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In order to explore the energy saving benefits and economy of ultra-low energy consumption renovation of existing buildings in cold areas under the contract energy management (EPC) mode under different renovation schemes. On the basis of the existing net present value and net present value increment, the net present value rate is proposed as the evaluation index of the transformation plan, so as to realize the comprehensive benefit evaluation of a variety of transformation schemes. The results show that the energy-saving transformation scheme of the project with an external wall of 120 mm rock wool board, a 150 mm extruded polyphenylene board on the roof, and a three-glass single Low-E argon-filled glass on the exterior window has the greatest comprehensive benefits and meets the ultra-low energy consumption standard, the energy saving rate of the envelope transformation reaches 28.07%, and the static recovery period is 5.27 years. This paper provides a design method and reference basis for the ultra-low energy transformation of existing buildings in cold areas using EPC mode.

During the transition from lysogeny (a stable association between a phage and its bacterial host) to the lytic cycle, prophage excision can be followed or preceded by DNA replication and packaging. Here, the authors show that prophage excision is delayed in Salmonella phage P22, thus allowing the packaging and transfer of large fragments of host DNA via lateral transduction.

(1) Background: Most nations struggle to close significant income gaps between high and low earners. While the adoption of farm machinery rental services and off-farm employment may be beneficial, it is unclear whether jointly applying both approaches can raise income levels in rural households or help narrow the income gap within the farm sector. This study investigated scenarios involving both participation in farm machinery rental markets and in off-farm work, analyzing their varied impacts on household incomes based on survey data from 1027 rice producers in rural China. (2) Methods: We employed a two-stage econometric procedure encompassing a bivariate ordered probit model with an endogeneity-corrected unconditional quantile regression model. (3) Results: Rice farmers often simultaneously rent farm machinery services and engage in off-farm work. Both activities positively affect their household incomes; however, these effects vary across different income levels. Renting farm machinery provides greater marginal benefits for lower-income households, while off-farm employment has a stronger impact on higher-income households. Farm machinery rental services appear to benefit disadvantaged households more than off-farm employment opportunities do. (4) Suggestions: To enhance the welfare of lower-income households, policymakers should focus on expanding access to farm machinery rental services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wheat scab can reduce wheat yield and quality. Currently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used for monitoring field crops. However, UAV is constrained by limited computational resources on-board the platforms. In addition, compared to ground images, UAV images have complex backgrounds and smaller targets. Given the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a lightweight wheat scab detection network based on UAV. In addition, overlapping cropping and image contrast enhancement methods are designed to preprocess UAV remote-sensing images. Additionally, this work constructed a lightweight wheat scab detection network called LWSDNet using mixed deep convolution (MixConv) to monitor wheat scab in field environments. MixConv can significantly reduce the parameters of the LWSDNet network through depthwise convolution and pointwise convolution, and different sizes of kernels can extract rich scab features. In order to enable LWSDNet to extract more scab features, a scab feature enhancement module, which utilizes spatial attention and dilated convolution, is designed to improve the ability of the network to extract scab features. The MixConv adaptive feature fusion module is designed to accurately detect lesions of different sizes, fully utilizing the semantic and detailed information in the network to enable more accurate detection by LWSDNet. During the training process, a knowledge distillation strategy that integrates scab features and responses is employed to further improve the average precision of LWSDNet detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the average precision of LWSDNet in detecting wheat scab is 79.8%, which is higher than common object detection models and lightweight object detection models. The parameters of LWSDNet are only 3.2 million (M), generally lower than existing lightweight object detection networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this retrospective study is to determine the predictive factors of postoperative dyspnea in infants with Pierre Robin sequence (PRS). Forty children with PRS, who underwent general anesthesia, were retrospectively analyzed. The patient’s physiological status and anesthesiology data were collected accordingly, demographic characteristics including age, gender, height and weight at surgery, weight gain, preoperative airway status, tracheal intubation route, American Society of Anesthesiologists grading and airway Cormack–Lehane classification. Weight gain, dyspnea before the operation, Cormack–Lehane grade distribution showed a significant difference between patients with and without postoperative dyspnea (p = 0.0175, p = 0.0026, and p = 0.0038, respectively). Incompetent weight gain was identified as a predictor (p = 0.0371) of PRS postoperative dyspnea through the binary logistic regression model. In conclusion, this study established an early alerting model by monitoring the weight gain, dyspnea before the operation, Cormack–Lehane grade as potential combinations to predict the risk of postoperative dyspnea for PRS.