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Life cycle assessment (LCA) is commonly used to analyze the environmental profile of a material and product. For example, the selection of building insulation is crucial to ensure that energy and financial conservation goals can be met. Most of the current methods used in material selection are deterministic in nature, which ignores or neglects the effects caused by uncertainties present in various factors, including how the thermal insulation properties of insulation may change with time. In addition, during the use phase, uncertainty in operating conditions may also affect the performance of the selected material, affecting the overall environmental and economic performance. In practice, when material usage is in large quantities, uncertainty may have significant impacts. This article proposes a novel optimization model-based approach in selecting suitable building insulations using LCA results and economic consideration together with its uncertainties. This work presents an optimization-based approach to select building thermal insulation materials in the presence of data uncertainties. Firstly, we developed a deterministic model, incorporating life cycle assessment and costing to evaluate various environmental impacts and costs of the different materials. Next, by considering the different uncertainties in the data used for the environmental and cost assessments, a robust optimization approach is proposed to derive the second model. A novel solution algorithm is then developed to obtain model solutions efficiently. Computational studies based on a high-rise apartment in Shanghai were performed to test the applicability and performance of the proposed solution. The results demonstrate that the proposed robust optimization model is effective in mitigating the data uncertainties in the material selection optimization and outperforms the deterministic model significantly in terms of probability of achieving cost and environmental impact requirements under uncertainty. In addition, from our case studies, it was identified that parametric uncertainties and payback period exert great influence in decision-making. The work which had expanded the basic deterministic model to include multiple aspects rather than a single objective, and taking into account of parametric uncertainties to mitigate the risks of uncertainties in real applications allows building engineers to select appropriate building material(s) based on both environmental and economic consideration. Furthermore, this work also proposes a novel solution approach to address a wide range of intractable nonlinear optimization problems.

Background: Community acquired pneumonia (CAP) in children is one of the common clinical diseases and infectious diseases threatening the health of the population. CAP has complicated causes, closely related to region, season, age, and primary disease. It is the most common cause of children being hospitalized and the first cause of death for children under 5 years old. At present, the clinical treatment is mainly antibiotics, but abuse and non-standard combination of antibiotics have led to increasing antibiotic resistance. Anerning Granules have the functions of clearing away heat and removing wind, reducing phlegm and relieving cough, and improving cough symptoms and lung signs. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the efficacy and safety of Anerning Granules (AEN) in the treatment of community-acquired pneumonia in children, and to explore whether AEN can reduce the use of antibiotics and have a good effect on the clinical treatment of CAP.Methods and analysis: this study, a randomized, double-blind, single-dummy, parallel control of placebo, multicenter clinical study will be established in 7 hospitals in the same period. A total of 216 patients with community-acquired pneumonia will be randomly allocated at a ratio of 2:1 to two groups: experimental group, control group. The experimental group receives Anerning Granules plus ceftriaxone sodium; the control group receives AEN placebo plus ceftriaxone sodium. Each group will be treated for ten days, and a stage effect evaluation will be conducted on the sixth day. The primary outcome is the end of antibiotics in frequency (DDDs) and effective rate. Secondary outcome measures of effectiveness are the full fever time, sore throat onset time, and safety assessment. Outcomes will be assessed at baseline and after treatment. In addition, adverse events will be monitored throughout the trial process and must be traced to be resolved.Discussion: This study protocol will provide the research data regarding the efficacy and safety of AEN for the treatment of community-acquired pneumonia in children. The first aim is to determine whether Anerning Granules can reduce the use of antibiotics; the second aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of Anerning Granules combined with ceftriaxone sodium in the treatment of children with community-acquired pneumonia. The third aim is to observe the safety of clinical application of Anerning Granules. The results of this study will improve the rational use of drugs, especially the rational application of antibiotics. It will also enable safety evaluation from laboratory indices of adverse events, which will provide reliable evidence for clinical treatment.Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT03675178, registered on 16 September 2018.

In this paper, a stable Pd/NH2-SBA-15 catalyst was prepared by an ammonia evaporation method using amino-functionalized SBA-15 as support. Pd/NH2-SBA-15 showed excellent catalytic performance in the selective hydrogenation of phenol to produce cyclohexanone. Furthermore, this Pd/NH2-SBA-15 catalyst kept the conversion of phenol and selectivity of cyclohexanone both over 90 % even after 10 runs, much better than Pd/SBA-15 and the previously reported Pd-based catalysts, demonstrating the benefit of amine functionalization on the activity of supported Pd nanoparticles. TEM and XPS results indicate that small Pd particles were highly dispersed on the NH2-SBA-15 support and a stronger interaction occurred between the active Pd particles and the amine functionalized SBA-15 support, which could effectively inhibit the agglomeration of the active Pd particles during the reaction and then improve the stability of this catalyst.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the mechanisms of CCAAT/enhancer-binding protein β (C/EBPβ) in cardiac myofibroblast (CMF) differentiation and in a rat model of cardiac fibrosis induced by experimental autoimmune myocarditis (EAM).In vitro studies performed in primary neonatal rat CMF revealed that silencing of C/EBPβ expression (via lentiviral mediated shRNA strategies) was sufficient to reduce C/EBPβ mRNA and protein levels as well as to decrease the expressions of actin cytoskeletal proteins, cofilin, and filamin A (FLNA). TGFβ increased IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-a production in cardiac fibroblasts (CF), while C/EBPβ knockdown reduced the secretion of these inflammatory mediators. In vivo studies performed in rats exhibiting EAM revealed that lentiviral-mediated silencing of C/EBPβ was sufficient to reduce the expression of C/EBPβ as well as inflammation and fibrosis in the hearts of EAM rats, when compared to controls. Echocardiography further revealed that C/EBPβ knockdown was sufficient to significantly improve cardiac dimensions and function in EAM rats. Immunohistochemical results showed that C/EBPβ knockdown attenuated the expression of C/EBPβ protein as well as the expressions of collagen I, collagen III, MMP-2, MMP-9, and α-SMA in heart tissue sections from rats in the EAM + Lenti-shC/EBPβ group.Strategies targeted at inhibiting C/EBPβ expression can be potentially exploited to regulate cofilin and FLNA expression, thereby regulating actin polymerization/depolymerization, cytoskeleton rearrangement, and CF differentiation into CMF and the production of inflammatory cytokines. C/EBPβ knock down reduces the degree of inflammation-mediated myocardial fibrosis in a rat model of EAM.

This paper proposes a change detection algorithm in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on the salient image guidance and an accelerated genetic algorithm (S-aGA). The difference image is first generated by logarithm ratio operator based on the bi-temporal SAR images acquired in the same region. Then a saliency detection model is applied in the difference image to extract the salient regions containing the changed class pixels. The salient regions are further divided by fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm into three categories: changed class (set of pixels with high gray values), unchanged class (set of pixels with low gray values) and undetermined class (set of pixels with middle gray value, which are difficult to classify). Finally, the proposed accelerated GA is applied to explore the reduced search space formed by the undetermined-class pixels according to an objective function considering neighborhood information. In S-aGA, an efficient mutation operator is designed by using the neighborhood information of undetermined-class pixels as the heuristic information to determine the mutation probability of each undetermined-class pixel adaptively, which accelerates the convergence of the GA significantly. The experimental results on two data sets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed S-aGA. On the whole, S-aGA outperforms five other existing methods including the simple GA in terms of detection accuracy. In addition, S-aGA could obtain satisfying solution within limited generations, converging much faster than the simple GA.

Based on the phenomenon that the acetonitrile–water system can form phase separation in the presence of sugar, a sugaring-out assisted liquid/liquid extraction coupled with HPLC protocol was proposed for the determination of honokiol and magnolol in traditional Chinese herbal formula Huoxiang-Zhengqi oral liquid. Extraction conditions such as the type and concentration of sugaring-out agent, the volume of acetonitrile, pH value, temperature, and vortex time were investigated. Separation was performed on a Diamonsil C18 column (150 × 4.6 mm i.d., 5 µM) with acetonitrile and 0.05% formic acid (60:40, v/v) as mobile phase. The column effluents were monitored at 254 nm. The method showed good linearity for honokiol and magnolol in the range of 0.5–50.0 µg · mL−1, and the limits of detection were 13 and 24 ng · mL−1, respectively. RSD values for repeatability and reproducibility were less than 1.62% and 1.80%, respectively. The recoveries were in the range of 85.8–103.7%. Compared with the Chinese Pharmacopoei...