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The modeling of the concrete matrix serves as a foundation for mesoscale analysis of concrete, which provides a crucial avenue for investigating the crack propagation and strength characteristics of concrete. However, the primary prerequisite for conducting such analyses is the generation of aggregate models. By combining the advantages of Voronoi diagrams and the random walk algorithm (RWA), a Voronoi–random walk algorithm is proposed in this paper. The algorithm overcomes the limitations of traditional methods, including constraints on aggregate volume fraction, low computational efficiency, and insufficient randomness in aggregate distribution. The meso-structure of a concrete block was modeled by the proposed method, and then its failure behavior under uniaxial compression was simulated using the finite element method. The numerical results agreed well with the experimental observations, indicating the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxidative stress plays a pivotal role in the development of diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM). Previous studies have revealed that inhibition of mitochondrial fission suppressed oxidative stress and alleviated mitochondrial dysfunction and cardiac dysfunction in diabetic mice. However, no research has confirmed whether mitochondria fission accentuates hyperglycemia‐induced cardiomyoblast oxidative stress through regulating fatty acid oxidation (FAO). We used H9c2 cardiomyoblasts exposed to high glucose (HG) 33 mM to simulate DCM in vitro. Excessive mitochondrial fission, poor cell viability, and lipid accumulation were observed in hyperglycemia‐induced H9c2 cardiomyoblasts. Also, the cells were led to oxidative stress injury, lower adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels, and apoptosis. Dynamin‐related protein 1 (Drp1) short interfering RNA (siRNA) decreased targeted marker expression, inhibited mitochondrial fragmentation and lipid accumulation, suppressed oxidative stress, reduced cardiomyoblast apoptosis, and improved cell viability and ATP levels in HG‐exposed H9c2 cardiomyoblasts, but not in carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1 (CPT1) inhibitor etomoxir treatment cells. We also found subcellular localization of CPT1 on the mitochondrial membrane, FAO, and levels of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) were suppressed after exposure to HG treatment, whereas Drp1 siRNA normalized mitochondrial CPT1, FAO, and NADPH. However, the blockade of FAO with etomoxir abolished the above effects of Drp1 siRNA in hyperglycemia‐induced H9c2 cardiomyoblasts. The preservation of mitochondrial function through the Drp1/CPT1/FAO pathway is the potential mechanism of inhibited mitochondria fission in attenuating oxidative stress injury of hyperglycemia‐induced H9c2 cardiomyoblasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aged myocardium is more susceptible to ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury. Autophagy and apoptosis play important roles in cardiac I/R injury. However, whether resveratrol can reduce the I/R vulnerability of aged myocardium by regulating apoptosis and autophagy remains unclear. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of resveratrol on the tolerance to I/R injury in aged male mice and to determine the contribution of apoptosis and autophagy. We used aged C57 mice as our research subjects. The hearts of mice were isolated after 6 weeks of intragastric administration with resveratrol and subsequently perfused with Krebs–Henseleit buffer to produce the I/R model. We found that resveratrol alleviated cardiac I/R injury in aged mice, but not in SIRT1+/− mice. Aged mice exhibited decreased LC3 and Beclin1 expressions, which were significantly rescued by resveratrol treatment. In addition, resveratrol decreased the expression of Bax and the activity of Caspase‐3, while increasing the expression of Bcl‐2 and the activity of SIRT1 in aged mouse hearts. Coimmunoprecipitation assays revealed that resveratrol facilitated the binding of Bax to Bcl‐2 and the dissociation of Bcl‐2 from Beclin1 in aged mouse myocardium. Conversely, SIRT1 knockout enhanced the formation of the Beclin1/Bcl‐2 complex and disrupted the interaction between Bcl‐2 and Bax. The above results indicate that resveratrol can reduce the vulnerability of myocardial I/R injury in senile myocardium by inhibiting apoptosis and upregulating autophagy through the SIRT1 signaling pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep neural networks can significantly improve the quality of super-resolution. However, previous work has made insufficient use of low-resolution scale features and channel-wise information, hence hindering the representational ability of CNNs. To address these issues, a multi-scale fractal residual attention network (MFRAN) is proposed. Specifically, MFRAN consists of fractal residual blocks (FRBs), dual-enhanced channel attention (DECA), and dilated residual attention blocks (DRABs). Among them, FRB applies multi-scale extension rule to continuously expand into a fractal structure that detects multi-scale features; DRAB constructs a combined dilated convolution to learn a generalizable and expressive feature space with a larger receptive field; DECA employs one-dimensional convolution to achieve cross-channel information interaction, and enhance the flow of information between groups by channel shuffling. Then, we integrate horizontal feature representations via local residual and feature fusion. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations of benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative metrics and visual results. [Display omitted] • We propose a Multi-scale Fractal Residual Attention Network (MFRAN) for SISR, where Dual-Enhanced Channel Attention can capture inter-channel dependencies more efficiently and lightly while enabling cross-channel information interaction for enhanced channel modeling capabilities, so that the model can reconstruct SR images with richer details at large-scale factors; Fractal Residual Block with multiple local feature extraction paths of different lengths, each path consists of dilated residual attention blocks with different size receptive fields, so that LR features of different scales can be extracted efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Daliangshan area of Sichuan, China, is located on the southeastern margin of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau. It marks the central section of the left‐lateral Xianshuihe–Xiaojiang Fault System (XXFS), which plays a crucial role in accommodating clockwise vertical-axis rotation of the expanding Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau relative to the South China Block. The area is seismically and tectonically active, and three major active faults—the Anninghe fault (ANHF), Zemuhe fault (ZMHF) and Daliangshan fault (DLSF)—together accommodate a significant amount of left-lateral strike-slip motion. Here, we present a geodetic study of the Daliangshan area mainly based on satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). We processed Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS2) Phased-Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar-2 (PALSAR2) imagery to reconstruct the present-day interseismic deformation field. We developed an optimal atmospherics phase correction strategy to overcome the significant artefacts caused by ionospheric and tropospheric. By applying a multitemporal analysis on corrected interferograms, for the first time we generated a spatially continuous deformation rate field for the Daliangshan area. The satellite line-of-sight (LOS) rate field agrees with Global Positioning System (GPS) and levelling data to ∼2 mm yr–1, confirming that our processing approach is suitable for use in heavily vegetated areas. The InSAR rate map reveals displacements along the central and southern segments of the DLSF and ZMHF. By applying an inversion based on the Okada model, we quantitatively estimated the kinematic parameters of fault segments. Assuming a simple rectangular fault plane for each fault segment and constrained with the prior knowledge of the left-lateral slip, we determined that the ZMHF has a slip rate of 5.06 |$\pm 0.99{\rm{\ mm}}\,{\rm{yr}}^{-1}$| with a rake angle of ∼ |$38^\circ $| gently dipping to the SW. The southern section of the DLSF has a rake of |$- 48^\circ \,\,{\rm to}\,\, - 41^\circ $| with the total slip rate of |$4.93 \pm 0.4{\rm{\ mm}}\,{\rm{yr}}^{-1}$|⁠ , dipping towards to the NE at |$63.50^\circ \pm 2.31^\circ $|⁠. The modelled 3-D rate field has been validated with GPS and levelling measurements. Additionally, the inversion model and strain field suggest that the middle section of the DLSF undergoes strong deformation. We considered the implications of three factors—oblique convergence, gravity-driven movement, and the ELIP beneath the Sichuan–Yunnan area—for complex 3-D velocities in the transitional Daliangshan area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

6DoF camera localization is an important component of autonomous driving and navigation. Deep learning has achieved impressive results in localization, but its robustness in dynamic environments has not been adequately addressed. In this paper, we propose a framework based on hybrid attention mechanism which can be generally applied to existing CNN-based pose regressors to improve their robustness in dynamic environments. Specifically, we propose a novel Transformer Bottleneck (TBo) block including convolution, channel attention, and a position-aware self-attention mechanism, which extracts more geometrically robust features by capturing the corresponding long-term dependencies between pixels. Furthermore, we introduce shuffle attention (SA) before the pose regressor, which integrates feature information in both spatial and channel dimensions, forcing the network to learn geometrically robust features, reducing the effects of dynamic objects and illumination conditions to improve camera localization accuracy. We evaluate our method on commonly benchmarked indoor and outdoor datasets and the experimental results show that our proposed method can significantly improve localization performance compared compare favorably to contemporary pose regressors schemes. In addition, extensive ablation evaluations are conducted to prove the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid attention bottleneck block for pose regression networks. • We propose a novel Transformer Bottleneck block with self-attention and channel attention to overcome the limitations of convolution. This coupling allows them to be optimized in a mutually reinforcing manner, significantly improving fine-grained feature extraction for accurate localization. • We propose a novel end-to-end hybrid attention network for single image localization, which improves the accuracy and robustness of camera localization, especially in dynamic scenes. • We conduct extensive experiments in both indoor and outdoor dataset, which shows that our model performs better than the existing competitive methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video action recognition faces the important and challenging problem of spatiotemporal relationship modeling. In order to solve this issue, current methods typically rely on 2D or 3D CNN operations to model local spatiotemporal dependencies at fixed scales. However, most of these models fail to emphasize the keyframes and action-sensitive regions of the input video, resulting in poor performance. In this paper, an action recognition network with local motion feature extraction and spatiotemporal attention mechanism is proposed. The proposed network consists of a motion capture (MC) module and a temporal attention (TA) and spatiotemporal attention (STA) module, which capture detailed motion features, and learns the contribution of each frame and each region to the action at the feature level, respectively. To evaluate our network, we construct a concrete water addition violation dataset (CWAVD), which can be used to identify water addition violations by construction site workers and improve construction management efficiency and quality. The proposed network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three of the most challenging datasets, UCF101 (97.6%), HMDB51 (77.3%) and SSV2 (67.8%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) modifies the trimethylation of Lys-27 of histone 3, affecting downstream target genes' expression. It was reported that EZH2 is highly expressed in gastric cancer and may be a potential prognostic molecule and promising therapeutic target. We aim to present the value of EZH2 research in gastric cancer by focusing on the crucial events of EZH2 involvement in gastric cancer progression. Therefore, in this review, we present the two main functions of EZH2: histone methylation modification and DNA methylation by EZH2; the molecular mechanism of the action of EZH2 in regulating target genes; a detailed description of the mechanism of EZH2 in gastric cancer-related events. Finally, progress in the development of EZH2 inhibitors is summarized. This review article provides researchers studying the epigenetics of gastric cancer with research ideas to find new targets for studying gastric cancer pathogenesis. Gastric cancer is the fifth most common cancer and the third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Understanding the factors influencing the therapeutic effects in gastric cancer patients and the molecular mechanism behind gastric cancer is still facing challenges. In addition to genetic alterations and environmental factors, it has been demonstrated that epigenetic mechanisms can also induce the occurrence and progression of gastric cancer. Enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) is the catalytic subunit of the polycomb repressor complex 2 (PRC2), which trimethylates histone 3 at Lys-27 and regulates the expression of downstream target genes through epigenetic mechanisms. It has been found that EZH2 is overexpressed in the stomach, which promotes the progression of gastric cancer through multiple pathways. In addition, targeted inhibition of EZH2 expression can effectively delay the progression of gastric cancer and improve its resistance to chemotherapeutic agents. Given the many effects of EZH2 in gastric cancer, there are no studies to comprehensively describe this mechanism. Therefore, in this review, we first introduce EZH2 and clarify the mechanisms of abnormal expression of EZH2 in cancer. Secondly, we summarize the role of EZH2 in gastric cancer, which includes the association of the EZH2 gene with genetic susceptibility to GC, the correlation of the EZH2 gene with gastric carcinogenesis and invasive metastasis, the resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs of gastric cancer mediated by EZH2 and the high expression of EZH2 leading to poor prognosis of gastric cancer patients. Finally, we also clarify some of the current statuses of drug development regarding targeted inhibition of EZH2/PRC2 activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional constant admittance controller (CAC) in uncertain contact environment is highly dependent on environmental location and stiffness, which are always difficult to obtain in most applications. To address this problem, a fuzzy adaptive admittance controller (FAAC) based on fuzzy inference rules is proposed in this paper. Firstly, an adaptive admittance controller (AAC) that can compensate for the admittance parameters in real time based on force error information is proposed. Secondly, a fuzzy logic loop is introduced into the adaptive term of the AAC system to reduce the overshoot when force tracking, thus creating the FAAC. The detailed design method of FAAC is presented, and the stability conditions are analysed. Finally, simulations and experiments are conducted in several dynamic environments to demonstrate the force tracking performance of the proposed controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novel Ti/Al laminated composite embedded with particles of the high entropy alloy Al0.5CoCrFeNi were produced by vacuum hot press sintering at 650°C. The microstructure of the laminated composite was investigated using XRD, SEM, EDS, TEM and EBSD techniques. It was found that a thin layer of Al3Ti was formed at the Ti/Al interface. There were no obvious defects between the Al0.5CoCrFeNi particles and Al matrix, achieving a good interfacial bond. The tensile properties of the material were tested at room temperature. The results of the tensile test indicated that the material exhibited an elongation to failure of 59% and an average tensile strength of 240 MPa, demonstrating excellent plastic deformation capability. During the tensile process, the expansion of fractures and cracks in Al0.5CoCrFeNi particles can consume energy, which helps to improve the material's ability to undergo plastic deformation. Based on the morphologies of tensile fracture, it has been observed that the fracture surface of high entropy alloys exhibits a mixed fracture mode consisting of both brittle and plastic fracture. The brittle BCC phase has been identified as the main cause of cracking in HEA. Ultimately, the material fractures due to necking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this study, The ENVISAT advanced synthetic aperture radar observations from 2003 to 2010 of a descending track covering an area of 100 km × 300 km were used to map the surface velocity field in northwestern Tibet. The derived line-of-sight (LOS) velocity map revealed that interseismic deformation was mainly located on the Altyn Tagh Fault (ATF) and other four immature subsidiary faults (i.e., Tashikule Fault, Muzitage-jingyuhe Fault, Heishibeihu Fault, and Woniuhu Fault). A 2D elastic screw dislocation model was used to interpret the interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) velocity profiles, which revealed the following results. (a) The oblique movement is partitioned between left-lateral slip at a rate of 6.3 ± 1.4 mm/y on the ATF and 5.9 ± 2.8 mm/y on the subsidiary faults. The low slip rate of the ATF indicates that the ATF does not drive the northeastward extrusion of material, with most of the extrusion occurring in the eastern interior of the plateau and the four subsidiary faults localizing the oblique convergence partitioned in the west. This can reasonably explain why catastrophic earthquakes and rapid slip do not occur all over along the ATF. (b) Based on the four subsidiary faults accommodating the oblique movement and the traces amalgamation with the EKLF (delineated Bayan Har plate boundary to the northeast), we concluded guardedly that the four subsidiary faults are the evoluting plate boundary of the Bayan Har block to the northwest. (c) The Tanan top-up structure had an uplift rate of ~0.6 mm/y at the south of the Tarim Basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study comprehensively investigated the FRP-concrete debonding mechanism in the pull-off test using a mesoscale cohesive zone modelling approach. Pull-off tests were performed on the FRP-strengthened concrete elements, and corresponding 2-D mesoscale finite element models were established. The numerical stress-separation responses and strain/crack initiation and propagation in the pull-off test were examined. Subsequently, a parametric study numerically investigated the effect of adhesive and FRP properties, concrete heterogeneity, loading fixture stiffness, and sample scale on the debonding mechanism. Finally, the 2-D mesoscale model was extended to the 3-D. The main conclusions are: (1) global separation between FRP and concrete in the pull-off test is minimal; (2) the normal bond strength of the epoxy resin-concrete interface controls the failure mode; however, FRP stiffness does not affect the result; (3) the aggregate content and mortar porosity significantly influence the bond strength, and the effect of aggregate shape and gradation is slight; (4) the loading fixture stiffness should increase with an increase in sample size; (5) the pull-off bond strength aligns with the size effect theory; (6) the bond stiffness and strength of the 3-D model is significantly greater than that of the 2-D model, which is attributed to the out-of-plane concrete constraining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]