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Multi-class cell segmentation in high-resolution Giga-pixel whole slide images (WSI) is critical for various clinical applications. Training such an AI model typically requires labor-intensive pixel-wise manual annotation from experienced domain experts (e.g., pathologists). Moreover, such annotation is error-prone when differentiating fine-grained cell types (e.g., podocyte and mesangial cells) via the naked human eye. In this study, we assess the feasibility of democratizing pathological AI deployment by only using lay annotators (annotators without medical domain knowledge). The contribution of this paper is threefold: (1) We proposed a molecular-empowered learning scheme for multi-class cell segmentation using partial labels from lay annotators; (2) The proposed method integrated Giga-pixel level molecular-morphology cross-modality registration, molecular-informed annotation, and molecular-oriented segmentation model, so as to achieve significantly superior performance via 3 lay annotators as compared with 2 experienced pathologists; (3) A deep corrective learning (learning with imperfect label) method is proposed to further improve the segmentation performance using partially annotated noisy data. From the experimental results, our learning method achieved F1 = 0.8496 using molecular-informed annotations from lay annotators, which is better than conventional morphology-based annotations (F1 = 0.7051) from experienced pathologists. Our method democratizes the development of a pathological segmentation deep model to the lay annotator level, which consequently scales up the learning process similar to a non-medical computer vision task. The official implementation and cell annotations are publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/MolecularEL.

This paper aims to efficiently enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to use multimodal tools. Advanced proprietary LLMs, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have shown great potential for tool usage through sophisticated prompt engineering. Nevertheless, these models typically rely on prohibitive computational costs and publicly inaccessible data. To address these challenges, we propose the GPT4Tools based on self-instruct to enable open-source LLMs, such as LLaMA and OPT, to use tools. It generates an instruction-following dataset by prompting an advanced teacher with various multi-modal contexts. By using the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) optimization, our approach facilitates the open-source LLMs to solve a range of visual problems, including visual comprehension and image generation. Moreover, we provide a benchmark to evaluate the ability of LLMs to use tools, which is performed in both zero-shot and fine-tuning ways. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various language models, which not only significantly improves the accuracy of invoking seen tools, but also enables the zero-shot capacity for unseen tools. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/StevenGrove/GPT4Tools.

Supplementary Material 1

In this study, we are interested primarily in how a structural factor – social capital – relates to Chinese national government agencies’ partner selection in environmental protection. Our study finds that their partner selection is associated positively with activity closure and popularity closure while being negatively influenced by cyclicity closure. Moreover, their partner selection is characterized predominantly by a leading-agency coordinated collaboration model, which favors the engagement of a shared third agency and emphasizes the similarity of interests. This study expands the theoretical connotations of social capital and provides new insights into the mechanisms underlying actors’ partner selection in interagency collaboration.

Supplementary Material 2

The potentially pathogenic species of the genus Vibrio pose a threat to both humans and animals, creating medical burdens and economic losses to the mariculture industry. Improvements in surveillance and diagnosis are needed to successfully manage vibriosis outbreaks. Matrix assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) can provide rapid diagnosis and has been widely used in the identification of Vibrio spp. The main weakness of this technology is the limited number of strains and species of Vibrio in the existing commercial database. Here, we develop a new in-house database named PVBase containing 790 main spectra projections (MSP) of ten Vibrio species that come from various regions of China and include abundant clinical and environmental strains. PVBase was validated through a blind test of 65 Vibrio strains. The identification accuracy and scoring of Vibrio strains was greatly improved through the addition of PVBase. Identification accuracy increased from 73.4 to 100%. The number of strains with identification scores above 2.2 increased from 53.1% to 96.9% and 53.1% of strains had an identification score above 2.59. Moreover, perfect discrimination was obtained when using all of the MSPs created for the Vibrio species, even for very closely related species such as V. cholerae, V. albensis, and V. mimicus or V. alginolyticus, V. parahaemolyticus, and V. harveyi. In addition, we used phyloproteomic analysis to study whether there are differences in protein fingerprints of different regions or pathogenic strains. We found that MSP characteristics of Vibrio species were not related to their region or source. With the construction of PVBase, the identification efficiency of potentially pathogenic Vibrio species has been greatly improved, which is an important advance for epidemic prevention and control, and aquaculture disease detection.

Lessons Learned Patient compliance with the oral dosage treatment was good, with no need for hospitalization. Patients with tracheal and esophageal fistulas can take crushed apatinib by nutrient tube, with the same bioavailability and efficacy. Apatinib may be an effective and safe second- or further-line treatment for advanced esophageal cancer. Background Apatinib is an inhibitor of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 (VEGFR2), which is thought to play a role in esophageal cancer progression. Our goal was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of apatinib in patients with unresectable esophageal cancer and to examine whether VEGFR2 expression influenced the clinical response. Methods This single-arm, open-label, investigator-initiated phase II study enrolled patients with advanced squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) or adenocarcinoma of the esophagus or esophagogastric junction who were admitted to Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital between August 2017 and January 2019. Apatinib monotherapy (500 mg/day) was given orally or via an enteral tube until disease progression, unacceptable toxicity, withdrawal, or death. Patients were followed until treatment was discontinued or death. The main endpoints were tumor response, progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and adverse events (AEs). Results Among 32 patients screened for inclusion, 30 were included in the safety and survival analyses (i.e., received apatinib), and 26 were included in the efficacy analysis (at least one imaging follow-up). Median follow-up time and exposure to apatinib were 5.34 months and 72 days, respectively. Among 26 patients included in the efficacy analysis, 2 had a partial response (PR; 7.7%) and 14 had stable disease (SD; 53.8%). The overall response rate (ORR) was 7.7%, and the disease control rate (DCR) was 61.5%. Median PFS and OS were 4.63 months (95% confidence interval, 2.11–7.16 months) and 6.57 months (4.90 months to not estimable), respectively. Fifteen patients (50.0%) experienced treatment-related AEs, most commonly hypertension (26.7%), diarrhea (20.0%), and hand-foot-skin reaction (10.0%). No patients had grade ≥4 treatment-related AEs. Conclusion Apatinib was effective as second- or further-line treatment for advanced esophageal cancer.

supplemental material for Governing the sharing economy smartly: A tale of two initiatives in China by Yanwei Li 12534 Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China in Public Policy and Administration

In this work, we present a unified framework for multi-modality 3D object detection, named UVTR. The proposed method aims to unify multi-modality representations in the voxel space for accurate and robust single- or cross-modality 3D detection. To this end, the modality-specific space is first designed to represent different inputs in the voxel feature space. Different from previous work, our approach preserves the voxel space without height compression to alleviate semantic ambiguity and enable spatial connections. To make full use of the inputs from different sensors, the cross-modality interaction is then proposed, including knowledge transfer and modality fusion. In this way, geometry-aware expressions in point clouds and context-rich features in images are well utilized for better performance and robustness. The transformer decoder is applied to efficiently sample features from the unified space with learnable positions, which facilitates object-level interactions. In general, UVTR presents an early attempt to represent different modalities in a unified framework. It surpasses previous work in single- or multi-modality entries. The proposed method achieves leading performance in the nuScenes test set for both object detection and the following object tracking task. Code is made publicly available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/UVTR., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2022

Supplementary data to: "Direct measurement of fragments generated by hypervelocity impact of dust particles at grazing incidents"

In order to solve the problem that the linear array image of the two-dimensional road surface is easily affected by factors such as illumination changes, shadows, this thesis carried out the research on the design of the intelligent perception system of the three-dimensional information of the highway road surface. This paper first analyzes the design requirements of the intelligent perception system for 3D information on highway pavement, studies the cooperative working mechanism of various high-precision sensors, and proposes a hardware system architecture scheme for 3D information perception of pavement diseases based on multiple sensors. Then, a method of “blocking” classification of road 3D point cloud images based on deep learning network model is proposed. Based on the construction of a small block road point cloud data set, an experimental comparative study is carried out on Pointnet and Pointnet++ networks. The experimental results show that the recognition rate of pavement diseases is better than 86.7% and 90.0%.

In this paper, the near-field injection characteristics of fuel injection nozzles are studied based on the roughness of the hole wall. Using FLUENT’s VOF multiphase flow model and realizable k-e turbulence mode to simulate the process of fuel injection from the nozzle under different hole wall roughness. Based on the two parameters of penetration distance and atomization cone angle, the results of fuel injection under different hole wall roughness are analyzed, and the fuel injection verification experiment is carried out through the injection nozzle hole processed by picosecond laser. The results show that the simulation results are consistent with the actual results, and the influence of roughness on the penetration distance and the atomization cone angle is verified. The specific effect is that the increase of the wall surface roughness of the injection hole will lead to the decrease of the penetration distance of the fuel injection and the increase of the atomization cone angle.

Teleosts show varied master sex determining (MSD) genes and sex determination (SD) mechanisms, with frequent turnovers of sex chromosomes. Tracing the origins of MSD genes and turnovers of sex chromosomes in a taxonomic group is of particular interest in evolutionary biology. Oyster pompano (Trachinotus anak), a marine fish, belongs to the family Carangidae, in which 17b-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase 1 (hsd17b1) has repeatedly evolved to an MSD gene. Whole-genome resequencing identified a single SNP at Chromosome 24 to be strictly associated with phenotypic sex, with females being the heterozygous sex. This SNP is located in a splicing site at the first exon/intron boundary of hsd17b1. The Z-linked SNP results in malfunction of all spliced isoforms, whereas the W-linked isoforms were predicted to have open reading frames (ORF) that are conserved among vertebrates, suggesting that hsd17b1 is a female-determining gene. The differential alternative splicing patterns of ZZ and ZW genotypes were consistently observed both in undifferentiated stages and differentiated gonads. We observed elevated recombination around the SD locus and no differentiation between Z and W chromosomes. The extreme diversity of mutational mechanisms that hsd17b1 evolves to an MSD gene highlights frequent in situ turnovers between sex chromosomes in the Carangidae.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-2-ppa-10.1177_09520767211034664 for The evolution of collaborative networks: A social network analysis of Chinese environmental protection policy by Yanwei Li and Jing Huang in Public Policy and Administration

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ppa-10.1177_09520767211034664 for The evolution of collaborative networks: A social network analysis of Chinese environmental protection policy by Yanwei Li and Jing Huang in Public Policy and Administration

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ppa-10.1177_09520767211034664 for The evolution of collaborative networks: A social network analysis of Chinese environmental protection policy by Yanwei Li and Jing Huang in Public Policy and Administration

In order to improve the accuracy of road surface disease detection, an artificial intelligence-based highway pavement 3D information perception software system scheme is proposed. This article first proposed the hardware composition of the system and the overall system architecture scheme, and introduced in detail the method of implementing high-speed acquisition and storage software system functions. Subsequently, a collaborative control algorithm for coordinating and orderly working the sensors of the three-dimensional road inspection vehicle is proposed, which can avoid conflicts in the work of the sensors. Finally, the specific algorithm flow of the highway pavement 3D information perception software system is proposed. The actual experimental results show that the system can extract the highway pavement 3D information at high speed and accurately.

This paper describes the development of an X-band pulsed miniature traveling-wave tube (mini-TWT) at the Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (AIRCAS). This mini-TWT can produce more than 600-W peak output power and 47.5% minimum overall efficiency over the frequency range of 9 to 10 GHz. It achieves a compact size less than 180mm $(\mathrm{L})\times 30$mm $(\mathrm{W})\times 20$mm (H) and weighs less than 0.3kg.

Background The traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formula 01 for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC01) is used in the management of head and neck cancers (HNCs), but whether NPC01 has an impact on the HR-QOL of patients with HNCs is unknown. Methods This was a retrospective study of patients with HNCs who were treated between January 2019 and January 2020 at the Head & Neck Cancer Center of Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute & Hospital. The patients were grouped according to whether they received NPC01 or not (controls). All patients routinely completed the EORTC QLQ-C30 and QLQ-H&N35 modules before and after 3 months of systemic treatment. Health economics were collected. Results The patients who received NPC01 were older than the controls (48.6 ± 11.4 vs. 43.4 ± 8.8 years, P = 0.004). All other characteristics were comparable between the two groups (all P > 0.05). In EORTC QLQ-C30, physical functioning (P = 0.03), fatigue (P = 0.04), pain (P = 0.02), appetite loss (P = 0.02), and constipation (P = 0.01) scores were improved more in the NPC01 group than in controls. In EORTC H&N35, the scores for pain (P = 0.02), swallowing (P = 0.01), and dry mouth (P = 0.02) were better in the NPC01 group than in controls. The NPC01 cost was 38.94 RMB/patient compared with 12.81 RMB/patient for regular follow-up, but considering insurance coverage, the financial burden was not higher. Conclusions The results suggest that NPC01 improves HNCs-related symptoms and HR-QOL.

The Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) presents a remarkable approach to alleviate the scale variance in object representation by performing instance-level assignments. Nevertheless, this strategy ignores the distinct characteristics of different sub-regions in an instance. To this end, we propose a fine-grained dynamic head to conditionally select a pixel-level combination of FPN features from different scales for each instance, which further releases the ability of multi-scale feature representation. Moreover, we design a spatial gate with the new activation function to reduce computational complexity dramatically through spatially sparse convolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method on several state-of-the-art detection benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/StevenGrove/DynamicHead., Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS-2020

This study aims to examine the effects of wellness education (WE) intervention on the behavioral change, psychological status, performance status on patients with stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) undergoing icotinib hydrochloride treatment and their relationships with family caregivers.We conducted an intervention study involving 126 individuals with confirmed activating epidermal growth factor receptor mutation-positive stage IV NSCLC who received icotinib hydrochloride as first-line therapy between January 2014 and January 2016; their caregivers were also included in the study. For a period of 12 weeks, participants were randomly assigned into WE and control groups. The patients and family members in the WE group were provided with WE information about treatment, diet, social needs, rehabilitation, physical/mental health education, communication strategies, and patient care advice at least 3 times per week during treatment. Qualitative feedback of the participants was recorded during the intervention. Food Composition Database, the Family Environment Scale, patients/caregivers quality-of-life (Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Lung/Caregiver Quality of Life Index-Cancer Scale), and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) were measured at baseline and for 12 weeks. Data were analyzed to compare the different outcomes.Of the 126 caregivers (64 WE and 62 control), 120 completed the study. We observed significant differences between the WE group and control group with respect to low daily calorie intake (31.0% vs 77.4%, p0.05), smoking cessationaaa and awareness of cancer (85.48% vs 100%, p0.05). The WE group showed high ratings on awareness of cancer risk and benefit, as well as confidence relating to the behaviors of healthful diet and self-motivation to conduct cancer test. Family caregivers had high ratings on 30-minute daily moderate physical activity (p0.05). After 12 weeks, WE intervention had improved scores on Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Lung-EWB and Caregiver Quality of Life Index-Cancer Scale adaptation. In addition, the patients also showed improvements in HADS.WE interventions in patients with stage IV NSCLC undergoing icotinib hydrochloride treatment and their family resulted in strong intentions to engage in health-promoting behaviors related to physical activity, smoking cessationaaa, and nutrition at the treatment period. WE intervention is a viable way to improve quality of life and HADS.Findings from this study suggest that WE interventions in patients' family with stage IV NSCLC undergoing icotinib hydrochloride treatment are significant improvements in both HADS and quality of life. These data also indicate that lung cancer disparities are unlikely to be associated with differential willingness to receive care but that Chinese may perceive financial and insurance ebarriers to treatment.

Nickel hydroxides with hierarchical micro-nano structures are prepared by a facile homogeneous precipitation method with different nickel salts (Ni(NO3)2·6H2O, NiCl2·6H2O, and NiSO4·6H2O) as raw materials. The effect of nickel sources on the microstructure and lithium storage performance of the nickel hydroxides is studied. It is found that all the three prepared samples are α-nickel hydroxide. The nickel hydroxides synthesized with Ni(NO3)2·6H2 or NiCl2·6H2O show a similar particle size of 20–30 μm and are composed of very thin nano-sheets, while the nickel hydroxide synthesized with Ni(SO4)2·6H2O shows a larger particle size (30–50 μm) and consists of very thin nano-walls. When applied as anode materials for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), the nickel hydroxide synthesized with NiSO4·6H2O exhibits the highest discharge capacity, but its cyclic stability is very poor. The nickel hydroxides synthesized with NiCl2·6H2O exhibit higher discharge capacity than the nickel hydroxides synthesized with Ni(NO3)2·6H2O, and both of them show much improved cyclic stability and rate capability as compared to the nickel hydroxide synthesized with Ni(SO4)2·6H2O. Moreover, pseudocapacitive behavior makes a great contribution to the electrochemical energy storage of the three samples. The discrepancies of lithium storage performance of the three samples are analyzed by ex-situ XRD, FT-IR, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and cyclic voltammetry (CV) tests.

The flow pattern and heat and mass transfer in the porous media and fluid mixing area are widely found in the production and engineering, such as heat pipe, building envelope and insulation materials. Especially the slip effect at the at the interface between the fluid and the porous media has a great impact on the flow and heat and mass transfer. Therefore, the processing of the interface in the mixed area is the focus of many studies. In this paper, the mixed area of fluid and porous media is studied by means of theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. The numerical simulation of the mixed region is carried out by using the single domain method. The purpose of controlling the entire mixing area with a set of control equations is achieved by controlling the source terms which are defined by the user-defined function (UDF) in Fluent. And the accuracy and feasibility of the procedure are verified by comparison with numerical simulation of double domain method. Then, by discussing the influence of different physical parameters on the slip characteristics at the interface between fluid and porous media, the mechanism of velocity slip effect is summarized, which lays the foundation for the study of heat transfer and mass transfer.

A risk assessment model based on the D-S evidence theory is proposed to solve problems concerning the security risks of tourism in inland waterways. First, we explain the risk assessment index system and describe the steps for the inland waterway cruise ship navigation safety assessment. Second, we evaluate all indicators at the bottom level and transform them into the distribution of belief items. Finally, we apply the evidential reasoning (ER) approach to merge the belief structure information with the index level, in order to obtain the evaluation indicators. Subsequently, it would be possible for us to obtain the assessment results of the goal level in a comparable way. The evaluation results are presented through a belief assignment form, but it is necessary to transform the distribution information into crisp values for comparison purposes, by using a comprehensive evaluation function. Furthermore, we also conducted a case study on the Lijiaxia reservoir, to present and validate the proposed model and the corresponding methods. The results show that the safety evaluation score of the investigated waterway is 3.06, a value that can be considered to be of an intermediate level. Thus, it can be seen that the risk grade generated from the proposed model tends to be consistent with the real safety state of the waterway.

Learning discriminative global features plays a vital role in semantic segmentation. And most of the existing methods adopt stacks of local convolutions or non-local blocks to capture long-range context. However, due to the absence of spatial structure preservation, these operators ignore the object details when enlarging receptive fields. In this paper, we propose the learnable tree filter to form a generic tree filtering module that leverages the structural property of minimal spanning tree to model long-range dependencies while preserving the details. Furthermore, we propose a highly efficient linear-time algorithm to reduce resource consumption. Thus, the designed modules can be plugged into existing deep neural networks conveniently. To this end, tree filtering modules are embedded to formulate a unified framework for semantic segmentation. We conduct extensive ablation studies to elaborate on the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Specifically, it attains better performance with much less overhead compared with the classic PSP block and Non-local operation under the same backbone. Our approach is proved to achieve consistent improvements on several benchmarks without bells-and-whistles. Code and models are available at https://github.com/StevenGrove/TreeFilter-Torch., Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS-2019

Long-wavelength Mermin-Wagner fluctuations prevent the existence of translational long-range order, in two-dimensional systems at finite temperature. Their dynamical signature, which is the divergence of the vibrational amplitude with the system size, also affects disordered solids and washes out the transient solid-like response generally exhibited by liquids cooled below their melting temperature. Through a combined numerical and experimental investigation, here we show that long-wavelength fluctuations are also relevant at high temperature, where the liquid dynamics does not reveal a transient solid-like response. In this regime, they induce an unusual but ubiquitous decoupling between long-time diffusion coefficient $D$ and structural relaxation time $\tau$, where $D\propto \tau^{-\kappa}$, with $\kappa > 1$. Long-wavelength fluctuations have a negligible influence on the relaxation dynamics only at extremely high temperatures, in molecular liquids, or extremely low densities, in colloidal systems.

Al-substituted Ni(OH) 2 samples with Al 3+ /Ni 2+ mole ratio of 0%, 10% and 20% have been prepared by a very facile chemical co-precipitation method. The microstructure of the prepared samples are analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA), and Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). The results reveal that the pure Ni(OH) 2 sample is β -Ni(OH) 2 with nanosheets hierarchical structure; the sample with 10% Al is mixed phase α / β- Ni(OH) 2 with hybrid nanosheets/nanoparticles hierarchical structure; the sample with 20% Al is α- Ni(OH) 2 with irregular nanoparticles hierarchical structure. The lithium storage performances of the prepared samples are characterized by cyclic voltammograms (CV), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), and charge–discharge tests. The results demonstrate that Al substitution could improve the lithium storage performances of nickel hydroxide. In particular, the mixed phase α / β- Ni(OH) 2 with 10% Al exhibited the highest electrochemical activity, the best rate performance, and superior cycling stability. For example, after 30 charge/discharge cycles under a current density of 200 mA g −1 , the mixed phase α / β- Ni(OH) 2 with 10% Al can still deliver a specific discharge capacity of 964 mAh g −1 , much higher than of for the α- Ni(OH) 2 with 20% Al (681 mAh g −1 ) and the pure Ni(OH) 2 (419 mAh g −1 ).

Computed Tomography technique has been commonly used to obtain the geometric model of asphalt mixture for the microstructure-based heat transfer numerical analysis. However, this technique relies on expansive equipment and has shortcomings related to limited sample size and difficulty in identifying the boundary of stones. This study proposes a cost and time-effective numerical method to compute the heat transfer within asphalt mixture from the microstructure point of view. The computer graphics technique is adopted to develop the geometric model of asphalt mixture, including coarse stones and asphalt matrix. The generated geometric model is imported into the finite element software to compute the thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of asphalt mixture. To obtain input parameters of the newly developed numerical method, the thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of coarse stones and asphalt matrix are measured through the heat plate exchanger. The above two parameters of asphalt mixture are also measured to verify the computed results by the newly developed numerical method. The differences between computed and measured thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of asphalt mixture are 9.0% and 8.6% respectively, indicating a good performance of the newly proposed microstructure-based numerical approach. On the other hand, computed results show that asphalt mixtures with different sample sizes and aggregate size distributions have non-uniform distributions of heat flux and temperature, mainly due to the different thermo-physical properties between coarse stone and asphalt matrix. For asphalt mixtures, a knowledge of heat flux and temperature fluctuations from the microstructure point of view may shed light on the analysis of stress/strain distribution and crack propagation in asphalt mixture.

In order to improve compactness of asphalt mixture, a novel vacuum compaction method is proposed and its process parameters are optimized. A simple compaction cylinder with a hole adjusting air pressure was designed and fabricated based on marshal compaction cylinder design. Common compaction and vacuum compaction were conducted separately by using compaction cylinder. The experimental results demonstrate that accumulative compaction depth with vacuum compaction was deeper compared to that of common compaction in the same compaction repetitions. In vacuum compaction, the effect of compaction at -0.08 Mpa presented the best performance. Accumulative compaction depth at - 0.08 Mpa is 3.41mm deeper than that in common compaction, increased 20.53%. Meanwhile, density, porosity, voids in mineral aggregate and percentage of asphalt volume also exhibits that vacuum degree of -0.08 Mpa is most efficient pressure value. These results indicate that vacuum compaction method can effectively improve compactness of asphalt mixture, which could provide a novel method for the enhancement of road quality and road lifespan.

The phenomenon of coupled flow between free flow and porous media is characteristic of fluid flowing across porous media, but the slip characteristics at the coupling interface need to be further studied. The purpose of this work is to investigate the velocity distribution of turbulence with a high Reynolds number above and in porous media. In this paper, a visual flume test bench is built to simulate porous media as an accumulation of spherical glass beads with a diameter of 10 mm. The free flow velocity of fluid crossing the porous media and the velocity inside the porous media are measured by ultrasonic Doppler velocimetry. The effects of Reynolds number, relative water depth, and porosity parameters on the slip velocity and momentum transfer near the interface are studied. The results show that the slip coefficient of a porous-media bed with 0.331 porosity ranges from 0.000 082 to 0.000 594, while that of a porous-media bed with 0.476 porosity ranges from 0.000 034 to 0.001 068. The slip velocity increases with the increase in Reynolds number but decreases with the increase in relative water depth and porosity. The thickness of the transition layer in the porous-media region is insensitive to the Reynolds number and relative depth, but sensitive to porosity and increases with the increase in porosity. In this study, the influence of effective parameters on turbulent velocity is studied by experiments, which provides an important reference value for the development of a theoretical model in turbulent flow.

Single-molecule detection can reveal time trajectories and reaction pathways of individual intermediates/transition states in chemical reactions and biological processes, which is of fundamental importance to elucidate their intrinsic mechanisms. We present a reliable, label-free single-molecule approach that allows us to directly explore the dynamic process of basic chemical reactions at the single-event level by using stable graphene-molecule single-molecule junctions. These junctions are constructed by covalently connecting a single molecule with a 9-fluorenone center to nanogapped graphene electrodes. For the first time, real-time single-molecule electrical measurements unambiguously show reproducible large-amplitude two-level fluctuations that are highly dependent on solvent environments in a nucleophilic addition reaction of hydroxylamine to a carbonyl group. Both theoretical simulations and ensemble experiments prove that this observation originates from the reversible transition between the reactant and a new intermediate state within a time scale of a few microseconds. These investigations open up a new route that is able to be immediately applied to probe fast single-molecule physics or biophysics with high time resolution, making an important contribution to broad fields beyond reaction chemistry.

SpnF is the first monofunctional Diels-Alder/[6+4]-ase that catalyzes a reaction leading to both Diels-Alder and [6+4] adducts through a single transition state. The environment-perturbed transition-state sampling method has been developed to calculate free energies, kinetic isotope effects, and quasi-classical reaction trajectories of enzyme-catalyzed reactions and the uncatalyzed reaction in water. Energetics calculated in this way reproduce the experiment and show that the normal Diels-Alder transition state is stabilized by H bonds with water molecules, while the ambimodal transition state is favored in the enzyme SpnF by both intramolecular hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic binding. Molecular dynamics simulations show that trajectories passing through the ambimodal transition state bifurcate to the [6+4] adduct and the Diels-Alder adduct with a ratio of 1:1 in the gas phase, 1:1.6 in water, and 1:11 in the enzyme. This example shows how an enzyme acts on a vibrational time scale to steer post-transition state trajectories toward the Diels-Alder adduct.

Tourmaline modified bitumen was prepared by blending base bitumen with tourmaline powder. Effect of temperature, frequency as well as the content of tourmaline powder on the complex modulus and phase angle of the bitumen was investigated by dynamic shear rheometer (DSR). The results indicate that the complex modulus decreased whereas the phase angle increased with the increasing of temperature and frequency, the complex modulus of modified bitumen exhibit good linear relationship with the logarithmic value of loading frequency. Compared with base bitumen, the bitumen containing tourmaline powder exhibit higher rutting factor, indicating that the rutting resistance of bitumen at high temperature was improved by tourmaline, for the rigidity of bitumen was enhanced by tourmaline.

Vehicle load is one of the primary live loads for long-span bridges. However, load distribution and composition are complicated on long-span bridges and vary significantly. In general, bridge codes do not include specifications for bridges with long spans. In this study, the microscale traffic model, cellular automaton (CA) model, was adopted to establish a long-span vehicle load model through a merger with real-monitored traffic data. The differences in the current design vehicle loads used in China, the United States, Great Britain, and Europe are discussed. The effects of the CA load with different vehicle density and vehicle composition were estimated for loaded lengths from 100 to 1,000 m with the influence line. The largest moment of a bridge from a CA load was compared with that of the design vehicle load statistically. The results showed that vehicle density, loaded length, and the heavy truck percentage were the main features of the vehicle loading effects. An increase in vehicle density led to higher average and extreme values for the loading effect. When the loaded length was more than 600 m, the impact of the loaded lengths vanished. When the vehicle density was the same, a heavy percentage of truck traffic had a significant impact on the loading effect. Moreover, when the percentage of heavy trucks was high, the design load for relatively shorter loaded lengths needed to be adjusted because the current design load safety margin for a loaded length of not more than 300 m was small.

In order to improve the corrosion maintenance efficiency of grounding grid metal, the corrosion state of underground grounding grid in an 110kV substation was tested and evaluated by the electrical impedance tomography (EIT) technology. Results indicated that the impedance increase ratio of grounding grid branch was in a reasonable range below the warning value, proving the whole ground grid metal had not suffered severe thinning in soil and no breaking had happened in the grounding grid branches. The two-dimension corrosion image of the whole grounding grid was simulated and drawn accurately using the corrosion diagnosis software, with the consideration of the impedance increase ratio of grounding grid branch and the network topology of grounding grid. By realizing the underground grounding grid from the “black-box state” to the “visible state”, EIT technology could be used to evaluate and detect the corrosion degree, corrosion area and corrosion failure of grounding grid rapidly and effectively, which could reduce the blindness of corrosion detection for grounding grid, provide guidelines on the corrosion maintenance of grounding grid and improve the fine management ability of grounding apparatus in substation.

Vibration and Shock from the rocket launch bring high demands for the design of radiation cooled space travelling wave tube. In the paper, dynamic analysis of Ku band radiation cooled space travelling wave tube was carried on by means of finite element analysis method according to environmental conditions. And an optimized prototype was made and tested.

The couplers play an important role in coupling the power in and out from the helical SWS of a TWT with minimum reflection. For a space helix TWT, coupler should be wide bandwidth and small size. The main objective of the paper is to design a wide band output coaxial coupler, and a filter consisting of different radius and different length of transformer section is optimized. The simulated reflection loss of filter transformer section is obtained by using Ansoft HFSS and compares with that of three-stage transformer section. The wide band matching properties of the transformer is better than the three-section transformer section.

Activated carbon was prepared with active carbon and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as carriers of sulfur lithium–sulfur battery anode. The preparation was performed by sealing and heating molten lithium–sulfur batteries with different ratios of CNT, which was the positive active material. X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern showed that composite material had more amorphous structure; the sample of C/CNT ratio of 3:1 exhibited the strongest amorphous, indicating that elemental sulfur was scattered into the pores of the carbon materials. Scanning electron microscopy showed that CNT was evenly dispersed into the activated carbon/sulfur composite materials in the anode material, forming a 3D conductive structure. The discharge specific capacity of the composite test exhibited that a small amount of CNT improved the discharge specific capacity of the anode material to active material for the preparation of activated carbon. The discharge specific capacity of CNT with 2:2 ratio was up to 1371.1 mAh/g. After the first 50 cycles, the discharge specific capacity could be stabilized at 687.3 mAh/g.

In the paper, Influence of interface status (ratio of brazing area and fit clearance) of brazed collector parts on contact heat resistance was theoretically analysised. And by ANSYS simulation, influence of ratio of brazing area and fit clearance on heat dissipation capability of collector for travelling wave tube was studied.

A simple and efficient method has been developed which describes KOH-oriented catalytic regioselective ring-opening reactions of various N-tosylaziridines with malonates. In the presence of 20 mol% KOH, most N-tosylaziridines can smoothly react with malonates to give the corresponding products in good to excellent yields (up to 99%) and with good to excellent regioselectivity under mild experimental conditions.

The compensation accuracy of a forward image displacement compensation device in an area scan color CCD camera was analyzed,because it would influence the resolution of the camera directly.The characteristics of the mechanic compensation device were researched,and the allowable residual error of the velocity compensation corresponding exposure time was given.A mathematical model for the residual error of velocity compensation was established after analyzing main error sources of the device,then the error model was simulated by the Monte Carlo method.Finally,the compensation accuracy was verified by an imaging test with a dynamic target simulator.The test results show that the residual error of velocity compensation is 395.6 μm/s,which is coincident with the simulation data 400 μm/s.It is concluded that the method can estimate accurately the matching error accuracy.

[3+2] Cycloaddition of a series of substituted N-tosylaziridines with various nitriles promoted by Bi(OTf)3 is described for the synthesis of substituted imidazolines under mild reaction conditions. The procedure works well over a range of substrates to give the corresponding products in good to excellent yields (up to 99 %).

This study aimed to examine whether awareness of cancer diagnosis and prognosis among patients with stage IV lung cancer treated with first-line erlotinib vary with psychological distress and quality of life (QoL). This study was carried out at the Comprehensive treatment Department of Tianjin Cancer Hospital between August 2013 and September 2015 among patients ≥18 years-old and suffering from EGFR mutation-positive stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with first-line erlotinib (150 mg/day; N = 137). The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) was administered before (baseline) and after 12 weeks of treatment. QoL was assessed using the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Lung (FACT-L) questionnaire. Diagnosis and prognosis awareness was assessed by interview. Among patients, 21% reported to be fully aware of their disease; 41% were only aware of the diagnosis, not the stage; and 51% were not aware at all. Among patients, 63.5% reported elevated anxiety, 71.5% were depressed, and 75.2% had HADS score ≥15 (emotional distress). Patients who were totally and partly aware experienced improvements in HADS and FACT-L compared with baseline (all p