Drones for smart cities

Smart cities and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are two relatively recent concepts and also hot topics in research. The combination of these two technologies is expected to propel their capabilities even further for enabling revolutionary applications that will improve our quality of life. This Special Issue focuses on novel work done on the application of UAVs where state-of-the-art technologies in sensing, information dissemination, communications, and artificial intelligence (AI) are applied within the context of smart cities..

Ageing effects in supercooled silica: a molecular dynamics investigation

he two-, three- and four-body effective collision induced scattering spectral line shapes are calculated for dense gaseous krypton using the pairwise additivity (PA) approximation and different polarizability models. These spectra and several interaction induced spectra calculated at various densities are compared with the experimental measurements of Barocchi et al. [1988, Europhys. Lett., 5, 607]. The potential effect on the spectrum is found to be weak. The results obtained with the Meinander et al. [1986, J. chem. Phys., 84, 3005] empirical polarizability model and molecular dynamics fit well the experimental two- and three-body spectral shapes. The irreducible contribution to the spectral shape is evaluated using the dipole induced dipole irreducible polarizability [buckingham, A. D., and Hands, I. D., 1991, Chem. Phys. Lett., 185, 544]. This contribution is found to be relatively weak for the anisotropic spectra in the frequency and density range studied, explaining the good agreement between the pairwise approximation calculations and the experimental data. The spectra radiated by the quasi-molecules Kr2, Kr3, and Kr4 (the total spectrum within the PA approximation) are also simulated

Screening dependence of the dynamical and structural properties of BKS silica

Molecular dynamics simulations of amorphous silica are carried out on a large temperature range using a modified version of the BKS inter-atomic potential. We investigate the dependence on the screening procedure of the structural and dynamical properties of amorphous silica. We show that an increased screening of the electrostatic interaction leads to a decrease of the diffusion constants and then to better agreement with experimental data, while structural properties are unchanged. We show that the Arrhenius dependence of the diffusion constants may be reproduced in this case up to a temperature of 4000 K with activation energies very similar to the experimental data

Graph-Based Subjective Matching of Trusted Strings and Blockchain-Based Filtering for Connected Vehicles

International audienceAdvances in technology have led to the creation of a connected world. Due to the increase in the number of smart and autonomous cars and the requirements regarding road safety and associated comfort has led to attempts to adapt conventional vehicular network access to the world of connected vehicles. Consolidating the cooperative safety and collected mobility management from different distributed devices are of the utmost importance. However, the prime objective of connected vehicles is not only to impose security and trust measures for individual vehicles but the strategy of connected vehicles should also concentrate on the cooperative and collective environment of fleets of vehicles. Therefore, keeping simple authentication and access control may not be efficient to evaluate trust and assurance for all the distributed stakeholders. Trust being an important entity for this entire system, the strategy for trust evaluation also becomes crucial. In this paper, we propose a broader content matching model of trusted strings and block chain based filtering for connected vehicles where a content and subject headings are first matched and then the outcome of that is consolidated by a distributed block chain consensus voting mechanism for any decision taken with respect to trust evaluation

Translational Regulation of Utrophin by miRNAs

Background Utrophin is the autosomal homolog of dystrophin, the product of the Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) locus. Its regulation is of therapeutic interest as its overexpression can compensate for dystrophin's absence in animal models of DMD. The tissue distribution and transcriptional regulation of utrophin have been characterized extensively, and more recently translational control mechanisms that may underlie its complex expression patterns have begun to be identified. Methodology/Principal Findings Using a variety of bioinformatic, molecular and cell biology techniques, we show that the muscle isoform utrophin-A is predominantly suppressed at the translational level in C2C12 myoblasts. The extent of translational inhibition is estimated to be ~99% in C2C12 cells and is mediated by both the 5′- and 3′-UTRs of the utrophin-A mRNA. In this study we identify five miRNAs (let-7c, miR-150, miR-196b, miR-296-5p, miR-133b) that mediate the repression, and confirm repression by the previously identified miR-206. We demonstrate that this translational repression can be overcome by blocking the actions of miRNAs, resulting in an increased level of utrophin protein in C2C12 cells. Conclusions/Significance The present study has identified key inhibitory mechanisms featuring miRNAs that regulate utrophin expression, and demonstrated that these mechanisms can be targeted to increase endogenous utrophin expression in cultured muscle cells. We suggest that miRNA-mediated inhibitory mechanisms could be targeted by methods similar to those described here as a novel strategy to increase utrophin expression as a therapy for DMD

IRES-Mediated Translation of Utrophin A Is Enhanced by Glucocorticoid Treatment in Skeletal Muscle Cells

Glucocorticoids are currently the only drug treatment recognized to benefit Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) patients. The nature of the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects remains incompletely understood but may involve an increase in the expression of utrophin. Here, we show that treatment of myotubes with 6α−methylprednisolone-21 sodium succinate (PDN) results in enhanced expression of utrophin A without concomitant increases in mRNA levels thereby suggesting that translational regulation contributes to the increase. In agreement with this, we show that PDN treatment of cells transfected with monocistronic reporter constructs harbouring the utrophin A 5′UTR, causes an increase in reporter protein expression while leaving levels of reporter mRNAs unchanged. Using bicistronic reporter assays, we further demonstrate that PDN enhances activity of an Internal Ribosome Entry Site (IRES) located within the utrophin A 5′UTR. Analysis of polysomes demonstrate that PDN causes an overall reduction in polysome-associated mRNAs indicating that global translation rates are depressed under these conditions. Importantly, PDN causes an increase in the polysome association of endogenous utrophin A mRNAs and reporter mRNAs harbouring the utrophin A 5′UTR. Additional experiments identified a distinct region within the utrophin A 5′UTR that contains the inducible IRES activity. Together, these studies demonstrate that a translational regulatory mechanism involving increased IRES activation mediates, at least partially, the enhanced expression of utrophin A in muscle cells treated with glucocorticoids. Targeting the utrophin A IRES may thus offer an important and novel therapeutic avenue for developing drugs appropriate for DMD patients

Molecular Dynamics Computer Simulation of Multicomponent Liquids: From Effective Potentials to Crystallization from the Melt

The molecular dynamics (MD) simulation technique is a powerful tool for the investigation of multicomponent liquids and solids. A realistic description of such systems relies on the quality of the effective potential with which the interactions between the atoms are modeled in a MD simulation. We propose a fitting scheme to derive effective potentials from {it ab initio} simulations. This scheme is used to parameterize a new potential for silica. In a second case study, MD simulations are used to investigate crystallization in an AlNi alloy, elucidating the crystal growth mechanism on an atomistic scale

Screening dependence of the dynamical and structural properties of BKS silica

International audienceMolecular dynamics simulations of amorphous silica are carried out on a large temperature range using a modified version of the BKS inter-atomic potential. We investigate the dependence on the screening procedure of the structural and dynamical properties of amorphous silica. We show that an increased screening of the electrostatic interaction leads to a decrease of the diffusion constants and then to better agreement with experimental data, while structural properties are unchanged. We show that the Arrhenius dependence of the diffusion constants may be reproduced in this case up to a temperature of 4000 K with activation energies very similar to the experimental data