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Reasonable test scenarios and objective evaluation methods can rapidly promote the development of autonomous vehicle technology. A new quantitative evaluation method for the comprehensive performance of autonomous vehicle is proposed in this paper. First, different test environments and test contents are combined to obtain vehicle test scenarios of different complexity. Then, the evaluation index system of autonomous vehicle is divided into target layer, total index layer, and index layer. After that, the weights of the index layer are determined by the objective weight method of Criteria Importance though Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method, and the total weights of index layer are determined by the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) of subjective weight method. Finally, the improved grey relational theory method is used to quantitatively evaluate autonomous vehicles from four aspects: driving safety, riding comfort, intelligence, and efficiency. The quantitative evaluation of autonomous vehicles can reduce the influence of abnormal data on the correlation degree and increase the robustness of the evaluation algorithm. The evaluation results of the proposed method and the traditional fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method are compared by simulation experiment and evaluation. The results show that the proposed evaluation method in this paper is more objective and reasonable, which can quantitatively evaluate the comprehensive performance of autonomous vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims: Selection effect (SE) and complementarity effect (CE) are often considered as two key indicators to mediate the positive diversity-productivity relationship in the maize-legume intercropping system, as intercropping generally enables crops to use the available resources more efficiently than monoculture. Yet, it is unclear whether soil moisture drives the SE and CE transformation, plant-plant interaction, and accordingly affect the productivity. Methods: A two-year field experiment was conducted to explore the impacts of soil water status (with and without plastic mulching) on interspecific interaction and productivity and its key mechanism in the maize-faba bean intercropping system. Results: Low soil moisture reduced the net effect (NE) and land equivalent ratio (LER) with evident yield loss (NE < 0 and LER = 1.05), whereas the improved soil moisture reversed this trend and resulted in overyielding (NE > 0 and LER = 1.13). Regardless of soil moisture, faba bean was the dominant species and maize was the inferior one. Low soil moisture promoted the contribution of SE to productivity (P < 0.05). In contrast, high moisture turned to lower the competition intensity of faba bean against maize and accordingly promote the transformation of biodiversity effect from SE to CE. The main mechanism was that the water competition imposed by faba bean strips on maize ones decreased the NE through reducing photosynthetic rate and water use efficiency of maize. Conclusion: The adaptive transitions of interspecific relationship and the biodiversity effect were driven by soil water availability. This novel phenomenon should be emphasized in the crop diversity management of intercropping system in the rainfed region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Approximately 5% of differentiated thyroid cancers lose the ability to uptake iodine, leading to limited treatment options and poor prognosis due to invasion and distant metastasis. PSMA imaging probes have been proposed as a potential diagnostic and therapeutic tool for iodine-refractory thyroid cancer. However, there are limited reports and significant heterogeneity in patient selection, warranting further exploration of the application value of PSMA in thyroid cancer. Methods: We performed Western Blot, PCR, and [68Ga]Ga-PSMA uptake experiments on cell lines and conducted in vivo small animal imaging. Clinical and radiological results of included differentiated thyroid cancer patients were collected. (Trial registration number: 2021-669, Trial registration date: December 30, 2021). Results: PSMA expression levels were significantly higher in poorly differentiated thyroid cancer (7.86 ± 1.90 vs. 1.00 ± 0, P < 0.01; 7.86 ± 1.90 vs. 0.03 ± 0.02, P < 0.01), but [68Ga]Ga-PSMA imaging correlated with tumor burden, such as 18F-FDG (8.08 ± 7.74 and 5.67 ± 4.23, P = 0.01) and Tg levels (307.1 ± 183.4 vs. 118.0 ± 116.1, P = 0.002). Conclusion: Our results showed that PSMA expression increased with the decrease of thyroid cancer differentiation. However, the level of [68Ga]Ga-PSMA uptake in thyroid cancer patients was not significantly associated with the degree of thyroid cancer differentiation, but also with the metabolism and burden of tumors such as 2-[18F]FDG and Tg levels. These findings provide additional clinical significance and application value for PSMA in thyroid cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Central South University is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recently, Sato et al. proposed an public verifiable blind quantum computation (BQC) protocol by inserting a third-party arbiter. However, it is not true public verifiable in a sense, because the arbiter is determined in advance and participates in the whole process. In this paper, a public verifiable protocol for measurement-only BQC is proposed. The fidelity between arbitrary states and the graph states of 2-colorable graphs is estimated by measuring the entanglement witnesses of the graph states, so as to verify the correctness of the prepared graph states. Compared with the previous protocol, our protocol is public verifiable in the true sense by allowing other random clients to execute the public verification. It also has greater advantages in the efficiency, where the number of local measurements is O (n 3 log n) and graph states' copies is O (n 2 log n) . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The carcass layer of flexible pipe comprises a large-angle spiral structure with a complex interlocked stainless steel cross-section profile, which is mainly used to resist radial load. With the complex structure of the carcass layer, an equivalent simplified model is used to study the mechanical properties of the carcass layer. However, the current equivalent carcass model only considers the elastic deformation, and this simplification leads to huge errors in the calculation results. In this study, radial compression experiments were carried out to make the carcasses to undergo plastic deformation. Subsequently, a residual neural network based on the experimental data was established to predict the load–displacement curves of carcasses with different inner diameter in plastic states under radial compression. The established neural network model's high precision was verified by experimental data, and the influence of the number of input variables on the accuracy of the neural network was discussed. The conclusion shows that the residual neural network model established based on the experimental data of the small-diameter carcass layer can predict the load–displacement curve of the large-diameter carcass layer in the plastic stage. With the decrease of input data, the prediction accuracy of residual network model in plasticity stage will decrease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Kazal-type serine protease inhibitors play a role in physiological processes such as blood coagulation and fibrinolysis. The amino acid residues at the P1 site are different, and they inhibit different types of proteases. The inhibitory mechanism of the protease in the salivary glands of Poecilobdella manillensis is still unclear. Methods and results: Based on cloning, prokaryotic expression and bioinformatics analysis, we studied the role of Kazal-type serine protease inhibitors in P. manillensis and analyzed their expression by quantitative real-time PCR. The results suggested that the recombinant protein was successfully expressed in the supernatant when a prokaryotic expression vector was constructed and induced with 0.2 mmol/L IPTG at 37 °C for 4 h, and the enzymatic activity was determined. The mature protein encodes 91 amino acids and has a relative molecular weight of 9929.32 Da, and after removing the signal peptide, the theoretical isoelectric point was 8.79. It is an unstable protein without a transmembrane domain. The mature protein contains two Kazal-type domains, in which all P1 residues are Lys, consisting of an α helix and three antiparallel β sheets. The upregulated expression of the mRNA was induced after a meal was provided, and the results showed an increasing and then decreasing trend. Conclusions: Taken together, the results indicate that mature proteins from P. manillensis inhibit thrombin activity, laying the foundation for the subsequent in-depth study of the function of genes encoding Kazal-type serine protease inhibitors. Highlights: The pmKPI cDNA from salivary glands of Poecilobdella manillensis was cloned and expressed. pmKPI proteins can inhibit thrombin activity. pmKPI mRNA expression was upregulated after a meal was provided, showing an increasing and then decreasing trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Liu and Yin (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 60, 2074-2083 (2021)) proposed a two-party private set intersection protocol based on quantum Fourier transform. We find the participant can deduce the other party’s private information, which violates the security requirement of private set computation. In order to solve this problem, an improved private set intersection protocol based on Hadamard gate is proposed. Firstly, the more feasible Hadamard gates are used to perform on the original n qubits instead of the quantum Fourier transform, which may reduce the difficulty of implementation. In addition, through the exclusive OR calculation, the participant’s private information is randomly chosen and encoded on the additional n qubits, which prevents participants from obtaining the result of the difference set Sdiff, and then avoids the internal leakage of private information. Finally, the correctness and security analysis are conducted to show the proposed protocol can guarantee the correctness of computation result as well as resist outside attacks and participant internal attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowd flow prediction has become a strategically important task in urban computing, which is the prerequisite for traffic management, urban planning and public safety. However, due to variousness of crowd flows, multiple hidden correlations among urban regions affect the flows. Besides, crowd flows are also influenced by the distribution of Points-of-Interests (POIs), transitional functional zones, environmental climate, and different time slots of the dynamic urban environment. Thus, we exploit multiple correlations between urban regions by considering the mentioned factors comprehensively rather than the geographical distance and propose multi-graph convolution gated recurrent units (MGCGRU) for capturing these multiple spatial correlations. For adapting to the dynamic mobile data, we leverage multiple spatial correlations and the temporal dependency to build an urban flow prediction framework that uses only a little recent data as the input but can mine rich internal modes. Hence, the framework can mitigate the influence of the instability of data distributions in highly dynamic environments for prediction. The experimental results on two real-world datasets in Shanghai show that our model is superior to state-of-the-art methods for crowd flow prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A BiCuPO microwave dielectric ceramic was prepared using a solid-state reaction method. As the sintering temperature increased from 800°C to 880°C, the bulk density of BiCuPO ceramic increased from 6.299 g/cm to 6.366 g/cm; the optimal temperature was 860°C. The best microwave dielectric properties [permittivity ( ɛ ) = ∼16, a quality factor ( Q × f) = ∼39,110 GHz and a temperature coefficient of resonant frequency ( τ ) = ∼−59 ppm/°C] were obtained in the ceramic sintered at 860°C for 2 h. Then, TiO with a positive τ (∼+400 ppm/°C) was added to compensate the τ value. The composite material was found to have a near-zero τ (+2.7 ppm/°C) and desirable microwave properties ( ɛ = 19.9, Q × f = 24,885 GHz) when synthesized at a sintering temperature of 880°C. This system could potentially be used for low-temperature co-fired ceramics technology applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for materials with high dielectric breakdown strength and discharged energy density for high power capacitors has been widely explored. In this work, composite ceramics of BaSr(TiMn)O-x wt% MgO (0 ≤ x ≤ 6) were prepared by conventional solid state sintering process. Structure and energy storage properties were investigated in detail. It was found that the discharged energy density (W) and energy storage efficiency (η) was obviously enhanced in Mn-doped in BaSrTiO with MgO addition. As the concentration of MgO increased, the breakdown electric field (E) of BaSr(TiMn)O-MgO composite was greatly improved. The BaSr(TiMn)O-2 wt% MgO ceramic exhibited excellent energy storage properties with a W ~ 2.014 J/cm and a η ~ 88.6% at a high E ~ 300 kV/cm. This work significantly increased the E and W of BST-based materials for high power energy storage applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of temperature-stable microwave dielectric ceramics (1 − x)Ba Ln(MoO)- xTiO (Ln = Ce, Nd, and Sm; 0.4 ≤ x ≤0.55) were prepared by solid-state reaction. Sintering behavior, phase composition, microstructure, and microwave dielectric properties were investigated. X-ray powder diffraction and scanning electron microscopy revealed that the main phases of the BaLn(MoO)-TiO ceramics were the monoclinic BaLn(MoO) phase and the rutile TiO phase. Study of the materials' microwave dielectric properties revealed that the permittivity ( ε) and the temperature coefficient of the resonant frequency ( τ) increased gradually with increasing x value whereas quality factors ( Q × f) decreased. For BaLn(MoO)-TiO (Ln = Ce and Nd), τ values could be adjusted to near zero, relative permittivity ( ε) was 13.2-14.3, and Q × f values were between 11,950 and 45,720 GHz (at 9.11-9.83 GHz) when x = 0.45 to 0.55. For BaSm(MoO)-TiO, excellent microwave dielectric properties were obtained when x = 0.4 to 0.5, τ values could be adjusted to near zero, ε was 13.1-13.9, and Q × f values were between 25,520 and 63,130 GHz (at 9.31-10.11 GHz). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Arterial stiffness is an important feature of diabetic macrovascular complications. Activin receptor-like kinase 7 (ALK7), a member of type I transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) receptors, is correlated with pathogenic risks of type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases and may be involved in cardiovascular remodeling. We aimed to investigate whether ALK7 is implicated in diabetes-induced aortic stiffness. Methods: Type 2 diabetes was induced by high-fat diet and low-dose streptozotocin (STZ; 27.5 mg/kg). Forty rats were separated into four groups: control, diabetes, diabetes with empty virus and diabetes treated with ALK7-shRNA. The metabolic index, ALK 7 expression and aortic stiffness were evaluated. We used gene silencing method to investigate the role of ALK7 in the pathological development. Results: Diabetic rats showed increased blood glucose, cholesterol, triglyceride levels, severe insulin resistance and ALK7 overexpression. Diabetes enhanced aortic stiffness, as demonstrated by the loss and disruption of elastic fibers as well as by an increase in collagen fibers in the aortic media. ALK7 gene silencing ameliorated metabolic hyperlipidemia and insulin resistance. With ALK7 gene silencing, collagen content, elastin to collagen ratio, as well as collagen I-to-collagen III content ratio in diabetic rats were significantly decreased. Moreover, the phosphorylation level of Smad2/3 was markedly decreased after ALK7 gene silencing. Conclusions: ALK7 gene silencing has a protective effect on diabetes-induced aortic stiffness, insulin resistance and hyperlipidemia, thus implicating a new potential therapeutic approach to diabetic macrovascular stiffness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A low firing microwave dielectric ceramic BaY(MoO) with monoclinic phase was prepared by using solid state reaction method. Microstructure and microwave dielectric properties of the ceramic were investigated. Optimized microwave dielectric properties were obtained in the ceramic sintered at 925 °C for 2 h with a relative permittivity ~11.5, a Q × f value about 47,200 GHz (at 10.3 GHz) and a temperature coefficient of resonant frequency of −35 ppm/°C. Furthermore, 0.5BaY(MoO)-0.5TiO ceramic sintered at 970 °C for 2 h with a relative permittivity ~13.6, a Q × f value about 30,800 GHz (at 9.6 GHz) and a near zero τ value of +0.8 ppm/°C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ordinal regression is to predict categories of ordinal scale and it has wide applications in many domains where the human evaluation plays a major role. So far several algorithms have been proposed to tackle ordinal regression problems from a machine learning perspective. However, most of these algorithms only seek one direction where the projected samples are well ranked. So a common shortcoming of these algorithms is that only one dimension in the sample space is used, which would definitely lose some useful information in its orthogonal subspaces. In this paper, we propose a novel ordinal regression strategy which consists of two stages: firstly orthogonal feature vectors are extracted and then these projector vectors are combined to learn an ordinal regression rule. Compared with previous ordinal regression methods, the proposed strategy can extract multiple features from the original data space. So the performance of ordinal regression could be improved because more information of the data is used. The experimental results on both benchmark and real datasets proves the performance of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five silver(I) complex of 4-amino-3,5-dipropyl-4 H-1,2,4-triazole (4-NH-3,5-Prtz) or 4-amino-3,5-dibutyl-4 H-1,2,4-triazole (4-NH-3,5-Butz), namely [Ag(4-NH-3,5-Butz)(NO)] ( 1), [Ag(4-NH-3,5-Prtz)(NO)](NO) ( 2), [Ag(4-NH-3,5-Prtz)](ClO) ( 3), [Ag(4-NH-3,5-Prtz)](CFSO) ( 4) and [Ag(4-NH-3,5-Butz)](BF) ( 5), have been prepared and structurally characterized by X-ray single crystal diffractions. Based on the structural data, a possible mechanism for the formation of Agtz cluster has been proposed, involving the formation of a dimer of dimer-(Agtz), followed by the replacement of counterions by two additional triazoles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reaction characteristics of phenolic hydroxyl group were studied under the conditions of direct coal liquefaction. 2-naphthol was used as a coal model compound in this study. Under the conditions of with and without catalysts, a series of experiments were conducted at different temperatures, pressures and reaction time. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and gas chromatography were used to identify and quantify the reactants and products respectively. The conversion of 2-naphthol rises with the increase of reaction temperature, initial pressure and catalyst amount. The results indicated that temperature had a significant effect on 2-naphthol conversion, which promoted the dehydroxylation reaction. However, initial pressure had an important influence on the hydrogenation of 2-naphthol and naphthalene. The iron catalyst plays a significant role of cracking instead of hydrogenation. It is concluded that the harsh reaction conditions of high temperature, high pressure, and more catalyst are conducive to promoting dehydroxylation of 2-naphthol. The reaction mechanism was put forward based the experimental results, in which 2-tetralone was an intermediate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network-on-Chip (NoC) with excellent scalability and high bandwidth has been considered to be the most promising communication architecture for complex integration systems. However, NoC reliability is getting continuously challenging for the shrinking semiconductor feature size and increasing integration density. Moreover, a single node failure in NoC might destroy the network connectivity and corrupt the entire system. Introducing redundancies is an efficient method to construct a resilient communication path. However, prior work based on redundancies, either results in limited reliability with coarse grain protection or involves even larger hardware overhead with fine grain. In this paper, we notice that data path such as links, buffers and crossbars in NoC can be divided into multiple identical parallel slices, which can be utilized as inherent redundancy to enhance reliability. As long as there is one fault-free slice left available, the proposed salvaging scheme named as RevivePath, can be employed to make the overall data path still functional. Furthermore, RevivePath uses the direct redundancy to protect the control path such as switch arbiter, routing computation, to provide a full fault-tolerant scheme to the whole router. Experimental results show that it achieves quite high reliability with graceful performance degradation even under high fault rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distillation range analysis and elemental analysis of fractioned direct liquefied oil were conducted. Each fraction of liquefied oil contains some nitrogen compounds. Using the acid extraction method and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC-MS), the basic nitrogen compounds have been separated and identified. Compared with the nitrogen content of the liquefied oil before and after separation, the basic nitrogen compounds account for more than half of all nitrogen compounds. The basic nitrogen compounds in the light liquefied oil are easily separated, and contain more types of basic nitrogen compounds. The results also show that there are many basic nitrogen compounds in liquefied oil, such as pyrrole, aniline, pyridine, quinoline and so on. However, there are fewer other types of basic nitrogen compounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Retinal pigment epithelium cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) could be useful for restoring retinal function in age-related macular degeneration. However the use of non-human feeder cells to support the growth of ESCs for clinical applications raises the concern of possible contamination because of direct contact between animal and human cells. Methods: In this study, we produced human ESCs using human fibroblast feeder layers isolated from foreskin and abdominal tissues. Using this system, human ESCs differentiated into retinal pigment epithelium cells in differentiation medium. Results: Seven human ESC lines were established from 18 blastocysts. These human ESCs showed normal morphology, expressed all expected cell surface markers, had the ability to form embryoid bodies upon culture in vitro and teratomas after injection into SCID mice, and differentiated further into derivatives of all three germ layers. Under conditions of committed differentiation, these human ESCs could differentiate into retinal pigment epithelium cells after 2 months in culture. Conclusions: The results of this study demonstrated that human foreskin/abdominal fibroblasts have the potential to support the derivation and long-term culture of human ESCs, which can then be used to generate retinal pigment epithelium cells with characteristic morphology and molecular markers. This technique avoids the concerns of contamination from animal feeder layers during human ESC derivation, culture and differentiation, and will thus facilitate the development of retinal pigment epithelium cell transplantation therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coal hydrogenation reaction process is simply considered as three steps. In the first step, the smaller molecules associated with coal structure units are released as some gases and water in the condition of solvent and heating. In this step, some weaker bonds of the coal structure units are ruptured to form free radicals. The radicals are stabilized by hydrogen atoms from donor solvent and/or H2. In the second step, chain reaction occurs quickly. In the process of chain reaction, the covalent bonds of coal structure units are attacked by the radicals to form some asphaltenes. In the third step, asphaltenes are hydrogenated form more liquids and some gases. In coal liquefaction, the second step of coal hydrogenation reaction should be controlled to avoid integration of radicals, and the third step of coal hydrogenation should be accelerated to increase the coal conversion and the oil yield. A new concept of coal liquefaction process named as China direct coal liquefaction (CDCL) process is presented based on the mechanism study of coal liquefaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The composition of coal-derived light oil (IBP-220 °C) was separated into 5 fractions by atmospheric distillation and analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). The light oil was made at 0.1 t/d coal direct liquefaction bench scale unit (BSU) at China Coal Research Institute (CCRI). Six groups of organics, including acyclic hydrocarbon, alicyclic hydrocarbon, aromatics, phenols, polynuclear aromatics and heterocyclics, were found and 80 compounds were tentatively identified in total. Alicyclic hydrocarbon is the main component of the light oil compared to other groups whether in relative mass percentage or the number of compounds in group. The predominant oxygen-contained compound is phenols, and the nitrogen-containing compound is pyridine. No sulfur-containing compound is detected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Acupuncture & Tuina Science is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)