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Taking a dual-motor planetary two-gear transmission drive system as the research object, this paper analyzes the gear shift process as well as the factors influencing gear shift process and major performance indexes, with emphasis on the effects of torque unloading and loading processes on vehicle impact during gear shift stage. In view of the collaborative operation of main motor, auxiliary motor and gear shift actuator of transmission, this paper proposed a control method and strategy process featuring multiple collaborative gear-shift torque. Then, a simulation platform was built for the vehicle and power system to simulate torque unloading and torque recovery under specified acceleration conditions. Compared with non-collaborative torque controls, the vehicle impact under the multiple collaborative control was reduced by 60% in torque unloading stage and decreased by 80% in torque recovery stage. Furthermore, prototype transmission control units and powertrain systems were developed, and installed on the entire vehicle for validation test. The test results further demonstrated that multiple collaborative gear-shift torque control could effectively reduce the vehicle impact during unloading and loading processes, with gear shift time shortened and gear shift comfort improved.

A rare case of fungus Arthroderma multifidum infection occurred in a 63-year-old man. The patient had some risk factors, including occupational exposure, immunosuppressive state, and structural basis following pulmonary tuberculosis and pneumothorax surgery. The pathogen was repeatedly isolated from bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and identified by gene sequencing. It is the first report of human infection caused by A. multifidum. Whole genome sequencing and analysis of its genomic characterization are completed. The findings provide us with a key clinical insight that the combination of immune suppression and environmental exposure could create an ideal condition for zoonotic fungal infections.

Abstract Background Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases that affects more than 300 million people worldwide. Though most asthma can be well controlled, individuals with severe asthma experience recurrent exacerbations and impose a substantial economic burden on healthcare system. Neutrophil inflammation often occurs in patients with severe asthma who have poor response to glucocorticoids, increasing the difficulty of clinical treatment. Methods We established several neutrophil-dominated allergic asthma mouse models, and analyzed the airway hyperresponsiveness, airway inflammation and lung pathological changes. Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) formation was analyzed using confocal microscopy and western blot. Results We found that the ovalbumin (OVA)/complete Freund’s adjuvant (CFA)/low-dose lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced mouse model best recapitulated the complex alterations in the airways of human severe asthmatic patients. We also observed OVA/CFA/LPS-exposed mice produced large quantities of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) in lung tissue and bone marrow neutrophils. Furthermore, we found that reducing the production of NETs or increasing the degradation of NETs can reduce airway inflammation and airway hyperresponsiveness. Conclusion Our findings identify a novel mouse model of neutrophilic asthma. We have also identified NETs play a significant role in neutrophilic asthma models and contribute to neutrophilic asthma pathogenesis. NETs may serve as a promising therapeutic target for neutrophilic asthma.

Mucormycosis is a rare and invasive fungal infection with high mortality. Cases of invasive pulmonary mucormycosis that involve allergic reactions such as allergic bronchopulmonary mycosis are rarely reported. Herein, we describe a case of invasive pulmonary mucormycosis overlapping with allergic diseases in a patient who presented with eosinophilia and high total plasma immunoglobulin E (IgE). The patient was successfully treated with systemic corticosteroids (initial dose of prednisolone approximately 0.5 mg/kg per day, total duration less than 3 months) combined with posaconazole antifungal therapy. The treatment resulted in recovery of peripheral-blood eosinophil count and total plasma IgE, and significant reduction in lung lesions. A subsequent lobectomy was performed. The findings in this case indicate that systemic corticosteroid therapy may contribute to the treatment of pulmonary mucormycosis combined with allergic factors.

With the increasing demand for battery electric buses, the dual-motor coupling powertrain (DMCP) shows great advantages, but it makes the energy optimization problem more complex. To solve the hybrid system optimization problem, a stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) method is proposed to exploit the potential performance of DMCP, where the most critical issue is to improve the prediction accuracy and handle the uncertainties. After analyzing the typical velocity profiles, statistical properties are used to develop a novel Signed Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) method that can enhance the accuracy of velocity prediction by more than 50%, compared to conventional Markov Chain methods. Next, considering the uncertainties present in various driving scenarios, the development of driving cycle recognition model based on fuzzy logic control (FLC) is introduced; this method permits to identify the current category of driving cycle rapidly. Then, dynamic programming (DP) is adopted to solve the rolling optimization problems in each finite horizon online, including necessary constraints of dynamic response. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed energy management strategy can address various daily driving cycles well, and can improve the energy performance by 6% under a generalized combination of driving conditions compared to preliminary rule-based control.

Cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) have been reported to play major roles in tumorigenesis, tumor relapse, and metastasis after therapy against colorectal carcinoma (CRC). Therefore, identification of colorectal CSC regulators could provide promising targets for CRC. Ligand-of-Numb protein X1 (LNX1) is one E3 ubiquitin ligase which mediates the ubiquitination and degradation of Numb. Although several studies indicate LNX1 could be a potential suppressor of cancer diseases, the functions of LNX1 in mediating cancer stemness remain poorly understood. In this study, LNX1 was identified as a negative regulator of cancer stemness in CRC, which was downregulated in colonospheres or side population (SP) cells. Furthermore, the coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor (CXADR) was found to be one critical downstream mediator of cancer stemness regulated by LNX1. Interestingly, the anti-breast cancer drug tamoxifen was found to be an agonist of LNX1 and suppress cancer stemness in CRC. In sum, this study provided the evidences that LNX1 signaling plays important roles in regulating the stemness of colon cancer cells.

The aim of the reported study was to optimize the extraction process for ganoderma triterpenes and to investigate the in vivo inhibitory effect of ganoderma triterpenes on the genesis and progression of oral cancer. Single-factor and orthogonal methods were used to investigate the effects of extraction solvent, solvent amount, extraction time, extraction temperature, and number of extractions, on the extraction rate for ganoderma triterpenes. A golden hamster model with cheek pouch dynamic canceration was established to receive oral treatment of ganoderma triterpenes water solution. Animals were continuously monitored, oral tissue samples were collected for histopathologic examination, and changes in the expression of VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) and Caspase-3 were detected by immunohistochemical methods. Optimization of the experimental conditions allowed the identification of the optimal extraction conditions: 90% ethanol as the extraction solvent, a solvent amount by the liquid-material ratio of 35 mL/g, extraction time of 2 h and extraction temperature of 80 °C. Under these conditions, the average extraction rate of ganoderma triterpenes was 1.09%. Tests in golden hamsters showed that compared with the model group during the same period, animals in the treatment group had better conditions, constantly larger number of normal cases shown by histopathologic results (P < 0.01), and consistently smaller numbers of cases with paraplasm (P < 0.05). Immunohistochemical results showed that compared with the model group, the treatment group had significantly lower (P < 0.05) rates of positive VEGF expression in the normal state, simple epithelial hyperplasia, epithelial dysplasia or squamous cell carcinoma disease stages. Caspase-3 expression showed a tendency toward a gradual increase with the worsening of disease severity in each group. Compared with the model group, the treatment group had significantly lower (P < 0.05) rates of positive Caspase-3 in the normal state, simple epithelial hyperplasia, epithelial dysplasia or squamous cell carcinoma disease grades. Using the optimized extraction process, ganoderma triterpenes could be extracted with high efficiency, and the results of animal tests showed inhibitory effects of ganoderma triterpenes on oral mucosa cancer.

Conventional concept suggests that immediate surgery is the optimal choice for elderly hip fracture patients; however, few studies focus on the adverse effect of immediate surgery. This study aims to examine the adverse effect of immediate surgery, as well as to explore the meaning of mtDNA release after trauma. In the experiment, elderly rats, respectively, received hip fracture operations or hip fracture plus intramedullary nail surgery. After fracture operations, the serum mtDNA levels as well as the related indicators of systemic inflammatory response and lung injury significantly increased in the rats. After immediate surgery, the above variables were further increased. The serum mtDNA levels were significantly related with the serum cytokine (TNF-α and IL-10) levels and pulmonary histological score. In order to identify the meaning of mtDNA release following hip fracture, the elderly rats received injections with mtDNA. After treatment, the related indicators of systemic inflammatory response and lung injury significantly increased in the rats. These results demonstrated that the immediate surgery increased the mtDNA release that could aggravate systemic inflammatory response and lung injury induced by elderly hip fracture; serum mtDNA might serve as a potential biomarker of systemic inflammatory response and lung injury following elderly hip fracture.

Scene graphs are structured representations that can clearly convey objects and the relationships between them, but are often heavily biased due to the highly skewed, long-tailed relational labeling in the dataset. Indeed, the visual world itself and its descriptions are biased. Therefore, Unbiased Scene Graph Generation (USGG) prefers to train models to eliminate long-tail effects as much as possible, rather than altering the dataset directly. To this end, we propose Geometric and Semantic Improvement (GSI) for USGG to mitigate this issue. First, to fully exploit the feature information in the images, geometric dimension and semantic dimension enhancement modules are designed. The geometric module is designed from the perspective that the position information between neighboring object pairs will affect each other, which can improve the recall rate of the overall relationship in the dataset. The semantic module further processes the embedded word vector, which can enhance the acquisition of semantic information. Then, to improve the recall rate of the tail data, the Class Balanced Seesaw Loss (CBSLoss) is designed for the tail data. The recall rate of the prediction is improved by penalizing the body or tail relations that are judged incorrectly in the dataset. The experimental findings demonstrate that the GSI method performs better than mainstream models in terms of the mean Recall@K (mR@K) metric in three tasks. The long-tailed imbalance in the Visual Genome 150 (VG150) dataset is addressed better using the GSI method than by most of the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies political connections from the view of the social networks. We build social networks annually from 2009 to 2017, where firm leaders serve or served in the same government institutions are linked together. Empirically, the social network each year shares a similar structure and shows a small-world effect. Furthermore, we apply four network topologies, namely, degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and the clustering coefficient, to measure the strength of political connections and utilize these new proxies to predict the post performance of initial public offerings (IPOs). We observe political network centrality has negative effects on the short-term and longterm post-IPO stock returns in that the leaders' position on the political hierarchy is inversely related to the post-performance of IPO firms. This finding may be attributable to the argument of "grabbing hand" that the capability of an IPO firm on acquiring resources or information on the political network is positively correlated to the extent that government officials using their power to reap the private or political benefits instead of firm value maximization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the reported study was to optimize the extraction process for ganoderma triterpenes and to investigate the in vivo inhibitory effect of ganoderma triterpenes on the genesis and progression of oral cancer. Single-factor and orthogonal methods were used to investigate the effects of extraction solvent, solvent amount, extraction time, extraction temperature, and number of extractions, on the extraction rate for ganoderma triterpenes. A golden hamster model with cheek pouch dynamic canceration was established to receive oral treatment of ganoderma triterpenes water solution. Animals were continuously monitored, oral tissue samples were collected for histopathologic examination, and changes in the expression of VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) and Caspase-3 were detected by immunohistochemical methods. Optimization of the experimental conditions allowed the identification of the optimal extraction conditions: 90% ethanol as the extraction solvent, a solvent amount by the liquid-material ratio of 35 mL/g, extraction time of 2 h and extraction temperature of 80 °C. Under these conditions, the average extraction rate of ganoderma triterpenes was 1.09%. Tests in golden hamsters showed that compared with the model group during the same period, animals in the treatment group had better conditions, constantly larger number of normal cases shown by histopathologic results (P < 0.01), and consistently smaller numbers of cases with paraplasm (P < 0.05). Immunohistochemical results showed that compared with the model group, the treatment group had significantly lower (P < 0.05) rates of positive VEGF expression in the normal state, simple epithelial hyperplasia, epithelial dysplasia or squamous cell carcinoma disease stages. Caspase-3 expression showed a tendency toward a gradual increase with the worsening of disease severity in each group. Compared with the model group, the treatment group had significantly lower (P < 0.05) rates of positive Caspase-3 in the normal state, simple epithelial hyperplasia, epithelial dysplasia or squamous cell carcinoma disease grades. Using the optimized extraction process, ganoderma triterpenes could be extracted with high efficiency, and the results of animal tests showed inhibitory effects of ganoderma triterpenes on oral mucosa cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Breast Cancer Res Treat," that was published in the February 15, 2007 issue is presented.