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Additional file 2: Figure S1. Area under ROC curve of TyG index and TyGVR combined with various scores for in-hospital mortality and 1-year mortality.

Intrinsic flexible structures enable a continuum manipulator to exhibit attractive dexterity and intrinsic compliance over traditional hyper-redundant robots. However, its insufficient stiffness makes the performance of continuum manipulators unsatisfactory and thus limits the applications in many fields. A significant challenge is how to make a trade-off among dexterity, compliance and stiffness. From an evolutionary perspective, this paper compares several biological structures that enable the continuum manipulator function, and intends to reveal the mechanism on how the biological structures can improve the stiffness. The notochord and the vertebral column with acoelous centra are abstracted and physically implemented. A fundamental rod-driven continuum manipulator is also introduced as a comparison. The stiffness models of these three continuum manipulators are proposed, and comparative experiments are conducted to verify their stiffness properties. Our results demonstrate that the rigid-flexible segmental structure can improve the stiffness properties of a continuum manipulator.

The solubility of 2,2′-(1,2-ethenediyldi-4,1-phenylene) bis-benzoxazole (OB-1) in four monosolvents (chlorobenzene, N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), and water) and four di...

Additional file 8: Supplementary materials and methods.

The inherent interactivity in knowledge visualization design is considered to be able to help users better understand and recall information content. However, little is known about whether and how such interactivity would affect information recall. Therefore, this study designs an experiment for subjects with a single factor at two levels (high and low intrinsic interaction) to explore the influencing mechanism between inherent interactivity and information recall, while measuring the influence of such intermediary variables as cognitive involvement, perceived active control and cognitive load on this mechanism. The results show that participants in low inherent interactivity can recall more information than in high inherent interactivity. In the analysis of mediating variables, the relationship between inherent interactivity and information recall is significantly affected by the mediating variables, and the perceived active control delivers a significant positive impact on this relationship.

Additional file 1.

Additional file 1. Other details of this study.

Additional file 6: The information ofall cell lines used in the study.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-cat-10.1177_10760296221117969 for The Association Between High CHA2DS2-VASc Scores and Short and Long-Term Mortality for Coronary Care Unit Patients by Long Cheng, Sheng Kang, Li Lin and Hairong Wang in Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis

Context-aware recommendation systems improve upon classical recommender systems by including, in the modelling, a user's behaviour. Research into context-aware recommendation systems has previously only considered the sequential ordering of items as contextual information. However, there is a wealth of unexploited additional multi-modal information available in auxiliary knowledge related to items. This study extends the existing research by evaluating a multi-modal recommendation system that exploits the inclusion of comprehensive auxiliary knowledge related to an item. The empirical results explore extracting vector representations (embeddings) from unstructured and structured data using data2vec. The fused embeddings are then used to train several state-of-the-art transformer architectures for sequential user-item representations. The analysis of the experimental results shows a statistically significant improvement in prediction accuracy, which confirms the effectiveness of including auxiliary information in a context-aware recommendation system. We report a 4% and 11% increase in the NDCG score for long and short user sequence datasets, respectively., Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, to be published in the SACAIR CCIS Springer proceedings volume

Additional file 1: Fig.S1. INSM2 expression in GN tissue and NB tissue (GSE147635).Fig. S2. SK-N-BE(2) and SK-N-SHcells were infected with sh-NC or sh-INSM2 or sh-INSM2+INSM2. The cells were harvestedfor CCK-8 colorimetric assay. Fig. S3. IHCanalysis for CD31. Fig.S4. Lipid metabolism-related geneFASN affects the growth of NB. Fig.S5. A KEGGpathway analysis of the differentially expressed genes. B-C qPCR and Western blot analysis of the expression for oncogenes of NB (MYCN andANXA2) after knockdown of INSM2. Fig. S6. A-D Kaplan-Meier curvesindicating the survival of NB patients with high or low FASN, ACC, ACSS2 andSCD expression.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-cat-10.1177_10760296221117969 for The Association Between High CHA2DS2-VASc Scores and Short and Long-Term Mortality for Coronary Care Unit Patients by Long Cheng, Sheng Kang, Li Lin and Hairong Wang in Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis

Additional file 7: List of all primers used in the study.

Additional file 3: Figure S2. The NIPD results of MMA

Additional file 1: Table S1. Summary statistics of alignment

Additional file 4: Figure S3. The NIPD results of PKU, ARPKD and DFNB1A

Background Though massively parallel sequencing has been widely applied to noninvasive prenatal screen for common trisomy, the clinical use of massively parallel sequencing to noninvasive prenatal diagnose monogenic disorders is limited. This study was to develop a method for directly determining paternal haplotypes for noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of monogenic disorders without requiring proband’s samples. Methods The study recruited 40 families at high risk for autosomal recessive diseases. The targeted linked-read sequencing was performed on high molecular weight (HMW) DNA of parents using customized probes designed to capture targeted genes and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) distributed within 1Mb flanking region of targeted genes. Plasma DNA from pregnant mothers also underwent targeted sequencing using the same probes to determine fetal haplotypes according to parental haplotypes. The results were further confirmed by invasive prenatal diagnosis. Results Seventy-eight parental haplotypes of targeted gene were successfully determined by targeted linked-read sequencing. The predicted fetal inheritance of variant was correctly deduced in 38 families in which the variants had been confirmed by invasive prenatal diagnosis. Two families were determined to be no-call. Conclusions Targeted linked-read sequencing method demonstrated to be an effective means to phase personal haplotype for noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of monogenic disorders.

In this paper, we build autoencoder based pipelines for extreme end-to-end image compression based on Ball\'e's approach, which is the state-of-the-art open source implementation in image compression using deep learning. We deepened the network by adding one more hidden layer before each strided convolutional layer with exactly the same number of down-samplings and up-samplings. Our approach outperformed Ball\'e's approach, and achieved around 4.0% reduction in bits per pixel (bpp), 0.03% increase in multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM), and only 0.47% decrease in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), It also outperforms all traditional image compression methods including JPEG2000 and HEIC by at least 20% in terms of compression efficiency at similar reconstruction image quality. Regarding encoding and decoding time, our approach takes similar amount of time compared with traditional methods with the support of GPU, which means it's almost ready for industrial applications.

This paper proposes and establishes the iteration-complexity of an inexact proximal accelerated augmented Lagrangian (IPAAL) method for solving linearly constrained smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. Each IPAAL iteration consists of inexactly solving a proximal augmented Lagrangian subproblem by an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) method followed by a suitable Lagrange multiplier update. It is shown that IPAAL generates an approximate stationary solution in at most ${\cal O}(\log(1/\rho)/\rho^{3})$ ACG iterations, where $\rho>0$ is the given tolerance. It is also shown that the previous complexity bound can be sharpened to ${\cal O}(\log(1/\rho)/\rho^{2.5})$ under additional mildly stronger assumptions. The above bounds are derived assuming that the initial point is neither feasible nor the domain of the composite term of the objective function is bounded. Some preliminary numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the IPAAL method.

Open disconnector can observe the action state of disconnector by naked eye, but for the operating mechanism of gas insulated switchgear (GIS)high voltage disconnector, the working state of the operating mechanism cannot be observed because it is sealed in the insulating cylinder, and cannot be directly observed the separation and closure of dynamic and static contacts. In order to monitor the position status of the operating mechanism in real time, a current-based identification method is proposed. A new online monitoring method for mechanical characteristics of gas insulated switchgear high voltage disconnector operating mechanism technology is presented. This method uses current sensor to measure the current of driving motor and draw the current-time curve. Combining with angular displacement sensor, it can accurately judge the position and status of disconnector of gas insulated switchgear disconnector and whether the mechanism has broken rod and jammed or not. By using the envelope of current-time curve, the mechanical state of disconnector operating mechanism can be accurately reflected. It is of great significance to improve the safe operation of power system and meets the technical requirements of building ubiquitous power Internet of things in our country.

While modern self-driving vehicles have shown their impressive capabilities towards offering new mobility to millions of people, it still remains challenging to build fully dependable and safe self-driving systems. To ensure the dependability of automated driving, the self-driving system is not only required to understand common road situations, but also widely different unusual events (e.g., objects on the roadway, pedestrian crossing highway, deer standing next to the road, etc.), which are very rare but more likely to cause unanticipated accidents.To detect unusual events, existing approaches seek to collect them by driving millions of miles with self-driving prototypes. But there still remains uncertainty because of limited miles covered. In contrast, this thesis proposes automatic unusual driving events identification algorithms, which can detect unusual cases through inertial sensing from in-vehicle devices in human-driven vehicles. This approach can be scaled to a much larger number of vehicles and thereby cover larger driving distances. The approach involves monitoring human driver reactions based on inertial sensors (e.g., accelerometer and gyroscope) and demonstrating that they are useful indicators of unusual driving events.Our inertial detection approach includes three stages. At first, we apply a potential emergency period (braking and swerving) detection to detect a sudden driver reaction, which reflects situations that challenge human drivers. Then we utilize three features to extract different properties from the detected periods. Finally, we propose a feature fusion method to fuse the features in an accuracy- driven way. Therefore, by extracting the features from the potential unusual periods, we can detect hazardous events from a large data set automatically. Besides, in order to improve the efficiency of processing a large scale of dataset, we also provide an alternative approach to process data in parallel pipelines in the cloud.We evaluate whether the inertially identified driving events match events that are manually labeled as unusual based on more than 120 hours of real-world driving data. The result shows the proposed fusion method outperforms the baseline methods with an 82% accuracy improvement for braking events as well as a 94% accuracy improvement for swerving events. To improve the dependability of automated driving systems, such detected events could be used in simulation tests to gradually refine self-driving software.

To solve the problem of empty or incongruent results in semantic queries, the paper proposes a flexible query method of domain ontology. Starting with the synonym analysis of semantic dictionary, the method makes a synonym expansion combining the synonymy and hyponymy in ontology, calls word similarity formula to calculate the similarity between the query keyword and its synonyms, and then, on the basis, defines flexible query inference rules, and makes the flexible expansion of query keyword by calling the inference mechanism and then uses the standard SPARQL query engine to complete the flexible query processing. The experimental system and corresponding experiment results prove the effectiveness of the method proposed.

Thinopyrum intermedium, which has many useful traits, is valuable for wheat breeding. A new wheat-Thinopyrum addition line, SN100109, was developed from the progeny of common wheat cultivar Yannong 15 and Th. intermedium. It was resistant to most races of Blumeria graminis f. sp tritici (Bgt), which caused powdery mildew in wheat, and its reactions were different from the reactions of gene Pm40 and Pm43. Genomic in situ hybridization (GISH) and molecular marker analysis were used to identify the genomic composition of SN100109. GISH results showed that SN100109 was a wheat-Th. intermedium disomic addition line containing one pair of J chromosomes, and the resistance gene was located on the alien additional chromosomes of SN100109. And four molecular markers BE425942, BF482714, Xgdm93 and BV679214 which were assigned to homologous group 2, were specific molecular markers of the additional chromosomes. All the results indicated that SN100109 contained one pair of 2J chromosomes. SN100109 can be used as a novel germplasm source for introducing powdery mildew resistance genes to wheat in breeding programs.

The solubilities of l-valine in four binary mixed solvents of water + (ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, N,N-dimethylformamide, acetone) were experimentally measured from 293.15 K to 343.15 K at atmospheric pressure by employing the synthetic method. The experimental data indicate that the solubility of l-valine in the binary mixed solvents increases with the increasing temperature and decreases with the rise of mass concentration (w) of nonaqueous solvent in the binary aqueous solution. The experimental data can be correlated by using the modified Apelblat model, λh model, and CNIBS/R-K model. The results indicate that the solubility data show agreement with the modified Apelblat model much better than others in the studied binary solvents system. The dissolution enthalpy, dissolution entropy, and molar Gibbs energy of the dissolution of l-valine in the studied binary mixed solvents were then calculated. The experimental data and the correlation equations in this work can be used as essential data and models i...

The solubilities of l-valine in water, ethanol, N,N-dimethylformamide, acetone, and isopropyl alcohol were experimentally measured by the synthetic method over the temperature range from (293.15 to 343.15) K at atmosphere pressure. The solubilities of l-valine in pure solvents increase with increasing temperature and in the following order: acetone < N,N-dimethylformamide < isopropyl alcohol < ethanol < water. The solubilities correlated using the modified Apelblat model show good agreement with the experimental data, and the dissolution enthalpy, dissolution entropy, and the molar Gibbs energy were predicted. The experimental solubilities and the modified Apelblat model can be used as essential data and model in the industrial manufacturing process of l-valine.

To further investigate the airborne infection mechanism of Marek's disease virus (MDV), a MDV aerosol infection model was established, and the generation, transmission and infectiosity of MDV aerosols were monitored in this study. Two positive/negative pressure isolators, in which SPF chickens were raised, were connected with a closed conduit. Two repetitive trials, Trial 1 (T1) and Trial 2 (T2) were carried out for objective assessment. Air samples were collected using the AGI-30 sampler. Viral DNA in air samples and feather follicle samples were detected using real-time quantitative PCR (QRT-PCR). MDV in air and blood samples was detected by indirect immunofluorescence assay (IFA). In chickens of isolator A (MDV inoculation group), MDV was detected in feather follicles in 100% of the tested chickens at 6 days post inoculation (dpi) in both trials; and MDV was isolated from blood samples at 9-10 dpi. MDV DNA was detected in air samples from isolator A at 12 dpi in T1 and 14 dpi in T2 and concentration of aerosolized MDV DNA was peaked at 3.84 × 10(6)copies/m(3) air at 40 dpi in T1, and 6.17 × 10(5)copies/m(3) air at 38 dpi in T2, respectively. Infectious MDV (cell culture) was isolated from isolator A at 17 in T1 and 19 dpi in T2, respectively. MDV aerosol in Isolator B was almost same as isolator A. Viremia was detected in isolator B at 26-30 dpi. The incidence of viremia in isolator B reached 70% at 3 months post inoculation. These results demonstrated that infected chicken could discharge virus, the MDV could form aerosols and infect neighboring chickens. Understanding the mechanism of generation and infection of MDV aerosols is helpful to prevent and control MD.

To improve the dynamic response performance of a high-flow electro-hydraulic servo system, scholars have conducted considerable research on the synchronous and time-sharing controls of multiple valves. However, most scholars have used offline optimization to improve control performance. Thus, control performance cannot be dynamically adjusted or optimized. To repeatedly optimize the performance of multiple valves online, this study proposes a method for connecting a high-flow proportional valve in parallel with a low-flow servo valve. Moreover, this study proposes an algorithm in which a proportional–integral–derivative system and multivariable predictive control system are used as an inner loop and outer loop, respectively. The simulation and experimental results revealed that dual-valve parallel control could effectively improve the control accuracy and dynamic response performance of an electro-hydraulic servo system and that the proportional-integral-derivative–multivariable predictive control controller could further dynamically improve the control accuracy.

A recombinant inbred line (RIL) population with 302 lines derived from a cross of Weimai 8 × Luohan 2 was used to identify the quantitative trait loci (QTL) for plant height (PH) in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Possible genetic relationships between PH and PH components (PHC), including spike length (SL) and internode length from the first to the fourth node counted from the top, abbreviated as FIITL, SITL, TITL and FOITL, respectively, were evaluated at the QTL level. A QTL for PH was mapped using data on PH and on PH conditioned by PHC using the IciMapping V3.0 software. Conditional QTL mapping proved that, at the QTL level, SL contributed the least to PH, followed by FIITL and FOITL, while TITL had the strongest influence on PH, followed by SITL. These results indicate that the conditional QTL mapping method can be used to evaluate possible genetic relationships between PH and PHC, and that it can efficiently and precisely reveal counteracting QTL, which will enhance our understanding of the genetic basis of PH in wheat.

Grain yield (GY) and yield components (YC) were investigated using two F8: 9 RILs, comprising 229 and 485 lines, respectively. A conditional analysis was conducted to generate conditional values for GY independent of each YC. Then both unconditional and conditional values were analyzed to map QTLs with additive effect. In both RILs, up to 23 unconditional and conditional QTLs were detected. However, only two QTLs were identified repeatedly among environments. All QTLs, except for 4 detected in unconditional mapping, were also identified as conditional QTLs, whereas a number of QTLs were additionally detected in conditional mapping. The number of QTLs detected that affected GY was different with respect to component-special influences. Our results revealed that the contributions of YC influencing QTL expression related to GY differed.

Continuum manipulators can exhibit behaviors similar to snakes, elephant's trunks, and octopus tentacles, which possess incredible dexterity and intrinsic compliance for safe interaction with unstructured environments. However, the lack of enough stiffness limits their scope and application. In this paper, we introduce four different structures of continuum manipulators, including a simple structure with three elastic actuated rods, a structure with a passive rigid kinematic chain, a structure with a hyperelastic notochord and a segmental structure inspired from the spine without articular structure. This paper presents an experimental comparison of four continuum manipulators and aims to explore approaches to enhance the stiffness of a continuum manipulator and maintain the simple constant curvature kinematics as far as possible simultaneously. Results of this paper contribute to guiding the design of a continuum manipulator for achieving desired stiffness properties.

The tradeoff between the dexterity, compliance and payload capacity is a key challenge in the design of Hyper-Dexterous Manipulator (HDM). In this paper, we focus on the properties of typical biological structures related to HDM in order to guide the design of a high performance HDM, as biological inspiration provides a key design guideline for robotic design. The typical biological structures are generalized into soft-body structure, spine with articular structure and spine without articular structure. Finally, a unique conceptual design of HDM inspired by spine without articular structure is proposed.

To comprehensively understand the genetic basis of plant height (PH), quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis for internode lengths, internode component indices and plant height component index (PHCI) were firstly conducted in the present study. Two related F8:9 recombinant inbred line (RIL) populations comprising 485 and 229 lines were used. Two hundred and nine putative additive QTL for the eight traits were identified, 35 of which showed significance in at least three trials. Of these, at least 11 pairwise QTL were common to the two populations. PH components at the QTL level had different effects on PH, confirming our previous multivariate conditional analysis (Cui et al. 2011). Eleven major QTL that showed consistency in expression across environments should be of great value in the genetic improvement of PH in wheat. The results above will enhance the understanding of the genetic basis of PH in wheat.

Among the progenies of crossing Triticum turgidum — Haynaldia villosa amphiploid with synthetic hexaploid wheat (T. carthlicum / Aegilops tauschii) Am3, two lines (SN030713 and SN05078), with good resistance to stripe rust and powdery mildew, were developed. Cytological studies demonstrated that SN030713 contained 42 chromosomes and formed 21 bivalents at meiotic metaphase I. SN05078 contained 28 chromosomes and formed 14 bivalents. Genomic in situ hybridization analysis using H. villosa V genomic DNA as the probe showed SN030713 and SN05078 had no large H. villosa chromosome fragments. PCR analysis with H. villosa specific primer pHv29 showed that H. villosa genetic materials were introgressed in these two lines. SSR analysis indicated that the genomic composition of SN030713 was 2n = 6x = 42 (AABBDD), and SN05078 was 2n = 4x = 28 (AABB). Introgressed Ae. tauschii genetic materials in SN05078 were also detected.

The aim of this paper is to improve the positioning accuracy of the micro-positioning stage constructed by flexure hinge and driven by piezoelectric devices. The micro-positioning stage is the micro-stage of an two-dimensional ultra-precision positioning system with high-speed and large range, which is a typical macro–micro-dual-drive system. Because of the strong nonlinearity of the micro-positioning stage, such as hysteresis and creep, and the influence of the highly accelerated operation of the macro-positioning stage, the traditional PID control cannot achieve good performance. To solve this problem, a PID position controlling system based on adaptive neural-fuzzy inference has been proposed and the structure of this control system is also analyzed. The experimental results show that the performance is effectively improved under the intelligent control method. The repetitive positioning accuracy is improved from 92 nm to 23 nm at the axis X and from 102 nm to 28 nm at the axis Y .

In order to obtain reliable evaluation result by nanoindentation, the related problems during measurement of the hardness and elastic modulus are investigated. Two quantitative approaches, i.e. calculating actual contact area and correcting contact depth errors, are proposed to deal with the significant pile-up errors for indentation on those ductile soft materials, especially thin soft metal films on hard substrates. The various influence factors during indentation are analyzed, and a new method for uncertainty estimation in hardness and elastic modulus is provided based on the random-fuzzy variables. Through the illustration of Au/glass-ceramic and Al/7059 glass, both the quantitative approaches are suitable for the elastically matching film-substrate systems. The measurement uncertainties in hardness and elastic modulus of Si(100) are effectively estimated, and all possible influencing effects on uncertainty can be involved.

Recently, as oil exploitation has become focused on deepwater slope areas. more multi-channel high resolution 2D and 3D seismic data were acquired in the deepwater part of the Qiongdongnan Basin, northern South China Sea. Based on 3D seismic data and coherence time slice, RMS and 3D visualization, a series of deepwater channels were recognized on the slope that probably developed in the late Quaternary period. These channels trend SW-NE to W-E and show bifurcations, levees, meander loops and avulsions. High Amplitude Reflections (HARs), typical for channel-levee complexes, are of only minor importance and were observed in one of the channel systems. Most of the detected channels are characterized by low-amplitude reflections, and so are different from the typical coarse-grained turbidite channels that had been discovered worldwide. The absence of well data in the study area made it difficult to determine the age and lithology of these channels. Using a neighboring drill hole and published data about such depositional systems worldwide, the lithology of these channels is likely to be dominated by mudstones with interbedded thin sandstones. These channels are formed by turbidity currents originated from the little scale mountain river of mid-Vietnam in SW direction and were probably accompanied by a relative sea level drop in the last glacial age. These channels discovered on the northern South China Sea slope are likely to be fine-grained, mud-dominant and low N:G deposits in a deepwater paleogeographic setting. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

According to the theory of capital structure, this paper uses principal component analysis and linear regression analysis to study the relationship between the debt characteristics of the private listed companies in Jiangsu Province and their business performance. The results show that the average debt ratio of the 29 private listed companies selected from the sample is lower. And it is found that for the sample whose debt ratio is lower than 80%, its debt ratio is negatively related to corporate performance, while for the sample whose debt ratio is beyond 80%, the relationship of debt financing and enterprise performance shows the different trends. The conclusions reflect the drawbacks may exist that the debt ratio is relatively low and having not take full advantage of debt governance effect of the private listed companies in Jiangsu Province.

In this paper, we investigated the sensing properties of oxygen gas sensors in which the nanostructured TiO2 thin films buried with Pd layer serve as the semiconducting materials. The nanostructured titania thin films for O2 sensors were prepared with the sol-gel process by using the Ti butoxide-derived sol and were processed by heat-treatment at 500 °C. The TiO2 square board with an area of 350 μm × 350 μm was prepared by wet etching. On the square board, 150 nm Pt micro interdigitated electrodes with 50 nm Ti buffer layer were fabricated by lift-off process. X-ray diffraction(XRD) analysis of TiO2 film results indicated the crystal phase of TiO2 thin films was anatase, and SEM observation showed the average size of TiO2 thin films buried with Pd layer crystals were decreased compared with the pure TiO2 thin films. Electric resistance of the O2 sensor was monitored to evaluate its performance and the results showed that the sensor outputs stable signal with good response properties.

In order to realize mechanical properties test of the emergency towing arrangements, anchor chain and other large marine components, a large-tonnage and multi-function horizontal tension test platform is put forward in this paper. The paper analyzes the disadvantages of the frame structure of the existing experimental platform and designs the composite structure of the concrete and steel. The steel has good elasticity and toughness, the concrete has good performance of high rigidity and compression resistance, so the composite structure takes the advantages of both. The sharp of the frame is like “L”, which can be used to testing different projects. The paper gives the detailed size and analysis procedure of the frame. And it finds a more reasonable structure by means of finite element to analyze and optimize. The frame structure has the advantages of low weight and cost. The platform has been installed in Zhoushan, China successfully.

The preeminent manipulation capabilities of the human hand are undoubtedly related to the thumb. In view of this, this paper presents an anthropomorphic design guideline for the thumb of the dexterous hand. Anatomy analysis of the human thumb represents an excellent base from which a robotic design can be inferred. With simplification of human thumb's joint motion model, five configurations of thumb are given for the design of dexterous robotic hand. A new method for determining the position of thumb on the palm is proposed, according to the Euler Theorem about Finite Rotation of Rigid Body. A numeric method for computing the opposability of the thumb is described based on Monte Carlo methods, to evaluate dexterity of the hand in object manipulation. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied to the revised design of the HIT/DLR II hand. Performance indexes of both the original and the revised hand are calculated for comparison. The opposability of the thumb on revised dexterous robotic hand is 2.92 times of the original, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The article intends to introduce the authors’ experimental study on adsorption behaviour of chitosan solution on silica by reflectometry. Effect of pH on adsorption has been studied. The adsorbed amount ? was 0.80, 0.35 mg•m-2 at pH6.8 and 6.0, respectively. Zeta potential measurements and dynamic light scattering have been measured in the experiment. The mechanism of the adsorption process are likely to be the electrostatic attraction and entropic origin which is typical for adsorption of strongly charged polyelectrolytes onto oppositely charged surfaces.

Airborne Newcastle disease (ND) viruses in the air of five chicken houses were detected and differentiated by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) using degenerate primers. Fifteen air samples were collected with All Glass Impinger-30 (AGI-30) air samplers in each house. Airborne ND viruses were also isolated and virulence identified by in vivo tests. Avirulent viruses were detected both in air samples and swab samples in four houses by degenerate primers based RT-PCR. Virulent viruses were detected only in the air samples by degenerate primers based RT-PCR in two houses. Seven strains viruses were isolated from the RT-PCR positive air samples. Of the seven strains, three strains were virulent viruses and four strains were avirulent viruses identified by in vivo tests. The results showed that it was feasible to detect and differentiate NDV in the air samples using degenerate primers based RT-PCR. This technique could decrease the time it required identify NDV infected flocks while distinguishing between virulent and avirulent viruses. It will help effectively to control Newcastle disease.