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With growing demands for higher image quality in the fields of film, video post-production, image restoration, art creation, and computer vision, color transfer between images has become an important research area. Based on previous research on color transfer techniques, this paper proposes a color transfer method for images based on saliency features, aiming at automatic color migration between them. Transferring colors based on the saliency features of the input image can avoid the problem of unnatural color of the output image due to mixing of colors from different regions. First, the local variances of both the original and reference images are calculated, serving as a temporary saliency feature map. This is followed by obtaining a refined saliency feature map after undergoing processes such as minimization filtering, binarization, expansion, and iteration. Subsequently, color is transferred between the saliency and non-saliency regions of the original and reference images. To avoid the generation of pseudo-contours, the image is then refined using base projection. Finally, an output image is obtained by fusing the base-projected image with the outcome from Reinhard's method, ensuring the output retains its naturalness and consistency. We conducted experiments with different types of images such as natural landscapes, buildings, and art paintings. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper not only retains the intricacies of the original image but also offers fuller and more realistic color renditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pollen allergy is a common disease in the department of allergy, and its incidence is increasing year by year, seriously affecting human health. As an important task in palynology, pollen identification is widely used in several fields, such as pollen allergy meteorological index forecasting. Despite its wide range of applications, pollen identification is still, in most cases, carried out manually by professionals, and the whole procedure is tedious and time-consuming. In the last few years, the convolutional neural network based on deep learning has demonstrated excellent performance in visual tasks, such as image recognition. Applying a deep learning solution for recognizing the pollen grains can enhance the pollen identification accuracy and reduce human participation time. In this study, we designed a pollen recognition model on the base of DenseNet combined with an improved dual attention module, which can effectively enhance the pollen identification accuracy by remodeling features in two dimensions: space and channel. Our attention module can be easily integrated into other CNNs and Vision Transformers, and both have a different magnitude of performance improvement. In addition to that, our method has better recognition performance than other most SOTA attention methods. During the experiment, we used a self-built pollen dataset and four public datasets. The proposed method can achieve up to 96.1 % classification accuracy, 94.9 % recall, 95.2 % precision, and 95.6 % F1 score on the self-built electron-microscopic pollen dataset. In addition, the same 1–2% performance improvement can be obtained on the public datasets and all experiments were trained from scratch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the development of media equipment, color images have been extensively applied in various domains. However, people with dichromatic or anomalous trichromatic vision have difficulty discriminating the colors that common trichromatic vision would distinguish. To improve image visibility for dichromats, a lightness modification method considering the chromaticity loss was proposed in this study. First, the chromaticity loss was defined for dichromats. Subsequently, an objective function including the chromaticity loss was constructed. To focus on color pairs with a large chromaticity loss, a weight was introduced into the objective function. The objective function was then minimized to obtain output images. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified through experiments, which indicated that the proposed method could maintain naturalness for normal trichromats and improve recognition for dichromats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining genomic stability is a prerequisite for proliferating NPCs to ensure genetic fidelity. Though histone arginine methylation has been shown to play important roles in safeguarding genomic stability, the underlying mechanism during brain development is not fully understood. Protein arginine N-methyltransferase 5 (PRMT5) is a type II protein arginine methyltransferase that plays a role in transcriptional regulation. Here, we identify PRMT5 as a key regulator of DNA repair in response to double-strand breaks (DSBs) during NPC proliferation. Prmt5F/F; Emx1-Cre (cKO-Emx1) mice show a distinctive microcephaly phenotype, with partial loss of the dorsal medial cerebral cortex and complete loss of the corpus callosum and hippocampus. This phenotype is resulted from DSBs accumulation in the medial dorsal cortex followed by cell apoptosis. Both RNA sequencing and in vitro DNA repair analyses reveal that PRMT5 is required for DNA homologous recombination (HR) repair. PRMT5 specifically catalyzes H3R2me2s in proliferating NPCs in the developing mouse brain to enhance HR-related gene expression during DNA repair. Finally, overexpression of BRCA1 significantly rescues DSBs accumulation and cell apoptosis in PRMT5-deficient NSCs. Taken together, our results show that PRMT5 maintains genomic stability by regulating histone arginine methylation in proliferating NPCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this note, we present an L2 extension approach to the effectiveness result of Lp strong openness property of multiplier ideal sheaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pollen identification is a sub-discipline of Palynology, which has broad applications in several fields such as allergy control, paleoclimate reconstruction, criminal investigation, and petroleum exploration. Among these, pollen allergy is a common and frequent disease worldwide. Accurate and rapid identification of pollen species under the electron microscope help medical staff in pollen forecast and interrupt the natural course of pollen allergy. The current pollen species identification needs to rely on professional researchers to identify pollen particles in pictures manually, and this time-consuming and laborious way cannot meet the requirements of pollen forecasting. Recently, the self-attention based Transformer has attracted considerable attention in vision tasks, such as image classification. However, pure self-attention lacks local operations on pixels and requires large-scale dataset pretraining to achieve comparable performance to convolutional neural networks (CNN). In this study, we propose a new Vision Transformer pipeline for image classification. First, we design a FeatureMap-to-Token (F2T) module to perform token embedding on the input image. A global self-attention operation is performed on the basis of tokens with local information, and the hierarchical design of CNN is applied to the Vision Transformer, combining local and global strengths in multiscale spaces. Second, we use a distillation strategy to learn the feature representation in the output space of the teacher network to further learn the inductive bias in the CNN to improve the recognition accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves CNN-equivalent performance under the same conditions after being trained from scratch on the electron-microscopic pollen dataset. It also requires less model parameters and training time. Code for the model is available at https://github.com/dkbshuai/PyTorch-Our-S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this note, we present an L2 extension approach to the effectiveness result of strong openness property of multiplier ideal sheaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vibrational, mechanical, electronic, and optical properties of the ε-O8 phase in the pressure range of 11.4–70 GPa were studied by the first-principle calculation method. The phonon dispersion curves have a tiny virtual frequency at 60 GPa, which indicates that ε-O8 is dynamically unstable at 60 GPa. However, the 3-BM EOS demonstrates that the unit cell is stable up to 70 GPa. It has been shown that ε-O8 remains ductile within the whole applied pressure range. Concurrently, we calculated the variation of the band gap of ε-O8 in the pressure range of 11.4–70 GPa. The results show that the band gap of ε-O8 decreases with increasing pressure. Notably, the band gap disappears within the range of 50–60 GPa, which reveals that the metallic phase transition occurs within this pressure range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superhard material BC2N compound has attracted much attention because of its high hardness and stability. Here, we take Pmm2-BC2N as an example; the phonon dispersion, electronic structure, and mechanical properties of Pmm2-BC2N crystal structure are studied theoretically by using first-principles calculation method. The results show that it is dynamically and mechanically stable. The reason of forming strong covalent bonds between B, C, and N atomic orbitals is analyzed by means of state density. The shear modulus, bulk modulus, Young's modulus, and Poisson's ratio are calculated. The results show that the shear modulus is larger than that of the bulk modulus, and it is a brittle material. In addition, we calculated the Vickers hardness of Pmm2-BC2N is 74.9GPa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For images with insufficient visibility, image processing is required. Retinex theory is often implemented for image contrast enhancement for images with this characteristic. This paper proposes a multi-scale retinex-based contrast enhancement method using the illumination component; this method could preserve the naturalness of color images. In the proposed method, illumination was first modified using an illumination modification factor; second, the image was enhanced via adaptive gamma correction. Finally, through the combination of the illumination components of the input image and the adaptive gamma correction image, we ensured the visibility and the naturalness of the output image. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compared it with existing contrast enhancement methods. For the experiments, we employed discrete entropy, lightness order error, and mean chrominance error to perform the numerical evaluation. The results indicated that our method was better than a majority of existing methods. Moreover, with regard to the visual evaluation, the naturalness of the image obtained via the proposed method was superior to that of images obtained using other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sargassum polycystum C. Agardh, a brown alga that is widely distributed in tropical areas, has significant economic value by virtue of its use as food, traditional medicine, animal fodder, and chemical products in Asian countries. In order to explore suitable conditions for the aquaculture of this alga, we used 9-10 cm long branches of S. polycystum to assess the effects of various environmental factors, including temperature, salinity, and irradiance upon the relative growth rate (RGR), photosynthetic pigment content, and chlorophyll fluorescence characteristics of this species. Data showed that S. polycystum exhibited a relatively broad tolerance to various environmental conditions, and grew well in different conditions of temperature, salinity, and irradiance, ranging from 15 to 25 °C, 20-40 PSU, and 10-80 μmol photons·m−2·s−1. The maximum RGR of S. polycystum occurred at 23 °C, 32 PSU, and 20-80 μmol photons·m−2·s−1 (P < 0.05). Temperature had a significant effect (P < 0.05) upon RGR and the chlorophyll fluorescence characteristics of S. polycystum, and lower temperature (10 °C) led to rapid reductions in the maximal photochemical quantum yield of photosystem II (Fv/Fm) and non-photochemical quenching (NPQ) values. Salinity exhibited a relatively weak effect upon the growth of S. polycystum, and the plant was able to survive at salinities from 16 to 40 PSU; during a two-week cultivation period, significant differences in RGR were not observed among different salinity conditions until 2 weeks of cultivation. Chlorophyll a and carotenoid content of S. polycystum decreased as irradiance increased (P < 0.05), and photo-inhibition occurred under higher levels of irradiance (> 80 μmol photons·m−2·s−1). These physiological data provide valuable data related to the successful cultivation of S. polycystum under controlled conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a universal system control strategy for voltage source converter (VSC) based high voltage direct current (HVDC) systems. The framework of the designed control strategy consists of five layer structures considering the topology and control characteristics of the VSC-HVDC system. The control commands sent from the topmost layer can be transmitted to the next layer based on the existing communication system. When the commands are sent to each substation, the following transmission of commands between the four lower layers are realized using the internal communication system while ignoring the communication delay. This hierarchical control strategy can be easily applied to any VSC-HVDC system with any topology. Furthermore, an integrated controller for each converter is designed and implemented considering all of the possible operating states. The modular-designed integrated controller makes it quite easy to extend its operating states if necessary, and it is available for any kind of VSC. A detailed model of a VSC-HVDC system containing a DC hub is built in the PSCAD/EMTDC environment. Simulation results based on three operating conditions (the start-up process, the voltage margin control method and the master-slave control method) demonstrate the flexibility and validity of the proposed control strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two aerobic, Gram-stain positive actinobacterial strains with nematicidal activity, designated HA11164 and HA12591, were isolated from mangrove sediments in Hainan, China. Phylogenetic analysis based on the 16S rRNA gene sequences indicated that strains HA11164 and HA12591 belong to the genus Pseudonocardia and are closely related to Pseudonocardia carboxydivorans (with the similarities of 98.30 and 98.24 %, respectively), Pseudonocardia alni (98.23 and 98.16 %, respectively) and Pseudonocardia antimicrobica (98.10 and 98.03 %, respectively). The major polar lipids of the strain HA11164, as a representative strain of the two strains, were found to consist of phosphatidylmethylethanolamine, phosphatidylglycerol, diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylinositol, five unidentified glycolipids and four unidentified polar lipids. The predominant menaquinone of strain HA11164 was identified as MK-8 (H), and the major fatty acids were identified as iso-C, C ω10, C and C ω9. The G+C content of strain HA11164 was determined to be 74.9 mol%. The DNA-DNA relatedness values between strains HA11164 and P. alni, Pseudonocardia tropica, Pseudonocardia antarctica, P. carboxydivorans and Pseudonocardia parietis were 58.3, 56.2, 50.0, 57.1 and 46.0 %, respectively. Based on the results of this polyphasic study, strains HA11164 and HA12591 are considered to represent a novel species of the genus Pseudonocardia, for which the name Pseudonocardia nematodicida sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is HA11164 (=CGMCC 4.7118 = DSM 45940). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two Gram-positive actinobacterial strains, designated HA11166 and HA12420, were isolated from mangrove sediments in Hainan, China. The bacterial cells grew with 0-9 % (w/v) NaCl, at 15-40 °C and pH 5.0-10.0, with the optimum growth at 1 % NaCl, 30-37 °C and pH 7.0. The organisms had a range of chemical and morphological properties consistent with their classification in the genus Nocardiopsis. Phylogenetic analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequences indicated that strains HA11166 and HA12420 can be affiliated to the genus Nocardiopsis and most closely related to Nocardiopsis trehalosi VKM Ac-942 (with the similarity of 97.2 and 97.5 %, respectively). The value of DNA-DNA relatedness between type strain HA11166, selected as the representative strain, and N. trehalosi VKM Ac-942 was 38.8 %. The DNA G+C content of strain HA11166 was 73.7 %. On the basis of these phenotypic and genotypic data, strains HA11166 and HA12420 are proposed to represent a novel species of the genus Nocardiopsis, for which the name Nocardiopsis mangrovei sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is HA11166 (=CGMCC 4.7119=DSM 46665). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An object's color depends on its reflectance and illumination, and dichromats cannot distinguish specific color pairs. It is considered that there is an appropriate illumination under which a dichromat can distinguish confusing color pairs. In this study, a fundamental investigation of an illumination transformation to assist dichromats is carried out. Because the appropriate illumination depends on the object, we propose a search algorithm for the optimum light source spectrum for an object. In experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is examined using digital images and an sRGB display. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a color-to-gray conversion, which only considers lightness components, difference of colors are not appropriately reflected in monochrome images. Gooch et al. have proposed a color removal method that considers the differences of colors. Although the method can obtain good results in many cases, there is room for improvement. In this paper, a new color removal method that introduces a weight to Gooch's algorithm is proposed. In the proposed method, for combinations of colors of each pixel in an input image, weights are determined by distance in color space. In the proposed method, unimportant color combinations are not considered by weight and color information in an input image is appropriately reflected in a monochrome image. The validity of the proposed method is shown by experiments using some images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents anode shift method to find the optimal distribution of nodes in single-layer reticulated shells. The optimization process searches for the minimum strain energy configuration and this leads to reduced sensitivity in initial imperfections. Strain energy sensitivity numbers are derived for free shift and restricted shift where nodes can move freely in the 3D space or have to move within a predefined surface respectively. Numerical examples demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach. It was found that optimized structures achieve higher ultimate load and are less sensitive to imperfections than the initial structure. The configuration of the final structure is closely related to factors like the initial structural configuration, spatial conditions, etc. Based on different initial conditions, architects can be provided with diverse reasonable structures. Furthermore, by amending the defined shapes and nodal distributions, it is possible to improve the mechanical behavior of the structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two gram-positive, aerobic, spore-forming, rod-shaped bacteria, designated HB09003 and HB12160, were isolated from seawater and sediment in the northern South China Sea, respectively. Cells were found to be motile by means of peritrichous flagella. The strains were found to grow with 0-15 % (w/v) NaCl, at 10-45 °C and pH 5.0-10.7, with an optimum of 3 % NaCl, 28 °C and pH 8.5, respectively. The predominant isoprenoid quinone of strain HB09003, selected as the representative strain, was identified as MK-7. This strain was found to possess anteiso-C15:0, iso-C15:0, anteiso-C17:0 and C16:0 as the major fatty acids. The G+C contents of strain HB09003 and HB12160 were determined to be 34.1 and 34.3 mol%, respectively. Analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequences of the two strains showed an affiliation with the genus Gracilibacillus, with Gracilibacillus kekensis CGMCC 1.10681 (similarity of 97.4, 98.0 %, respectively) and Gracilibacillus ureilyticus CGMCC 1.7727 (similarity of 97.1, 97.8 %, respectively) as their closest relatives. The DNA-DNA hybridization values between strain HB09003 and the two type strains were 42.2 and 54.1 %, respectively. On the basis of phenotypic and genotypic data, strain HB09003 and HB12160 are proposed to represent a novel species of the genus Gracilibacillus, for which the name Gracilibacillus marinus sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is HB09003 (=CGMCC 1.10343 = DSM 23372). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between glutathione S-transferase T1 (GSTT1) null/presence gene polymorphism and the risk of lung cancer from the published reports are still conflicting. This study was conducted to evaluate the relationship between GSTT1 null/presence gene polymorphism and the risk of lung cancer using meta-analysis method. The association studies were identified from PubMed, and Cochrane Library on July 1, 2012, and eligible investigations were included and synthesized using meta-analysis method. 51 reports were recruited into this meta-analysis for the association of null genotype of GSTT1 with lung cancer susceptibility, consisting of 15,140 patients with lung cancer and 16,662 controls. There was a marked association between GSTT1 null genotype and lung cancer risk in overall populations (OR = 1.15, 95 % CI 1.04-1.27, P = 0.007). Furthermore, GSTT1 null genotype was associated with the lung cancer risk in Asians (OR = 1.47, 95 % CI 1.23-1.76, P < 0.0001). However, GSTT1 null genotype was not associated with the risk of lung cancer in Caucasians, Brazilian population and Africans. In conclusion, GSTT1 null genotype is associated with the lung cancer in overall populations and in Asians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conclusions of the published reports on the relationship between glutathione S-transferase P1 (GSTP1) A/G gene polymorphism and the histological types of lung cancer are still debated. GSTP1 is one of the important mutant sites reported at present. This meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the association between GSTP1 and histological types of lung cancer. The association investigations were identified from PubMed and Cochrane Library, and eligible studies were included and synthesized using meta-analysis method. Seventeen reports were included into this meta-analysis for the association of GSTP1 A/G gene polymorphism and histological types of lung cancer. The G allele and GG genotype were not associated with the susceptibility of risk of squamous cell carcinomas, adenocarcinomas, small cell carcinoma, non-small cell carcinoma or large cell carcinoma. However, in the sub-group analysis, there was an association between G allele/GG genotype with the risk of squamous cell carcinomas in East-Asians and GG genotype was associated with the risk of small cell carcinoma in Caucasians. In conclusion, GSTP1 A/G gene polymorphism is not associated with the susceptibility of squamous cell carcinomas, adenocarcinomas, small cell carcinoma, non-small cell carcinoma or large cell carcinoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim:Galectin-3 (Gal-3) is a member of the carbohydrate-binding protein family that contributes to neoplastic transformation, tumor survival, angiogenesis, and metastasis. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of Gal-3 in human tongue cancer progression.Methods:Human tongue cancer cell lines (SCC-4 and CAL27) were transfected with a small-interfering RNA against Gal-3 (Gal-3-siRNA). The migration and invasion of the cells were examined using a scratch assay and BD BioCoat Matrigel Invasion Chamber, respectively. The mRNA and protein levels of β-catenin, Akt/pAkt, GSK-3β/pGSK-3β, MMP-9 in the cells were measured using RT-PCR and Western blotting, respectively.Results:Transient silencing of Gal-3 gene for 48 h significantly suppressed the migration and invasion of both SCC-4 and CAL27 cells. Silencing of Gal-3 gene significantly decreased the protein level of β-catenin, leaving the mRNA level of β-catenin unaffected. Furthermore, silencing Gal-3 gene significantly decreased the levels of phosphorylated Akt and GSK-3β, and suppressed the mRNA and protein levels of MMP-9 in the cells.Conclusion:Our data suggest that Gal-3 mediates the migration and invasion of tongue cancer cells in vitro via regulating the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway and Akt phosphorylation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conclusions of the published reports on the relationship between glutathione S-transferase P1 (GSTP1) gene polymorphism and the risk of lung cancer are still debated. GSTP1 is one of the important mutant sites reported at present. This meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the association between GSTP1 and the risk of lung cancer. The association investigations were identified from PubMed and Cochrane Library, and eligible studies were included and synthesized using meta-analysis method. Forty-four reports were included into this meta-analysis for the association of GSTP1 A/G gene polymorphism and lung cancer susceptibility, consisting of 12,363 patients with lung cancer and 13,948 controls. The association between GSTPI G allele and lung cancer risk was found in this meta-analysis (OR 1.08, 95 % CI 1.02-1.15, P = 0.01). However, the GG genotype and AA genotype were not associated with the susceptibility of lung cancer. Furthermore, there was no association between GSTP1 A/G gene polymorphism and the risk of lung cancer in Caucasians, and East-Asians. In conclusion, GSTP1 G allele is associated with the lung cancer susceptibility. However, more studies on the relationship between GSTP1 A/G gene polymorphism and the risk of lung cancer should be performed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cytochrome P450c17 (CYP17, 17a-hydroxylase/17,20-lyase) is a critical enzyme in the production of androgens and estrogens in vertebrates. A 2,469 bp full length cDNA of P450c17-I ( CYP17A1) has been isolated from the ovary of half-smooth tongue sole, Cynoglossus semilaevis which encodes 509 amino acids. Additionally, a relatively shorter cDNA (1,742 bp), a likely result of polyadenylation, was also found. The putative P450c17-I enzyme shares high sequence identity with that of the fathead minnow (73%), zebrafish (71%), the Japanese eel (70%), catfish (70%), tilapia (79%), three-spined stickleback (81%), medaka (79%), dogfish (60%), chicken (65%), rat (47%), and human (49%). Semi-quantitative RT-PCR analysis of spatial expression showed the enzyme was predominantly expressed in the ovaries and the brain. P450c17-I was also detected in the stomach, intestine, gill, spleen, kidney, and head kidney, albeit weakly. Further examination of temporal expression pattern of P450c17-I in ovary and brain revealed developmental stage-dependency. In addition to this our data on T and E2 levels further endorse the critical role of P450c17-I during shift in steroidogenesis. Based on the present study we indicate an important role for P450c17-I during ovarian development. However, further studies are needed at transcriptional regulation level for deeper insights into the physiological functions of P450c17-I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cytochrome P450 aromatase, which is encoded by the CYP19a gene, converts androgens to estradiol. Considerable evidence suggests that estrogens play an important role in fish reproductive process. Therefore CYP19a is an excellent candidate gene for reproductive traits. Variants in the promoter of the CYP19a gene might also be involved in the control of aromatase expression and affect regulatory mechanism linking cholesterol metabolism to the synthesis of sex steroids. In this study, nine single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were detected with polymerase chain reaction-single stranded conformational polymorphism (PCR-SSCP), namely A-680G, G-672A, AGTAGT-649 inserting or deleting, T-623C, C-410A, T7-454A, T-402C, TTTCCAGACTGA-345 inserting or deleting, and G-297C. Nine SNPs within the promoter of the CYP19a gene were tested for association with four reproductive traits [serum testosterone (T), serum 17β-estradiol (E2), hepatosomatic index (HSI), and gonadosomatic index (GSI)] in a population of 50 female Japanese flounder individuals. A locus, P3 (TTTCCAGACTGA-345 inserting or deleting, G-297C), was significantly associated with 17β-estradiol (E2) level ( P < 0.05) in female Japanese flounder. In addition, there was significant association between one diplotype based on nine SNPs and reproductive trait. The genetic effect for E2 level of diplotype D3 was significantly higher than those of other diplotypes ( P < 0.05). Results indicate that these genetic effects of those variants on E2 level may help to explain CYP19a gene status in the reproductive endocrinology of Japanese flounder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  This paper emphasizes the importance of a fast and reliable tool for design parametric studies. Three methods that have been used in studying the shock phenomena in hard disk drives (HDD) are discussed briefly. A more efficient (i.e. faster and reasonably accurate) method is proposed. This new method uses state-space formulation to model the structural components of the HDD and quasi-static concept to model the non-linearity of the air bearing. The structural and the air bearing response, and their coupled interaction are evaluated simultaneously. The computation time and the accuracy of the proposed method are compared against two existing methods: the full finite element model and CML’s HDD dynamics event simulator. The proposed method is found to be much faster with reasonably good accuracy. Experimental shock tests also show that the method is reliable in predicting the shock tolerance of the HDD. A procedure on how to do parametric study with this method is proposed and the effect of overmold and voice coil stiffness on the shock tolerance is studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By means of Riccati transformation technique, we establish some new oscillation criteria for the second-order nonlinear delay dynamic equations (p(t)(xΔ(t))γ)Δ + q(t) f (x(τ(t))) = 0 on a time scale T, here γ ≥ 1 is a quotient of odd positive integers with p and q real-valued positive rd-continuous functions defined on T. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of isothermal quenching process of low-alloy and medium carbon (LAMC) CrMnSi cast steel on the impact toughness was investigated. The microstructure and mechanical property of LAMC CrMnSi cast steel were analyzed by the laser optical modulator, the scanning electron microscopy, the energy dispersive spectrometer, the hardness and impact tests. The experimental results show that the dual phases of bainite and residual austenite can be obtained by the severity isothermal quenching, the fractographies of specimens change from quasicleavage to dimple at 310 °C for 60 min, the impact toughness for specimens at the room temperature isothermally achieves 130 J/cm2, meantime and its hardness is more than 45 (HRC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the oscillation criteria for the solutions of the nonlinear differential equations of neutral type of the forms: and are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to investigate the impact of timing interval to start AED withdraw (TIW) after surgery on the seizure outcome in non-neoplastic drug resistant epilepsy (DRE). TIW were divided into three groups (respectively,<1 year, 1-<2 years, and ≥2 years). The seizure outcome at the different time points after starting AED withdrawal were compared among three groups. Other factors that related to seizure recurrence and TIW were included into the multiple analysis to investigate the predictors of seizure-free. Altogether, 205 patients were involved in the study. 102 individuals (50%) had seizure recurrence and 127 (62%) had seizure-free at the final follow up. 115 of them have attempted AED reduction and had not seizure recurrence before AED reduction. The rate of seizure-free had no significant difference among people with different TIW. Multiple analysis indicated that temporal surgery is a favorable predictor of seizure-free at the first year after starting AED withdrawal, and preoperative secondary generalized seizures is an unfavorable predictor of seizure-free at the final follow up. In patients with non-neoplastic DRE, TIW is not the mainly influence factor on seizure outcome, however, preoperative secondary generalized seizures and extra-temporal surgery are negatively associated with seizure-free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]