1,838 research outputs found
New-type of Multi-purpose Standard Radon Chamber in South Korea
Radon is an inert and a radioactive gas which is colorless, tasteless and odorless. As the radon decay proceeds, and if DNA damage continues beyond repair capacity of cells in the human body, it can cause severe health problems such as lung cancer in the long-term. There is a tendency that those countries where legal restriction on radon is strict, various studies related to radon are under way. In South Korea, radon has been regulated under recommendation level. Even though there are about 3 standard radon chambers in Korea, they have not been in an active use because of lack of demand. Also, most of them are specialized in calibration of radon detectors only. Recently, Korean government started giving some attention to radon issue and supporting radon research fields. Thus, this study was carried out to develop a new type of radon chamber for multi-purpose such as 1) radon emission rate from natural and artificial radon sources; 2) calibration of radon detectors; 3) evaluation of radon mitigation efficiency. Keywords: Radon, Radon Chamber, Indoor Air Quality, Chamber Desig
A STUDY ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN THE FOOT FEATURES AND GAIT CHARACTERISTICS DURING OVER-GROUND WALKING
We analysed the correlation between the foot features such as foot length, foot width, the height and angles of foot arch curves and gait spatiotemporal parameters. To measure the structure of the foot, we measured the height and structural variation of medial longitudinal arch(MLA) and lateral longitudinal arch(LLA) in various conditions using a �� Scanning stage�� consisting of a single depth camera and four uni-axial force sensors. The gait spatiotemporal parameters were obtained by a motion capture system from the seventeen subjects. All subjects were instructed to walk at a regular pace, and spatiotemporal gait parameters of ten strides in the middle of the walkway were measured. As a result, it has been shown that the height angle of MLA is significantly correlated with gait temporal parameters while the LLA is significantly related to gait spatial parameters
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Mitochondrial Dysfunction Induces Formation of Lipid Droplets as a Generalized Response to Stress
Lipid droplet (LD) formation is a hallmark of cellular stress. Cells attempt to combat noxious stimuli by switching their metabolism from oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis, sparing resources in LDs for generating cellular reducing power and for anabolic biosynthesis. Membrane phospholipids are also a source of LDs. To elucidate the formation of LDs, we exposed mice to hyperoxia, hypoxia, myocardial ischemia, and sepsis induced by cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). All the above-mentioned stressors enhanced the formation of LDs, as assessed by transmission electron microscopy, with severe mitochondrial swelling. Disruption of mitochondria by depleting mitochondrial DNA (ρ0 cells) significantly augmented the formation of LDs, causing transcriptional activation of fatty acid biosynthesis and metabolic reprogramming to glycolysis. Heme oxygenase (HO)-1 counteracts CLP-mediated septic shock in mouse models. In HO-1-deficient mice, LD formation was not observed upon CLP, but a concomitant decrease in “LD-decorating proteins” was observed, implying a link between LDs and cytoprotective activity. Collectively, LD biogenesis during stress can trigger adaptive LD formation, which is dependent on mitochondrial integrity and HO-1 activity; this may be a cellular survival strategy, apportioning energy-generating substrates to cellular defense
Enhancement on Radon Adsorption Property of GAC using Nano-size Carbon Colloids
Granular activated carbon (GAC) is well-known as an efficient adsorbent against a number of gaseous pollutants. Radon is one of those pollutants, and radon has been classified as the second leading cause of lung cancer in USA. This study was to enhance the radon removal efficiency with applying nano-technology. Nano-size carbon colloids (NCC) was produced through electrolysis which is simple and cheap. NCC was used for impregnation with activated carbon. Surface areas of both NCC-treated and non-treated activated carbon did not show a significant difference. However, the results of radon removal efficiency show that impregnated carbon with NCC could capture about 1.3 ~ 2 times of more radon gas compared to non-treated activated carbon. It is assumed that nano-size carbon colloids might have filled up meso-pores, and meso-pores turned into micro-pores eventually. Because meso-pores initially accounted for large portion of whole pores, more radon could be captured to NCC-impregnated activated carbon. Keywords: Radon, Nano-Size Carbon Collid, Activated Carbo
Comparative Microarray Analysis of Intestinal Lymphocytes following Eimeria acervulina, E. maxima, or E. tenella Infection in the Chicken
Relative expression levels of immune- and non-immune-related mRNAs in chicken intestinal intraepithelial lymphocytes experimentally infected with Eimeria acervulina, E. maxima, or E. tenella were measured using a 10K cDNA microarray. Based on a cutoff of >2.0-fold differential expression compared with uninfected controls, relatively equal numbers of transcripts were altered by the three Eimeria infections at 1, 2, and 3 days post-primary infection. By contrast, E. tenella elicited the greatest number of altered transcripts at 4, 5, and 6 days post-primary infection, and at all time points following secondary infection. When analyzed on the basis of up- or down-regulated transcript levels over the entire 6 day infection periods, approximately equal numbers of up-regulated transcripts were detected following E. tenella primary (1,469) and secondary (1,459) infections, with a greater number of down-regulated mRNAs following secondary (1,063) vs. primary (890) infection. On the contrary, relatively few mRNA were modulated following primary infection with E. acervulina (35 up, 160 down) or E. maxima (65 up, 148 down) compared with secondary infection (E. acervulina, 1,142 up, 1,289 down; E. maxima, 368 up, 1,349 down). With all three coccidia, biological pathway analysis identified the altered transcripts as belonging to the categories of “Disease and Disorder” and “Physiological System Development and Function”. Sixteen intracellular signaling pathways were identified from the differentially expressed transcripts following Eimeria infection, with the greatest significance observed following E. acervulina infection. Taken together, this new information will expand our understanding of host-pathogen interactions in avian coccidiosis and contribute to the development of novel disease control strategies
MobileSAMv2: Faster Segment Anything to Everything
Segment anything model (SAM) addresses two practical yet challenging
segmentation tasks: \textbf{segment anything (SegAny)}, which utilizes a
certain point to predict the mask for a single object of interest, and
\textbf{segment everything (SegEvery)}, which predicts the masks for all
objects on the image. What makes SegAny slow for SAM is its heavyweight image
encoder, which has been addressed by MobileSAM via decoupled knowledge
distillation. The efficiency bottleneck of SegEvery with SAM, however, lies in
its mask decoder because it needs to first generate numerous masks with
redundant grid-search prompts and then perform filtering to obtain the final
valid masks. We propose to improve its efficiency by directly generating the
final masks with only valid prompts, which can be obtained through object
discovery. Our proposed approach not only helps reduce the total time on the
mask decoder by at least 16 times but also achieves superior performance.
Specifically, our approach yields an average performance boost of 3.6\% (42.5\%
\textit{v.s.} 38.9\%) for zero-shot object proposal on the LVIS dataset with
the mask AR@ metric. Qualitative results show that our approach generates
fine-grained masks while avoiding over-segmenting things. This project
targeting faster SegEvery than the original SAM is termed MobileSAMv2 to
differentiate from MobileSAM which targets faster SegAny. Moreover, we
demonstrate that our new prompt sampling is also compatible with the distilled
image encoders in MobileSAM, contributing to a unified framework for efficient
SegAny and SegEvery. The code is available at the same link as MobileSAM
Project
\href{https://github.com/ChaoningZhang/MobileSAM}{\textcolor{red}{https://github.com/ChaoningZhang/MobileSAM}}.
\end{abstract}Comment: MobileSAM achieves faster segment anything, while MobileSAMv2
achieves faster segment everythin
Attribution of the 2015 record high sea surface temperatures over the central equatorial Pacific and tropical Indian Ocean
This study assessed the anthropogenic contribution to the 2015 record-breaking high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) observed in the central equatorial Pacific and tropical Indian Ocean. Considering a close link between extreme warm events in these regions, we conducted a joint attribution analysis using a fraction of attributable risk approach. Probability of occurrence of such extreme anomalies and long-term trends for the two oceanic regions were compared between CMIP5 multi-model simulations with and without anthropogenic forcing. Results show that the excessive warming in both regions is well beyond the range of natural variability and robustly attributable to human activities due to greenhouse gas increase. We further explored associated mechanisms including the Bjerknes feedback and background anthropogenic warming. It is concluded that background warming was the main contribution to the 2015 extreme SST event over the central equatorial Pacific Ocean on a developing El Niño condition, which in turn induced the extreme SST event over the tropical Indian Ocean through the atmospheric bridge effect.113Ysciescopu
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