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Oxidation of sulfite and competitive absorption existed in Na2SO3 solution for simultaneous removal of NOx and SO2, inhibited the long-term high-efficiency when used for practical applications. A matching strategy was developed to solve these problems. Antioxidants combination was used to retard the oxidation of antioxidant and enhance inhibition of S(IV) (tetravalent sulfur) oxidation. Hydroquinone (HQ) and sodium thiosulfate (ST) showed a positive synergistic effect on inhibition of S(IV) oxidation. When SO2 concentration was 500 and 2000 ppmV, the addition of 0.1 wt.% HQ and 1 wt.% ST decreased the percentage of S(IV) oxidized by oxygen by over 30% and 40%, respectively. Alkali (Na2CO3) alleviated the competitive absorption between NOx and SO2. Moreover, Na2CO3 exhibited an enhancement effect on the absorption of NOx and SO2 when coupled with anti-oxidants. While the increase of oxygen pressure accelerated the oxidation of S(IV), the anti-oxidants can retard the oxidation. The measurement of pH suggested the removal efficiency of NOx highly depended on SO32⁻ concentration rather than pH. The further investigation of the mechanism suggested the match effect was related to the interaction between ST and the intermediate product of HQ. The match strategy holds a potential for application of SO32⁻ to denitration.

Text-to-image diffusion models pre-trained on billions of image-text pairs have recently enabled text-to-3D content creation by optimizing a randomly initialized Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) with score distillation. However, the resultant 3D models exhibit two limitations: (a) quality concerns such as saturated color and the Janus problem; (b) extremely low diversity comparing to text-guided image synthesis. In this paper, we show that the conflict between NeRF optimization process and uniform timestep sampling in score distillation is the main reason for these limitations. To resolve this conflict, we propose to prioritize timestep sampling with monotonically non-increasing functions, which aligns NeRF optimization with the sampling process of diffusion model. Extensive experiments show that our simple redesign significantly improves text-to-3D content creation with higher quality and diversity.

The DEtection TRansformer (DETR) algorithm has received considerable attention in the research community and is gradually emerging as a mainstream approach for object detection and other perception tasks. However, the current field lacks a unified and comprehensive benchmark specifically tailored for DETR-based models. To address this issue, we develop a unified, highly modular, and lightweight codebase called detrex, which supports a majority of the mainstream DETR-based instance recognition algorithms, covering various fundamental tasks, including object detection, segmentation, and pose estimation. We conduct extensive experiments under detrex and perform a comprehensive benchmark for DETR-based models. Moreover, we enhance the performance of detection transformers through the refinement of training hyper-parameters, providing strong baselines for supported algorithms.We hope that detrex could offer research communities a standardized and unified platform to evaluate and compare different DETR-based models while fostering a deeper understanding and driving advancements in DETR-based instance recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/detrex. The project is currently being actively developed. We encourage the community to use detrex codebase for further development and contributions., Comment: project link: https://github.com/IDEA-Research/detrex

Humans have long been recorded in a variety of forms since antiquity. For example, sculptures and paintings were the primary media for depicting human beings before the invention of cameras. However, most current human-centric computer vision tasks like human pose estimation and human image generation focus exclusively on natural images in the real world. Artificial humans, such as those in sculptures, paintings, and cartoons, are commonly neglected, making existing models fail in these scenarios. As an abstraction of life, art incorporates humans in both natural and artificial scenes. We take advantage of it and introduce the Human-Art dataset to bridge related tasks in natural and artificial scenarios. Specifically, Human-Art contains 50k high-quality images with over 123k person instances from 5 natural and 15 artificial scenarios, which are annotated with bounding boxes, keypoints, self-contact points, and text information for humans represented in both 2D and 3D. It is, therefore, comprehensive and versatile for various downstream tasks. We also provide a rich set of baseline results and detailed analyses for related tasks, including human detection, 2D and 3D human pose estimation, image generation, and motion transfer. As a challenging dataset, we hope Human-Art can provide insights for relevant research and open up new research questions., Comment: CVPR2023

Existing text-guided image manipulation methods aim to modify the appearance of the image or to edit a few objects in a virtual or simple scenario, which is far from practical applications. In this work, we study a novel task on text-guided image manipulation on the entity level in the real world (eL-TGIM). The task imposes three basic requirements, (1) to edit the entity consistent with the text descriptions, (2) to preserve the entity-irrelevant regions, and (3) to merge the manipulated entity into the image naturally. To this end, we propose an elegant framework, dubbed as SeMani, forming the Semantic Manipulation of real-world images that can not only edit the appearance of entities but also generate new entities corresponding to the text guidance. To solve eL-TGIM, SeMani decomposes the task into two phases: the semantic alignment phase and the image manipulation phase. In the semantic alignment phase, SeMani incorporates a semantic alignment module to locate the entity-relevant region to be manipulated. In the image manipulation phase, SeMani adopts a generative model to synthesize new images conditioned on the entity-irrelevant regions and target text descriptions. We discuss and propose two popular generation processes that can be utilized in SeMani, the discrete auto-regressive generation with transformers and the continuous denoising generation with diffusion models, yielding SeMani-Trans and SeMani-Diff, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on the real datasets CUB, Oxford, and COCO datasets to verify that SeMani can distinguish the entity-relevant and -irrelevant regions and achieve more precise and flexible manipulation in a zero-shot manner compared with baseline methods. Our codes and models will be released at https://github.com/Yikai-Wang/SeMani., Comment: Extension of our CVPR 2022 oral paper: 2204.04428. Yikai Wang and Jianan Wang contribute equally. The arxiv version uses small size figures for fast preview, the full size pdf version can be found in our project page: https://yikai-wang.github.io/semani/. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2204.04428

We propose DisCo-CLIP, a distributed memory-efficient CLIP training approach, to reduce the memory consumption of contrastive loss when training contrastive learning models. Our approach decomposes the contrastive loss and its gradient computation into two parts, one to calculate the intra-GPU gradients and the other to compute the inter-GPU gradients. According to our decomposition, only the intra-GPU gradients are computed on the current GPU, while the inter-GPU gradients are collected via all_reduce from other GPUs instead of being repeatedly computed on every GPU. In this way, we can reduce the GPU memory consumption of contrastive loss computation from $\bigO(B^2)$ to $\bigO(\frac{B^2}{N})$, where $B$ and $N$ are the batch size and the number of GPUs used for training. Such a distributed solution is mathematically equivalent to the original non-distributed contrastive loss computation, without sacrificing any computation accuracy. It is particularly efficient for large-batch CLIP training. For instance, DisCo-CLIP can enable contrastive training of a ViT-B/32 model with a batch size of 32K or 196K using 8 or 64 A100 40GB GPUs, compared with the original CLIP solution which requires 128 A100 40GB GPUs to train a ViT-B/32 model with a batch size of 32K. The code will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DisCo-CLIP, Comment: To appear in CVPR 2023 as a highlight, our code will be public at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DisCo-CLIP

We apply the stabilizer method to the study of some complicated molecules, such as water and benzene. In the minimal STO-3G basis, the former requires 14 qubits, and the latter 72 qubits, which is very challenging. Quite remarkably, We are still able to find the best stabilizer states at all the bond lengths. Just as the previously studied H$_2$, LiH and BeH$_2$ molecules, here the stabilizer states also approximate the true ground states very well, especially when the molecules are strongly distorted. These results suggest stabilizer states could serve as natural reference states when the system involves strong static correlation. And in the language of quantum computing, one would expect stabilizer states to be natural initial states for chemical simulation., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures

Controllable human image generation (HIG) has numerous real-life applications. State-of-the-art solutions, such as ControlNet and T2I-Adapter, introduce an additional learnable branch on top of the frozen pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) model, which can enforce various conditions, including skeleton guidance of HIG. While such a plug-and-play approach is appealing, the inevitable and uncertain conflicts between the original images produced from the frozen SD branch and the given condition incur significant challenges for the learnable branch, which essentially conducts image feature editing for condition enforcement. In this work, we propose a native skeleton-guided diffusion model for controllable HIG called HumanSD. Instead of performing image editing with dual-branch diffusion, we fine-tune the original SD model using a novel heatmap-guided denoising loss. This strategy effectively and efficiently strengthens the given skeleton condition during model training while mitigating the catastrophic forgetting effects. HumanSD is fine-tuned on the assembly of three large-scale human-centric datasets with text-image-pose information, two of which are established in this work. As shown in Figure 1, HumanSD outperforms ControlNet in terms of accurate pose control and image quality, particularly when the given skeleton guidance is sophisticated.

This paper presents a new family of backpropagation-free neural architectures, Gated Linear Networks (GLNs). What distinguishes GLNs from contemporary neural networks is the distributed and local nature of their credit assignment mechanism; each neuron directly predicts the target, forgoing the ability to learn feature representations in favor of rapid online learning. Individual neurons can model nonlinear functions via the use of data-dependent gating in conjunction with online convex optimization. We show that this architecture gives rise to universal learning capabilities in the limit, with effective model capacity increasing as a function of network size in a manner comparable with deep ReLU networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the GLN learning mechanism possesses extraordinary resilience to catastrophic forgetting, performing comparably to a MLP with dropout and Elastic Weight Consolidation on standard benchmarks. These desirable theoretical and empirical properties position GLNs as a complementary technique to contemporary offline deep learning methods., arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1712.01897

Fine particles with the size below 1 μm are difficult to be captured with the traditional dust removal devices because of their poor charge capacity and filterability. Using the agglomeration pretreatment can realize the fine particles growth, then facilitating the capture process. In this study, a novel system with the combination of corona discharge and embedded turbulence was put forward. The results showed that the device can agglomerate the smaller particles into bigger ones, and the maximum decrease of number concentration for small particles can reach 40% in the bipolar corona discharge condition. The median diameters of fine particles can be improved by 47% maximumly in the condition of arrangement of turbulence bars and loopholes with a lower flow velocity. The simulated calculation and pilot scale test were conducted and the results were consistent with experimental conclusions.

Protein kinases C (PKCs) are a family of serine/threonine kinases involved in various cellular processes, including proliferation, differentiation, cell survival, and apoptosis. Here, we report the identification, structure-activity relationship (SAR), and 3D-QSAR studies of 69 natural indolocarbazoles, including 15 new compounds, from marine streptomyces strains. Interestingly, we found that the chair conformational isomer of 7-oxo-staurosporine (compound 15) inhibited PKCθ more potently than the corresponding boat isomer. An evaluation of kinase selectivity and antitumor efficacy revealed that 15 was a potent dual PKCθ/δ inhibitor and that it could efficiently inhibit tumor growth in pancreatic cancer (PC) by inducing cellular apoptosis and suppressing the NF-κB/p-P65 pathway. In addition, we demonstrated that overexpression of p-PKCδ and p-P65 was associated with poor survival rates in patients with PC, and p-PKCθ expression also showed significant positive correlations with p-PKCδ and p-P65 levels. Finally, the PC patient-derived xenograft model further confirmed the potential anti-PC efficacy of 15.

Excessive oxidation of sulfite can lead to low utilization efficiency and inhibit its application in the wet flue gas denitration process. Using organic absorbent can retard the sulfite oxidation r...

Supplementary Material 1

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Monthly average air temperature (dots) and rainfall (bars) during 2010–2016 in Hefei. Figure S2. Scatter plot with a linear regression line showing correlation between leaf function traits. Red dots (park), blue dots(street). Ψmd: leaf midday water potential, TLP: leaf turgor loss point, P50: leaf water potential at 50% loss of hydraulic conductance, Kleaf: leaf hydraulic conductivity, PT: palisade mesophyll thickness, LT: leaf thickness, Fv/Fm: maximum photochemical quantum yield of photosystem II.

We propose a heuristic method to obtain the approximate groundstate for a Hamiltonian in the qubit form, based on the stabilizer formalism. These states may serve as proper initial states for further refined computation. It would be interesting to assess the efficiency and scalability of the method., Comment: 10 pages

Additional file 2: Table S2. List of differentially expressed proteins with lower expression in TR group compared with PR group

Additional file 1: Table S1. List of differentially expressed proteins with higher expression in TR group compared with PR group

This paper investigates the leader-follower formation tracking problem of linear multiagent systems with unknown external disturbances. To deal with the unknown disturbances, an adaptive observer is proposed for each follower. Then, a formation tracking protocol is proposed by utilizing the disturbances and states obtained from adaptive observers. Based on the Lyapunov analysis, the asymptotical convergence of the state error is rigorously proved. Different from some existing anti-disturbance consensus approaches, the adaptive disturbance observer is completely decoupled from formation control. Finally, simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the theoretical research.

Background Recently, pine wood nematode (PWN, Bursaphelenchus xylophilus) has been found in the extreme cold area of northeast China. The third-stage dispersal juvenile (DJ3) of PWN, which is a long-lived stress-resistant stage, plays an important role in the process of PWN spreading to low-temperature areas, as this stage can survive under unfavorable conditions. Results Weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) was used to analyze the expression patterns of 15,889 genes included in 21 RNA-Seq results of PWN at DJ3 and the other 6 different stages, and a total of 12 coexpression modules were obtained. Among them, the magenta module has the highest correlation with DJ3, which included a total of 652 genes. KEGG enrichment analysis showed that most of the genes in the magenta module were involved in metabolic processes, which were related to autophagy and longevity regulation. These pathways included starch and sucrose metabolism, which contains trehalose metabolism. To explore the function of trehalose in DJ3 formation and survival under − 20 °C, a trehalose-6-phosphate synthase encoding gene (Bx-tps), a trehalose-6-phosphate phosphatase encoding gene (Bx-tpp) and 7 trehalase encoding genes (Bx-tres) were identified and investigated. The expression of these 9 genes was related to the formation of DJ3. A treatment under − 20 °C induced the accumulation of trehalose. The survival rate of DJ3 at -20 °C reduced after silencing of any of these trehalose metabolism genes. Further analysis suggested that two trehalose synthesis genes were highly correlated with DJ3 and might be involved in autophagy by regulating with energy conversion related genes. Conclusions The above results indicated that trehalose metabolism promotes DJ3 formation and helps DJ3 survive at -20 °C. Although trehalose accumulation is favorable for DJ3 to cope with low-temperature stress, multiple trehalose metabolism genes need to work together. There may be a multi-path regulated physiological process involving trehalose synthesis genes under low-temperature stress resistance. This physiological process may regulate the formation and maintenance of DJ3 through autophagy and energy conversion.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Cluster Dendrogram. Figure S2.KEGG enrichment analyses of genes in the magenta module. Figure S3.Signal peptide analysis. Figure S4. KEGG enrichment analyses of Bx-tpsand Bx-tpp coexpressed genes. Table S1. Primers used in cloning encoding sequence. Table S2.Target sequences for siRNA. Table S3.Primers used in RT-qPCR. Table S4. Statistical analysis of the RNA sequencing data. Table S5. Alignment results of trehalose metabolism related genes in pine wood nematode. Table S6. Expression of trehalose metabolism related genes after RNAi treatment. Table S7. Expression of trehalose metabolism related genes after RNAi treatment. Table S8. Selected genes in the magenta module with high weight value (>0.2) to Bx-tps or Bx-tpp.Table S9. KEGG enrichment for genes highly related to Bx-tps1 andBx-tps2. Table S10. Gene annotation result.

With rapid development of the economy, more and more power transmission, railway systems and oil/gas pipelines have been constructed in recent years. There have been many cases of pipelines crossing or paralleling to adjacent high-voltage transmission lines or railways. Corrosion caused by AC or DC interference is increasingly prominent and has received increasing attention for buried pipelines. In this work, a crevice cell was constructed to simulate the local environment on the surface of pipeline steel under disbonded coating in a soil environment. Corrosion behavior of X80 pipeline steel under stray current interference is investigated in the crevice cell. The results show that the AC interference shifts the local potential to the negative direction and markedly increases anodic dissolution of the steel. The attack of pipeline steel at the coating defect is the most serious, while corrosion attack slightly alleviates under the coating disbondment. Influence of stray current interference on corrosion behavior of pipeline steel under the coating defect was discussed from aspects of the commutation effect of AC interference, the irreversibility of anode reaction and effect of AC on the double layer structure at steel/solution interface.

In this research, the Electrostatic-bag-precipitator (EBP) platform was made of the fully transparent organic glass materials, and the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) device was used to carry out the direct test of the charged particles movement in the precipitator. The Electrical Low Pressure Impactor (ELPI+) was applied to test the charge amounts of the outlet of the electrostatic precipitator (ESP) part and the outlet of EBP simultaneously. It was found that the movement of charged particles was both affected by the electrostatic repulsion among the particles and the charged dust layer on the filter cartridges, and the effect was positively correlated with the charge amounts on the particles and the dust layer. The variation law of cumulative charge amounts of the dust layer under different voltages and during different time phases was analyzed indirectly and the corresponding function model was established, hoping to provide reference for the research on the high-efficient trapping technique of fine particles.

Human intelligence is characterized not only by the capacity to learn complex skills, but the ability to rapidly adapt and acquire new skills within an ever-changing environment. In this work we study how the learning of modular solutions can allow for effective generalization to both unseen and potentially differently distributed data. Our main postulate is that the combination of task segmentation, modular learning and memory-based ensembling can give rise to generalization on an exponentially growing number of unseen tasks. We provide a concrete instantiation of this idea using a combination of: (1) the Forget-Me-Not Process, for task segmentation and memory based ensembling; and (2) Gated Linear Networks, which in contrast to contemporary deep learning techniques use a modular and local learning mechanism. We demonstrate that this system exhibits a number of desirable continual learning properties: robustness to catastrophic forgetting, no negative transfer and increasing levels of positive transfer as more tasks are seen. We show competitive performance against both offline and online methods on standard continual learning benchmarks.

The effects of dynamic ultra-high pressure homogenization (UHPH) on the structure and functional properties of whey protein were investigated in this study. Whey protein solution of 10 mg/mL (1% w/w) was prepared and processed by a laboratory scale high pressure homogenizer with different pressures (25, 50, 100, 150, 200, and 250 MPa) at an initial temperature of 25 °C. Then, the solution samples were evaluated in terms of secondary structure, sulfhydryl and disulfide bond contents, surface hydrophobicity, average particle size, solubility, foaming capacity, emulsifying activity, and thermal properties. It was found that the secondary structure of whey protein changed with the dynamic UHPH treatment. The interchange reaction between the disulfide bond and the sulfhydryl group was promoted and the surface hydrophobicity significantly increased. The functional properties of the whey protein accordingly changed. Specifically, after dynamic UHPH treatment, the average particle size of the whey protein and emulsion decreased while the solubility, the foaming capability and the emulsification stability increased significantly. The results also revealed that with the dynamic UHPH at 150 MPa, the best improvement was observed in the whey protein functional properties. The whey protein solubility increased from 63.15 to 71.61% and the emulsification stability improved from 195 to 467 min.

With a series of widespread applications, resistive gas sensors are considered to be promising candidates for gas detection, benefiting from their small size, ease-of-fabrication, low power consumption and outstanding maintenance properties. One-dimensional (1-D) nanomaterials, which have large specific surface areas, abundant exposed active sites and high length-to-diameter ratios, enable fast charge transfers and gas-sensitive reactions. They can also significantly enhance the sensitivity and response speed of resistive gas sensors. The features and sensing mechanism of current resistive gas sensors and the potential advantages of 1-D nanomaterials in resistive gas sensors are firstly reviewed. This review systematically summarizes the design and optimization strategies of 1-D nanomaterials for high-performance resistive gas sensors, including doping, heterostructures and composites. Based on the monitoring requirements of various characteristic gases, the available applications of this type of gas sensors are also classified and reviewed in the three categories of environment, safety and health. The direction and priorities for the future development of resistive gas sensors are laid out.

Highlights • Victims sustained severe burns (two with TBSA > 90%, eight with TBSA > 60%, and eight with severe inhalation injuries). • Adequate preparation, planning, and drills are crucial during mass casualty events. • Efficient rescue and burn-centered multidisciplinary therapies can help save lives., Background On 5 July 2014, a suicide terrorist set a crowded bus on fire in Hangzhou, injuring 33 passengers. Among these, 19 adult victims with the most severe burns were triaged to our center. This is a single-center, descriptive study recording the prehospital response and in-hospital treatment of these patients. Methods Information on the attack, on-scene rescue, and patient triage was collected from public media, governmental, and hospital reports. Information on patient injury and our in-hospital procedures was collected from the emergency registry and patient records. Results Of the 80 passengers in the burning bus, 33 were injured. The total burn surface area (TBSA) of the 19 most severely injured patients triaged to our hospital ranged from 25% to 95% (mean 48.3 ± 2.08%). Two patients had a TBSA of >90% (92% and 95%) and eight had a TBSA of >60%. Nineteen cases of inhalation injury were diagnosed, eight of which were severe. The emergency center performed 14 bedside escharotomies, 14 central venous catheter (CVC) implantations, and one cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Approximately 131 000 ml of resuscitation fluid was infused within the first 24 h and 111 000 ml within the second; further, 160 230 ml of plasma and 4100 ml of red blood cells were infused during the antishock stage. All victims were transported to the burn ward to receive burn-centered multidisciplinary care. The respiratory team conducted 121 bronchoscopies. A total of 89 operations were performed, and the residual wound area decreased dramatically. After 124 days of extensive therapy, complete wound healing was observed and all patients entered the rehabilitation stage. Conclusion Adequate preparation, including planning and disaster drills, is crucial for handling mass casualty events. Efficient and precise first rescue and triage can reduce prehospital mortality, and burn-centered multidisciplinary care and hospital–government cooperation helps reduce in-hospital mortality. Nevertheless, lessons can be drawn from this incident to be better prepared for future disasters.

The electric vehicles, or may be called plug-in cars, are continuing to make waves across the modern vehicle industry. So far electric vehicles can be distorted by pure and hybrid, which are usually called Plug-in Electric Vehicles and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles. (James Larminie, 2012) The electric vehicles have contribution to protect environment through reducing carbon emission and pollution by improving the using efficiency of fuel and electricity, and indirect use of pollution-free energy, like wind energy, waterpower and nuclear. Electric vehicles need electricity as fuel, so the charging facilities are becoming an important infrastructure. Up to now, the US has about 120,000 gas stations while charging stations are only 10,000. Unfortunately, most of them are slow charging piles, like Level 1 or 2. (James Larminie, 2012) So sufficient charging facilities, especially Level 3 piles, should be deployed in order to meet the increasing of electric vehicles quantity. However, we have to consider about many following problems. This paper introduced some simple technical details of batteries and all levels of stations, and discussed about where and how to deploy, cost and benefit, safety issues and other challenges, and gave a prediction of what the future tendency will be.

This paper discusses the reasons of plastic pollution in the US in several aspects. The key point of pollution is massive disposable plastics and people should say no to them sooner or later. Then there are 4 alternative policies for solving the problem. All of them are evaluated, analyzed as well as some possible trade-offs. The current best choice is to increase landfill density while producing CH4 from landfill suit as a sustainable trade-off, and develop microorganisms of degrading plastics. But developing proper replacements through biotechnology and chemistry technologies will be the ultimate solution.

Nine new indolocarbazoles (1–9) were isolated from the marine-derived Streptomyces sp. DT-A61. Among them compounds 1–8 featured a hydroxy group at the C-3 or C-9 position. All purified compounds were identified by 1D and 2D NMR and HRESIMS data. The absolute configurations of 4–6, 8, and 9 were determined by electronic circular dichroism spectroscopic data. Compound 7 exhibited significant activity against human prostate PC-3 cancer cells with an IC50 value of 0.16 μM. Compounds 1, 5, 6, and 9 showed moderate inhibition against the same cell line with IC50 values of 8.0, 3.6, 3.1, and 5.6 μM. Compound 2 displayed a notable inhibitory effect against Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK2) with an IC50 value of 5.7 nM, which was similar to the positive control staurosporine (IC50 7.8 nM).

Recent studies suggested that TLR4 signaling pathways played an important role in the development of LPS-induced acute lung injury (ALI). Sesamin, a sesame lignan exacted from sesame seeds, has been shown to exhibit significant anti-inflammatory activity. The purpose of this study was to investigate the anti-inflammatory effects of sesamin on LPS-induced ALI in mice. Mice ALI model was induced by intratracheal instillation of LPS. Sesamin was given 1 h after LPS challenge. Our results showed that sesamin inhibited LPS-induced lung pathological change, edema, and myeloperoxidase (MPO) activity. Sesamin suppressed LPS-induced inflammatory cytokines TNF-α, IL-6, and IL-1β production. Furthermore, sesamin inhibited LPS-induced TLR4 expression and NF-κB activation. In conclusion, the results of this study indicated that sesamin protected against LPS-induced ALI by inhibition of TLR4 signaling pathways.

El Parque Circundante de la ciudad de Hefei tiene caracteristicas tipicas de bosque urbano. En este investigacion se utilizan metodos de ecologia de la vegetacion para analizar la estructura de la comunidad del parque. La composicion de especies, la distribucion de alturas de los arboles y el DAP (diametro a la altura del pecho) fueron descritos. Existen 27,662 arboles en el area de estudio, la cual tiene un area de bosque urbano de 42.5 hm2. El DAP promedio fue de 19.2 cm, la densidad en pie fue de 651 arboles·hm2 y el area basal promedio fue de 20.8 m2·hm-2. Con base en la evaluacion, los arboles en el parque cuentan con buena salud, pues representaron 53.4 % del total del bosque urbano. Las estructuras de la comunidad fueron analizadas a traves del calculo del indice de crecimiento de los arboles y la correlacion de asociacion de las especies componentes en el parque. Los resultados muestran que las estructuras de la comunidad en el parque son complejas; existen 22 pares de especies con asociacion positiva y, en las siguientes comunidades, los individuos tienen buen crecimiento y son mas estables, incluyendo principalmente Platycladus orientalis-Prunus cerasifera f. atropurpurea-Osmanthus fragrans, Robinia pseudoacacia-Ligustrum lucidum, R. pseudoacacia-Ginkgo biloba-Photinia serrulata, Populus canadensis-L. lucidum-O. fragrans, Sophora japonica-L. lucidum-Buxus sinica, Cyclobalanopsis glauca-Distylium racemosum

We present a novel solver for solving Quantified Boolean Formulae problem (QBF). In order to improve the performance, we introduce some reasoning rules into the message passing algorithm for solving QBF. When preprocessing the formulae, the solver incorporates the equality reduction and the hyperbinary resolution. Further, the solver employs the message passing method to obtain more information when selecting branches. By using the unit propagation, conflict driven learning, and satisfiability directed implication and learning, the solver handles the branches. The experimental results also show that the solver can solve QBF problem efficiently.

Basketball electromagnetic launcher is designed on the basis of the principle of electromagnetic gun. The ejection mechanism is used to launch the basketball in order to complete the shooting action. This mechanism has simple and compact structure, stable operation and so on. At the same time, it has the ability to the great acceleration. The basketball is accelerated to a higher launch speed by the mechanism in order to obtain a larger initial kinetic energy. Then the basketball does the parabolic movement in the air, and goes into the basket at last.

In this paper, we primarily address the impact on consensus of multi-agent systems by incorporating the equality constraint. Both linear and certain form of nonlinear constraints are considered. In order to visualize the impact, the convergence rate over a strongly connected graph is proposed for both proposed linear and nonlinear consensus algorithms. In addition, for certain cases, the consensus can be achieved by only using constraint and thus the additional, fragile and logy communication link can be entirely gotten rid of. Numerical examples are further elaborated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and its improved performance.

With the sharp growth of smart phone applications in all industrial aspects, the advanced wireless monitoring system will replace the traditional monitoring equipments. An Android based monitoring and locating system has been proposed in this study. In this system, the wireless monitoring methods reduce the communication cost between hardwares. The system provides the convenient real time services of more accurate positions to any mobile phone without any preparation. Especially, it enhances the accuracy while distinguishing two short distance equipments. This system provides all the monitoring functions that can help control the instruments in a factory. Finally, the experiment results show that factory and other industry environment are located well in the tests.

Objectives: This study was aimed at assessing the value of the adenosine test for noninvasive diagnosis of dual AV nodal physiology (DAVNP) in patients with AV nodal reentrant tachycardia (AVNRT). Methods: 53 patients with paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia (PSVT) were given incremental doses of adenosine intravenously during sinus rhythm before electrophysiological study. The adenosine test was repeated on a subset of 18 patients with AVNRT after radiofrequency catheter ablation. Results: Sudden increments of PR interval of more than 60 msec between two consecutive beats were observed in 26 (83.9%) of 31 patients with typical AVNRT and 2 (9.1%) of 22 patients with AVRT and AT (P

The Search engine based P2P give a new solution for internet information search. The best advantage of P2P search engine at using the advanced peer search idea that completely search the internet without through center server and don't limit for information document format and host equipment. The paper introduces the current technology development of P2P search, analyzes the mainstream P2P search algorithm in detail, and give some suggest for the future P2P search work.

Objective Heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) is a chaperone for several client proteins involved in transcriptional regulation, signal transduction, and cell cycle control. HSP90 is abundantly expressed by a variety of tumour types and has been recently targeted for cancer therapy. The objective of this study is to determine the role of Hsp90 in regulating the migration of Mesenchymal stem cells and to determine the mechanism. We hypothesised that inhibition of Hsp90 impairs the MSCs migration via PI3K/Akt and ERK1/2 signalling pathways. Methods The MSCs were cultured from femoral and tibia. The ability for MSCs cells to migrate is to be determined by the wound healing assay and transwell assay. The activity of matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) and matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) were estimated by gelatin –zymography. The mRNA levels of MMP-2, MMP-9, CXCR4 and VCAM-1 were detected by real-time PCR. The protein expression of MMP-2, MMP-9 and ERK1/2, phospho-ERK1/2, Akt and phospho-Akt were determined by Western-blot. Results Treatment with RhHsp90α significantly enhances MSCs migration from 9.83±2.48 to 48.65±2.81 cells. Treatment with sirhsp90α significantly decreased MSCs migration compared with treatment of hsp90α from 63.33±9.61 to 13.00±4.38 cells. Pretreat with 17-AAG, wortmannin, U0126, decreased MSCs migration to 13.33±1.29, 15.33±2.1, 16.5±3.3 cells, respectively. Treatment with RhHsp90α enhanced the MSCs secretion of MMP-2 and MMP-9, as well as significantly increasing the activity of MMP-9, and increasing the expression of CXCR4 and VCAM-1. PI3K/Akt and ERK signalling pathways mediate the promotion of MSCs migration by RhHsp90α. Conclusions Our data showed that Hsp90 promotes MSCs migration, elevate the expression of MMP-2, MMP-9, CXCR4 and VCAM-1. PI3K/Akt and ERK signalling pathways mediates these effects. Hsp90 is a candidate drug for enhancement of MSCs migration.

Objective Coronary artery disease (CAD) has emerged as the dominant etiologic factor in patients with heart failure. The Objective of this work was to identify new biomarkers and establish serum protein fingerprint models for early diagnosis and preoperative evaluation of luminal stenosis severity of CAD. Methods 48 eligible case subjects, having >50% luminal stenosis in at least one major coronary artery (defined as coronary artery disease (CAD) by angiography), 39 patients with luminal stenosis between 25% and 50% (defined as coronary atherosclerosis), and 52 eligible health individuals, were recruited randomly in this study. The above 139 samples were analysed by Surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS). Results The clinical and biochemical characteristics in three groups matched well. To detect CAD, thirty samples from patients with CAD (stenosis ≥50%) and thirty-two samples from the control group were analysed and designated as pattern 1. This pattern 1 model comprised ten potential biomarkers with m/z of 4276, 5326, 4481, 4320, 4205, 5814, 5551, 3689, 5344 and 6134 Da, respectively. The peaks at 5326, 5814, 5551, 5344, 6134 Da were expressed greatly in samples from patients with CAD, but weakly expressed in healthy individuals; and the other five peaks were expressed greatly in healthy individuals but weakly expressed in patients with CAD. Pattern 1 had a specificity of 78.1% and a sensitivity of 80.0%, as evaluated by leave-one-out crossvalidation. The remaining 38 serum samples, as a blind test set, were analysed on the second day to test pattern 1. The specificity and sensitivity of the blind test were 83.3 and 72.2%, respectively. To distinguish different severities of coronary artery stenosis, twenty-seven samples from patients with coronary atherosclerosis (between 25% and 50%) were analysed and compared with thirty CAD (stenosis ≥50%) patient samples. Pattern 2 was established similarly to distinguish coronary atherosclerosis (stenosis between 25% and 50%) from CAD. Pattern 2 comprised seven potential biomarkers with m/z of 3280, 3689, 5326, 4289, 6135, 3164 and 6439 Da, respectively. While the peaks with m/z 5326 and 6135 Da, were expressed more significantly in CAD samples than in coronary atherosclerosis (stenosis between 25% and 50%), the other five biomarkers appeared to be expressed in the opposite manner. This model had a specificity of 92.6% and a sensitivity of 93.3%, as evaluated by leave-one-out crossvalidation. Pattern 2 was tested blindly in another 30 serum samples on the second day. The specificity and sensitivity of the blind test were 75.0% and 77.8%, respectively. Conclusion Taken together, the SELDI-TOF-MS technique combined with bioinformatics approaches can not only facilitate the discovery of better biomarkers for CAD and its severity, but also provide a useful tool for molecular diagnosis.

Objectives Menstrual blood stem cells (MBSCs) have been reported to offer superior protective effects over bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) on cardiac performance lost after myocardial infarction. The exact protective mechanisms of MBSCs are still elusive. The present study aimed to investigate effects and relevant mechanisms of MBSCs on myocardial fibrosis that impairs heart function by inducing cardiac remodelling, decreasing myocardial compliance, and compromising normal electrical conduction. Methods Eighteen 10-week old male SD rats randomised to 3 groups (n=6 each), they were subjected to left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD) ligation and treated with intramyocardial injection of 2×10 6 MBSCs (MBSCs group) or equal volume of DMEM (MI group), or sham operation procedure (Sham group) for 7 days. Myocardial fibrosis was evaluated by picrosirius red staining followed by a quantitative analysis of collagen volume fraction (CVF), and changes of endothelial markers (CD31 and VE-cadherin), and markers of fibroblasts (FSP-1) and myofibroblasts (α-SMA) in heart tissue were detected by immunofluroence, immnobloting and real-time RT-PCR, respectively. Cells isolated from cardiac scar were quantitatively analysed with FACS in order to reveal the effect of MBSCs on cardiac fibroblasts produced through EndMT characterised by emerging of CD31+/α-SMA+ cells. Results In comparison with MI group, MBSCs decreased CVF by about 5% ((14.6±1.8) % vs (19.8±2.1)%, p Conclusions MBSCs can attenuate cardiac fibrosis emerged after myocardial infarction; inhibition of EndMT is a protective mechanism of MBSCs treatment that contributes to improvement of cardiac remodelling after myocardial infarction.

Objectives Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) have been employed as a therapeutic means, to cure multiple ischaemic injuries, including acute myocardial infarction (AMI). However, the anaemic condition inside the infarcted area provides an obstacle for survival. Hypoxia preconditioning can reduce apoptosis of BM-MSCs. This study explored the impact of a hypoxia related up-regulation of leptin in BM-MSC on anti-apoptosis. Methods Human bone marrow mononuclear cells (BMNCs) were isolated using Ficoll 400. BM-MSCs are separated by adhering to the flask bottom. BM-MSCs were characterised by detecting cell surface antigens using flow cytometry. BM-MSCs were tested from passage 3∼8 incubated under 0.5% O 2 , 37°C for 24 h, and prolonged with a 2-h re-oxygen. BM-MSCs cultured in normoxia condition were employed as the control group. Both cells were exposed to an oxygen, glucose and serum deprived (OGSD) condition for 36 h. Endogenous expression of leptin was tested using western blot and ELISA. Leptin neutralising antibody and signalling pathway inhibitors were used. Apoptosis was detected by nuclear staining using DAPI and TUNEL assay. The possible mechanism was assessed using flow cytometry of Annexin V/PI and PI/RNase. Associated signalling pathways were assayed by western blot. Fatal mice cardiac myocytes were isolated and seeded for co-culture in a apoptosis model, with either conditioned medium (CM) from BM-MSCs or BM-MSCs. Fatal mice cardiac myocytes viability was screened by TUNEL assay. Results Endogenous expression of leptin was up-regulated in hypoxic pre-conditioned BM-MSCs. Leptin improves anti-apoptosis ability, since it was abolished by leptin neutralising antibody. The anti-apoptosis ability was introduced by activating PI3K/Akt, Erk1/2, and JAK2/STAT3 pathways, respectively. Fatal mice cardiac myocytes co-cultured with CM but not BM-MSC, gained better survival rate vs control group. Conclusions Hypoxia related up-regulation of endogenous leptin improves the anti-apoptosis ability of BM-MSCs through multiple survival associated signalling pathways. This BM-MSC protects fatal mice cardiac myocytes from apoptosis via Bcl-2/Bax pathway.

A 61-year-old man was seen for sustained high serum B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) level prior to admission. During the past 3 months, the serum BNP of the patient were measured for four times with Abbott AxSYM BNP immunoassay method. The results were as high as 3234, > 4000.00 and 3798 pg/ml in one hospital (normal reference value (NRV)