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Rendering glinty details from specular microstructure enhances the level of realism in computer graphics. However, naive sampling fails to render such effects, due to insufficient sampling of the contributing normals on the surface patch visible through a pixel. Other approaches resort to searching for the relevant normals in more explicit ways, but they rely on special acceleration structures, leading to increased storage costs and complexity. In this paper, we propose to render specular glints through a different method: differentiable regularization. Our method includes two steps: first, we use differentiable path tracing to render a scene with a larger light size and/or rougher surfaces and record the gradients with respect to light size and roughness. Next, we use the result for the larger light size and rougher surfaces, together with their gradients, to predict the target value for the required light size and roughness by extrapolation. In the end, we get significantly reduced noise compared to rendering the scene directly. Our results are close to the reference, which uses many more samples per pixel. Although our method is biased, the overhead for differentiable rendering and prediction is negligible, so our improvement is essentially free. We demonstrate our differentiable regularization on several normal maps, all of which benefit from the method.

Wood is a great potential natural material with good energy storage and temperature adjustment for the energy crisis. In this study, wood was delignified, and the PEG based eutectic polymer (PGMA) was impregnated into the delignified wood, and styrene (SM) grafted AlN was selected as thermal conductive filler to synthesize a stable phase change heat storage wood. The result shows that the styrene (SM) polymerized on the surface of AlN to form polystyrene (PS), the dispersion of AlN was enhanced. The thermal stability and loss resistance of PCES-Wood are improved for the penetration of PS-AlN into the cavities, which is attributed to the PS-AlN playing a "limiting" role in the crystallization of PGMA. When the content of PS-AlN is 6%, the thermal conductivity of PCES-Wood reaches 0.5148 W/(m·K). 4% PS-AlN-PCES@Balsa has the lowest undercooling and heat loss rate, and the melting enthalpy and solidification enthalpy reach 125.60 J/g and 120.30 J/g, respectively. The phase change temperature range is between 19.59 ℃ and 33.87 ℃, which is in the comfortable temperature range for the human. Under the illumination of the simulated solar light source, the surface temperature of PS-AlN-PCES@Balsa rises rapidly and shows a lasting heat storage capacity at low temperatures. After 200 cold and hot cycle tests, the phase change enthalpy of PS-AlN-PCES@Balsa is still high, and there is a slight leakage phenomenon. The phase-change wood prepared in this study shows that it is a potential material to store and release solar energy in practical applications.

In 2020, the comprehensive pilot project of expanding the opening-up of Beijing's service industry has entered a new stage of comprehensive upgrading. It is of great practical significance to study the growth potential source of Beijing's service trade export. Based on the data of 2012-2018 Beijing service export volume and the national service export volume of 2012-2018, this paper uses the Dynamic shift - share model to analyze the dynamic evolution of the export structure and competitiveness of Beijing service trade. The study shows that the overall growth rate of Beijing's service export lags behind the national standard level. All the traditional service export departments have competitive disadvantages and their competitiveness is declining year by year. Among the modern service export departments, financial and insurance service exports have gradually shown competitive advantages since Beijing became the comprehensive pilot to expand the opening up of the service industry in 2015, but other modern service export departments still face the problem of insufficient competitiveness. According to the study, Beijing should promote the digital transformation and upgrading of the traditional service export sector, steadily promote the development of financial service trade, and enhance its professional export capacity.

Benign breast nodules, thyroid nodules, and myoma of the uterus are similar in etiology and pathogenesis. These three diseases are classified according to accumulation patterns in traditional Chinese medicine theory and can be treated with the same prescription. Yang stagnation is the basic pathogenesis of benign accumulation patterns in young and middle-aged women. Its treatment principle should be “unblocking yang,” and its treating methods should include diffusing yang, warming yang, dissolving phlegm, and dissipating stasis, which can unblock yang qi and dissolve stasis. Meanwhile, heart-nourishing and mind-calming ingredients should be included in the prescriptions to improve the clinical manifestations.

Background: To explore the associations of serum high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) and prealbumin (PAB) with the number of diseased coronary vessels, degree of stenosis and heart failure in patients with myocardial infarction (MI). Methods: A total of 39 MI patients treated in the Cardiology were selected as the observation group, and another 41 patients with normal results of coronary angiography during the same period were selected as the control group. The general data of patients were recorded in detail, the content of serum hs-CRP and PAB in the peripheral blood was detected, and the number of diseased coronary vessels and the degree of stenosis were detected via coronary angiography. Results: Compared with those in control group, the blood pressure and heart rate significantly rose, the content of indexes related to the severity of MI were significantly increased, the content of hs-CRP was significantly increased, and the content of PAB was significantly decreased in observation group. Hs-CRP was positively correlated with the number of diseased coronary vessels, degree of stenosis and heart failure in patients, but PAB was negatively correlated with the above factors. The survival rate of MI patients with high content of hs-CRP was obviously lower than that of patients with low content of hsCRP Conclusions: Serum hs-CRP and PAB are closely associated with the number of diseased coronary vessels, degree of stenosis and heart failure in MI patients.

Speech enhancement and separation have been a long-standing problem, especially with the recent advances using a single microphone. Although microphones perform well in constrained settings, their performance for speech separation decreases in noisy conditions. In this work, we propose RadioSES, an audioradio speech enhancement and separation system that overcomes inherent problems in audio-only systems. By fusing a complementary radio modality, RadioSES can estimate the number of speakers, solve source association problem, separate and enhance noisy mixture speeches, and improve both intelligibility and perceptual quality. We perform millimeter-wave sensing to detect and localize speakers, and introduce an audioradio deep learning framework to fuse the separate radio features with the mixed audio features. Extensive experiments using commercial off-the-shelf devices show that RadioSES outperforms a variety of state-of-the-art baselines, with consistent performance gains in different environmental settings. Compared with the audiovisual methods, RadioSES provides similar improvements (e.g., ~3 dB gains in SiSDR), along with the benefits of lower computational complexity and being less privacy concerning., Comment: Project webpage: https://zahidozt.github.io/RadioSES/

A micro/nano-multiscale hierarchical structure strategy is used to fabricate films. A leaf-like structure with AgNWs and MXene results in a conductive 3D network. TOCNFs in the middle layer endow the films with excellent mechanical properties.

A novel MOF-based ternary nanocomposite PtNPs/UiO-66-NH2/MWCNTs was rationally designed and prepared for the facile construction of an electrochemical sensor to sensitively determine toxic methyl parathion in foods and environment.

This work simultaneously measured the acoustic signals, plasma images, and LIBS spectra from an underwater plasma and compared the three external normalization strategies using acoustic signals, plasma images, and the acoustic-image combination.

Molecular ferroelectric films (MFFs) offer a good platform for miniaturized electronic devices, which are inseparable from their multiaxial nature. Despite great studies, soft MFFs with broadband photo-electroactivity still remain a huge blank as the photoexcited leakage current will severely deteriorate ferroelectricity, hindering their optoelectronic applications. Here, we constructed the multiaxial MFF of HA

The linker histone H1 binds to the nucleosome core particle at the site where DNA enters and exits, and facilitates folding of the nucleosomes into a higher-order chromatin structure in eukaryotes. Additionally, some variant H1s promote specialized chromatin functions in cellular processes. Germline-specific H1 variants have been reported in some model species with diverse roles in chromatin structure changes during gametogenesis. In insects, the current understanding of germline-specific H1 variants comes mainly from the studies in Drosophila melanogaster, and the information on this set of genes in other non-model insects remains largely unknown. Here, we identify two H1 variants (PpH1V1 and PpH1V2) that are specifically predominantly expressed in the testis of the parasitoid wasp Pteromalus puparum. Evolutionary analyses suggest that these H1 variant genes evolve rapidly, and are generally maintained as a single copy in Hymenoptera. Disruption of PpH1V1 function in the late larval stage male by RNA interference experiments has no phenotype on spermatogenesis in the pupal testis, but results in abnormal chromatin structure and low sperm fertility in the adult seminal vesicle. In addition, PpH1V2 knockdown has no detectable effect on spermatogenesis or male fertility. Collectively, our discovery indicates distinct functions of male germline-enriched H1 variants between parasitoid wasp Pteromalus and Drosophila, providing new insights into the role of insect H1 variants in gametogenesis. This study also highlights the functional complexity of germline-specific H1s in animals.

Most existing studies characterizing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-specific T cell responses are peptide based. This does not allow evaluation of whether tested peptides are processed and presented canonically. In this study, we use recombinant vaccinia virus (rVACV)-mediated expression of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and SARS-CoV-2 infection of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE)-2-transduced B cell lines to evaluate overall T cell responses in a small cohort of recovered COVID-19 patients and uninfected donors vaccinated with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. We show that rVACV expression of SARS-CoV-2 antigen can be used as an alternative to SARS-CoV-2 infection to evaluate T cell responses to naturally processed spike antigens. In addition, the rVACV system can be used to evaluate the cross-reactivity of memory T cells to variants of concern (VOCs) and to identify epitope escape mutants. Finally, our data show that both natural infection and vaccination could induce multi-functional T cell responses with overall T cell responses remaining despite the identification of escape mutations.

Squamous cervical cancer (SCC) is a major cause of death in women, yet its molecular characteristics are poorly understood. Here, we profiled histopathological and molecular alterations in SCC, and used large language models (LLMs) for interpretation, reasoning, and understanding of multi-modal data. We implemented an immersive-knowledge prompting (iKLP) strategy to trigger LLMs, which interpreted 17.8%-20.3% of omic alterations known to be associated with cancer. Also, the emergence of cross-disciplinary reasoning in LLMs helped for interpreting phenotypic effects of SCC molecular alterations, exemplified by a prognostic biomarker HRG, and targetable kinases, CDK18 and CDK9. With experimental validations, LLM-reasoning showed >2-fold increased confidence for 68.5% of analyzed molecules. Strikingly, LLMs understood the information flow of cell-cell communications, and uncovered a CDK18-mediated immune escaping axis in orchestrating the crosstalk of malignant, immune, and niche cells. We anticipate that LLMs can be used for completely distinguishing between knowns and unknowns in any scientific problems.

To accurately reflect the movement of humans or robots, multi-sensor integration strategy is necessary to decouple complex deformations caused by motion in the wearable artificial kinesthetic perception system. The multi-sensor integration strategy could collect multi-dimension information, making up for the deficiency of robustness and accuracy of single sensor in complex motion scenes and extending the sensing capability of the system. However, the inevitable inconsistency between multiple sensors causes difficulties in fabrication, integration, and perception, limiting the development of artificial kinesthetic perception systems toward the direction of compact integration, large-area sensing, and high-resolution decoupling. Here, we propose a strategy to build an artificial kinesthetic perception system based on the differential design of homogeneous sensors. The strategy aims at guiding system design to avoid the inconsistency in multi-sensor integration by revealing the explicit relationship among structure, signal, and movements from the perspective of the physics model. According to the strategy, we presented a simple fabrication method of the kinesthetic perception prototype. The prototype with two homogenous sensors (0.019 56 residual on average) shows three differential signal modes to three deformations. With the help of machine learning, it realized the decoupling task to 25 kinds of complex deformations. The accuracy remains at 95% even though the decoupling resolution is up to 0.2 mm. With more than one prototype arrayed, complex deformation composed with more kinds of basic deformation (shear and twist) could be further decoupled. We believe that the strategy described in this paper will contribute to the development of a compact and programmable kinesthetic perception system.

In order to solve the problems faced in the process of laboratory construction and management, the author proposes a complete laboratory cloud desktop virtualization management platform. The platform combines the school’s existing experimental teaching environment and teaching mode, through actual deployment and online monitoring; it is further verified that the cloud desktop platform not only provides personalized desktop services but also realizes unified management of resources. Experimental results show that the system function tests are all in line with expectations; during the network bandwidth test, the thin client protocol machine is used to access the cloud platform, and the Thunder player is opened to play the movie application, and then, the thin client machine uses RDP to access the cloud platform; when RDP is playing a movie, the traffic is mainly in the range of 1.2~1.6 Mbps, and the network delay is less than 1.3 s. Through research, it is found that the platform enhances students’ learning initiative, improves teaching management level, and has high experimental teaching application value.

As automobiles have become an essential part to facilitate our daily life, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been gaining more and more interest in assisting drivers to enhance both safety and convenience. To respond timely in case of an emergency, ADAS needs to keep track of the driver’s health/consciousness, which is generally achieved by monitoring the driver’s vital signs including Respiration Rate (RR), Heart Rate (HR) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). However, most of the state-of-art solutions need to assume that the human is stationary, which does not hold in practical driving scenarios. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel system, which can estimate driver’s RR, HR and Inter-Beat Intervals (IBI) in the presence of driver’s motion artifacts using commercial millimeter-wave (mmWave) radio. The system consists of two key components. First, to extract the reflection signals containing vital signals, the motion artifacts are first removed by a novel motion compensation module, followed by the periodicity check to identify the components with vital signals. Second, the respiration and heartbeat signals are reconstructed by jointly optimizing the decomposition of all the extracted compound vital signals over different range-azimuth bins. We evaluate the system performance in real driving environment and investigate the impact of different parameters including the device locations, pavement conditions and motion types. Experimental results show that the proposed system can achieve a median error of 0.16 Respiration Per Minute (RPM), 0.82 Beat Per Minute (BPM) and 46 ms for RR, HR and IBI estimations, corresponding to the relative accuracy of 99.17%, 98.94% and 94.11%, respectively.

Commercial 6061 Al alloy and SiCp reinforced 6092 Al matrix composite (AMC) were joined by friction-stir welding (FSW) with different tool offsets. Results show offsetting the pin to Al alloy side could significantly reduce tool wear, while maintaining ultimate tensile strength of the joint around 180 MPa. As tool offset increased from zero to 3 mm, pin and shoulder wear length reduced from 0.17 mm to almost zero and from 0.28 to 0.02 mm, respectively. The corresponding estimated maximum safe welding length increased from 568 to 3125 mm. Fe debris were generated from the steel pin by the sharp SiC particles, then transferred into the nugget zone, eventually formed Al8Fe2Si particles during the FSW process.

Fall is recognized as one of the most frequent accidents among elderly people. Many solutions, either wearable or non-contact, have been proposed for fall detection recently. Among them, WiFi-based non-contact approaches are gaining popularity due to the ubiquity and non-invasiveness. The existing works, however, usually rely on labor-intensive and time-consuming training before it can achieve a reasonable performance. In addition, the trained models often contain environment-specific information and thus cannot be generalized well for new environments. In this paper, we propose DeFall, a WiFi-based passive fall detection system that is independent of the environment and free of prior training in new environments. Unlike previous works, our key insight is to probe the physiological features inherently associated with human falls, i.e., the distinctive patterns of speed and acceleration during a fall. DeFall consists of an offline template-generating stage and an online decision-making stage, both taking the speed estimates as input. In the offline stage, augmented dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithms are performed to generate a representative template of the speed and acceleration patterns for a typical human fall. In the online phase, we compare the patterns of the real-time speed/acceleration estimates against the template to detect falls. To evaluate the performance of DeFall, we built a prototype using commercial WiFi devices and conducted experiments under different settings. The results demonstrate that DeFall achieves a detection rate above 95% with a false alarm lower than 1.50% under both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios with one single pair of transceivers. Extensive comparison study verifies that DeFall can be generalized well to new environments without any new training.