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The effect of lanthanum on the characteristics of inclusions in the slab of non-oriented electrical steels was investigated through industrial trials and thermodynamic analysis. The number, size, and chemical composition of inclusions in the surface, one-quarter of thickness and the center of slabs with and without lanthanum addition were statistically analyzed using an automatic inclusion analysis system. In the lanthanum-free slab, inclusions were predominately MgO·Al2O3, MgO, and AlN as well as a small number of Al2O3–MgO–CaO and MgS. The number densities of oxide inclusions and AlN decreased from the surface to the center of the slab, which was ascribed to the difference in cooling intensity during the continuous casting. In the steel with lanthanum addition, inclusions were modified into LaAlO3and La2O2S and gradually transformed into dual-phase MgO–La2S3with an increasing distance from the slab surface due to the reaction between the lanthanum-containing inclusion and the steel matrix. The uneven distribution of oxide inclusions along the thickness of the slab was eliminated in the lanthanum-bearing slab because the dissolved oxygen was remarkably decreased by lanthanum. Lanthanum-bearing inclusions were more likely to agglomerate AlN by inducing the heterogeneous nucleation of AlN on their surface, while small-size MgO·Al2O3inclusions hardly showed a coarsening effect on the size of AlN.

Lithium–sulfur (Li–S) battery is an important candidate for next-generation energy storage. However, the reaction between polysulfide and lithium (Li) anode brings poor cycling stability, low Coulombic efficiency, and Li corrosion. Herein, we report a Li protection technology. Li metal was treated in crown ether containing electrolyte, and thus, treated Li was further used as the anode in Li–S cell. Due to the coordination between Li+and crown ether, a Li+-permeable film can be formed on Li, and the film is proved to be able to block the detrimental reaction between Li anode and polysulfide. By using the Li anode pretreated in 2 wt % B15C5-containing electrolyte, Li–S cell exhibits significantly improved cycling stability, such as∼900 mAh g–1after 100 cycles, and high Coulombic efficiency of>93%. In addition, such effect is also notable when high S loading condition is applied.

We have reported that hepatitis B X-interacting protein (HBXIP, also termed LAMTOR5) can act as an oncogenic transcriptional co-activator to modulate gene expression, promoting breast cancer development. Pyruvate kinase muscle isozyme M2 (PKM2), encoded by PKMgene, has emerged as a key oncoprotein in breast cancer. Yet, the regulatory mechanism of PKM2 is still unexplored. Here, we report that HBXIP can upregulate PKM2 to accelerate proliferation of estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer. Immunohistochemistry analysis using breast cancer tissue microarray uncovered a positive association between the expression of HBXIP and PKM2. We also discovered that PKM2 expression was positively related with HBXIP expression in clinical breast cancer patients by real-time PCR assay. Interestingly, in ER+ breast cancer cells, HBXIP was capable of upregulating PKM2 expression at mRNA and protein levels in a dose-dependent manner, as well as increasing the activity of PKMpromoter. Mechanistically, HBXIP could stimulate PKMpromoter through binding to the −779/−579 promoter region involving co-activation of E2F transcription factor 1 (E2F1). In function, cell viability, EdU, colony formation, and xenograft tumor growth assays showed that HBXIP contributed to accelerating cell proliferation through PKM2 in ER+ breast cancer. Collectively, we conclude that HBXIP induces PKM2 through transcription factor E2F1 to facilitate ER+ breast cancer cell proliferation. We provide new evidence for the mechanism of transcription regulation of PKM2 in promotion of breast cancer progression.

Aspirin can efficiently inhibit liver cancer growth, but the mechanism is poorly understood. In this study, we report that aspirin modulates glucose uptake through downregulating glucose transporter 1 (GLUT1), leading to the inhibition of hepatoma cell proliferation. Our data showed that aspirin significantly decreased the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and glucose consumption in hepatoma cells. Interestingly, we identified that GLUT1 and HIF1α could be decreased by aspirin. Mechanically, we demonstrated that the -1008/-780 region was the regulatory element of transcriptional factor NF-κB in GLUT1 promoter by luciferase report gene assays. PDTC, an inhibitor of NF-κB, could suppress the expression of GLUT1 in HepG2 and H7402 cells, followed by affecting the levels of ROS and glucose consumption. CoCl2-activated HIF1α expression could slightly rescue the GLUT1 expression inhibited by aspirin or PDTC, suggesting that aspirin depressed GLUT1 through targeting NF-κB or NF-κB/HIF1α signaling. Moreover, we found that GLUT1 was highly expressed in clinical HCC tissues relating to their paired adjacent normal tissues. Importantly, we observed that high level of GLUT1 was significantly correlated with the poor relapse-free survival of HCC patients by analysis of public data. Functionally, overexpression of GLUT1 blocked the PDTC-induced or aspirin-induced inhibition of glucose metabolism in HepG2 cells. Conversely, aspirin failed to work when GLUT1 was stably knocked down in the cells. Administration of aspirin could depress the growth of hepatoma cells through controlling GLUT1 in vitro and in vivo. Thus, our finding provides new insights into the mechanism by which aspirin depresses liver cancer.

The mitogen-activated protein kinases family of genes plays a crucial role in a wide range of inflammatory responses in the human body. The MAPK family of genes includes ERK, ERK5, JNK, P-38 mitogen-activated protein kinases. However, the correlation between MAPK family gene expression and pan-cancer prognosis, as well as the tumor microenvironment, has not been extensively studied. This study integrated multiple bioinformatics analysis methods to assess the expression and prognostic value of MAPK family genes, as well as their relationship with tumor microenvironment in patients with pan-cancer. The results showed that ERK, JNK, and P-38 MAPK expression were found to be significantly upregulated in rectum adenocarcinoma (READ), colon adenocarcinoma/rectum adenocarcinoma esophageal carcinoma (COADREAD), and kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC), and significantly downregulated in acute myeloid leukemia. And the results revealed good prognostic results for ERK, JNK, and P-38 MAPK in READ, COADREAD, and KIRC. We observed significant positive correlation between MAPK family gene expression and immune scores especially dendritic cells in READ, COADREAD, and KIRC. And we observed that the expression levels of MAPK family genes were significantly correlated with the expression of immune-related genes, such as CXCL1, CXCL2, CXCL8, CXCR1, CXCR2, CTLA-4, CD80, CD86, and CD28, suggesting their important role in regulating immune infiltrates and tumor progression. Therefore, our study suggested that MAPK family gene plays an important role in regulating immune infiltrates and tumor progression.

The Android operating system is the most popular handheld devices operating system, the cloud computing is taken for processing large scale data efficiently, the commonly used scheduling technology of cloud computing needs to assign the user jobs to the reasonable resources for execution, the scheduling performance is not good. The mass data scheduling model is proposed based on application service quality limitation, and the cloud computing data scheduling principle is analyzed on the Android platform, the Android platform user requirements and the resources of node vectors are described, independent computing ability of users are ensured. On the basis of service quality parameters computing, cloud mass data scheduling tasks are matched to the tasks on the Android platform, the different service quality requirements of user can be accurately judged, the resources is provided to the user according to the requirement, the scheduling overhead is reduced after the service quality matching, the efficient scheduling of mass data is obtained. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling model has better performance in time consumption and user satisfaction degree, the new model has lower CPU load ratio on the Android platform, it is a high efficient mass data scheduling model of cloud computing on the Android platform.

In this paper, the sapphire crystal furnace is taken as the object of research. Based on the finite element analysis software ANSYS Workbench, static and modal analysis of the key parts of the crystal furnace are completed, the static and dynamic characteristics of the parts are studied, and the natural frequencies and the mode shapes of the key parts are obtained. According to the analysis of each mode type of the vibration, the weaknesses of the structure are identified, which provides theory reference for the structure optimization design of crystal furnace.

When scroll compressors are operated, the heat and force loads acting on scroll plates result in the deformation of them. The temperature distribution and deformations of scroll plates were researched in this paper. The simulation results show that the maximum temperatures of scroll plates are at the center of scroll profiles. And there are the maximum axial deformation values at the center of scroll profiles. The maximum radial and axial fit clearances of compressor are 59.5μm and 38.8μm respectively.

Particle filter is a powerful tool for video tracking however its large amount of calculation restricts its application especially when the number of particles is large. This paper analysis the distribution of the particles, and the finite additive feature in the weighting calculation of the particles. Then this paper proposed a method which utilized the overlapped particles thus up to 81.22% time consumed is reduced in computation. Experimental results show its validity.

SiCp/Al composites were prepared by vacuum hot pressing and sintering method. Optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) is applied to study the diffusion-homogenization process of various elements of powder, and the effect of the diffusion-homogenization temperature and holding time on the SiCp/Al Composites’ microstructure in state of vacuum hot pressing. The results show that the Enrichment of Cu-phase is existed in the composites organization which is in the state of vacuum hot pressing; Al2CuMg fully dissolve into the Al matrix, Cu fully diffused and the diffusion of various elements becomes homogeneous with the temperature increased and time extend. The best processing parameters for the diffusion-homogenization is at 500℃for 3h.

We studied the optimization of 300mm CZ silicon crystal growth in 28 inch hot zone with axial magnetic field. The convex of melt-crystal interfaces toward to the crystal are observed in our simulations under different growth velocities (0.3mm/min, 0.5mm/min and 0.65mm/min). The convections in melt were illustrated under different growth rates and intensities of magnetic field. The growth rate of 0.5mm/min and axial magnetic fields intensity of 0.3T were recommended as an appropriate control condition.

The key of decision-making of manufacturing resource planning is material requirement planning (MRP). The traditional computing method of MRP is not efficient while the market is fluctuant and the customer demands are different. A new kind of optimized MRP model based on the real supply environment and the real demand is presented in this paper.The new optimized MRP model can improve the material demand plan effectively. Some aid information for decision-making such as price, ordering costs, holding costs, the working capital and restraint for safety stock are taken into account in the optimized MRP model. The discrete characteristics of the net requirements are considered in this new optimized MRP model, and this new model can make the decision-making of production process dynamically respond to the changes of real demand efficently.

Abstract: 1-inkdot alternating pushdown automaton is a slightly modified alternating pushdown automaton with the additional power of marking at most 1 tape-cell on the input (with an inkdot) once. This paper investigates the closure property of sublogarithmic space-bounded 1-inkdot alternating pushdown automata with only existential (universal) states, and shows, for example, that for any function L(n) such that L(n) ≥ log log nn and L(n) = o(log n), the class of sets accepted by weakly (strongly) L(n) space-bounded 1-inkdot two-way alternating pushdown automata with only existential (universal) states is not closed under concatenation with regular sets, length-preserving homomorphism, and Kleene closure.

BackgroundThe current prevalence of tuberculosis (TB) in the People's Republic of China (P. R. China) demonstrates geographical heterogeneities, which show that the TB prevalence in the remote areas of Western China is more serious than that in the coastal plain of Eastern China. Although a lot of ecological studies have been applied in the exploration on the regional difference of disease risks, there is still a paucity of ecological studies on TB prevalence in P. R. China.ObjectiveTo understand the underlying factors contributing to the regional inequity of TB burden in P. R. China by using an ecological approach and, thus, aiming to provide a basis to eliminate the TB spatial heterogeneity in the near future.DesignLatent ecological variables were identified by using exploratory factor analysis from data obtained from four sources, i.e. the databases of the National TB Control Programme (2001–2010) in P. R. China, the China Health Statistical Yearbook during 2002–2011, the China Statistical Yearbook during 2002–2011, and the provincial government websites in 2013. Partial least squares path modelling was chosen to construct the structural equation model to evaluate the relationship between TB prevalence and ecological variables. Furthermore, a geographically weighted regression model was used to explore the local spatial heterogeneity in the relationships.ResultsThe latent ecological variables in terms of ‘TB prevalence’, ‘TB investment’, ‘TB service’, ‘health investment’, ‘health level’, ‘economic level’, ‘air quality’, ‘climatic factor’ and ‘geographic factor’ were identified. With the exception of TB service and health levels, other ecological factors had explicit and significant impacts on TB prevalence to varying degrees. Additionally, each ecological factor had different impacts on TB prevalence in different regions significantly.ConclusionEcological factors that were found predictive of TB prevalence in P. R. China are essential to take into account in the formulation of locally comprehensive strategies and interventions aiming to tailor the TB control and prevention programme into local settings in each ecozone.