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Background: Tibetan pigs have exhibited unique characteristics from low‐altitudes pigs and adapted well to the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau. Objectives: The current study was undertaken to investigate the hypoxic adaptation of heart in Tibetan pigs. Methods: The hearts of Tibetan pigs and Landrace pigs raised at high or low altitudes were compared using 3D casting technology, scanning electron microscopy and real‐time quantitative PCR (qRT‐PCR). Results: We found that the ratio of the major axis to the minor axis and the density of the heart were significantly higher in Tibetan pigs than in Landrace pigs (p < 0.05). Tibetan pigs had larger diameters and higher densities of arterioles than Landrace pigs (p < 0.05), and these features have a similar variation with the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). The cardiac expression levels of hypoxia‐inducible factor‐1α (HIF‐1α) and endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) were significantly higher in pigs reared at high altitudes than in those reared at low altitudes (p < 0.05). In contrast, Egl nine homolog 1 (EGLN1) had the opposite trend with respect to HIF‐1α and eNOS and was related to red blood cell (RBC) counts. Notably, the expressions of erythropoietin (EPO) and endothelial PAS domain‐containing protein 1 (EPAS1) were significantly higher in Landrace pigs kept at high altitudes than in the others (p < 0.05) and were associated with haemoglobin. Conclusions: These findings show that the regulation of the heart function of Tibetan pigs in a hypoxic environment is manifested at various levels to ensure the circulation of blood under extreme environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land subsidence can be observed with time-series of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) data. However, existing approaches only reveal subsidence signals that are multi-scale mixed, which is not conducive to the systematic analysis of subsidence of different mechanisms. A deformation signal decomposition (DSD) method based on spectral analysis is used to decompose the deformation extracted by time-series InSAR into three classes of deformation signals. They refer to large-scale deformation related to geological settings, medium-scale deformation caused more by group excavation, and small-scale deformation along linear infrastructures. TerraSAR-X datasets for Shanghai spanning April 2013 to September 2020, and Sentinel-1A datasets spanning January 2016 to September 2020 are used in this study. The results were cross-verified between the TerraSAR-X and Sentinel-1A datasets, and validated against levelling measurements. Subsidence signals caused by different mechanisms were automatically decomposed, which facilitates a systematic analysis for targeted diagnosis of land subsidence signals. A detailed analysis was conducted jointly at three scales of surface displacement, geological conditions, major construction activities, and subsidence mechanisms. It indicated that construction activities were the leading cause of land subsidence, and suggests that local authorities that wish to mitigate surface subsidence may benefit from primarily considering this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building change detection (BCD) plays a vital role in city planning and development, ensuring the timely detection of urban changes near metro lines. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has the advantage of providing continuous image time series with all-weather and all-time capabilities for earth observation compared with optical remote sensors. Deep learning algorithms have extensively been applied for BCD to realize the automatic detection of building changes. However, existing deep learning-based BCD methods with SAR images suffer limited accuracy due to the speckle noise effect and insufficient feature extraction. In this paper, an attention-guided dual-branch fusion network (ADF-Net) is proposed for urban BCD to address this limitation. Specifically, high-resolution SAR images collected by TerraSAR-X have been utilized to detect building changes near metro line 8 in Shanghai with the ADF-Net model. In particular, a dual-branch structure is employed in ADF-Net to extract heterogeneous features from radiometrically calibrated TerraSAR-X images and log ratio images (i.e., difference images (DIs) in dB scale). In addition, the attention-guided cross-layer addition (ACLA) blocks are used to precisely locate the features of changed areas with the transformer-based attention mechanism, and the global attention mechanism with the residual unit (GAM-RU) blocks is introduced to enhance the representation learning capabilities and solve the problems of gradient fading. The effectiveness of ADF-Net is verified using evaluation metrics. The results demonstrate that ADF-Net generates better building change maps than other methods, including U-Net, FC-EF, SNUNet-CD, A2Net, DMINet, USFFCNet, EATDer, and DRPNet. As a result, some building area changes near metro line 8 in Shanghai have been accurately detected by ADF-Net. Furthermore, the prediction results are consistent with the changes derived from high-resolution optical remote sensing images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriate shielding methods can reduce the lightning induced voltage and current of cables. In this article, different lightning surge currents (8/20 and 5/320 μs) are coupled to the tested multi-core cable with single shielding layer and double shielding layers. The shielding effectiveness (SE) on the lightning surge current is compared for different cable shielding methods. The experimental results show that the cable induced current is effectively reduced when the shielding layer, the shielding spare core wire or the metal tube are grounded at two ends. A better shielding effect for the cable with double shielding layers is achieved by grounding both ends of the outer shielding layer and one end of the inner shielding layer, reducing the induced current to about 5% when the shielding layer is not grounded. Moreover, the SE of the spare core wire, used as the shielding wire in the multi-core cable, is better than that of the external shielding wire of the cable. The SE of the metal tube increases more and more slowly with the increase of the tube coverage percentage. Furthermore, the descending order of the SE of shielding methods involved here are grounding both ends of double shielding layers, grounding both ends of single shielding layer, spare core wire shielding and metal tube shielding. Finally, some engineering recommendations are proposed through the comparison between the shielding methods in this article and relevant works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vertical–horizontal curtain system (VH curtain) is sometimes utilized in foundation pit dewatering under complex hydrogeological conditions. However, the working mechanism of this system when the horizontal curtain is semi-permeable and cannot completely cut off the bottom aquifer remains unknown. A transparent soil physical model test was performed to reveal the water control mechanism of the VH curtain system with a semi-permeable horizontal curtain. A multi-point inert tracer with a high-speed camera was used to photograph the seepage process. The seepage mode was revealed via a model test. With the Shanghai deep tunnel project as background, a numerical simulation was performed to understand the utilization of the VH curtain. The influence of horizontal curtain position, horizontal curtain thickness, horizontal curtain hydraulic conductivity, and VH curtain combination form on the seepage path around the foundation pit and on the drawdown of water level inside and outside the pit were studied. Results provide a basis for the engineering application of the VH curtain pumping well system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]