide guidance information for deep and shallow feature mapping, so as to make up for the problem of feature misalignment in the fusion of information at different scales, and thus reduce the loss of small target information. In order to further improve the model’s awareness of key information, a global context module is designed to capture the most important features in the input data. The proposed network uses NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Laptop GPU experiment, on the road street view data set Cityscapes and CamVid average occurring simultaneously ratio reached 77.1% and 78.4% respectively, with running speed of 127 frames/s respectively and 112 frames/s. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve real-time segmentation and improve the accuracy significantly, showing good semantic segmentation performance

A PLS-based quality prediction method is proposed for batch processes using two-dimensional extended windows. To realize the adoption of information in the direction of sampling time and batch, a new definition region of support (ROS), k-i-back-extended region of support (KIBROS), is proposed to establish the extended window, which including the data of the previous sampling times in the same batch, the data of the same sampling time in the historical batches, the data of the previous sampling times in the historical batches and the data of the later sampling times in the historical batches. According to these regions of support, extended windows are established, and different models are proposed based on the extended windows for batch processes quality prediction. Further, using a typical batch process as an example, the injection molding process, the proposed quality prediction method is experimentally verified, proving that the proposed methods have higher prediction accuracy than the traditional method and the prediction stability is also improved.

Brassica yellows virus (BrYV) is a tentative species of the genus Polerovirus, which occurs widely and mostly damage Brassicaceae plants in East Asia. Since BrYV could not be transmitted mechanically, an insect transmission method is required for further virus research. Here, a reliable and unrestricted method was described, in which non-viruliferous aphids (Myzus persicae) acquired BrYV from transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plants with virus full length genome germinated from seeds and frozen infected leaves were used to transmit the virus to healthy plants, and there was no significant difference in acquisition rate though transmission rate from frozen infected leaves was somehow lower compared to fresh infected leaves. This novel simple method could be applied to preservation of virus inocula, evaluation of variety resistance to BrYV, biological research on interaction among BrYV, aphid and host, which also provide a new idea on establishing a basic method using virus genomic transgenic plants or frozen infected leaves for other poleroviruses research.

Tack is one of the most important factors affecting the operability of prepregs, but it is still very difficult to obtain the change of prepreg tack with time at different temperatures. In this paper, a newly designed T-peel device is used to test the tack decay rate of prepregs at different temperatures. The obtained decay rate deviates less than 8.9% from the manufacturer's data. The maximum deviation of the ratio of tack decay speeds calculated by the Arrhenius equation from the experiments is not higher than -9.7%. It is proved that the present method can obtain the decay rate of tack of prepregs at different temperatures. This method is also applicable to the other two types of prepregs. The article proposes the handling life unit, an operational life measurement unit for prepregs, and establishes that the relationship between tack and remaining shelf life reduces prepreg management costs.

The AREB/ABF (ABA response element binding) proteins in plants are vital for plant stress responses, but the understanding of AREB/ABFs in orchid species, an important traditional medicinal and ornamental plants, is limited. Here, twelve AREB/ABF genes were identified within three orchids’ complete genome and classified into three groups (groups I, II, and III) via a phylogenetic analysis, which was further supported by the analysis of their conserved motifs and gene structures. The cis-elements analysis showed that hormone response elements followed by light and stress responses were widely rich in AREB/ABFs. A prediction analysis of orchid ABRE/ABF-mediated regulatory network was further constructed through cis-regulatory elements (CREs) analysis of their promoter regions and revealed that several transcriptional factor (TF) gene family were abundant as the potential regulators for orchid AREB/ABFs. Expression profile analysis based on public transcriptomic data showed that most AREB/ABF genes have distinct tissue-specific expression patterns in orchid plants. Additionally, DcaABI5 as the homolog of ABA INSENSITIVE 5 (ABI5) from Arabidopsis was selected for further analysis. The results showed that Arabidopsis transgenic overexpressing DcaABI5 could rescue the ABA insensitive phenotype in the mutant abi5. Collectively, these findings will provide valuable information on AREB/ABF genes in orchids.

In this work, a simple and environmentally friendly process combining low pressure (vacuum) and mechanical compression is proposed to convert recycled polypropylene (PP) foams (28 kg/m3) into low density foams (90-131 kg/m3) having negative tensile and compressive Poisson's ratios (NPR). The effect of processing conditions (vacuum time, temperature, and mechanical pressure) was studied. Based on the optimized conditions, the tensile Poisson’s ratio of the resulting auxetic foams reached −1.50, while the minimum compressive Poisson's ratios was −0.32 for the same sample. The foam structure was characterized via morphological analysis (SEM) to determine any changes related to the treatment applied. Finally, tensile and compressive properties (Young's modulus, strain energy, energy dissipation and damping capacity) are also presented and discussed. It was observed that the mechanical properties of the resulting auxetic foams were improved compared to the original PP foam (PP-O) for all tensile properties in terms of modulus (19.9 to 59.8 kPa), strength (0.298 to 1.43 kPa) elongation at break (28 to 77%), energy dissipation (14.4 to 56.3 mJ/cm3) and damping capacity (12 to 19%). Nevertheless, improvements were also observed under compression in terms of energy dissipation (1.6 to 3.6 mJ/cm3) and damping capacity (13 to 19%). These auxetic foams can find applications in sport and military protective equipment, as well as any energy mitigation system.

In recent years, there has been significant growth in the ubiquity and popularity of three dimensional(3D) point clouds, with an increasing focus on the classification of 3D point clouds. To extract richer features from point clouds, many researchers have turned their attention to various point set regions and channels within irregular point clouds. However, this approach has limited capability in attending to crucial regions of interest in 3D point clouds and may overlook valuable information from neighboring features during feature aggregation. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel 3D point cloud classification method based on global attention and adaptive graph convolution. The method consists of two main branches: the first branch com-putes attention masks for each point, while the second branch employs adaptive graph convolu-tion to extract global features from the point set. It dynamically learns features based on point interactions, generating adaptive kernels to effectively and precisely capture diverse relationships among points from different semantic parts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves 93.8% in overall accuracy and 90.8% in average accuracy on the ModeNet40 dataset.

China is in the climbing phase of the "Inverted U" environmental Kuznets curve, from excessive environmental consumption to the development stage of governance and protection, and green innovation. It is the most complex period of environmental quality. Environmental and policy regulation are very important. Select panel data of 29 provinces of China (excluding Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Hainan and Tibet) from 2008 to 2017, construct a nonlinear two-threshold regression model, empirically analyse the impact of environmental tax and government innovation subsidies to green processes innovation, and attempt to explore whether the implementation of these two policies at the same time can make enterprises more inclined to green process innovation and whether there is an optimal space for policy implementation. It is proposed that the synergy effect of environmental tax and government innovation subsidy policies on enterprise green process innovation should be fully utilized, and the enterprise green process innovation environment and incentive mechanism should be improved to promote the green transformation and sustainable development of enterprises.

In this paper, we study the well-posedness and asymptotic behaviour of solutions to a laminated beam in thermoelasticity of type III. We first give the well-posedness of the system by using the semigroup method. Then, we show that the system is exponentially stable under the assumption of equal wave speeds. Furthermore, it is proved that the system is lack of exponential stability for case of nonequal wave speeds. In this regard, a polynomial stability result is proved.

As the global population rapidly ages with longer life expectancy and declining birth rates, the need for healthcare services and caregivers for older adults is increasing. Current research envisions addressing this shortage by introducing domestic service robots to assist with daily activities. The successful integration of robots as domestic service providers in our lives requires them to possess efficient manipulation capabilities, provide effective physical assistance, and have adaptive control frameworks that enable them to develop social understanding during human-robot interaction. In this context, human factors, especially quantifiable ones, represent a necessary component. The objective of this paper is to conduct an unbiased review encompassing studies on human factors studied in research involving physical interactions and strong manipulation capabilities. We identified the prevalent human factors in physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), noted the factors typically addressed together and determined the frequently utilized assessment approaches. Additionally, we gathered and categorized proposed quantification approaches based on measurable data for each human factor. We also formed a map of common contexts and applications addressed in pHRI for a comprehensive understanding and easier navigation of the field. We found out that most of the studies in direct pHRI (when there is direct physical contact) focus on social behaviors with belief being the most commonly addressed human factor type. Task collaboration is moderately investigated, while physical assistance is rarely studied. In contrast, indirect pHRI (when the physical contact is mediated via a third item) studies often involve industrial settings, with physical ergonomics being the most frequently investigated human factor. More research is needed on human factors in direct and indirect physical assistance applications, including studies that combine physical social behaviors with physical assistance tasks. We also found that while the predominant approach in most studies involves the use of questionnaires as the main method of quantification, there is a recent trend that seeks to address quantification approaches based on measurable data.

In this paper, a new approach is proposed for designing ultra-low-power FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) system suitable for use in energy harvesting powered sensors. Bit-serial architecture is adopted to reduce the power consumption of butterfly operation. Simulation results show that, compared with state-of-the-art bit-serial and conventional parallel processors, the proposed technique is superior in terms of silicon area, power consumption, dynamic energy use due to variable precision arithmetic. A sample design of a 64-point FFT shows that the implementation can save about 40% area and 36% leakage power compared with a conventional parallel counterpart, accordingly achieving significant power benefits at a low sample rate and low voltage domain. The dynamic variation of the arithmetic precision can be achieved through a simple modification of the controller with hardware area overhead of 10% gate count.