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Understanding temperature variability especially elevation dependent warming (EDW) in high-elevation mountain regions is critical for assessing the impacts of climate change on water resources including glacier melt, degradation of soils, and active layer thickness. EDW means that temperature is warming faster with the increase of altitude. In this study, we used observed temperature data during 1979–2017 from 23 meteorological stations in the Qilian Mountains (QLM) to analyze temperature trend with Mann-Kendall (MK) test and Sen's slope approach. Results showed that the warming trends for the annual temperature followed the order of T_min > T_mean > T_max and with a shift both occurred in 1997. Spring and summer temperature have a higher increasing trend than that in autumn and winter. T_mean shifts occurred in 1996 for spring and summer, in 1997 for autumn and winter. T_max shifts occurred in 1997 for spring and 1996 for summer. T_min shifts occurred in 1997 for spring, summer and winter as well as in 1999 for autumn. Annual mean diurnal temperature range (DTR) shows a significant decreasing trend (−0.18°C/10a) from 1979 to 2017. Summer mean DTR shows a significant decreasing trend (−0.26°C/10a) from 1979 to 2017 with a shift occurred in 2010. After removing longitude and latitude factors, we can learn that the warming enhancement rate of average annual temperature is 0.0673°C/km/10a, indicating that the temperature warming trend is accelerating with the continuous increase of altitude. The increase rate of elevation temperature is 0.0371°C/km/10a in spring, 0.0457°C/km/10a in summer, 0.0707°C/km/10a in autumn, and 0.0606°C/km/10a in winter, which indicates that there is a clear EDW in the QLM. The main causes of warming in the Qilian Mountains are human activities, cloudiness, ice-snow feedback and El Nino phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, geological disasters have frequently occurred on basarlt highway slopes. Studying the stability of highway slopes in this type of area is of great significance for traffic safety. However, due to the high cost and low efficiency of traditional monitoring and experimental methods for slope engineering, these methods are not conducive to the quick and comprehensive identification of regional slope stability. Due to the high iron content of basalt, iron staining anomalies in the ore prospecting field are reinterpreted from an engineering perspective in this study. Taking the S3K section of a highway in Changbai County, China, as an example, Landsat8 remote sensing (RS) images from 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2021 are selected, and principal component analysis is used to extract iron staining anomalies in the region. Combined with field investigation and evidence collection, the corresponding rock mass fragmentation is distinguished via iron staining anomalies. Then, according to previous research results, eight indexes including annual rainfall, slope, topographic relief, surface roughness, vegetation index, leaf area index (LAI), root depth of vegetation, and human activity intensity are selected for investigation. The artificial neural network–cellular automata (ANN-CA) model is established, and the rock fragmentation classification data obtained based on iron staining anomalies are used to simulate the area. Next, the calculation formula of slope stability is determined based on the simulation results, and the stability of a high and steep slope in the area is calculated and analyzed. Finally, a comparison with an actual field investigation shows that the effect of the proposed method is good. The research findings reveal that it is feasible to judge the stability of a high and steep slope in a basalt area via the use of iron staining anomalies as an indicator. The findings are tantamount to expanding the application scope of RS in practical engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each part of a nonuniform distorted video (NUDV) has a unique distortion degree. When NUDV blocks are used as inputs, traditional machine-learning-based video quality assessment (VQA) methods frequently do not work effectively. Because these methods directly assign the label of the entire video to blocks, causing the unreliability of labels. We creatively propose video bag, a collection of video blocks, to deal with this unreliability. We develop a novel multiple instance learning (MIL) based model, VQA-MIL, which dynamically adjusts the weights by a block-wise attention module and enriches the features of video bags by a MI Pooling layer. Furthermore, we apply the mixup data-augmentation strategy to address the lack of human labels in common video datasets. We test our method on LIVE and CSIQ, and on a relatively large-scale dataset, named NUDV-KT, that we have collected. Results show that our method outperforms popular state-of-the-art no-reference VQA methods on NUDVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RIPK1 is a death-domain (DD) containing kinase involved in regulating apoptosis, necroptosis and inflammation. RIPK1 activation is known to be regulated by its DD-mediated interaction and ubiquitination, though underlying mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Here we show that K627 in human RIPK1-DD and its equivalent K612 in murine RIPK1-DD is a key ubiquitination site that regulates the overall ubiquitination pattern of RIPK1 and its DD-mediated interactions with other DD-containing proteins. K627R/K612R mutation inhibits the activation of RIPK1 and blocks both apoptosis and necroptosis mediated by TNFR1 signaling. However, Ripk1K612R/K612R mutation sensitizes cells to necroptosis and caspase-1 activation in response to TLRs signaling. Ripk1K612R/K612R mice are viable, but develop age-dependent reduction of RIPK1 expression, spontaneous intestinal inflammation and splenomegaly, which can be rescued by antibiotic treatment and partially by Ripk3 deficiency. Furthermore, we show that the interaction of RIPK1 with FADD contributes to suppressing the activation of RIPK3 mediated by TLRs signaling. Our study demonstrates the distinct roles of K612 ubiquitination in mRIPK1/K627 ubiquitination in hRIPK1 in regulating its pro-death kinase activity in response to TNFα and pro-survival activity in response to TLRs signaling. RIPK1 is a critical kinase which mediates necroptosis, apoptosis and inflammation. Regulation of RIPK1 by ubiquitination is being intensively investigated. Here, the authors made knock-in RIPK1-K612R mice and demonstrate that this mutation alters the RIPK1 ubiquitinylation pattern and inhibits its prodeath kinase activity in response to TNFα but sensitizes cell death to TLRs signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Axin proteins are key negative regulators of the canonical Wnt signal transduction pathway. Although Axin2 null mice are viable, we identified an unusual ENU-induced recessive allele of Axin2, canp, that causes midgestation lethality in homozygotes. We show that the Axin2canp mutation is a V26D substitution in an invariant N-terminal sequence motif and that the Axin2canp protein is more stable than wild type. As predicted for an increased level of a negative regulator, the Axin2canp mutation leads to decreased Wnt signaling in most tissues, and this can account for most of the morphological phenotypes of Axin2canp mutants. In contrast, there is a paradoxical increase in canonical Wnt activity in the late primitive streak of all Axin2canp mutant embryos that is associated with the formation of an ectopic tail in some mutants. Treatment of wild-type embryos with an inhibitor of Tankyrase that stabilizes Axin proteins also causes inhibition of Wnt signaling in anterior regions of the embryo and a gain of Wnt signaling in the primitive streak. The results indicate that although increased stability of Axin2 leads to a loss of canonical Wnt signaling in most tissues, stabilized Axin2 enhances Wnt pathway activity in a specific progenitor population in the late primitive streak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The differentiation rule and driving mechanisms of collapse disasters in various regions are unclear, and the results from existing methods of research are not sufficiently scientific. To reveal the nature of collapse disasters, this study utilized data from the 1:50,000 geological disaster investigation results database, 1:50,000 topographic data, and TM images. Topography, human activity intensity, rock mass structure, hydrological conditions, vegetation status, and meteorological conditions were used as indicators in the DEA model to analyze their validity and to explore the differentiation law and driving mechanisms of the highway slope along the YaLu river, a location of frequent geological disasters in Changbai County. In the analysis process, each index was quantitatively graded, i.e., the number of disaster points corresponding to each index was used as an input index, and the number of disaster points and the scale and stability of disaster points corresponding to the graded quantitative index were used as the output indexes. The results of the analysis of the study area indicate that there are significant differences in geological disasters due to different regional characteristics. We carried out three evaluations and performed spatial superposition analysis of the indicators corresponding to the effective values and the regional collapse points. The driving factors of collapse disasters can be divided into three categories, namely the impact of human activities, rainfall, and gravity stress. The GIS analysis and mapping found that the collapse points located to the south of the Grand Canyon of Changbai County were primarily affected by rainfall. Additionally, the areas affected by activity intensity are mostly concentrated in county towns with concentrated populations and road slopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]