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Thermotropic (TT) glazing is able to achieve energy-saving capabilities similar to external shading devices by dynamically regulating solar heat gain transmitted through windows in response to ambient climatic conditions. However, the building performance of TT glazing compared to traditional shading devices remains underexplored. This study aims to bridge this knowledge gap by comparing the building performance of hydrogel-based TT glazing and fixed horizontal external shading devices in terms of building energy consumption, daylighting performance, and thermal comfort. Experimental tests were conducted over a continuous ten-day period, focusing on the indoor temperature and illumination distribution within experimental rooms equipped with either TT glazing or fixed horizontal external shading device. Building performance models were developed using EnergyPlus and validated with experimental data. Subsequently, a comparative analysis was then conducted to evaluate the impact of TT glazings and fixed horizontal external shading devices on building energy consumption, daylighting performance, and thermal comfort across five typical climate conditions in China. The findings indicated that: (1) In five climate zones, TT provided the greatest energy savings in West-facing orientations, followed by East-facing orientations. (2) TT can replace fixed horizontal external shading device with a certain length to achieve similar building energy efficiency and indoor thermal comfort performance. (3) In regard to daylighting performance, TT achieved the desired values of sUDI <100lx,50 % and sUDI 300–3000lx,50 % across all four orientations in the five climates. (4) In terms of thermal comfort, TT improved thermal comfort by reducing the annual daytime average PPD overheating across all orientations in the five climate zones. • Compared energy, daylighting and thermal performance of thermotropic glazings and shading devices. • Validated models with ten-day experimental data. • Thermotropic glazings can replace shading devices to achieve similar energy efficiency and thermal comfort. • Provided optimal transition temperatures and equivalent shading lengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Employ contour features as geometric priors to preserve the outline details of lesions and explicitly model the correlation between region and contour. • Propose a parallel graph reasoning strategy to model the long-range relationship between adjacent pixels and analyze the global dependencies along the channel dimension of feature maps. • The improvements of the proposed method compare to the state-of-the-art models are validated on two public LiTS17 and 3DIRCADb datasets. The accurate detection and segmentation of liver cancers from abdominal CT scans is critical. However, segmenting liver tumors presents significant hurdles due to indistinct lesion boundaries and ignoring the correlation between target and outlines. In this paper, we propose the Parallel Graph Convolutional Network (PGC-Net), a completely novel segmentation framework for liver tumors. With regard to segmentation against constraints, we specifically use contour-induced parallel graph reasoning for quick yet efficient segmentation. First, we use a Pyramid Vision Transformer that has already been trained to extract multi-scale features of region and contour. In order to project the pixels into two distinct high-dimensional areas, we secondly use the parallel graph reasoning strategy, where the vertices are weighted in accordance with the geometric prior of the contour. Through the process of graph convolution, the complementary properties of region and contour also propagate the information. Finally, we project back to the original pixel space for the prediction using the refined features deduced from the graph. Experimental results on two available datasets, LiTS17 (with an average Dice score of 73.63%) and 3DIRCADb (with an average Dice score of 74.16%). Our framework focused on the interaction between two orthogonal graphs and contour information, which has the potential to improve the accuracy and efficiency of liver tumor segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydrogel-based thermotropic glazing, which achieves the dynamic characteristics by maneuvering the light-scattering behaviors, has a great potential in improving building energy performance, visual and thermal comfort. The visual-thermal comfort and energy performance of the thermotropic glazing with different transition temperature was evaluated by using an experimental validated building performance simulation model. The performance of the thermotropic glazing was compared with conventional double-clear glazing and low-emissivity double glazing under five cities within the five major climate zones across China. The objective is to comprehensively understand the applicability of the thermotropic glazing in different climatic conditions of China as well as to determine the optimal transition temperature. The results showed that: (1) The thermotropic glazing with a transition temperature of 30 °C could achieve better energy performance, visual and thermal comfort in Xiamen, Nanjing, and Kunming. (2) Low transition temperature is not an essential requirement for the application of the thermotropic glazing, which could result in increasing energy use intensity and this effect is more significant in colder regions. (3) The thermotropic glazing could contribute to building energy savings (up to 16.3% and 2.3% i.e., in Xiamen) compared with conventional double-clear glazing and low-emissivity double glazing with low SHGC. (4) The thermotropic glazing applied in Xiamen, Nanjing and Kunming could obtain better visual and thermal comfort (i.e., increase of the desired range of illuminance sUDI 500–2000lux , is up to 85.19% and a promotion of 29.18% in time proportion of desirable thermal comfort in Kunming) when compared with low-emissivity double glazing and conventional double-clear glazing. • Annual visual-thermal comfort and energy performance of thermotropic glazing. • Building simulation model of an office room validated with experimental data. • The thermotropic glazing (transition temperature of 30 °C) has better performance. • Low transition temperature is not an essential requirement for the application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obesity results from a sustained positive energy balance, occurring when energy intake exceeds energy expenditure. One promising therapeutic strategy to mitigate obesity is the promotion of thermogenesis of brown adipose tissue (BAT) to increase energy expenditure. Cyanidin-3-glucoside (C3G) is an anthocyanin compound widely distributed in human diets. In this study, researchers studied the effect and mechanism of C3G on the prevention and treatment of high-fat and high-fructose diet (HFFD) induced obesity. The study shows that C3G enhances energy expenditure and thermogenic capacity of BAT, protecting mice against HFFD obesity. Further, C3G increases expression of UCP1 and other thermogenic genes in inguinal white adipose tissue (iWAT), as well as in BAT. Results demonstrate that C3G promotes the heat production of BAT and iWAT by increasing mitochondrial biogenesis and function. These findings reveal that C3G activates BAT, which may provide a safe, effective approach to prevent and treat diet-induced obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyanidin 3-glucoside (C3G) and cyanidin 3-rutinoside (C3R), two anthocyanin compounds isolated from mulberry fruit, have beneficial effects in regards to reducing obesity. Their molecular targets have yet to be elucidated, however. Improving the function or increasing the quantity of mitochondria in brown adipose tissue (BAT) can promote the metabolism of carbohydrates and fat. This study was designed to investigate the mitochondrial biogenesis regulated by C3G and C3R during brown adipogenesis. The BAT-cMyc cell was treated with C3G and C3R, both of which significantly increased the expression levels of fatty acid oxidation-related genes such as PGC1α , PRDM16 , and CPT1α . C3G and C3R also significantly increased the expression of TFAM and NRF1 / NRF2 . Notably, C3G and C3R treatment greatly elevated the mitochondrial copy number and BAT specific gene- UCP1 expression through AKT and ERK signaling pathways. These results altogether suggest that C3G and C3R may ameliorate metabolic disease through activating BAT thermogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A chiller FDD method combining model-based and data-based methods was proposed. • The deviation was used as a diagnostic parameter, and its contribution to FDD was verified. • The effect of sample size on the accuracy of the feature recognition model was explored. • Compared with the PCA, FDA, and SVM, the proposed method had excellent performance. Reliability of chillers is of great significance to maintaining sustainability buildings and reducing carbon emissions. The cause of chiller performance degradation was found in early fault detection and diagnosis technology, and the measure can be taken to save energy. This paper proposed an automatic diagnosis technique for Chiller based on the feature-recognition model and Spectral Regression Kernel Discriminant Analysis (SRKDA). Feature-recognition model would be used to calculate diagnostic parameters, deviations(D) between normal and fault data. At the same time, SRKDA would be applied for mapping original nonlinearly separable feature space to the separable features that are linear and improving the computational speed. For one thing, compared with principal component analysis (PCA) and Fisher Discriminant Analysis (FDA), the proposed method has the lowest false alarm rate and the highest detection rate for fault detection. For another, compared with the FDA and Support vector machine (SVM) for fault diagnosis, the proposed method has excellent accuracy and training time performance. In addition, experiments show that model-based data processing improved the separability of original data and further improved FDD accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Grape seed flour decreases weight gain and cold tolerance in diet-induced mice. • Body weight was reduced via enhancing energy expenditure. • Attuned energy balance is highly related with brown adipose tissue thermogenesis. • The beige adipocytes formation also play an important part in energy metabolism. During the last decades, a dramatic global rise in the prevalence of obesity has become evident. Therefore, effective therapeutic approaches are necessary to help combat this condition. Grape seed is known as a rich source of biologically active polyphenols, which can be used as one of the candidates to resolve problems associated with obesity. This paper investigated the anti-obesity effects of grape seed flour (GSF) and showed that GSF ameliorated weight gain, hepatic lipid levels and part of the serum profiles. Moreover, GSF increased energy expenditure (EE) and thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue (BAT) in high-fat diet (HFD) induced obese mice. GSF also affected expressions of uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) and other metabolism-related genes in white adipose tissue (WAT). In conclusion, our results showed that GSF prevented diet-induced obesity in C57BL/6J mice, and suggested that the mechanism responsible was related to the promotion of energy metabolism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]