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Abstract Background T cell-based immunotherapies are facing great challenges in the recruitment and activation of tumor-specific T cells against solid tumors. Among which, utilizing nanobody (Nb) or nanobodies (Nbs) to construct T cell engager has emerged as a more practical potential for enhancing the anti-tumor effectiveness of T cells. Here, we designed a new Nb-guided multifunctional T cell engager (Nb-MuTE) that not only recruited effector T cells into the tumor tissues, but also efficiently activated T cells anti-tumor immunity when synergies with photothermal effect. Results The Nb-MuTE, which was constructed based on an indocyanine green (ICG)-containing liposome with surface conjugation of CD105 and CD3 Nbs, and showed excellent targetability to both tumor and T cells, following enhancement of activation, proliferation and cytokine secretion of tumor-specific T cells. Notably, the immunological anti-tumor functions of Nb-MuTE-mediated T cells were further enhanced by the ICG-induced photothermal effect in vitro and in vivo. Conclusions Such a new platform Nb-MuTE provides a practical and “all-in-one” strategy to potentiate T cell responses for the treatment of solid tumor in clinic.

Formic acid is a promising hydrogen storage medium that can be produced via the catalytic hydrogenation of CO2. Compared with heterogeneous catalysts, homogeneous catalysts composed of organic metal complexes, especially Ru- and Ir-based catalysts, show higher activity and selectivity for the catalytic reaction of CO2 hydrogenation to formic acid; however, it is difficult to separate them from the reaction products. Heterogeneous catalysts prepared by immobilizing metal complexes onto solid materials demonstrate high activity and selectivity, similar to homogeneous catalysts, and solve the problem of catalyst separation. For preparing such catalysts, the choice of support is particularly important because effective anchoring is the key to realize catalyst recycling. Supported heterogeneous catalysts are mainly based on inorganic oxides and porous polymers (e.g., metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, and organic polymers). This review comprehensively examines the advancements in immobilized heterogeneous catalysts for the hydrogenation of CO2, focusing on support materials, reaction mechanisms, catalyst immobilization conditions, and the impact of various reaction conditions on catalytic performance. Furthermore, we provide a comparative analysis of immobilized catalysts and their homogeneous counterparts, underlining the advantages of site isolation and the role of support materials in enhancing catalytic activity. The design and development of immobilized heterogeneous catalysts are important in the field of CO2 hydrogenation to formic acid because of their abundant active sites, excellent catalytic stability, flexible chemical modifiability, and low preparation cost. We conclude with perspectives on future research directions, emphasizing the need for innovative catalyst designs and optimization of reaction conditions to achieve sustainable and economically viable CO2 hydrogenation processes.

IntroductionThe aim of this study was to investigate the effects of blood flow-restrictive resistance training (BFR-RT) on improving metabolic abnormalities, blood pressure (BP), obesity, and 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk in middle-aged patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).MethodWe conducted a parallel-group, single blind randomized controlled trial. Participants who met the inclusion criteria were randomly divided into control group, BFR-RT group and aerobic exercise (AE) group. Control group received health education and follow-up; Two exercise groups received supervised collective training for a period of six months, three times per week. AE group trained at moderate-intensity for 60 minutes each time, while BFR-RT group trained at low-intensity for 40 minutes each time. The primary outcomes were change in 10-year ASCVD risk index and level, and the secondary outcomes included changes in fasting plasma glucose (FPG), glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), blood lipids, BP, and obesity level within and across the three groups at baseline, the third and sixth months of intervention.ResultAmong 93 individuals (control group, n=31; AE, n=30; BFR-RT, n=32) were analyzed. At baseline, there were no significant differences in various indicators among the three groups (p>0.05). After intervention, the 10-year ASCVD risk index and risk level of both exercise groups significantly decreased compared to the control group and baseline (p0.05).ConclusionBFR-RT could reduce the 10-year ASCVD risk in middle-aged T2DM patients for by improving metabolic abnormalities, BP and obesity, and its effect was similar to that of moderate-intensity AE.Clinical trial registrationhttps://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=178886, identifier ChiCTR2300074357.

Preferences, the setting options provided by Android, are an essential part of Android apps. Preferences allow users to change app features and behaviors dynamically, and therefore their impacts need to be considered when testing the apps. Unfortunately, few test cases explicitly specify the assignments of valid values to the preferences, or configurations, under which they should be executed, and few existing mobile testing tools take the impact of preferences into account or provide help to testers in identifying and setting up the configurations for running the tests. This article presents the Prefest approach to effective testing of Android apps with preferences. Given an Android app and a set of test cases for the app, Prefest amplifies the test cases with a small number of configurations to exercise more behaviors and detect more bugs that are related to preferences. In an experimental evaluation conducted on real-world Android apps, amplified test cases produced by Prefest from automatically generated test cases covered significantly more code of the apps and detected seven real bugs, and the tool’s test amplification time was at the same order of magnitude as the running time of the input test cases. Prefest’s effectiveness and efficiency in amplifying programmer-written test cases was comparable with that in amplifying automatically generated test cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous visual localization started from point correspondences (PCs) to estimate poses. This article takes the camera position as the entry point and finds that the camera position solution set rotates around an axis connected by two observed 3D points to form a surface called a torus-like surface (TLS). The relevant parameters of TLS are calculated based on PCs and camera intrinsic parameters. In order to reduce the number of solutions, this article uses four PCs to construct three TLSs. By utilizing four PCs, the pose determination problem is reformulated as the task of finding the optimal intersection of three surfaces. By using the step-size adaptive tracking method, the candidate set of intersections can be quickly and accurately found. Combining the feature information of intersections on TLS and the camera intrinsic parameters, the optimal position is obtained. Based on this position, the rotation matrix can be determined. In the synthetic data experiments and the dataset experiments based on image localization, it is shown that the visual localization based on TLS is more accurate than current state-of-the-art methods, which provides a new entry angle and effective ideas for visual localization. Its accuracy and practicality are fully demonstrated in the application test of augmented reality indoor navigation.

There is more than a decade-long history of using static analysis to find bugs in systems such as Linux. Most of the existing static analyses developed for these systems are simple checkers that find bugs based on pattern matching. Despite the presence of many sophisticated interprocedural analyses, few of them have been employed to improve checkers for systems code due to their complex implementations and poor scalability. In this article, we revisit the scalability problem of interprocedural static analysis from a "Big Data" perspective. That is, we turn sophisticated code analysis into Big Data analytics and leverage novel data processing techniques to solve this traditional programming language problem. We propose Graspan, a disk-based parallel graph system that uses an edge-pair centric computation model to compute dynamic transitive closures on very large program graphs. We develop two backends for Graspan, namely, Graspan-C running on CPUs and Graspan-G on GPUs, and present their designs in the article. Graspan-C can analyze large-scale systems code on any commodity PC, while, if GPUs are available, Graspan-G can be readily used to achieve orders of magnitude speedup by harnessing a GPU's massive parallelism. We have implemented fully context-sensitive pointer/alias and dataflow analyses on Graspan. An evaluation of these analyses on large codebases written in multiple languages such as Linux and Apache Hadoop demonstrates that their Graspan implementations are language-independent, scale to millions of lines of code, and are much simpler than their original implementations. Moreover, we show that these analyses can be used to uncover many real-world bugs in large-scale systems code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Insulation breakdown of dry‐type valve‐side bushing cores under electrothermal compound stress has become a key factor limiting the safe and stable operation of the converter transformer. Based on slices of the real bushing core, it is observed for the first time that fold, peeling off, and fracture defects exist near the aluminium (Al) foil edge, accompanied by many metal spikes with a curvature radius

The problem of probabilistic safety verification of stochastic hybrid systems is to check whether the probability that a given system will reach an unsafe region from certain initial states can be bounded by some given probability threshold. The paper considers stochastic hybrid systems where the behavior is governed by polynomial equalities and inequalities, as for usual hybrid systems, but the initial states follow some stochastic distributions. It proposes a new barrier certificate based method for probabilistic safety verification which guarantees the absolute safety in a infinite time horizon that is beyond the reach of existing techniques using either statistical model checking or probabilistic reachable set computation. It also gives a novel computational approach, by building and solving a constrained optimization problem coming from verification conditions of barrier certificates, to compute the lower bound on safety probabilities which can be compared with the given threshold. Experimental evidence is provided demonstrating the applicability of our approach on several benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The downstream uniformity of the atmospheric-pressure plasma jet array is a key technical problem in regards to large-scale applications. This paper presents a 2-D array device of five jets arranged in four different shapes designed from the perspective of symmetry. Various schemes were tested to determine the effects of jet arrangement on the downstream uniformity of the array: the completely symmetrical array X, the completely asymmetrical array J, and semi-symmetrical arrays T and U. The interactions in the arrays were observed via optical imaging as well as electrical and spectroscopic characterizations. The results show that the downstream plume pattern markedly changes with the jet arrangement. Peripheral plumes suppress the internal plumes to varying extent under different jet arrangements. The emission intensity of the helium line at 706.5 nm was taken as a criterion to find that downstream uniformity under the arrangements J, T, U, and X gradually decreases as the jet arrangement grows increasingly symmetrical. The electric field simulation shows that different jet arrangements cause various degrees of inhomogeneous electric field distributions, which in turn affect the charge transferred into each plasma jet and the distributions of active particles resulting in downstream uniformity variations. The results presented here may provide a theoretical foundation for improving the downstream uniformity of the plasma jet arrays and achieving large-scale plasma jet sources.

This paper presents a formal approach to specify and verify object-oriented programs written in the 'programming to interfaces' paradigm. In this approach, besides the methods to be invoked by its clients, an interface also declares a set of abstract and polymorphic function/predicate symbols, together with a set of constraints about these symbols. The methods declared in this interface are specified using these abstract symbols. A class implementing this interface can give its own definitions to the abstract symbols, as long as all the constraints are satisfied. This class implements all the methods declared in the interface such that the method specification declared in the interface are satisfied w.r.t. the function symbol definitions in this class. Based on the constraints about the abstract symbols, client code using the interfaces can be specified and verified precisely without knowing what classes implement the interfaces. Given more information about the implementing classes, the specifications of the client code can be specialized into more precise ones without re-verifying the client code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background This systematic review with meta-analyses sought to answer whether casein phosphopeptide-amorphous calcium phosphate (CPP-ACP) provided a remineralizing benefit superior to that of nonintervention or placebo. Methods Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines, Cochrane databases, PubMed, EmBase, and Ovid up to May 20th, 2019, were scanned, only published in English. Study information extraction and methodological quality assessments were accomplished independently by two reviewers. The “Criteria for judging risk of bias in the ‘Risk of bias’ assessment tool” was used for methodological quality assessment. The continuous data was analyzed by mean difference (MD) or standardized mean difference (SMD) with a 95% confidence interval (CI). Review Manager 5.3 was used for statistical analysis. Outcome variables include quantitative light-induced fluorescence in clinical research, average surface roughness and surface microhardness in vitro. Results There were significant differences in the quantitative light-induced fluorescence (SMD = − 0.43, 95% CI: [− 0.79, − 0.07], P = 0.02), average surface roughness (SMD = − 8.21, 95% CI: [− 10.37, − 6.04], P

Gas spark closing switch is one of the most important components for a fast linear transformer driver (FLTD). In this paper, we describe the investigation of insulation gas media for a multi-gap multi-channel gas spark closing switch. A six-gap gas switch with corona needles was tested in a typical FLTD brick with two capacitors of 40 nF and a load resistor of about 10 Ω. Corona discharge current, self-breakdown voltage distribution, and triggered breakdown performance were tested when the gas switch was filled with air, N2, CO2, SF6/N2, and C4F7N/N2. When C4F7N/N2 was applied, there was no abnormal breakdown with low voltage found in the whole test process; the trigger breakdown delay time and switch jitter were very stable, and no pre-fire was found during about 2000 triggered shots. Therefore, we think the C4F7N/N2 gas mixture with a very little amount of C4F7N can dramatically improve the switch performance. It is valuable and easy to realize the application of C4F7N/N2 mixture in large scale pulsed power facilities.

Dealing with crosscutting concerns has been a critical problem in software development processes. To facilitate handling crosscutting concerns at design phases, we proposed an as-pect-oriented modeling and integration approach with UML activity diagrams. The primary concerns are depicted with UML activity diagrams as primary models, whereas crosscutting concerns are described with aspectual extended activity diagrams as aspect models. Aspect models can be integrated into primary models automatically. The AOM approach can reduce the complexity of design models. However, potential faults that violate desired properties of the software system might still be introduced during the modeling or integration processes. The verification technique is well-known for its ability to assure the correctness of models and uncover design problems before implementation. We propose a framework to verify aspect-oriented UML activity diagrams based on Petri net verification techniques. For verification purpose, we transform the integrated activity diagrams into Petri nets and prove the con-sistency of the transformation. Then, crosscutting concerns in system requirements are refined to properties in the form of CTL formulas. Finally, the Petri nets are verified against the formalized properties to report whether the aspect-oriented design models satisfies the requirements. Furthermore, we implement a tool named Jasmine-AOV to support the veri-fication process. Case studies are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing techniques for reachability analysis of linear hybrid systems do not scale well to the problem size of practical interest. The performance of existing techniques is even worse for reachability analysis of a composition of several linear hybrid automata. In this paper, we present an efficient path-oriented approach to bounded reachability analysis of composed systems modeled by linear hybrid automata with synchronization events. It is suitable for analyzing systems with many components by selecting critical paths, while this task was quite insurmountable before because of the state explosion problem. This group of paths will be transformed to a group of linear constraints, which can be solved by a linear programming solver efficiently. This approach of symbolic execution of paths allows design engineers to check important paths, and accordingly increase the faith in the correctness of the system. This approach is implemented into a prototype tool Bounded reAchability CHecker (BACH). The experimental data show that both the path length and the number of participant automata in a system checked using BACH can scale up greatly to satisfy practical requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing scale and complexity of the enterprise computing systems under distributed and heterogeneous environments present new challenges to system development, integration, and maintenance. In this paper, we present a model driven Web service development framework to combat these challenges. The framework capitalizes on the unified modeling language (UML) profile for enterprise distributed object computing (EDOC), MDA (model-driven architecture) and Web services. Within the framework, firstly, a general PIM (platform independent models) is created using the EDOC CCA structural specification and CCA choreography specification which defines the general functions of a system. Secondly, the general PIM is broken down into sub-PIMs according to functional decomposition, each of which can provide service independently and will be implemented in a Web service. Thirdly, all of the PIMs are transformed to Web service interface models for publication and invoking. Afterward, transform each PIM to a BPEL specified Web service orchestration model. Finally, supported by model transform techniques, the sub EDOC PIMs are implemented into Web services on specific platforms. Automatic model transformation is the key to this framework, therefore, the transformation from EDOC CCA models to WSDL specified Web service interface models and the transformation from EDOC CCA models to BPEL specified Web service orchestration models are deeply discussed, and the detailed transformation rules are proposed. A case study is also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these rules and the merits of this framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In situ growth of TiO2 nanoparticles on reduced graphene oxide (RGO-TiO2) exhibits good performance of photocatalytic degradation under visible light. The photocatalytic efficiency of GO-TiO2 and RGO-TiO2 in degrading Methyl Orange could reach 99% and 96% within 2 h, respectively. The results showed that the optimum mass ratio of GO or RGO to TiO2 was 0.15. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a critical component of a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission system, resin impregnated paper (RIP) wall bushing has become a weak point because of its surface charge accumulation. This paper studies a model RIP wall bushing core designed by the equal capacitance method. The stationary resistive field along the gas−solid interface of the RIP wall bushing core is investigated theoretically by a gas model, which considers the non-linearly field-dependent volume conductivity. The results show that the gas conductivity along the core surface tends to be an arched distribution from the high-voltage conductor to the end shielding screen. The surface charge mainly accumulates at the turning point of the radius, which may threaten the core’s insulation. Then, the surface charge is obtained through a measurement system, where the experimental results are highly consistent with the simulation results. Considering the time constant of charge dissipation is nearly 15 min, it would be better to measure the surface charge on one axial direction of RIP wall bushing core after each voltage application. The simulation and experimental results of this paper can guide the design of a RIP wall bushing core.

Test case generation based on design specifications is an important part of testing processes. In this paper, Unified Modeling Language activity diagrams are used as design specifications. By setting up several test adequacy criteria with respect to activity diagrams, an automatic approach is presented to generate test cases for Java programs. Instead of directly deriving test cases from activity diagrams, this approach selects test cases from a set of randomly generated ones according to a given test adequacy criterion. In the approach, we first instrument a Java program under testing according to its activity diagram model, and randomly generate abundant test cases for the program. Then, by running the instrumented program we obtain the corresponding program execution traces. Finally, by matching these traces with the behavior of the activity diagram, a reduced set of test cases are selected according to the given test adequacy criterion. This approach can also be used to check the consistency between the program execution traces and the behavior of activity diagrams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Titanium dioxide ceramic films have been prepared on titanium board by the micro-plasma oxidation method. The influence of reaction voltage (120, 140, 160, 180, and 200 V) on the structural and surface morphology of the film was investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The photocatalytic activity of the film was evaluated by the photodegradation of rhodamine B (Rh B). It was found that the films produced were microporous and consisted of crystalline titanium dioxide. The micropore size and the content of anatase and rutile TiO2 phase increased with the applied voltage. The relatively higher degradation efficiency for Rh B was obtained in the film produced in the voltage of 160 V. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]