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Lesion mimic mutants resembling the hypersensitive response without pathogen attack are an ideal material to understand programmed cell death, the defence response, and the cross‐talk between defence response and development in plants. In this study, mic, a lesion mimic mutant from cultivar Yunyin treated with ethyl methanesulphonate (EMS), was screened. By map‐based cloning, a short‐chain alcohol dehydrogenase/reductase with an atypical active site HxxxK was isolated and designated as SDR7‐6. It functions as a homomultimer in rice and is localized at the endoplasmic reticulum. The lesion mimic phenotype of the mutant is light‐dependent. The mutant displayed an increased resistance response to bacterial blight, but reduced resistance to rice blast disease. The mutant and knockout lines showed increased reactive oxygen species, jasmonic acid content, antioxidant enzyme activity, and expression of pathogenicity‐related genes, while chlorophyll content was significantly reduced. The knockout lines showed significant reduction in grain size, seed setting rate, 1000‐grain weight, grain weight per plant, panicle length, and plant height. SDR7‐6 is a new lesion mimic gene that encodes a short‐chain alcohol dehydrogenase with atypical catalytic site. Disruption of SDR7‐6 led to cell death and had adverse effects on multiple agricultural characters. SDR7‐6 may act at the interface of the two defence pathways of bacterial blight and rice blast disease in rice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a rapid parametric design system of the rotary kinetic sculpture. The multilevel skeletons enable users to model propeller-like units rapidly, arrange and deform them collaboratively, and generate transmission mechanisms automatically without any specialized machine knowledge. Experimental results show that our system can help users get diverse rotary kinetic sculptures effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A shape-changing robotic mannequin is a mechatronic robot used to simulate different human body shapes. With such a robot, the dressing effects of a ready-made garment on different human bodies can be simulated and evaluated, which is very useful for garment design and garment online sales. Currently, the robotic mannequin surfaces are mostly designed into patches. However, the methodological lack of design result evaluation and shape deformation control hinders the performance of the robotic mannequins. In this paper, the robotic mannequin is computationally designed and optimized based on a large number of three-dimensional scanned human bodies, which endows the robot with a high simulation capability. The robot is designed into three layers comprising a skin layer composed of patches, a muscle layer consisting of shape-controllable elastic bars, and a skeleton layer made of linear actuators. The skeleton layer controls the overall shape change of the robot, and the muscle layer attached on the skeleton adjusts the bending of the skin layer, which makes the robot deformation predictable and controllable. A prototype of the robotic mannequin has been made on which the simulations of various human bodies have been experimented, and examples of predicting the dressing effects of ready-made garments on different human bodies via augmented virtual try-ons have been experimented as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Rice cultivars from japonica and indica lineage possess differential resistance against blast fungus as a result of genetic divergence. Whether different rice cultivars also show distinct metabolomic changes in response to P. oryzae, and their role in host resistance, are poorly understood. Here, we examine the responses of six different rice cultivars from japonica and indica lineage challenged with P. oryzae. Both susceptible and resistant rice cultivars expressed several metabolites exclusively during P. oryzae infection, including the saponin Bayogenin 3‐O‐cellobioside. Bayogenin 3‐O‐cellobioside level in infected rice directly correlated with their resistant attributes. These findings reveal, for the first time to our knowledge that besides oat, other grass plants including rice produces protective saponins. Our study provides insight into the role of pathogen‐mediated metabolomics reprogramming in host immunity. The correlation between Bayogenin 3‐O‐Cellobioside levels and blast resistance suggests that engineering saponin expression in cereal crops represents attractive and sustainable disease management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to eliminate the deficiencies of the solvent-based cold patch asphalt mixture, this paper presented the cold patch asphalt mixture modified with waterborne epoxy resin (WER). Firstly, the new evaluation method were put forward based on its technical features and application requirements. Then the influence of different compositions and contents of WER on the cold patch asphalt liquid was evaluated by laboratory tests. Further, the pavement performance and workability of WER modified cold patch asphalt mixture were systematically evaluated. The results show that (i) WER can significantly improve strength, moisture susceptibility, high temperature performance and cohesion. However, the inappropriate addition may lead to poor storability and low temperature performance. So the optimal WER content is recommended 1.2–1.8 wt%, and its component ratio of epoxy resin to curing agent is 3:1. (ii) Different WER components produce different performances of mixture. The EP-20 + HGC brings about higher curing strength, excellent high temperature performance and storability. In comparison, the mixture modified with EP-20 + HGA owns preferable initial strength and moisture susceptibility. In the practical project, it is necessary to choose suitable WER considering the performance deficiency of cold patch materials and maintenance needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthesis from existing examples is a promising way to generate new patterns. However, pattern synthesis is challenging because it is difficult to understand and generate complex structures in patterns. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the layout tree descriptor (LTD) to understand and synthesize patterns from existing ones. The LTD is a binary tree that parametrically describes all primitives, layouts, their dependencies and hierarchies in a pattern. The LTD can be constructed automatically with proposed instance grouping, layout recognition, hyper-primitive matching and tree merging algorithms to realize pattern understanding. To meet specialists' requirements for detailed modification and recombination of patterns, we designed LTD operations including add, remove, replace and grafting operations to allow users to get new patterns by simply adjusting the LTDs. For stylized synthesis, we gave the computing method of LTD similarity. Therefore, the styles of results and input can be compared and users can control generated serialized results by setting the input pattern weights. To meet user's implicit preferences and provide novelty in creative design, we propose an evolutionary approach to creative synthesis. The system generates new patterns continuously based on LTD grafting, meanwhile user selection of preferred patterns will guide the direction of evolution. Experiments using the developed prototype system show that our approach can synthesize novel and complex patterns effectively, meeting different requirements in practice and providing plenty of digital textures for products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Potential applications of chelate-based ionic liquids depend on the structural and electronic properties of this class of liquid materials. Due to the large size of chelated metal anions, the high number of potential interaction sites could lead to complex intermolecular interactions, but metal-based anions have many degrees of freedom, and they have great potential in the structural modification of the physical properties of ionic liquids. To explore the influence of varying the metal center of anions and the length of carbon chains of cationic species, four single crystal structures of chelate-based ionic liquids, ([C10mim][M(F6-acac)3], M = Cu, Co, and Ni) and [C6mim][Cu(F6-acac)3] were obtained. Taking these as the initial configurations, theoretical efforts were made to understand the structural and electronic properties. The hydrogen bonding energies of the primary hydrogen bonding interaction, in the range of 17.7–20.9 kJ mol−1, follow the order of [C10mim][Ni(F6-acac)3] < [C10mim][Co(F6-acac)3] <[C10mim][Cu(F6-acac)3], and [Cnmim][Cu(F6-acac)3] (n ≠ 10) < [C10mim][Cu(F6-acac)3], while the experimental viscosities exhibit an opposite trend. Furthermore, by NBO analysis, the more negative charge on the oxygen atoms of anions shows the stronger hydrogen bonding of imidazolium with C2H. The reliability of the theoretical method was supported by the comparison between the simulated and experimental infrared and UV/vis spectra. This work is useful in increasing the understanding of the structure–property relationship of chelate-based ionic liquids and furthering the rational design of novel ionic liquids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant variability exists in the trajectories of late-life cognitive decline; however, their associated lifestyle factors remain less studied. We examined these trajectories among elderly participants from the recent five waves (at three-year intervals) of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Study (CLHLS) from 2002 to 2014. Participants from this cohort were included if they completed at least four waves of measurements. Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores, demographics, medical diagnoses (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease), and lifestyle-related information (e.g., smoking, drinking alcohol, and exercise) were collected from participants (N = 2,584; mean age at baseline = 73.3) at least four times across 12 years. MMSE scores were entered into a latent class mixed model analysis. Subsequently, demographic, medical, and lifestyle predictors were entered into multinomial logistic regression models to predict the trajectories. One of the four emerged classes (no decline) was characterized by an absence of cognitive decline; the other three exhibited various degrees of cognitive decline. The inclusion of lifestyle factors significantly improved the prediction of the different trajectories, above and beyond demographics and medical variables; the 'no decline' class was significantly more likely to report exercising regularly. Changes in cognitive functioning across the late-life period are characterized by multiple trajectories. Cognitive decline is not inevitable across the late-life period; the absence of such cognitive decline is partly explained by certain lifestyle factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of industrial invisible gas plays a vital role in preventing environmental pollution and fire accidents. Optical gas imaging (OGI) with infrared thermography is widely used in the field of gas leak monitoring and treatment by visualizing gases to quickly and accurately detect and locate the gas leak sources. However, this method still relies on manual visual inspection. Existing automatic visual gas detection methods suffer from insufficient gas feature extraction and high computational cost due to the indistinct gas features in thermal images. To address these problems, we propose a new lightweight network specialized for thermal gas feature extraction, namely GasViT, sufficiently extracting gas features at very low computational cost by local–global feature fusion. Specifically, two new feature extraction modules M ulti- s cale F usion F eature A ttention (MsFFA) and M ulti- h ead L inear S elf- a ttention (MhLSa) are proposed for GasViT. MsFFA enhances the gas local feature extraction ability by constructing multi-scale channel and spatial feature fusion maps, enabling the network to focus on more valid local information. MhLSa complements the gas global features with very low computational cost by efficiently encoding the global information of the image in terms of the innovative linear self-attention mechanism. Our experimental results on the self-made Industrial Invisible Gas (IIG) Dataset show GasViT achieves 82.7% mAP 50 , significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art lightweight networks. Moreover, GasViT achieves 33 FPS real-time detection with a running memory footprint of only 47.2 MB on edge computing devices, making it extremely suitable for portable and embedded detection devices than existing methods to cover gas leakage detection in complex and hazardous industrial scenarios. • The first thermal image dataset of industrial gas to our knowledge is available. • Visual gas detection achieves high accuracy by local-global feature extraction and fusion. • Our model realizes real-time automatic visual gas detection on edge computing devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel colorization technique for hand-drawn grayscale images, such as cartoons and sketches, based on reference natural images and simple user interactions, which can generate colorful and natural results. Firstly, to solve the problem of inputting complex color scribbles by simple interactions, we introduce a region thinning method for generating color scribbles and then map these scribbles to the corresponding regions in the hand-drawn image via region mapping method based on the scanning line. Secondly, to maintain the color fidelity, a luminance downward modification method is proposed. Next, a optimization method for colorization is proposed, where the feature vectors are adjusted by a smooth feature map, thus maintaining smooth color transitions in the smooth areas and controlling the color overflow in the texture areas. Thirdly, to fuse the colorized image with a highlight effect, a luminance upward modification method by weights, which are determined by color distance and boundary distance, is proposed. The experimental results of the proposed algorithm show the smooth color transition in the intensity-continuity areas, color overflow controlling in the texture-continuity areas and natural effect of light and shadow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL) is associated with poor prognosis, particularly in patients with relapsed/refractory (R/R) disease. Pralatrexate, a folate analogue inhibitor, was the first drug approved to treat R/R PTCL.Objective: As the distribution of PTCL subtypes differs between populations and few patients in the pivotal trial of pralatrexate were Asian, this study investigated the safety and efficacy of pralatrexate as monotherapy in Chinese patients with R/R PTCL.Patients and Methods: In this single-arm, open-label, multicenter study, 71 patients with R/R PTCL (median [range] 2 [1-14] prior systemic treatments) were recruited from 15 centers in China and received pralatrexate IV 30 mg/m2/week for 6 weeks in 7-week cycles (with vitamin B12/folate). The primary endpoint was objective response rate (ORR) per central review (null hypothesis: ORR < 15%).Results: The study's primary objective was met: ORR (95% CI) was 52% (40-64%) (p < 0.001) and responses were observed across pre-specified patient subgroups. Median (95% CI) duration of response was 8.7 (3.3-14.1) months and first response was observed in Cycle 1 for most (84%) patients. Median (95% CI) progression-free survival and overall survival was 4.8 (3.1-8.1) months and 18.0 (10.4-NA) months, respectively. The most common treatment-emergent adverse events were stomatitis (68% [Grade 3/4: 20%]), anemia (49% [Grade 3/4: 24%]) and alanine aminotransferase increase (41% [Grade 3/4: 4%]).Conclusions: These results demonstrate that pralatrexate may represent a promising treatment option for Chinese patients with R/R PTCL. The ORR of 52% compared favorably with prior studies of pralatrexate in other populations and there were no unanticipated side effects.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03349333. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]