Search

The initiation of osteogenesis primarily occurs as mesenchymal stem cells undergo differentiation into osteoblasts. This differentiation process plays a crucial role in bone formation and homeostasis and is regulated by two intricate processes: cell signal transduction and transcriptional gene expression. Various essential cell signaling pathways, including Wnt, BMP, TGF-β, Hedgehog, PTH, FGF, Ephrin, Notch, Hippo, and Piezo1/2, play a critical role in facilitating osteoblast differentiation, bone formation, and bone homeostasis. Key transcriptional factors in this differentiation process include Runx2, Cbfβ, Runx1, Osterix, ATF4, SATB2, and TAZ/YAP. Furthermore, a diverse array of epigenetic factors also plays critical roles in osteoblast differentiation, bone formation, and homeostasis at the transcriptional level. This review provides an overview of the latest developments and current comprehension concerning the pathways of cell signaling, regulation of hormones, and transcriptional regulation of genes involved in the commitment and differentiation of osteoblast lineage, as well as in bone formation and maintenance of homeostasis. The paper also reviews epigenetic regulation of osteoblast differentiation via mechanisms, such as histone and DNA modifications. Additionally, we summarize the latest developments in osteoblast biology spurred by recent advancements in various modern technologies and bioinformatics. By synthesizing these insights into a comprehensive understanding of osteoblast differentiation, this review provides further clarification of the mechanisms underlying osteoblast lineage commitment, differentiation, and bone formation, and highlights potential new therapeutic applications for the treatment of bone diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural image matting focuses on accurately estimating the opacity of the foreground object in an arbitrary background. Recently, deep learning-based approaches made significant progress in the matting task benefit from their powerful learning ability for semantic features. However, artifacts, blurry structures, and miscalculated pixels still often appear in some difficult regions with background interference and complex details. To address the above issues, we propose a cross-layer contextual information propagation mechanism (CCIP) that can explicitly model the long-range correlations between global and unknown regions. Specifically, we first calculate region affinity at high-level features with rich structure and semantic information; then reconstruct the adjacent low-level features by propagating information from the global region to the unknown region under the guidance of the affinity matrix; finally, transfer the reconstructed information to the corresponding decoder stage to further improve the feature distinctiveness. In addition, we design a simple and effective supervision strategy in a deep-to-shallow manner to gradually optimize the edges and details of the foreground object. We conducted extensive experiments on the common dataset Composition-1k, the alphamatting.com benchmark, and some real-world images. Compared with previous methods, the proposed method achieves competitive performance on the Composition-1k dataset (30.3 on SAD, 6.8 on MSE, 13.3 on Grad, and 26.7 on Con) and alphamatting.com benchmark (17 on average SAD rank and 16.8 on average Grad rank), while simultaneously yielding high-quality matting results on real-world images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TGF-β1/Smad3-signaling pathway and gender differences were investigated in alcoholic liver fibrosis. Mice were divided into female normal, female model, male normal, and male model groups. Liver injury and fibrosis were assessed using histopathology and serology. Western blotting was performed to analyze the expression of relevant factors. HSC-T6 cells were divided into estradiol + saline, estradiol + ethanol, testosterone + saline, and testosterone + ethanol groups, and similar assessments were conducted in vitro. Compared with the female model group, the male model group exhibited significantly increased GPT, GOT, TNF-α, IL-6, and testosterone levels, fibrosis rate, and TGF-β1, Smad3, and PCNA expression, and significantly decreased estradiol levels and Caspase-3 expression. The apoptosis rate was higher in the estradiol + ethanol group than in the testosterone + ethanol group, although the testosterone + ethanol group exhibited significantly increased TNF-α, IL-6, Collagen-I, α-SMA, TGF-β1, Smad3, and PCNA expression, and significantly decreased Caspase-3 expression. Alcoholic liver fibrosis showed significant gender differences associated with the TGF-β1/Smad3-signaling pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preservatives are essential components in cosmetic products, but their safety issues have attracted widespread attention. There is an urgent need for safe and effective alternatives. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are part of the innate immune system and have potent antimicrobial properties. Using machine learning-assisted rational design, we obtained a novel antibacterial peptide, IK-16-1, with significant antibacterial activity and maintaining safety based on β-defensins. IK-16-1 has broad-spectrum antimicrobial properties against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Candida albicans, and has no haemolytic activity. The use of IK-16-1 holds promise in the cosmetics industry, since it can serve as a preservative synergist to reduce the amount of other preservatives in cosmetics. This study verified the feasibility of combining computational design with artificial intelligence prediction to design AMPs, achieving rapid screening and reducing development costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SrFe12–2xNixZrxO19 (x = 0–0.9) ferrites were successfully synthesized through hydrothermal method using metal chloride as start materials. It exhibits very good hexagonal crystals with doping content x < 0.3, but deviate from hexagonal flakes with increasing doping, accompanied by some debris. XRD confirm that the impurity phase decrease with the increase of doping amount even though the sample annealed at 950 °C. After annealing at 1150 °C, It exhibits the absence of secondary phases of SrCO3. It was found the obvious preferred orientation and becomes more significant with the increase of doping amount. In addition, the deconvoluted XPS of Sr 3d and Zr 3d indicated the complexed coordination with high doping amount x > 0.5. Magnetic properties further validated the ions migration and multielectron transitions. The highest saturation magnetization value observed is 55.66 emu/g for the x = 0.3 sample. With dopant increasing, the coercivity decreases steadily from 840 to 190 Oe. Thus, the materials with high Ms and low Hc values could be suitable used in longitudinal magnetic recording media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated heterogeneity in language skills of children with autism and their relationship with different autistic social subtypes. Data from 90 autistic and 30 typically developing children were analyzed. Results showed that autistic social subtypes varied in language skill problems (aloof > passive > active-but-odd). There was a negative association between aloof dimension scores and language performance but positive for the active-but-odd dimension and no association in the passive one. Moreover, aloof dimension score was the main contributor to language performance. A receiver operating characteristic analysis suggested language vocabulary as an additional component in differentiating autistic social subtypes. These findings demonstrate that variations in language skills in autistic children provide additional information for discriminating their social subtype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies on L2 motivation have established a significant association between ideal self, learning engagement, and academic achievement, but few have examined the internal relationships between these variables in the L2 writing domain. In addition, students' linguistic competence, a fundamental element of writing achievement, remains underrepresented in most research on L2 integrated writing (IW). Considering that learner motivation and engagement may vary across different tasks, this study invited 589 Chinese secondary school students to complete tasks of story continuation (as an IW task) and linguistic competence, as well as a questionnaire relating to ideal writing self and engagement. Structural equation modeling results showed that: (a) linguistic competence was a significant direct predictor not only of students' writing achievement but also of their ideal L2 writing selves; (b) despite the significant contribution of ideal L2 writing selves to the three kinds of learning engagement, only behavioral engagement was a distinctive and unique mediator that materialized students' inner psychological drive towards writing performance. The pedagogical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonylphenol (NP) is widely used in the chemical industry; it accumulates in organisms through environmental contamination and causes learning memory impairment. Nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) has been found to have a positive effect on the treatment of central nervous-related diseases. This study aimed to investigate the protective effect of NMN on NP-induced learning memory-related impairment in vitro and to further identify the underlying mechanisms. The results showed that NP induced oxidative stress and impaired the cholinergic system, 5-HT system in PC-12 cells. NMN alleviated NP-induced learning and memory impairment at the molecular level through alleviating oxidative stress and protective effects on the 5-HT system and cholinergic system. The 50 μM NP group significantly reduced the NAD+ content, and the relative expression of SIRT1, PGC-1α, Nrf2, MAOA, BDNF, and p-TrkB were significantly downregulated. Co-treatment of NMN with NP significantly reduced oxidative stress, improved the homeostasis of 5-HT and cholinergic system, enhanced the intracellular NAD+ content, and significantly upregulated the expression of SIRT1 pathway proteins. SIRT1 inhibitors reduced the expression of SIRT1 pathway-related proteins, which implied the impairment of learning and memory by NP and the protective effect of NMN might be achieved through the SIRT1-mediated PGC-1α/MAOA/BDNF signaling pathway. Overall, this study not only help us to understand the toxic mechanism of NP on learning memory impairment in vitro, but also have important reference significance to further explore the health care value of NMN and promote the development of related functional foods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimodal Electroencephalography techniques were used to determine whether the name of famous people undergoes self-relevant processing due to a shared surname with participants. During a three-stimulus oddball task, brain activity was recorded when participants suddenly saw their own names (self-name [SN]), a famous name with the same surname (FNS), or a famous name with a different surname (FND). While familiarity ratings were kept similar across the three kinds of name, behavioral analysis showed a higher rating on self-relevance for SN than for FNS, which, in turn, received a higher rating than FND. P2 amplitudes demonstrated a similar enhancement in response to SN and FNS compared to FND while P3 amplitudes and power of theta band (3.5–6 Hz) oscillation were more pronounced in response to SN than to FNS, which in turn elicited larger P3 and theta activities than FND. These findings, excluding the influence of familiarity, revealed that famous people sharing same surname with us could elicit a reliable self-relevant effect, despite lack of real social connection. This self-relevant processing may be embodied by the P3 amplitude and theta band neural oscillation in EEG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Prognoses for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) between categories T2 and T3 in the Eighth American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system were overlapped. We explored the value of skull base invasion (SBI) subclassification in prognostic stratification and use of induction chemotherapy (IC) to optimize T2/T3 categorization for NPC patients. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed 1752 NPC patients from two hospitals. Eight skull base bone structures were evaluated. Survival differences were compared between slight SBI (T3 patients with pterygoid process and/or base of the sphenoid bone invasion only) and severe SBI (T3 patients with other SBIs) with or without IC using random matched-pair analysis. We calculated the prognosis and Harrel concordance index (C-index) for the revised T category and compared IC outcomes for the revised tumor stages. Results: Compared to severe SBI, slight SBI showed better 5-year overall survival (OS) (81.5% vs. 92.3%, p = 0.001) and progression-free survival (PFS) (71.5% vs. 83.0%, p = 0.002). Additional IC therapy did not significantly improve OS and PFS in slight SBI. The proposed T category separated OS, PFS, and locoregional recurrence-free survival in T2 and T3 categories with statistical significance. An improved C-index for OS prediction was observed in the proposed T category with combined confounding factors, compared to the AJCC T staging system (0.725 vs. 0.713, p = 0.046). The survival benefits of IC were more obvious in the advanced stage. Conclusions: NPC patients with slight SBI were recommended to downstage to T2 category. The adjustment for T category enabled better prognostic stratification and guidance for IC use. Key Points: • For nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients in T3 category, slight skull base invasion was a significant positive predictor for OS and PFS. • NPC patients with slight SBI might not gain significant survival benefits from induction chemotherapy. • Downstaging slight SBI NPC patients to T2 category would make a more accurate risk stratification, improve the predicting performance in OS, and have a better guidance in the use of IC for patients in advanced stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Atherogenic Index of Plasma (AIP) has been proposed as a novel marker of plasma atherogenicity, but its longitudinal predictive value in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) remains unclear. We aimed to assess the associations of AIP and its longitudinal transition with T2DM among middle-aged and older Chinese. Methods: Data were extracted from four rounds of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011, 2013, 2015, and 2018). AIP was calculated as log10 (triglyceride/high-density lipoprotein cholesterol). Participants were classified into high and low AIP groups at baseline, and subsequently into four transition patterns during follow-up: maintained-high, maintained-low, high-to-low, and low-to-high AIP. Multivariable Cox frailty models were applied to explore the longitudinal transition patterns of AIP on the development of T2DM. Results: A total of 8760 subjects without T2DM were selected in 2011, of which 981 developed T2DM until 2018. When compared with people with maintained-low AIP patterns, those with transition patterns of maintained-high AIP, high-to-low AIP, and low-to-high AIP were at around 1.5 times higher risk of T2DM (HRadj = 1.69, 1.32, and 1.47, respectively, all P < 0.05). However, the risk of T2DM did not decrease in the high-to-low AIP group as compared to the maintained-high AIP group. Conclusions: Three longitudinal AIP transition patterns (maintained-high AIP, high-to-low AIP, and low-to-high AIP) were associated with the development of T2DM. Preventions are needed to combat T2DM at an early dyslipidemic stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an experimental study concerning the relevance of mechanical characteristics and bedding planes of sand. The study was carried out using a new method of specimen fabrication based on the capillary effect. A series of triaxial tests were performed to study the stress-strain behavior of sand under different bedding plane tilting angles. The results show that the peak deviatoric stress and the volumetric strain are significantly different under different bedding plane tilting angles due to the inherent anisotropy of sand, and the difference between their peak strengths can reach 30%. The specimen reached the failure stage more easily and the peak strength was lower, reaching the residual state earlier when the bedding plane tilting angle was close to 45°-ϕ/2. The equation proposed in this study can thus reasonably reflect the relationship between the bedding plane tilting angle and the peak strength. The inherent anisotropy due to the bedding plane of sand may have a significant influence on the deformation of building foundations; therefore, neglecting this factor may lead to unsafe designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cellulose nanofiber (CNF)/zinc borate (ZB) aerogels were successfully prepared via a facile and simple freeze-drying method. The thermal and combustion behavior of synthesized CNF aerogels and CNF/ZB aerogels were systematically investigated via various experimental techniques, including TGA-DTG analysis, micro-scale combustion calorimetry, cone calorimeter, etc. It was known that the CNF aerogels mainly undergo smoldering combustion. The flame retardancy of CNF aerogels was observed remarkably improved with the introduction of ZB, where the formed carbon layer at the sample surface can prevent heat penetration. It was known from micro-scale calorimeter (MCC) test that the burning of CNF/ZB could not last over 20 s, where peak heat release rate and total heat release decrease by 35.1% and 16.3%, respectively, after 2 wt% ZB was added. Meanwhile, the presence of ZB did not affect the porous structure of CNF, which can be proved by the slightly increased thermal conductivity from 0.0276 to 0.0298 W/m K. Flame retardancy of ZB shows its advantages for cellulose aerogels as the improved flame retardancy by ZB will not compromise its original thermal insulation function. The research outcomes of this study provide a new insight for the flame retardancy of cellulose aerogels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selenium sulfide (SeS2) cathodes have attracted much concerns as an optimized choice comparing to sulfur and selenium for lithium and sodium storage. However, it also suffers from poor cycling stability due to the dissolution of reaction intermediate products. In this study, N-doped Interconnected carbon aerogels was applied as an efficient SeS2 host by infiltrating selenium sulfide into its microporous structure (denoted as SeS2@NCAs), which could effectively accommodate the volume change of SeS2 during cycling and alleviate the dissolution of reaction intermediate products. Therefore, as for Na storage, the SeS2@NCAs cathode delivers a superior long-term cycling performance of 536 mA·h·g−1 at a current density of 0.5 A·g−1 after 1,000 cycles with only 0.04% capacity decline per cycle and a high rate performance (524 mA·h·g−1 at 2 A·g−1 and 745 mA·h·g−1 at 0.1 A·g−1 retained), indicating the remarkable cycling stability of SeS2@NCAs cathodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in diabetic patients. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) produced by oxidative stress play an important role in the development of DCM. DCM involves abnormal energy metabolism, thereby reducing energy production. Exercise has been reported to be effective in protecting the heart against ROS accumulation during the development of DCM. We hypothesize that the AMPK/PGC-1α axis may play a crucial role in exercise-induced bioenergetic metabolism and aerobic respiration on oxidative stress parameters in the development of diabetic cardiomyopathy. Using a streptozotocin/high-fat diet mouse to generate a diabetic model, our aim was to evaluate the effects of exercise on the cardiac function, mitochondrial oxidative capacity, mitochondrial function, and cardiac expression of PGC-1α. Mice fed a high-fat diet were given MO-siPGC-1α or treated with AMPK inhibitor. Mitochondrial structure and effects of switching between the Warburg effect and aerobic respiration were analysed. Exercise improved blood pressure and systolic dysfunction in diabetic mouse hearts. The beneficial effects of exercise were also observed in a mitochondrial function study, as reflected by an enhanced oxidative phosphorylation level, increased membrane potential, and decreased ROS level and oxygen consumption. On the other hand, depletion of PGC-1α attenuated the effects of exercise on the enhancement of mitochondrial function. In addition, PGC-1α may be responsible for reversing the Warburg effect to aerobic respiration, thus enhancing mitochondrial metabolism and energy homoeostasis. In this study, we demonstrate the protective effects of exercise on shifting energy metabolism from fatty acid oxidation to glucose oxidation in an established diabetic stage. These data suggest that exercise is effective at ameliorating diabetic cardiomyopathy by improving mitochondrial function and reducing metabolic disturbances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The platform chemicals 1,3-propanediol (1,3-PD) and 2,3-butanediol (2,3-BD) are important raw materials for polyesters and biofuels. However, the biosynthesis of the compounds relies on massive consumption of glucose or glycerol, leading to the uneconomical production in industrial scale. In this work, we developed a new method for co-production of 1,3-PD and 2,3-BD from waste lard to reduce the cost in carbon source supply. A waste lard utilizing Pseudomonas alcaligenes PA-3 and a 1,3-PD producing Klebsiella pneumoniae AA405 were co-cultivated by using waste lard as the sole carbon source. In a shake flask, 1.05 g/L 1,3-PD and 0.35 g/L 2,3-BD were produced from waste lard within 24 h. The addition of nitrogen source significantly increased the relative ratio of K. pneumoniae AA405 in the medium, which further favored to the higher titers of the two products. In bioreactor, the co-cultivation system produced 5.98 g/L 1,3-PD and 4.29 g/L 2,3-BD from 100 g/L waste lard within 72 h, and the conversion rate of 1,3-PD and 2,3-BD from waste lard were 62.95% and 0.75%, respectively. In all, this is the first work on 1,3-PD and 2,3-BD production from waste triglyceride, which will favor the utilization of low-cost carbon source in industrial production of chemicals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SDN network is a dynamic, controllable, cost-effective and adaptable system. It is suitable for communication networks with high bandwidth and high dynamic characteristics. Therefore, combining SDN ideas with the new generation of LEO satellite networks can achieve more flexible monitoring and management of the network, and can make the network expansion more convenient. Joint the Depth-First-Search (DFS) idea and Dijkstra algorithm for the huge numbers of LEO mobile satellite network based on SDN is proposed to improve the computational efficiency and the reliability of calculation result. Moreover, the communication performance of space-based network based on SDN and traditional space-based network is compared and analyzed. The simulation results show that the huge numbers of LEO mobile satellite network based on SDN breaks through the performance limitations of the traditional network architecture, and it can achieve better performance of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH) isomers and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) metabolites were analyzed in sediments of three different depths (0-10, 10-20 and 20-30 cm) collected from Kabul River, Pakistan, in February 2014. The occurrence levels, enantiomer fractions and potential ecological risk of these organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) were evaluated. The total concentrations of ∑HCHs and ∑DDTs in surface sediments ranged from 4.9-23.9 ng g and from 6.4-18.8 ng g (dry weight basis), respectively. The vertical contamination profile of DDTs was found in order of 20-30 cm >10-20 cm >0-10 cm, indicated that the residue levels of DDTs gradually decreased after it was banned. The ratios of β-HCH/HCHs ranged from 0.04 to 0.73 (69 % of samples below 0.5) suggesting the fresh input of HCHs, while isomeric ratios of α-HCH/γ-HCH (ranged from 0.02 to 7.94), with 76 % of samples less than 3, indicating the cocktail use of technical grade HCH and lindane in the study area. The ratio of (DDE + DDD)/DDTs (ranged from 0.42 to 0.90) indicated long-term biodegradation of parent DDT. The enantiomer of α-HCH was generally racemic or close to racemic for most of the samples, with enantiomeric fraction (EF) value <0.5 for some of the samples indicated the preferential biodegradation of (+)-α-HCH enantiomer, while for o, p′-DDT the EF values >0.5 indicated the depletion of (-)- o, p′-DDT enantiomer in most of the samples. According to sediment quality guidelines (SQGs), HCH contamination is the main concern for ecotoxicological risk in Kabul River. Graphical Abstract: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arsenic (As) has been proven to be highly toxic to humans, but limited attention has focused on exposure levels and potential risks to mother-neonate pairs of coastal populations. This study was conducted by examining the As concentration in colostrum and umbilical cord serum collected from 106 mother-neonate pairs living on Shengsi Island, facing the Yangtze River estuary and Hangzhou Bay in China. Average concentrations of total As in colostrum and cord serum were 18.51 ± 7.00 and 19.83 ± 10.50 μg L. One-way ANOVA analysis showed delivered ages and source of drinking water played significant roles in influencing the maternal exposure patterns. Correlation analysis indicated a significantly positive association between As concentrations in colostrum and cord serum. Multivariable linear regression models adjusted for other confounders clarified the dose-response relationship with a coefficient value of 0.23 and a 95 % confidence interval of (0.006, 0.492); p < 0.05. The calculated daily intake of total As for neonates through breastfeeding was in the range from 0.413 to 3.65 μg kg body weight, and colostrum As, especially the most toxic species, inorganic arsenic (iAs), would pose a risk to neonates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent documents contain drawing pages which describe inventions graphically. By convention and by rule, these drawings contain figures and parts that are annotated with numbered labels but not with text. As a result, readers must scan the document to find the description of a given part label. To make progress toward automatic creation of 'tool-tips' and hyperlinks from part labels to their associated descriptions, the USPTO hosted a monthlong online competition in which participants developed algorithms to detect figures and diagram part labels. The challenge drew 232 teams of two, of which 70 teams (30 %) submitted solutions. An unusual feature was that each patent was represented by a 300-dpi page scan along with an HTML file containing patent text, allowing integration of text processing and graphics recognition in participant algorithms. The design and performance of the top-5 systems are presented along with a system developed after the competition, illustrating that the winning teams produced near state-of-the-art results under strict time and computation constraints. The first place system used the provided HTML text, obtaining a harmonic mean of recall and precision (F-measure) of 88.57 % for figure region detection, 78.81 % for figure regions with correctly recognized figure titles, and 70.98 % for part label detection and recognition. Data and source code for the top-5 systems are available through the online UCI Machine Learning Repository to support follow-on work by others in the document recognition community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lake surface water temperature (LSWT) is of vital importance for hydrological and meteorological studies. The LSWT ground measurements in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) were quite scarce because of its harsh environment. Thermal infrared remote sensing is a reliable way to calculate historical LSWT. In this study, we present the first and longest 35-year (1981–2015) daytime lake-averaged LSWT data of 97 large lakes (>80 km2 each) in the TP using the 4-km Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Global Area Coverage (GAC) data. The LSWT dataset, taking advantage of observations from NOAA's afternoon satellites, includes three time scales, i.e., daily, 8-day-averaged, and monthly-averaged. The AVHRR-derived LSWT has a similar accuracy (RMSE = 1.7 °C) to that from other data products such as MODIS (RMSE = 1.7 °C) and ARC-Lake (RMSE = 2.0 °C). An inter-comparison of different sensors indicates that for studies such as those considering long-term climate change, the relative bias of different AVHRR sensors cannot be ignored. The proposed dataset should be, to some extent, a valuable asset for better understanding the hydrologic/climatic property and its changes over the TP. Design Type(s) data collection and processing objective • statistical analysis and modeling objective • time series design Measurement Type(s) temperature of water Technology Type(s) satellite imaging Factor Type(s) geographic location • size • temporal_interval Sample Characteristic(s) Tibetan Plateau • lake Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this work is to study the similarity behavior of high-shear fluid-particle interaction with numerical simulations. Specifically, we demonstrate the process in vessels with four-blade impellers. Through the study, we provide guidance for practices scaling from lab tests to industrial level, which is a major interest in industry when computer capacity is limited and large scale tests are prohibitive. The numerical simulation is based on a coupling technique of SPH and DEM. Scale-up tests for particles as well as mixers are presented to illustrate the similarity behavior under certain scaling conditions. We examine the effects when multiple types of particles are included in the fluid as well. Through the tests, similarity behavior is observed in several aspects, such as particle distribution in number, velocity, energy, mass and volume. The results indicate that using less particles to reproduce the original system is a feasible practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the adverse impact of DDTs on ecosystems and humans, a full fate assessment deems a comprehensive study on their occurrence in soils over a large region. Through a sampling campaign across China, we measured the concentrations, enantiomeric fractions (EFs), compound-specific carbon isotope composition of DDT and its metabolites, and the microbial community in related arable soils. The geographically total DDT concentrations are higher in eastern than western China. The EFs and δ13C of o,p'-DDT in soils from western China show smaller deviations from those of racemic/standard compound, indicating the DDT residues there mainly result from atmospheric transport. However, the sources of DDT in eastern China are mainly from historic application of technical DDTs and dicofol. The inverse dependence of o,p'-DDT and p,p'-DDE on temperature evidences the transformation of parent DDT to its metabolites. Initial usage, abiotic parameters and microbial communities are found to be the main factors influencing the migration and transformation of DDT isomers and their metabolites in soils. In addition, a prediction equation of DDT concentrations in soils based on stepwise multiple regression analysis is developed. Results from this study offer insights into the migration and transformation pathways of DDTs in Chinese arable soils, which will allow data-based risk assessment on their use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]