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Supplemental Material for A cross-sectional study of systemic lupus erythematosus patients complicated with infection by Hang Yu, Qinwen Wen, Xiaolu Zhang and Xiudi Wu in European Journal of Inflammation

To understand the effect of abrasives on increasing friction in Cu-based metallic pads under different braking speeds, pad materials with two typical abrasives, titanium carbide (TiC) and alumina (Al2O3), were produced and tested using a scale dynamometer under various initial braking speeds (IBS). The results showed that at IBS lower than 250 km/h, both TiC and Al2O3 particles acted as hard points and exhibited similar friction-increasing behavior, where the increase in friction was not only enhanced as IBS increased, but also enhanced by increasing the volume fraction of the abrasives. However, at higher IBS, the friction increase was limited by the bonding behavior between the matrix and abrasives. Under these conditions, the composite containing TiC showed a better friction-increasing effect and wear resistance than the composite containing Al2O3 because of its superior particle-matrix bonding and coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) compatibility. Because of the poor interface bonding between the matrix and Al2O3, a transition phenomenon exists in the Al2O3-reinforced composite, in which the friction-increasing effect diminished when IBS exceeded a certain value.

Recently, generative adversarial network (GAN) has been widely employed in single image super-resolution (SISR), achieving favorably good perceptual effects. However, the SR outputs generated by GAN still have some fictitious details, which are quite different from the ground-truth images, resulting in a low PSNR value. In this paper, we leverage the ground-truth high-resolution (HR) image as a useful guide to learn an effective conditional GAN (CGAN) for SISR. Among it, we design the generator network via residual learning, which introduces dense connections to the residual blocks to effectively fuse low and high-level features across different layers. Extensive evaluations show that our proposed SR method performs much better than state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and visual perception.

Despite much progress has been made by applying generative adversarial network (GAN) to single image super-resolution (SISR), obvious difference remains between the details of reconstructed high-frequency and ground-truth because GAN is unstable that has a very high degree of freedom. To address this issue, we exploit conditional GAN (CGAN) for SISR, which leverages the ground-truth high-resolution (HR) image as its conditional variable to guide to learn a more stable model. To better reconstruct image with a large-scale factor, we further design an enhanced Laplacian pyramid network (ELapN) as the generator model of CGAN, which progressively reconstructs HR images at multiple pyramid levels. The proposed ELapN fuses low-and high-level features for the residual image learning achieves better generalization than those only based on high-level information. Finally, we train the proposed network via deep supervision using a combination of multi-level CGAN, VGG and robust Charbonnier loss functions to obtain high-quality SR results. Extensive evaluations on three benchmark datasets including Set5, Set14, B100 demonstrate superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM and visual effect.

Additional file 1.

Additional file 1: Supplementary Table 1. The demographic, representative laboratory, and lymphocyte parameter results of the participants from 10 centers. Supplementary Figure 1. Correlation between CD3+CD4+ T cell number and age. Each symbol represents an individual donor. Supplementary Figure 2. Correlation between CD3+CD8+ T cell number and other routine indicators including RBC, HB, HDL, PLT, and GLU. Each symbol represents an individual donor. RBC, red blood cell; HB, hemoglobin; HDL, high density lipoprotein; PLT, platelet; GLU, glucose.

Recently, extensive studies on a generative adversarial network (GAN) have made great progress in single image super-resolution (SISR). However, there still exists a significant difference between the reconstructed high-frequency and the real high-frequency details. To address this issue, this study presents an SISR approach based on conditional GAN (SRCGAN). SRCGAN includes a generator network that generates super-resolution (SR) images and a discriminator network that is trained to distinguish the SR images from ground-truth high-resolution (HR) ones. Specifically, the discriminator network uses the ground-truth HR image as a conditional variable, which guides the network to distinguish the real images from the SR images, facilitating training a more stable generator model than GAN without this guidance. Furthermore, a residual-learning module is introduced into the generator network to solve the issue of detail information loss in SR images. Finally, the network is trained in an end-to-end manner by optimizing a perceptual loss function. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets including Set5, Set14, BSD100, and Urban100 demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SRCGAN over state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and visual effect.

Gradient estimation and vector space projection have been studied as two distinct topics. We aim to bridge the gap between the two by investigating how to efficiently estimate gradient based on a projected low-dimensional space. We first provide lower and upper bounds for gradient estimation under both linear and nonlinear projections, and outline checkable sufficient conditions under which one is better than the other. Moreover, we analyze the query complexity for the projection-based gradient estimation and present a sufficient condition for query-efficient estimators. Built upon our theoretic analysis, we propose a novel query-efficient Nonlinear Gradient Projection-based Boundary Blackbox Attack (NonLinear-BA). We conduct extensive experiments on four image datasets: ImageNet, CelebA, CIFAR-10, and MNIST, and show the superiority of the proposed methods compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. In particular, we show that the projection-based boundary blackbox attacks are able to achieve much smaller magnitude of perturbations with 100% attack success rate based on efficient queries. Both linear and nonlinear projections demonstrate their advantages under different conditions. We also evaluate NonLinear-BA against the commercial online API MEGVII Face++, and demonstrate the high blackbox attack performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/NonLinear-BA., Comment: Accepted by AISTATS 2021; 9 pages excluding references and appendices

Additional file 1: Table S1. Summary of the number of detected polymorphic SNPs between Sherpa and IRAT109 and their average distances per chromosome. Numbers in parentheses are number of SNPs and average distance in cM using the final 1394 set of markers.

The serine protease tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), encoded by the gene Plat, exerts a wide range of proteolysis-dependent and proteolysis-independent functions. In the developing brain, tPA is involved in neuronal development via the modulation of the proteolytic degradation of the extracellular matrix (ECM). Both lack of and excessive tPA are associated with neurodevelopmental disorders and with brain pathology. Astrocytes play a major role in neurite outgrowth of developing neurons as they are major producers of ECM proteins and ECM proteases. In this study we investigated the expression of Plat in developing and mature hippocampal and cortical astrocytes of Aldh1l1-EGFP-Rpl10a mice in vivo following Translating Ribosome Affinity Purification (TRAP) and the role of tPA in modulating astrocyte-mediated neurite outgrowth in an in vitro astrocyte-neuron co-culture system. We show that Plat is highly enriched in astrocytes in the developing, but not in the mature, hippocampus and cortex. Both the silencing of tPA expression in astrocytes and astrocyte exposure to recombinant tPA reduce neuritogenesis in co-cultured hippocampal neurons. These results suggest that astrocyte tPA is involved in modulating neuronal development and that tight control of astrocyte tPA expression is important for normal neuronal development, with both experimentally elevated and reduced levels of this proteolytic enzyme impairing neurite outgrowth. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the ECM, by serving as adhesive substrate, enables neurite outgrowth, but that controlled proteolysis of the ECM is needed for growth cone advancement.

Aiming at understanding N2O formation in a low-temperature SCR process, mechanistic studies regarding the synergistic removal of NO and inhibition of N2O formation by the addition of Ce and V into MnOx/Ti based catalysts prepared by the sol-gel method were conducted and analyzed by various techniques, including BET, XRD, XPS, NH3-TPD, and FTIR. The results show that the addition of Ce raises the NO conversion efficiency and shifts the high performance region toward the low temperature range, while the addition of V generates less N2O. As an optimal formula, Mn(0.4)Ce(0.1)V(0.01)/Ti ensures a high NO conversion efficiency and low N2O formation. N2O mainly originates from (1) the direct oxidation of NH3 with O2 and (2) the reaction of NO and adsorbed NH3 in the low-temperature SCR process. The latter plays a dominant role at temperatures below 240 °C. The strong redox properties on the MnOx/Ti catalyst surface result in a high NO conversion efficiency and generates numerous NH(ads) species that cause N2O formation. The slight addition of V promotes the formation of acid by bringing Lewis acid sites to the catalyst surface and effectively restricts N2O formation. Lewis acid sites have a positive function in maintaining a high NO conversion and inhibiting N2O formation compared to Bronsted acid sites. In addition, the well-dispersed V on the surface of Mn(0.4)Ce(0.1)V(0.01)/Ti results in improved textural properties, more lattice oxygen and less labile oxygen, as well as comparable Mn4+/Mn3+, which also improves the catalyst performance at low temperature.

Observations from a wintertime and summertime field campaign are used to assess the relationship between black and brown carbon (BC and BrC, respectively) optical properties and particle composition and coating state. The wintertime campaign, in Fresno, CA, was impacted by primary emissions from residential wood burning, secondary organic and inorganic particle formation, and BC from motor vehicles. Two major types of BrC were observed in wintertime. One occurred primarily at night—the result of primary biomass burning emissions. The second was enhanced in daytime and strongly associated with particulate nitrate and the occurrence of fog. The biomass-burning-derived BrC absorbed more strongly than the nitrate-associated BrC but had a weaker wavelength dependence. The wintertime BC-specific mass absorption coefficient (MAC BC ) exhibited limited dependence on the ensemble-average coating-to-BC mass ratio (R coat-rBC ) at all wavelengths, even up to R coat-rBC of ~5. For the summertime campaign, in Fontana, CA, BC dominated the light absorption, with negligible BrC contribution even after substantial photochemical processing. The summertime MAC BC exhibited limited dependence on R coat-rBC , even up to ratios of >10. Based on the four classes of BC-containing particles identified by Lee et al. (2017, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-15055-2017) for the summertime measurements, the general lack of an absorption enhancement can be partly—although not entirely—attributed to an unequal distribution of coating materials between the BC-containing particle types. These observations demonstrate that in relatively near-source environments, even those impacted by strong secondary aerosol production, the ensemble-average, mixing-induced absorption enhancement for BC due to coatings can be quite small.

Light-absorbing organic aerosol (brown carbon; BrC) impacts the radiative balance of the earth’s atmosphere; however, the magnitude of this impact is poorly constrained due to uncertainties in BrC sources, composition, and lifetime. In particular, the role of chemical “aging” on the optical properties of BrC particles is poorly understood. Here we carry out laboratory studies aimed at understanding how one such aging process, heterogeneous oxidation, may affect the chemical and optical properties of biomass-burning-derived BrC. We generate BrC from smoldering ponderosa pine needles, oxidize the BrC in a flow reactor, and use simultaneous measurements of aerosol optical properties and chemical composition to monitor changes upon oxidation. Under the set of conditions investigated here, we find that with increased oxidant exposure the aerosol becomes more oxidized and less absorbing, presumably due to oxidative degradation of the chromophores. Both the kinetics and evolution of this process are oxidant dependent. While heterogeneous oxidation by ozone results in a rapid “bleaching” of the BrC (i.e. decrease in absorptivity), a substantial fraction of the BrC is resistant to bleaching by this mechanism. In contrast, bleaching due to heterogeneous oxidation by OH in the presence of ozone, remains active over long timescales (timescale of days), suggesting a sustained evolution of BrC optical properties throughout the aerosol atmospheric lifetime.

C/C–SiC ceramic is a promising braking material in high-speed trains. The research on wet braking is necessary for its application. In this paper, braking tests of C/C–SiC disc mated with powder metallic (P/M) pads were conducted under dry, wet and recovery braking conditions at initial braking speed (IBS) of 14, 22, 33, 44, 55 m/s. Coefficient of friction (COF) and surface morphologies under different conditions were discussed: The instantaneous COF under wet condition was lower but the instantaneous COF curves became smoother than those under dry condition. The difference between two conditions went smaller as IBS increased. Under recovery condition, it cost 33 stops at 14 m/s to recover to 93.1% of the origin COF. Meanwhile, 8 stops were needed at 55 m/s, and the recovery rate was 98.9%. When the IBS increased, the number of the stop needed was fewer and the recovery rate was higher. The surface morphologies further showed the braking under wet condition resulted in a smoother surface with less ploughing grooves and the disappearance of the friction film. Under the recovery condition, the surface became rough again with grooves and the friction film formed again. The results indicate that the wear debris were washed away by the sprayed water and the formation of friction film was inhibited. In addition, water film subsequently lubricated the friction surface, which reduced COF at low IBS. As IBS increased, high temperature accelerated the dewatering and evaporation of water and thus lead to the decrement of the COF difference between wet and dry friction which, in turn accelerated the recovery process.

As one major barrier for biomass combustion, the high-temperature silicate melt-induced slagging is studied by additions of SiO2, kaolin, and soil and two types of K2O–SiO2–Al2O3 ternary phase diagrams constructed on basis of the real biomass ash properties and biomass by addition of K2O (in the form of KOH), SiO2, and Al2O3, respectively. Results show that FT can be as the evaluate index for high-temperature silicate melt-induced slagging which increases with decreased FT. Meanwhile, a set of qualitative criteria on high-temperature silicate melt-induced slagging are proposed. However, because of the refractory minerals originated from additives directly or alumina-silication reactions indirectly when biomass blended with additives, the quantitative prediction of pure biomass and the biomass added additives should be based on the K2O–SiO2–Al2O3 ternary phase diagrams build by pure biomass ash properties and the biomass added Si/Al/K additives, respectively. Overall, FTs show ‘V’ shaped distributions with increased SiO2, Al2O3, and K2O in ash, respectively. Unlike SiO2 which exacerbates low-temperature silicate melt-induced slagging, soil can substitute for expensive kaolin served as additives during biomass combustion. The whole research provides useful guidelines for biomass selection, improvement, and slagging prevention during combustion.

A large quantity of waste gas from industrial processes can be used for steam and power generation. Thus, it is of great interest to define a strategy for these power generation systems to get improved performances and efficiency. Three detailed thermodynamic models of heat recovery and power generation from industrial waste gas specified as single-pressure, dual-pressure, and energy integration systems are presented; Meanwhile, impact factors such as steam parameters, pinch temperature difference, and fluctuation of waste gas source on power generating capacity and total site efficiency are comparable analyzed by adopting a thermodynamic analysis combined with pinch method. Also, a case study of energy integration which doubles the improving effect of power generation accompanied with considerable energy saving is performed on basis of fuel efficiency and exergy calculation. In particular, the hierarchical strategy of energy integration of the total site is proposed and exampled.

The improvement of braking systems for the high-speed train is driven by the demand for high & stable coefficient of friction (COF) as well as low wear at high speed. Given to the fading COF and severe wear of powder metallurgy (P/M) pad mated steel disk serving high-speed train in present, C/C–SiC ceramic materials are regarded as a strong candidate for braking disk due to the excellent strength, fracture toughness coupled with relatively low density. The fundamental understanding of the braking behavior at different braking speeds should be clarified for optimal application. In this work, P/M pads and C/C–SiC ceramic disk were prepared, braking tests with the initial braking speeds (IBS) of 15, 22, 30, 37, 46, 55, 59, 64, 69 m/s were conducted, and the surface development, friction & wear behavior were analysed. The COF vs. IBS curve shows a three-stage changing based on the turning points due to the contact patches continuously forming, growing and degrading: it went down and reached a low point with a value of 0.443 at 37 m/s, then increased gradually and reached the maximum 0.486 at 55 m/s, then little fell to 0.460 at 69 m/s. In the great scope of braking speeds, P/M pads mated C/C–SiC ceramic disk showed both high mean friction coefficient of 0.469 and high stability coefficient of 0.908, which are higher than the corresponding values of same P/M pads mated with typical steel disk (0.381 for COF and 0.895 for stability coefficient). Furthermore, at the highest speed tested, the wear rate of the pad mated with the ceramic disk is 0.147 cm3/MJ, far lower than that with steel mate: 0.338 cm3/MJ, showing desired properties for the high-speed train, owing to slight adhesion between ceramic disk and metal matrix of the pad.

Size-resolved composition of atmospheric aerosol particles during winter (19 December 2014 to 13 January 2015) in the San Joaquin Valley at Fresno and during summer (4 to 28 July 2015) in the Southern California Air Basin at Fontana were measured by aerosol mass spectrometer, Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, single particle soot photometer, and scanning electrical mobility sizer. The Fresno study had low-fog and high-fog winter conditions, and residential burning was a frequent contributor to evening emissions. Fireworks during Fourth of July celebrations characterized the start of the Fontana study; the remaining days were categorized as nonfirework days and were mostly affected by traffic emissions. Fresno had particle distributions with number mode diameters of 70–150nm, and Fontana had 30–50-nm diameters. The nonrefractory organic mass mode diameters were also larger at Fresno (250–380nm in dry mobility diameter) than at Fontana (130–150nm, 280nm in dry mobility diameter) as were refractory black carbon particles (Fresno: 80–180nm; Fontana: 80–100nm in dry volume equivalent diameter). The size dependence of organic contributions to particle mass indicated that condensation or other surface-limited processes contributed oxidized organic fractions to aerosol mass in Fontana but that volume-limited aqueous reactions produced organic mass on both low-fog and high-fog days in Fresno. Linear regression analysis of organic aerosol sources with size-resolved particle volume at different times of day also showed that residential burning-related particles increased from 70–160nm in the evening (18:00 to 23:59) to 150–260nm at night (00:00 to 05:59) on low-fog days.

Inorganic and organic coatings on black carbon (BC) particles can enhance light absorption and affect atmospheric lifetimes of BC-containing particles and thus have significant implications for climate. To study the physical and chemical characteristics of atmospheric BC and BC-associated coatings, a soot particle-aerosol mass spectrometer was deployed during the winter of 2014–2015 in Fresno, a city located in the San Joaquin Valley of California, to selectively analyze BC-containing particles. Comparing soot particle-aerosol mass spectrometer measurements to those from the collocated single-particle soot photometer (SP2) and high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometer, we found that 17% of total submicrometer aerosol mass was associated with BC-containing particles, suggesting that a majority of the fine particles in Fresno contained no BC. Most BC-containing particles appeared to be associated with residential wood burning and vehicular traffic. These particles typically had a bulk-average mass ratio of coating to BC (Rcoat/rBC) less than 2. However, during periods of persistent fog larger Rcoat/rBC values were observed, with the coatings primarily composed of secondary inorganic and organic components that likely resulted from aqueous-phase processing. Specifically, compared to periods with less fog, the BC coating increased in concentration and contained a larger fraction of nitrate and oxidized organic matter. The size distributions of BC and associated organic coating were generally centered around 300nm in vacuum aerodynamic diameter. However, during foggy periods BC had an additional peak at ~400nm and organics and nitrate displayed a prominent mode in the accumulation size range.

Metal matrix composites are now commonly used as braking pads for the train running over 250 km/h by virtue of a number of desirable properties. To develop a fundamental understanding of the stability of metallic composites at high-speed braking, four typical composite materials, with different Cu and Fe contents, were subjected to a series of high-speed emergency braking at a simulative running speed of 380 km/h and a braking inertia of 27 kg/m−2 and a normal pressure of 1.27 MPa in this paper. The results showed that the sample with higher Cu content displayed a fade COF and deteriorated wear, but the one with higher Fe content could maintain a stable COF and low wear rate. The tribological behaviour is associated with the relative rate of generation and consumption of the tribo-oxide film. For the sample with higher Cu content, the generation rate of tribo-oxide film was less than the consumption rate, and the COF fading and wear deterioration with the increasing braking times were attributed to the reduction in resistance to deform or to shear the asperities, which was thought to be caused by the degradation of near-surface layer due to the removal of protective tribo-oxide film. In contrast, for the sample with higher Fe content, the generation rate was approximately equal to the consumption rate, and a well-established tribo-oxide film on the surface was responsible for the stable friction level and low wear rates.

Adaptive optics is a real-time compensation technique using high speed support system for wavefront errors caused by atmospheric turbulence. However, the randomness and instantaneity of atmospheric changing introduce great difficulties to the design of adaptive optical systems. A large number of complex real-time operations lead to large delay, which is an insurmountable problem. To solve this problem, hardware operation and parallel processing strategy are proposed, and a high-speed adaptive optical control system based on DSP is developed. The hardware counter is used to check the system. The results show that the system can complete a closed loop control in 7.1ms, and improve the controlling bandwidth of the adaptive optical system. Using this system, the wavefront measurement and closed loop experiment are carried out, and obtain the good results.

The Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is becoming a popular way of screening gastrointestinal system diseases and cancer. However, the time-consuming process in inspecting WCE data limits its applications and increases the cost of examinations. This paper considers WCE-based gastric ulcer detection, in which the major challenge is to detect the lesions in a local region. We propose an approach named infinite curriculum learning, which generalizes curriculum learning to an infinite sampling space by approximately measuring the difficulty of each patch by its scale. This allows us to adapt our model from local patches to global images gradually, leading to a consistent accuracy gain. Experiments are performed on a large dataset with more than 3 million WCE images. Our approach achieves a binary classification accuracy of 87%, and is able to detect some lesions mis-annotated by the physicians. In a real-world application, our approach can reduce the workload of a physician by 90%-98% in gastric ulcer screening., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Copper and iron are the major ingredients in friction materials, among which Fe often been served as friction reinforcement in the past. But in our recent study, the coefficients of friction (COF) ...

Coal preheating method has demonstrated great potential to reduce NO x emissions. Interestingly, whether this method is suitable for all types of burner remains to be elucidated. Four types of burner with different air staging schemes were studied in the present experiments. With coal preheating method, numerous nitrogen (N) intermedias (HCN), soot and hydrocarbons (ΣC i H j ) were yielded in the preheating chamber. However, in oxygen-rich conditions the N-intermedias were easily converted to NO, and the most soot and hydrocarbons (ΣC i H j ) were oxidized before reducing the NO to N 2 . The type of burner and the way of air staging had a significant effect on NO emissions. Without air staging NO emissions even increased using a bad burner, and the NO emissions were almost unchanged as the speed of outer secondary air increased from 23 m/s to 118 m/s. Three fitting formulas were summarized based on a large number of experimental data. The close-coupled over fire air played a more important role when the speed of outer secondary air was lower or the volatile content of coal was lower. The residence time in the reducing zone was also a key to reduce NO emissions.

The shooting accuracy of cluster laser is an important indicator to evaluate the performance of ICF laser devices. By measuring the distribution of the X-ray generated from interaction between the third-harmonic beam and the target, the position information of the third-harmonic beam to the target can be obtained, along with the shooting accuracy. In the beam transmission process, the fundamental, second-harmonic beams and the third-harmonic beams approach to the target at the same time generating spurious X-ray. Based on the radiation fluid, the present paper is to assess the effect of the stray light on the performance of the shooting accuracy. The intensity distribution and power density of the fundamental, second-harmonic and third-harmonic beams at the target position were calculated for the SG-III laser device using SG-99 software. The characteristics of X-ray generated by the different beams radiation are simulated by one-dimensional radiation fluid program MULTI 1D. The results show that the power density of the fundamental, the second-harmonic and third-harmonic beams at the target position are, under the condition of typical shooting precision test (infused fundamental energy of 50J and pulse width is 200ps) 0.28GW / s / cm2 , 0.14GW / s / cm2 , 99GW / s / cm2 , respectively. The X-ray energy intensity radiated from the interaction between the third-harmonic beam and target is 104 times of that from the fundamental, second-harmonic beam. In the current optical system configuration conditions of SG-III laser device, the effects of the fundamental and second-harmonic beams on the target accuracy test can be ignored.

The purpose of this research was to study the braking behaviors of Cu-based composite pad under real operating conditions of high-speed train. A series of pad-on-disk braking tests was performed with the initial braking speed (IBS) from 80 to 380 km/h. Results showed that the coefficient of friction (COF) of the brake pad demonstrated a three-stage feature with the increase in IBS. It decreased from 0.395 to 0.358 with the increase in IBS from 80 to 200 km/h, then increased to 0.398 when IBS reached 320 km/h; and fell again to 0.379 at 380 km/h. Similarly, the pad also displayed three wear regimes as IBS increased, i.e., (1) mild wear (80–160 km/h), (2) moderate wear (200–250 km/h), and (3) severe wear (300–380 km/h). Surface morphologies and phase analyses indicate that the evolution of the COF mainly depends upon the state of friction film. The formation or completion of friction film regularly contributes to a lower COF and wear rate, while the destruction of friction film results in a higher COF and wear rate. Besides, the “lubricants” induced by high braking temperature are also responsible for the change in the COF. As IBS increased, the key wear mechanisms changed from abrasion, plowing, and oxidation to delamination at 250 km/h.

Copper matrix composites consisting of chromium (Cr) or ferrochrome (Cr-Fe) as strengthening elements and molybdenum disulfide as a lubricant had been sintered in nitrogen and hydrogen atmosphere, respectively. Their morphology and energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS) analysis showed that serious interaction occurred between MoS2 and Cr (or Cr-Fe) particles when the samples were sintered in hydrogen atmosphere. Chromium sulfide compound (Cr x S y ) was formed as a reaction product, which decreased the density and strength of the composites remarkably. This interaction was inhibited when the samples were sintered in nitrogen atmosphere; thus, the mechanical properties of the composites were improved.

In a communication network, automatic short message service (SMS) spammer detection is a big challenge for a telecommunication operator nowadays, especially with the development of the rich communication services (RCS). Three main problems exist in the areas of research and real practice. They are (1) the whole-volume content based SMS spam detection techniques cannot be easily used on the side of network due to the issue of user privacy, (2) traditional ways to filter the spam according to the combination of key words and sending frequency can be easily bypassed by adding the interference words, (3) Most of them result in a great deal of manual review after the automatic filtering due to a low precision rate. To make up the aforementioned gaps, we study the user behavior characteristics. A two-dimensional visualized result indicates that any combination of two user behavior attributes cannot distinguish the abnormal users from the whole set by splitting the 2-dimensional space. Thus, the integration of multiple user behavior attributes is exploited to train the classifier in a labeled set by machine learning algorithms, respectively, including decision tree, random forest, supported vector machine (SVM), logistic regression, and self-organized feature mapping (SOM). The performance comparison indicates that random forest is a good choice to balance the tradeoff of the precision rate and the recall rate, and in an acceptable time. The experimental result shows the proposed method without the knowledge of SMS content has a significant improvement in terms of precision rate and recall rate compared with the traditional method using the combination of key words and sending frequency used in most of existing networks.

FM-to-AM modulations are harmful to output characteristics of large-scale laser facility. In SG-III laser facility, some key techniques have been employed to suppress FM-to-AM modulations. Firstly, phase modulator was arranged at the end of fiber laser injection system to avoid GVD and PMD in the SM fiber system. Secondly, a fiber-based polarization rotated filter was proposed to suppress FM-to-AM modulations independently on each beam. Finally, less wave plates were employed and liquid crystal modulators were coated for decreasing weak etalon effect in preamplifier system. The results indicated that it can reduce the modulation depth less than 10% at a modulation frequency of 2.488GHz in SG-III laser facility.

Beam alignment is crucial to high-power laser facilities and is used to adjust the laser beams quickly and accurately to meet stringent requirements of pointing and centering. In this paper, a novel alignment method is presented, which employs data processing of the two-dimensional power spectral density (2D-PSD) for a near-field image and resolves the beam pointing error relative to the spatial filter pinhole directly. Combining this with a near-field fiducial mark, the operation of beam alignment is achieved. It is experimentally demonstrated that this scheme realizes a far-field alignment precision of approximately 3% of the pinhole size. This scheme adopts only one near-field camera to construct the alignment system, which provides a simple, efficient, and low-cost way to align lasers.

In this talk, we propose and demonstrate the process-oriented adaptive optics (AO) wavefront control method, for optimizing the beam quality in the multi-pass amplifiers. Different from the conventional target-oriented wavefront control approach, the novel method divides the aberration correction process into several steps, to optimize the wavefront quality in time during the courses of the beam's transport and amplification. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively prevent the beam quality from worsening and ensure the successful reality of multi-pass amplification, so it has obvious advantages both in efficiency and accuracy over the traditional target-oriented method.

We demonstrate a novel approach termed target-phase-locking that could improve the entire beam wavefront quality of a 500 TW Nd3+:phosphate glass laser facility. The thermal and static wavefront from front-end to target is corrected by using one deformable mirror that receives feedback from both the focal-spot sensor and wavefront sensor, and only the main laser of the laser system is employed in the correction process, with auxiliary calibration light no longer necessary. As a result, a static focal spot with full width at half maximum of 8.87 × 5.74 µm is achieved, the thermal wavefront induced by flash-lamp-pumped Nd3+:phosphate glass is compensated with PV from 3.54–0.43 µm, and a dynamic focal spot with intensity exceeding 1020 W cm−2 is precisely predicted at the target with such an approach.

Sarcomeric proteins are essential for the proper structural assembly and functioning of the sarcomere, the basic contractile unit in striated muscles. When mutations are present in the genes that encode for these proteins, it may lead to cardiac diseases, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), the leading cause of death in young athletes. Hundreds of mutations within the genes that encode sarcomeric proteins have been shown to cause HCM. The L29Q mutation in cardiac troponin C (cTnC) and the R502W mutation in cardiac myosin binding protein C (cMyBP-C) are two of these mutations. cTnC senses the cytosolic Ca2+ concentration and transduces this signal to allow for cross-bridging, leading to muscle contraction. cMyBP-C regulates muscle contractility by interacting with myosin and actin. How the L29Q and the R502W mutations, respectively, affect the cTnC and cMyBP-C and cause disease is unclear. To advance our knowledge of how these two mutations affect the cardiac proteins’ structures and functions, I first generated high resolution structures of the wild type (WT) and mutant regulatory domains of cTnC (cNTnC) using X-ray crystallography and then, determined the WT and R502W mutant structures of the C3 domain of cMyBP-C using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The WT cNTnC was discovered to have coordinating Cd2+ ions at both of its calcium-binding sites. This is true for the mutant cNTnC as well. In the WT cNTnC, the vestigial site (EF1) coordinated Cd2+ in a noncanonical ‘distorted’ octahedral geometry, while the functional calcium-binding site (EF2) coordinated Cd2+ in the canonical pentagonal bipyramidal geometry. A subtle structural change was observed in the region near the L29Q mutation, and it may play a role in the increased Ca2+ affinity of the mutant. The R502W mutation in cMyBP-C did not change the protein’s global structure. The dynamics and thermal stabilities of the protein were also not affected by the mutation, as shown by techniques such as amide 15N relaxation and circular dichroism spectroscopy. The mutation does, however, alter the surface charge on the C3 domain and, like other HCM-related mutations found within the same domain, may disrupt the protein’s interactions with other sarcomeric proteins, such as actin. The data acquired from this thesis project contributes to a better understanding of the structures of sarcomeric proteins and the pathophysiology of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

In the fast developing Mainland China, among the huge number of new construction project, green building constitute only a very small portion. This paper tries to figure out the factors that restrain the development of green building in Mainland China by carrying out surveys among construction professionals and university researchers. Fifteen barriers that may affect the development of green building negatively are identified from literature review, and factor analysis of the survey result extracts five independent principle factors behind these barriers: Techniques and Finance, Green Environment, Stakeholder Involvement, Motivation, and Management. The importance of management is especially emphasized by the survey result. Furthermore, a second survey is carried out two years later to monitor the change of importance of the five factors.

The feasibility of the closed-loop adaptive optic system based on laser far-field information was experimentally demonstrated, which can significantly increase the working efficiency of the multi-beamline high power solid laser facility. A stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm with mean-radius cost function was applied in the adaptive optics that was installed in one chosen beamline in the SG-III laser facility. The far-field diameter from a reference laser was corrected from about 275 to 100??m, very close to the ideal limit of 75??m. Multiple-wavefront correction can be performed with this far-field detection based adaptive optics system, and the experimental result validates the practicability of the proposed system in the multi-beamline high power solid laser facilities.

A novel method to amplify laser pulses in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) facilities is presented, in which twin pulses are employed to propagate along the amplifier in opposite directions. The resulting bidirectional propagation provides a substantially higher extraction efficiency of the amplifier than the conventional multipass architecture for an equal B limit, while keeping the laser fluence at a low level that is beneficial to system reliability and stability. It is shown that an extraction efficiency of ~61% is achievable under a laser fluence of 10 J cm−2 (1ω, one pulse) in an 18-slab amplifier with the bidirectional amplifying design (slab thickness: 4 cm, small signal gain coefficient: 0.0525 cm−1), while the extraction efficiency is only ~40% under a fluence of 13 J cm−2 (1ω) for the conventional multipass architecture.

In this paper, the cross relaxation time is proposed to combine the homogeneous and inhomogeneous broaden mechanism for broad bandwidth pulse amplification model. The corresponding velocity equation, which can describe the response of inverse population on upper and low energy level of gain media to different frequency of pulse, is also put forward. The gain saturation and energy relaxation effect are also included in the velocity equation. Code named CPAP has been developed to simulate the amplifying process of broad bandwidth pulse in multi-pass laser system. The amplifying capability of multi-pass laser system is evaluated and gain narrowing and temporal shape distortion are also investigated when bandwidth of pulse and cross relaxation time of gain media are different. Results can benefit the design of high-energy PW laser system in LFRC, CAEP.