Thermal storage/management system with phase change materials for building

Peer reviewe

Genes encoding hub and bottleneck enzymes of the Arabidopsis metabolic network preferentially retain homeologs through whole genome duplication

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Whole genome duplication (WGD) occurs widely in angiosperm evolution. It raises the intriguing question of how interacting networks of genes cope with this dramatic evolutionary event.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In study of the <it>Arabidopsis </it>metabolic network, we assigned each enzyme (node) with topological centralities (in-degree, out-degree and between-ness) to measure quantitatively their centralities in the network. The <it>Arabidopsis </it>metabolic network is highly modular and separated into 11 interconnected modules, which correspond well to the functional metabolic pathways. The enzymes with higher in-out degree and between-ness (defined as hub and bottleneck enzymes, respectively) tend to be more conserved and preferentially retain homeologs after WGD. Moreover, the simultaneous retention of homeologs encoding enzymes which catalyze consecutive steps in a pathway is highly favored and easily achieved, and enzyme-enzyme interactions contribute to the retention of one-third of WGD enzymes.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our analyses indicate that the hub and bottleneck enzymes of metabolic network obtain great benefits from WGD, and this event grants clear evolutionary advantages in adaptation to different environments.</p

Localized Histoplasma capsulatum osteomyelitis of the fibula in an immunocompetent teenage boy: a case report

BACKGROUND: Infection of local bone with Histoplasma capsulatum is rare and difficult to diagnosis, and occurs particularly in immunocompetent subjects, who are more likely to be affected by a wide range of organisms. CASE PRESENTATION: An 11-year-old boy presented with localized histoplasmosis osteomyelitis in the left fibula without any evidence of abnormal immunological function or systemic disease. After surgical clearance of the lesion and homologous cancellous bone, the patient was treated orally with voriconazole for 6 months. The patient completely recovered with full function of his left leg during the 5-year follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: Histoplasmosis osteomyelitis can occasionally occur in immunocompetent individuals and can be complete cured by surgical clearance of the lesion and antibiotic treatment

EventCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Event-based Object Recognition

Recent advances in zero-shot and few-shot classification heavily rely on the success of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP. Due to a shortage of large-scale datasets, training such models for event camera data remains infeasible. Thus, adapting existing models across modalities is an important research challenge. In this work, we introduce EventCLIP, a novel approach that utilizes CLIP for zero-shot and few-shot event-based object recognition. We first generalize CLIP's image encoder to event data by converting raw events to 2D grid-based representations. To further enhance performance, we propose a feature adapter to aggregate temporal information over event frames and refine text embeddings to better align with the visual inputs. We evaluate EventCLIP on N-Caltech, N-Cars, and N-ImageNet datasets, achieving state-of-the-art few-shot performance. When fine-tuned on the entire dataset, our method outperforms all existing event classifiers. Moreover, we explore practical applications of EventCLIP including robust event classification and label-free event recognition, where our approach surpasses previous baselines designed specifically for these tasks.Comment: Better few-shot accuracy. Add results on 1) model fine-tuning 2) compare with concurrent works 3) learning from unlabeled data (unsupervised & semi-supervised

Stability studies of ZnO and AlN thin film acoustic wave devices in acid and alkali harsh environments

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices based on piezoelectric thin-films such as ZnO and AlN are widely used in sensing, microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip applications. However, for many of these applications, the SAW devices will inevitably be used in acid or alkali harsh environments, which may cause their early failures. In this work, we investigated the behavior and degradation mechanisms of thin film based SAW devices in acid and alkali harsh environments. Results show that under the acid and alkali attacks, chemical reaction and corrosion of ZnO devices are very fast (usually within 45 s). During the corrosion, the crystalline orientation of the ZnO film is not changed, but its grain defects are significantly increased and the grain sizes are decreased. The velocity of ZnO-based SAW devices is decreased due to the formation of porous structures induced by the chemical reactions. Whereas an AlN thin-film based SAW device does not perform well in acid–alkali conditions, it might be able to maintain a normal performance without obvious degradation for more than ten hours in acid or alkali solutions. This work could provide guidance for the applications of both ZnO or AlN-based SAW devices in acid/alkali harsh environments