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In this paper, a new multifunctional compound, 1,1′-(oxalylbis(4,1-phenylene))bis(1H-pyrrole-2,5-dione) (BVM), is grafted onto crosslinked polyethylene (XLPE) by radical-initiated grafting to play triple roles as a voltage stabilizer, space-charge inhibitor and crosslinking auxiliary and to achieve the purpose of comprehensively enhancing the DC dielectric properties of polymers while decreasing the type and number of additives. By analyzing the DC breakdown field strength, current density and space-charge distribution of the materials at different temperatures, it is demonstrated that BVM grafting can comprehensively and effectively enhance the electrical properties of the materials, with little dependence on temperature. The BVM molecule has two polar groups and an effective molecular structure that acts as a voltage stabilizer, thus enabling the introduction of dense, uniform, deeply trapped energy levels within the material to inhibit the space charge and to capture high-energy electrons to prevent damage to the material structure; however, the two functions do not affect each other. This is also consistent with first-principles calculations and quantum-chemical calculations. Gel content testing shows no effect on polymer crosslinking, even with a 27.8% reduction in the amount of the crosslinking agent di-isopropyl peroxide (DCP), which reduces the damage to the polymer's electrical resistance caused by the byproducts of DCP decomposition. Therefore, grafting multifunctional BVM compounds to improve the dielectric characteristics of polymers is a viable area of study in the development of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cable materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses semi-supervised semantic segmentation by exploiting a small set of images with pixel-level annotations (strong supervisions) and a large set of images with only image-level annotations (weak supervisions). Most existing approaches aim to generate accurate pixel-level labels from weak supervisions. However, we observe that those generated labels still inevitably contain noisy labels. Motivated by this observation, we present a novel perspective and formulate this task as a problem of learning with pixel-level label noise. Existing noisy label methods, nevertheless, mainly aim at image-level tasks, which can not capture the relationship between neighboring labels in one image. Therefore, we propose a graph-based label noise detection and correction framework to deal with pixel-level noisy labels. In particular, for the generated pixel-level noisy labels from weak supervisions by Class Activation Map (CAM), we train a clean segmentation model with strong supervisions to detect the clean labels from these noisy labels according to the cross-entropy loss. Then, we adopt a superpixel-based graph to represent the relations of spatial adjacency and semantic similarity between pixels in one image. Finally we correct the noisy labels using a Graph Attention Network (GAT) supervised by detected clean labels. We comprehensively conduct experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, PASCAL-Context, MS-COCO and Cityscapes datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed semi-supervised method achieves the state-of-the-art performances and even outperforms the fully-supervised models on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS-COCO datasets in some cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study investigated the antibacterial, cytotoxicity, and mechanical properties of a dental adhesive modified with quaternary ammonium monomer ((2-acryloyloxyethyl)dimethyldodecylammonium bromide) and cross-linker (bis(2-acryloyloxyethyl)methyldodecylammonium bromide). Materials and methods: Monomer (M), cross-linker (C), or a combination of these (M + C) were incorporated into adhesive Adper Single Bond Plus (SB) in 5, 10, or 25% (as wt%). A colony-forming unit and MTT assays were used to evaluate antibacterial properties against Streptococcus mutans and cell viability. Resin-dentin beams (0.9 ± 0.1 mm2) were evaluated for micro-tensile bond strength (μTBS) after 24 h, 6 months, and 3 years. Hourglass specimens were evaluated for ultimate tensile strength (UTS) after 24 h, 1 week, and 6 months. Micro-hardness measurements after softening in ethanol were taken as an indirect assessment of the polymer cross-linking density. Kruskal-Wallis, one-way ANOVA, two-way ANOVA, and Student's t test were used for analysis of the antibacterial, cytotoxicity, μTBS, UTS, and hardness data, all with a significance level of p < 0.05. Results: 10%M and 25%M demonstrated a significant reduction in S. mutans relative to SB (p < 0.001). No differences in cytotoxicity were detected for any of the groups. After 6 months, no changes in μTBS were shown for any of the groups. After 3 years, all groups evidenced a significant decrease in μTBS (p < 0.05) except 5%M, 5%C, and 5%M + 5%C. All groups demonstrated either stable or significantly increased UTS after 6 months. Except for the cross-linker groups, a significant decrease in micro-hardness was shown for all groups after softening in ethanol (p < 0.05). Conclusions: A 5–10% of monomer may render the resin antibacterial without a compromise to its mechanical and bonding properties. Clinical relevance: Biomodification of a resin adhesive with an antibacterial monomer and cross-linker may help improve the life span of adhesive restorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of our work is to discover dominant objects in a very general setting where only a single unlabeled image is given. This is far more challenge than typical co-localization or weakly-supervised localization tasks. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but effective pattern mining-based method, called Object Location Mining (OLM), which exploits the advantages of data mining and feature representation of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we first convert the feature maps from a pre-trained CNN model into a set of transactions, and then discovers frequent patterns from transaction database through pattern mining techniques. We observe that those discovered patterns, i.e., co-occurrence highlighted regions, typically hold appearance and spatial consistency. Motivated by this observation, we can easily discover and localize possible objects by merging relevant meaningful patterns. Extensive experiments on a variety of benchmarks demonstrate that OLM achieves competitive localization performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our approach compared with unsupervised saliency detection methods and achieves competitive results on seven benchmark datasets. Moreover, we conduct experiments on fine-grained classification to show that our proposed method can locate the entire object and parts accurately, which can benefit to improving the classification results significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rapid and sensitive gas chromatography with mass spectrometry method for the determination of venlafaxine in rat plasma has been developed and applied to a drug-drug interaction study of fluoxetine on pharmacokinetics of venlafaxine in rats. Rat plasma was spiked with 2% aqueous ammonia before subjected to preactivated C18 solid-phase extraction columns and eluted with methanol. No endogenous interferences were observed under optimal condition. The calibration curve was linear ( R2 = 0.9994) in the range of 10-1000 ng/mL. The quantification limit of venlafaxine in rat plasma was 10 ng/mL. The accuracy was in the range of 85-110%, and the extraction recovery was no less than 50%. Both the intra- and interday precision were 5.0-10.7%. The concentration-time curve showed that plasma concentrations of the coadministration group (group B) were higher than that of single dose group (group A). Both values of Cmax (0.069 mg/L) and AUC0→∞ (0.291 mg h/L) in group B were statistically greater than that of Cmax (0.046 mg/L) and AUC0→∞ (0.181 mg·h/L) in group A ( P < 0.05). The results indicated that a significant effect of fluoxetine was shown on the pharmacokinetics of venlafaxine, suggesting that drug-drug interactions are of concern for the treatment of depression with the combined use of venlafaxine and fluoxetine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic mesoporous carbon composites incorporating hydrophilic metallic nanoparticles were synthesized from resol, ZrO(NO), ferric acetylacetonate, and triblock copolymer F127. The method involves a multi-component co-assembly strategy associated with direct carbonization. The resulting carbon material is shown to be useful as a metal oxide affinity chromatography (MOAC) material for enrichment of phosphopeptides owing to its large mesoporous (4.8 nm) surface area (442 m g), large pore volume (0.37 cm g) and excellent hydrophilicity. The metallic iron and ferric oxide particles modified on the mesoporous carbon exert a magnetic force and, in combination with the metallic zirconia, is a viable MOAC material for enrichment of low-abundance phosphopeptides. Because of metal chelation between metallic nanoparticles and the phosphate groups of phosphopeptides, the zirconia/magnetic mesoporous carbon displays high selectivity even at a phosphopeptide/nonphosphopeptide molar ratio of 1:500. As little as 1.5 fmol of phosphopeptides become detectable. The MOAC was successfully applied to the identification by MALDI-TOF MS of phosphopeptides in human serum and nonfat milk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morinda morindoidesis an important Liberian traditional medicine for the treatment of malaria, fever, worms etc. The plant was subjected to integrated approaches including phytochemical screening and gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC–MS) analyses. Phytochemical investigation of the powdered plant revealed the presence of phenolics, tannins, flavonoids, saponins, terpenes, steroidal compounds and volatile oil. Steam distillation followed by GC–MS resulted in the identification of 47 volatiles in its aerial parts: 28 were in common including various bioactive volatiles. Major constituents of leaves were phytol (43.63%), palmitic acid (8.55%) and geranyl linalool (6.95%) and stem were palmitic acid (14.95%), eicosane (9.67%) and phytol (9.31%), and hence, a significant difference in the percentage composition of aerial parts was observed. To study seasonal changes, similarity analysis was carried out by calculating correlation coefficient (r) and vector angle cosine (z) that were more than 0.91 for stem-to-stem and leaf-to-leaf batches indicating considerable consistency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For a series plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, higher working efficiency can be achieved by the drive system with two small motors in parallel than that with one big motor alone. However, the overly complex structure will inevitably lead to a substantial increase in the development cost. To improve the system price-performance ratio, a new kind of series-parallel hybrid system evolved from the series plug-in hybrid system is designed. According to the technical parameters of the selected components, the system model is established, and the vehicle dynamic property and pure electric drive economy are evaluated. Based on the dynamic programming, the energy management strategy for the drive system under the city driving cycle is developed, and the superiority validation of the system is completed. For the studied vehicle driven by the designed series-parallel plug-in hybrid system, compared with the one driven by the described series plug-in hybrid system, the dynamic property is significantly improved because of the multi-power coupling, and the fuel consumption is reduced by 11.4% with 10 city driving cycles. In a word, with the flexible configuration of the designed hybrid system and the optimized control strategy of the energy management, the vehicle performance can be obviously improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed a simple and rapid analysis method for the determination of four amphetamines in human whole blood and urine using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). During the course of sample preparation, the evaporation process was found to be the weak point for amphetamine and methamphetamine analysis. Liquid-liquid extraction in this study was conducted without the evaporation step, and the upper solvent layer was injected directly without derivatization, which effectively prevented the volatile amphetamines from vanishing during evaporation and guaranteed the linearity of the calibration curves. This method showed good selectivity, precision, and accuracy, and at the same time was simple and fast. The limits of detection were 5 ng/ml. As an application of this study, a whole blood sample and urine sample from a drug abuse suspect were analyzed. This method may be able to meet the need for rapid and accurate confirmation of positive immunoassay results as well as quantification in clinical and forensic toxicological cases. To our knowledge, no forensic toxicologists have noted that such a basic and simple method, without evaporation or derivatization, is useful for routine analysis of amphetamines using GC-MS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A field sampling method based on magnetic core–shell silica nanoparticles was developed for field sampling and the enrichment of low concentrations of pesticides in aqueous samples. The magnetic nanoparticles could be easily extracted from water samples by a custom-made magnetic nanoparticle collector. The recovery of 15 mg of magnetic particles from a 500 mL water sample was 90.8%. Mixtures of seven pesticides spiked into pure water and pond water were used as marker samples to evaluate the field sampling method. The average recoveries at three levels of spiking were in the range 60.0–104.7% with relative standard deviations <7.1%. The proposed method has good linearity with a correlation coefficient >0.9990 in the concentration range 0.5–15 μg L−1. The results of the analysis of a sample of poisoned pond water indicate that this method is fast, convenient and efficient for the field sampling and enrichment of pesticides in aqueous samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sulfite and sulfide share several similarities in terms of chemical properties, such as nucleophilic and reducing reactivities. Therefore, they may disturb the detection of each other. In order to discriminate between these two kinds of sulfur-containing species, a new probe TSSP-N3 was developed, in which para-azidobenzenyl ketone was covalently incorporated to a coumarin fluorophore linked by a C=C double bond. Sulfite and sulfide can respectively react with the C=C double bond and the azido group to give different products, consequently, they can be differentially identified by UV-vis and fluorescence spectroscopy as well as by the naked eye. Selectivity and competition results reveal that TSSP-N3 is a good candidate for the detection of sulfide and sulfite. The bioimaging experiment demonstrates the potential of the TSSP-N3 probe for the differential imaging of sulfide and sulfite in living cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network tomography is a promising inference technique for network topology from end-to-end measurements. In this letter, we propose a novel binary tree pruning algorithm based on t-test to infer the network topology. A binary tree topology is first inferred using the existing Agglomerative Likelihood Tree (ALT) method, and then two samples t-test is applied to prune the binary tree, thus a general tree corresponding to the real topology is obtained. A lower bound on the correctly identified probability of the proposed method is derived. Simulation results show that the pruning method based on t-test outperforms the method which prunes the binary tree using a fixed threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study was designed to develop a sensitive and reliable RP-HPLC method for the separation of aerial parts ofJologbo. Different extraction methods were used and compared to obtain the maximum number of constituents. Different chromatographic conditions were optimized to achieve optimum separation. A total of 98 peaks were obtained in the optimized separation method. Seasonal variation and difference in chemical composition among aerial parts of the plant were evaluated. Significant difference in the chemical composition was observed and statistical data processing supported the results. The correlation coefficient and vector cosine were calculated by chemometric analysis to evaluate peak retention times, peak areas, and peak heights between various batches (using selected peaks) which showed good repeatability. Gallic and protocatechuic acids were identified from the plant and their intra-day and inter-day repeatability values were calculated and convincing results were obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A simple and effective preconcentration method based on magnetic core-shell silica nanoparticles with C18-modified surface was developed for the analysis of pesticide residues in environmental water samples by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Several kinds of organophosphorous and pyrethroid pesticides including methamidophos, dichlorvos, orthene, phorate, dimethoate, carbofuran, bifenthrin, fenpropathrin, cypermethrin, fenvalerate, and deltamethrin were used as model compounds to systematically evaluate the method. Various parameters, including the amounts of magnetic nanoparticles absorbents, extraction time, eluting solvent, eluting volume, and sample p H values were optimized. The optimized method affords low detection limits (signal-to-noise ratio = 3) from 0.001 to 0.008 μg/L, and shows good linearity with correlation coefficients over 0.9990 in the concentration range of 0.025-0.5 μg/L. Average recoveries at three spiked levels were in the range of 70.2-110.2% with relative standard deviations below 9.6%. A maximum enrichment factor of 1015 times was achieved. Analysis results of poisoned pond water indicate that this method is fast, convenient, and efficient for the detections of low-concentration pesticides in aqueous samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional Langmuir equation displays drawback in accurately characterizing the methane adsorption behavior in coal, due to it assuming the uniform surface of coal pores. Additionally, the decay law of gas adsorption capacity with an increasing coal reservoir temperature remains unknown. In this study, the fractal adsorption model is proposed based on the fractal dimension (Df) of coal pores and the attenuation coefficient (n) of the adsorption capacity. The principles and methods of this fractal adsorption model are deduced and summarized in detail. The results show that the pore structures of the two coal samples exhibit obvious fractal characteristics, with the values of fractal dimensions (Df) being 2.6279 and 2.93. The values of adsorption capacity attenuation coefficients (n) are estimated as −0.006 and −0.004 by the adsorption experiments with different temperatures. The proposed fractal adsorption model presents a greater theoretical significance and higher accuracy than that of the Langmuir equation. The accuracy of the fractal adsorption model with temperature effect dependence is verified, establishing a prediction method for methane adsorption capacity in deep coal reservoirs. This study can serve as a theoretical foundation for coalbed methane exploration and development, as well as provide valuable insights for unconventional natural gas exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zheng Guanying paid close attention to the issue of the spread of Christianity in China since his youth. Over a period of more than three decades, he produced five monographs specifically addressing Christianity, from unequivocally opposing the spread of Christianity in China in the mid-to-late 1870s, to advocating for the adoption of the preaching form of the Christian "gatherings every seven days" to disseminate the village covenants and sacred edicts among the Chinese people in the 1890s. He proposed that the Chinese people should hold the right to spread Christianity. In 1906, he advocated for the establishment of a "common religion" and proposed "one religion for all nations" to eliminate wars around the world. In his later years, he proposed the "Five great wishes" to integrate and govern the various religions of the world with Taoism as the core, attempting to reconstruct global order from the perspective of religious unity. He envisioned the establishment of a sacred Taoist monastery, the dissemination of religious concepts, and the cultivation of talents, which drew on the organizational structure and missionary methods of Christianity, reflecting the thinking and efforts of modern Chinese intellectuals to bridge the Chinese and Western civilizations, seek solutions for modern China, reconcile conflicts between China and the West, and pursue global unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation There are many clustered transcriptionally active regions in the human genome, in which the transcription complex cannot immediately terminate transcription at the upstream gene termination site, but instead continues to transcribe intergenic regions and downstream genes, resulting in read-through transcripts. Several studies have demonstrated the regulatory roles of read-through transcripts in tumorigenesis and development. However, limited by the read length of next-generation sequencing, discovery of read-through transcripts has been slow. For long but also erroneous third-generation sequencing data, this study developed a novel minimizer sketch algorithm to accurately and quickly identify read-through transcripts. Results Readon initially splits the reference sequence into distinct active regions. It employs a sliding window approach within each region, calculates minimizers, and constructs the specialized structured arrays for query indexing. Following initial alignment anchor screening of candidate read-through transcripts, further confirmation steps are executed. Comparative assessments against existing software reveal Readon's superior performance on both simulated and validated real data. Additionally, two downstream tools are provided: one for predicting whether a read-through transcript is likely to undergo nonsense-mediated decay or encodes a protein, and another for visualizing splicing patterns. Availability and implementation Readon is freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/Bulabula45/Readon). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Forensic Science & Technology is the property of Institute of Forensic Science, Ministry of Public Security and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A coupling mechanism between flicker noise and hot carrier degradation (HCD) is revealed in this work. Predicting the flicker noise properties of fresh and aged devices is becoming essential for circuit designs, requiring an understanding of the fundamental noise behaviors. While certain models for fresh devices have been proposed, those for aged devices have not been reported yet because of the lack of a clear mechanism. The flicker noise of aged FinFETs is characterized based on the measure-stress-measure (MSM) method and analyzed from the device physics. It is found that both the mean and deviations of the noise power spectral density increase compared with the fresh counterparts. A coupling mechanism is proposed to explain the trap time constants, leading to the trap characterizations in their energy profiles. The amplitude and number of contributing traps are also changing and are dependent on the mode of HCD and determined by the position of the induced traps. A microscopic picture is developed from the perspective of trap coupling, reproducing well the measured noise of advanced nanoscale FinFETs. The finding is important for accurate flicker noise calculations and aging-aware circuit designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a great threat to the production safety of coal mines caused by mine water disasters. Traditional identification methods are not adapted to the efficiency of today's coal mining and do not offer the advantage of accurate detection in real-time. In this study, the Mayfly Algorithm (MA) was used to optimize the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, combined with laser-induced fluorescence technology, to apply it to the identification of mine water sources for the prevention of mine water disasters and post-disaster relief work. Taking sandstone water and goaf water as the original samples, five mixed water samples were also prepared by mixing the sandstone water and goaf water in different proportions, giving a total of seven water samples to be tested. Laser-induced fluorescence technology was used to obtain the fluorescence spectral data of water samples, and then the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) dimensionality reduction algorithm and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) dimensionality reduction algorithm were used to reduce the dimensions of the original spectral data. Then, three architectures, including LSTM, GA-LSTM (optimization of the LSTM by genetic algorithm) and MA-LSTM were designed to identify mine water sources. Finally, from the results' analysis, MA-LSTM performs best in many aspects after PCA dimensionality reduction and has the best identification effect. These results supported the feasibility of the novel method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haiyang-2 (HY-2) missions have accumulated sea surface height (SSH) observations on a global scale for more than 10 years. Four satellites, HY-2A, HY-2B, HY-2C and HY-2D, provide even but differently distributed data, which play a complementary role in marine gravity studies with other missions. Therefore, this paper evaluates the performances of HY-2 altimetric data in marine gravity modeling from the following four perspectives: SSH accuracy, geoid signal resolution ability, vertical deflections and gravity anomaly. First, the centimeter-magnitude accuracy level of HY-2 data is proved by analyzing SSH discrepancies at crossover points within a certain time limit. Second, the spectral analysis of repetitive along-track data sequences in a time domain shows a geoid resolution range from 18 to 24 km. Taking HY-2 exact repeat missions (ERM), for example, the resolution could be remarkably enhanced by stacking repetitive cycles. Third, validation with an XGM2019 model showed that vertical deflections were reliably computed for all HY-2 missions, but HY-2A performed slightly worse than the other HY-2 missions. Meanwhile, HY-2C and HY-2D with a ~66° orbital inclination obviously had an improved ability to capture east–west signals compared to HY-2A and HY-2B. Finally, we constructed global marine gravity results based on three input datasets, HY-2 dataset only, multi-satellite dataset without HY-2 and multi-satellite dataset with HY-2. Validations were performed using published models and shipborne gravimetric data. The results showed that the HY-2 dataset is capable of improving marine gravity anomaly recoveries and that the accuracy of NSOAS22 with incorporated HY-2 data is comparable to DTU21 and SS V31.1. Furthermore, HY-2 observations should not be the only input dataset to construct a 1' × 1' resolution marine gravity model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Signal Processing is the property of Journal of Signal Processing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: This paper aims to summarize the influence law of hybrid deposited and micro-rolling (HDMR) technology on the bead morphology and overlapping coefficient. A better bead topology positively supports the overlapping deposited in multi-beads between layers while actively assisting the subsequent layer's deposition in the wire and arc additive manufacturing (WAAM). Hybrid-deposited and micro-rolling (HDMR) additive manufacturing (AM) technology can smooth the weld bead for improved surface quality. However, the micro-rolling process will change the weld bead profile fitting curve to affect the overlapping coefficient. Design/methodology/approach: Weld bead contours for WAAM and HDMR were extracted using line lasers. A comparison of bead profile curves was conducted to determine the influence law of micro-zone rolling on the welding bead contour and fitting curve. Aiming at the optimized overlapping coefficient of weld bead in HDMR AM, the optimal HDMR overlapping coefficient curve was proposed which varies with the reduction based on the best surface flatness. The mathematical model for overlapping in HDMR was checked by comparing the HDMR weld bead contours under different rolling reductions. Findings: A fitting function of the bead forming by HDMR AM was proposed based on the law of conservation of mass. The change rule of the HDMR weld bead overlapping spacing with the degree of weld bead rolling reduction was generated using the flat-top transition calculation for this model. Considering the damming-up impact of the first bead, the overlapping coefficient was examined for its effect on layer surface flatness. Originality/value: Using the predicted overlapping model, the optimal overlapping coefficients for different rolling reductions can be achieved without experiments. These conclusions can encourage the development of HDMR technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we exploit Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) to increase the amount of training data to improve the performance of Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC). This problem has not been investigated in the past in spite of prohibitive annotation costs that FGVC requires. Our approach leverages unlabeled data with an adversarial optimization strategy in which the internal features representation is obtained with a second-order pooling model. This combination allows one to back-propagate the information of the parts, represented by second-order pooling, onto unlabeled data in an adversarial training setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined use by conducting experiments on six state-of-the-art finegrained datasets, which include Aircrafts, Stanford Cars, CUB-200-2011, Oxford Flowers, Stanford Dogs, and the recent Semi-Supervised iNaturalist-Aves. Experimental results clearly show that our proposed method has better performance than the only previous approach that examined this problem; it also obtained higher classification accuracy with respect to the supervised learning methods with which we compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to present a series of approaches for three-related issues in multiaxis in wire and arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) as follows: how to achieve a stable and robust deposition process and maintain uniform growth of the part; how to maintain consistent formation of a melt pool on the surface of the workpiece; and how to fabricate an overhanging structure without supports. Design/methodology/approach: The principal component analysis-based path planning approach is proposed to compute the best scanning directions of slicing contours for the generation of filling paths, including zigzag paths and parallel skeleton paths. These printing paths have been experimented with in WAAM. To maintain consistent formation of a melt pool at overhanging regions, the authors introduce definitions for the overhanging point, overhanging distance and overhanging vector, with which the authors can compute and optimize the multiaxis motion. A novel fabricating strategy of depositing the overhanging segments as a support for the deposition of filling paths is presented. Findings: The second principal component of a planar contour is a reasonable scanning direction to generate zigzag filling paths and parallel skeleton filling paths. The overhanging regions of a printing layer can be supported by pre-deposition of overhanging segments. Large overhangs can be successfully fabricated by the multiaxis WAAM process without supporting structures. Originality/value: An intelligent approach of generating zigzag printing paths and parallel skeleton printing paths. Optimizations of depositing zigzag paths and parallel skeleton paths. Applications of overhanging point overhanging distance and overhanging vector for multiaxis motion planning. A novel fabricating strategy of depositing the overhanging segments as a support for the deposition of filling paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to severer transistor aging at nanoscale, circuit design margin becomes extremely tight for advanced technology nodes. Thus, reliability-aware circuit design is urgently needed. In this article, a new framework to perform aging-aware static timing analysis (STA) is presented for reliability analysis. The key parts of aging-aware STA flows are workload analysis and aged delay/transition calculation. For the workload analysis, a new analytical stress probability (SP) calculation model is proposed, which considers the floating effect and signal correlations. For aged delay/transition calculation, a new aging-aware model is developed, which is accessible to large industrial libraries. The results show that the proposed model achieves high accuracy in the degradation estimation and aged-path-delay calculation. Due to its high accuracy and scalability, the proposed framework is a promising solution that is compatible with commercial Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most common and challenging issues in image recognition are scene character recognition from the street view image, and the scene character consists of both text and number. Recently, the researchers were introduced a lot of scene character recognition methods, but the performance of the methods often degraded due to complexity. So, we proposed the improved firefly algorithm for local trapping problem (IFLT) utilizing convolutional neural network (CNN) for the extraction of features from the scene character. The IFLT approach is the improved version of the firefly optimization algorithm to solve local trapping problems. During feature extraction, the hyperparameters on CNN are tuned with the help of the IFLT approach. The alignment and multilayer perceptron layers are used on CNN. Subsequently, the support vector machine approach is used to classify the relevant class of scene characters from the street view image. Experimentally, we use six scene character dataset SVHN, ISN, IIIT5K-words, SVT, ICDAR 2003, and ICDAR 2013 dataset. The performance of the proposed IFLT approach is evaluated with standard deviation, mean, average computational time, and most excellent minimum (MEmin) parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed IFLT-CNN is well suitable for scene character recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Forensic Science & Technology is the property of Institute of Forensic Science, Ministry of Public Security and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Prunella vulgaris, a traditional Chinese medicine, has been used to treat various benign and malignant tumours for centuries in China. In our previous studies, Prunella vulgaris extract (PVE) was shown to promote apoptosis in differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) cells. However, whether other mechanisms are involved in the antitumour effect of PVE in thyroid cancer (TC) cells remains unclear. The present study aimed to investigate the antiproliferative and antimigratory effects of PVE on TC cell lines both in vitro and in vivo. First, the TPC-1 and SW579 human TC cell lines were screened by MTT assay for their high level of sensitivity to PVE. Then, the results of cell growth curve and colony formation assay and cell cycle analyses, wound healing, and migration assays demonstrated that PVE inhibited the proliferation and migration of TPC-1 and SW579 cells. Moreover, the antitumour effect of PVE was verified in a subcutaneous xenotransplanted tumour model. Next, MKI67, PCNA, CTNNB1, and CDH1 were screened by qRT-PCR for their significantly differential expression levels in xenograft tissue with and without PVE treatment, and expression of MKI67, PCNA, and CDH1 was verified by Western blot. Finally, an integrated bioinformatics analysis containing protein-protein interaction network, KEGG pathway, and GO analysis was conducted to explore more potential antitumour mechanisms of PVE. In summary, PVE could inhibit the proliferation and migration of TC cells both in vitro and in vivo, which may have been achieved by modulation of the expression of MKI67, PCNA, and CDH1. These data suggest that PVE has the potential to be developed into a new anticancer drug for the treatment of TC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gene-editing technique CRISPR—clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats—is often depicted as a security threat because it could theoretically allow scientists or amateurs to edit the genome of a variety of organisms and potentially cause harm to humans, plants, and animals. The recent use of CRISPR by Chinese scientist He Jiankui to edit the genome of viable embryos, which resulted in the birth of twin girls, has exacerbated those fears. This article reviews the timeline of the CRISPR-babies experiment, highlights the challenges that contributed to the experiment's failure, and evaluates the risks of CRISPR's use for malevolent purposes. It concludes that although the potential for abuse is great, the technical obstacles are still too significant to allow successful modification that would threaten security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Genome‐wide association studies have identified many susceptibility loci for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). However, most of these loci are located in noncoding regions of the genome. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are pervasively expressed and have been reported to be involved in various diseases. This study aimed to explore the genetic significance of lncRNAs in SLE. Methods: A genome‐wide survey of SLE risk variants in lncRNA gene loci was performed in Han Chinese subjects (4,556 with SLE and 9,451 healthy controls). The functional relevance of an SLE risk variant in one of the lncRNA genes was explored using biochemical and molecular cell biology analyses. In vitro loss‐of‐function and gain‐of‐function strategies were used to clarify the functional and phenotypic relevance of this SLE susceptibility lncRNA. Moreover, correlation of this lncRNA with the degree of apoptosis in the peripheral blood of SLE patients was evaluated. Results: A novel SLE susceptibility locus in a lncRNA gene, designated SLEAR (for SLE‐associated RNA), was identified at the single‐nucleotide polymorphism rs13259960 (odds ratio 1.35, Pcombined = 1.03 × 10−11). The A>G variation at rs13259960, located in an intronic enhancer, was found to impair STAT1 recruitment to the enhancer that loops to the SLEAR promoter, resulting in decreased SLEAR production in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients with SLE (3 with the G/G genotype, 22 with A/G, and 103 with A/A at rs13259960; P = 0.0241). Moreover, SLEAR interacted with the RNA binding proteins interleukin enhancer binding factor 2, heterogeneous nuclear RNP F, and TATA‐binding protein–associated factor 15, to form a complex for transcriptional activation of the downstream antiapoptotic genes. In addition, SLEAR regulated apoptosis of Jurkat cells in vitro, and its expression level was correlated with the degree of cell death in the peripheral blood of patients with SLE (r = 0.824, P = 2.15 × 10−8; n = 30). Conclusion: These findings suggest a mechanism by which the risk variant at rs13259960 modulates SLEAR expression and confers a predisposition to SLE. Taken together, these results may give insights into the etiology of SLE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Data Acquisition & Processing / Shu Ju Cai Ji Yu Chu Li is the property of Editorial Department of Journal of Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Forensic Science & Technology is the property of Institute of Forensic Science, Ministry of Public Security and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this letter, the lateral trap distributions in planar and FinFET devices are experimentally studied under various bias stress conditions of hot-carrier degradation (HCD). In contrast to the traditional understanding that the generated traps are crowded near the drain region during hot-carrier stress, it is found that the peak of the trap distribution profile will gradually move closer to the source region with the increase in ${V}_{\text {ds}}$ stress. The results suggest that the electron–electron scattering and multiple vibrational excitation are important mechanisms for the lateral trap distributions during HCD stress, which is helpful for the physical understanding of HCD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A type of carbonate-hosted lead-zinc (Pb-Zn) ore deposits, known as Mississippi Valley Type (MVT) deposits, constitutes an important category of lead-zinc ore deposits. Previous studies proposed a fluid-mixing model to account for metal precipitation mechanism of the MVT ore deposits, in which fluids with metal-chloride complexes happen to mix with fluids with reduced sulfur, producing metal sulfide deposition. In this hypothesis, however, the detailed chemical kinetic process of mixing reactions, and especially the controlling factors on the metal precipitation are not yet clearly stated. In this paper, a series of mixing experiments under ambient temperature and pressure conditions were conducted to simulate the fluid mixing process, by titrating the metal-chloride solutions, doping with or without dolomite, and using NaHS solution. Experimental results, combined with the thermodynamic calculations, suggest that H2S, rather than HS− or S2−, dominated the reactions of Pb and/or Zn precipitation during the fluid mixing process, in which metal precipitation was influenced by the stability of metal complexes and the pH. Given the constant concentrations of metal and total S in fluids, the pH was a primary factor controlling the Pb and/or Zn metal precipitation. This is because neutralizing or neutralized processes for the ore-forming fluids can cause instabilities of Pb and/or Zn chloride complexes and re-distribution of sulfur species, and thus can facilitate the hydrolysis of Pb and Zn ions and precipitation of sulfides. Therefore, a weakly acidic to neutral fluid environment is most favorable for the precipitation of Pb and Zn sulfides associated with the carbonate-hosted Pb-Zn deposits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Finding peptides with high binding affinity to Class I major histocompatibility complex (MHC-I) attracts intensive research, and it serves a crucial part of developing a better vaccine for precision medicine. Traditional methods cost highly for designing such peptides. The advancement of computational approaches reduces the cost of new drug discovery dramatically. Compared with flourishing computational drug discovery area, the immunology area lacks tools focused on in silico design for the peptides with high binding affinity. Attributed to the ever-expanding amount of MHC-peptides binding data, it enables the tremendous influx of deep learning techniques for modeling MHC-peptides binding. To leverage the availability of these data, it is of great significance to find MHC-peptides binding specificities. The binding motifs are one of the key components to decide the MHC-peptides combination, which generally refer to a combination of some certain amino acids at certain sites which highly contribute to the binding affinity. Result: In this work, we propose the Motif Activation Mapping (MAM) network for MHC-I and peptides binding to extract motifs from peptides. Then, we substitute amino acid randomly according to the motifs for generating peptides with high affinity. We demonstrated the MAM network could extract motifs which are the features of peptides of highly binding affinities, as well as generate peptides with high-affinities; that is, 0.859 for HLA-A*0201, 0.75 for HLA-A*0206, 0.92 for HLA-B*2702, 0.9 for HLA-A*6802 and 0.839 for Mamu-A1*001:01. Besides, its binding prediction result reaches the state of the art. The experiment also reveals the network is appropriate for most MHC-I with transfer learning. Conclusions: We design the MAM network to extract the motifs from MHC-peptides binding through prediction, which are proved to generate the peptides with high binding affinity successfully. The new peptides preserve the motifs but vary in sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chuxiong basin, located in southwest China, is well known as a mineralization area of red-bed type copper deposits in China. These deposits are characterized by mineral zoning, which is especially true for the Dayao deposits. The mineral zoning is consistent for both horizontal and vertical zoning; from the base (center) of the ore body to the top (outermost), the mineral zones are from hematite, chalcocite, chalcocite + bornite, and bornite + chalcopyrite to pyrite. We studied the mineral zoning in detail using a thermodynamic phase diagram method, such as log⁡fO2-log⁡fS2, pH-log⁡fO2, and pH-Eh, and discussed the constraints on the order of the minerals precipitation under different physiochemical conditions. It is indicated that changes in temperature have little effect on pH and Eh in the formation of minerals. S2− is stable only below 473 K, and the forming temperature of chalcocite must be below 473 K. In this paper, we also explain the mineral zoning formation mechanism and propose that the main controlling factor of mineral zoning is pH. Because this mineral zoning is widespread in sediment-hosted deposits, studies on this mechanism can considerably promote better understanding of the genesis of ore deposits in order to guide the exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lamellar single crystals of poly(E-caprolactone) (PCL)-based crystalline/liquid-crystalline block copolymer (BCP) were prepared from two methods: solution crystallization in n-hexanol as well as addition of methanol dropwise to BCP/DMF solution. The crystalline morphologies of PCL single crystals prepared at different temperatures were investigated. It was observed that welldeveloped single crystals were formed in n-hexanol at high crystallization temperatures, while low crystallization temperatures favored to fabricate well-developed nanosheets in methanol/DMF. Annealing at the melting temperature of single crystals yielded the crystalline seeds and unimers in n-hexanol, while it formed spherical micelles in methanol/DMF system. As a result, the size of single crystals in n-hexanol could be tuned by addition of different ratios of unimer/seed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Telecommunication Engineering is the property of Telecommunication Engineering and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Pharmaceutial Care & Research is the property of Editorial Board of Pharmaceutial Care & Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)