Relationship between habitat and ant communities in oak-dominated Appalachian forests treated with microbial pesticides.

Ants in the George Washington (Augusta Co. VA, USA) and Monongahela National Forests (Pocahontas Co. WV, USA) were studied using pitfall traps and bait traps to assess the effect of Bacillus thuringiensis var kurstaki (Foray 48F) and gypsy moth nuclear polyhedrosis virus (Gypchek) application on ant communities and the association of habitat characteristics with ants. Ant samples were also compared by forest, sampling year and season, sampling method, and sampling micro-habitat. Pitfall traps were operated for 45 weeks during summers of 1995 to 1997. Bait traps were set up and collected 42 times during the same period. A total of 31,732 ants were collected from pitfall traps and 54,694 ants were collected from bait traps. They belonged to 4 subfamilies, 17 genera, and 33 species. The ant species richness, diversity, abundance, and species composition did not change as a result of the treatments. Both ant abundance and species richness were correlated with soil moisture, elevation, and vegetation structure of the plots. The correlation was stronger for species richness than for abundance. More mesic and higher elevation plots had fewer ants and lower species richness. Ants from the two sampling methods showed different relative abundance and species richness. Pitfall traps caught more species than bait traps. There was no clear seasonal trend in overall ant activities during the sampling season. Comparisons between sampling years showed a very similar species composition and species evenness. There was a significant decrease in ant abundance in 1997, which may have been caused by over-trapping. Some rare species did not appear in the second and third year of sampling. Ant communities on ridges had one more species than those in valleys in the George Washington National Forest. The difference in ant species richness between ridges and valleys was more distinct in the Monongahela National Forest, which had 5 more species on ridges than in valleys. The ants in valleys were also distributed less evenly. The abundance of ants between ridges and valleys was similar

Challenges and Innovation in Non-Common Language Teaching: Hungarian as an Example

The Belt and Road Initiative has expanded exchange and cooperation between China and the outside world in the fields of politics, economics, education, humanities, science and technology, and tourism, and has increased the demand for non-common language specialists in various industries in China. Currently a number of foreign language universities in China offer non-common language majors. Upon graduation, students of non-common language majors provide services to China’s party and government organisations, universities, research institutions and major enterprises. As society develops and career requirements increase, the overall quality of non-common language students need to be enhanced. Non-common language teachers in universities must be innovative in their theoretical and practical approaches if they are to help non-common language students meet the demands of the modern world. They need to summarize the experience and lessons learned from the teaching process, address any challenges that may arise, and explore ways to improve the quality and efficiency of their teaching. From the perspective of sustainable development, a practical path that can ensure the quality of non-common language teaching and learning is explored in terms of subject specialization

Study on Dual-spark Ignition Rapid Combustion Characteristic of Opposed-piston Two-stroke GDI Engine

AbstractThe mixture formation and combustion process of an opposed-piston two-stroke (OPTS) gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine was carried out by numerical simulation. The effects on in-cylinder combustion and engine performance in different ignition ways of dual-spark ignition have been compared and analyzed. The dual-spark ignition system were installed on cylinder liner could make the in-cylinder combustion more stable and faster. It was benefit for increasing the thermal efficiency and avoiding the knock. Compared with single-spark ignition, dual-spark ignition could shorten flame propagation distance and accelerate flame propagation. Compared with single-spark ignition and synchronous dual-spark ignition models, the rapid combustion period of asynchronous ignition model was shorter, which was helpful to fast burning. In 6000r/min and 15kW full load case, the best ignition angle step of asynchronous ignition was about 10° crank angle (CA). When the initial ignition angle was the same, the ignition angle step of asynchronous ignition was smaller and the antiknock was worse

Polysaccharides: Structure and Solubility

Understanding the solubility of polysaccharides is extremely important for their food applications as most functions of polysaccharides including stability, emulsifying property, drug delivery, membrane forming properties, etc., are all achieved in aqueous solution. This chapter aims specifically at the mechanism of solubility of polysaccharides from the molecular level. General understandings of the solubility including definition, testing methods, and the solution behaviors were provided; the relationships between polysaccharide solubility and the structural features in terms of molecular weight, degree of branching, charging properties, chain flexibility, and the special groups were all discussed. With all the information provided, the molecular modification and further applications of polysaccharides in both food and nonfood areas could be promoted

Interactions among Carbon Dioxide, Heat, and Chemical Lures in Attracting the Bed Bug, Cimex lectularius L. (Hemiptera: Cimicidae)

Commercial bed bug (Cimex lectularius L.) monitors incorporating carbon dioxide (CO2), heat, and chemical lures are being used for detecting bed bugs; however, there are few reported studies on the effectiveness of chemical lures in bed bug monitors and the interactions among chemical lure, CO2, and heat. We screened 12 chemicals for their attraction to bed bugs and evaluated interactions among chemical lures, CO2, and heat. The chemical lure mixture consisting of nonanal, 1-octen-3-ol, spearmint oil, and coriander Egyptian oil was found to be most attractive to bed bugs and significantly increased the trap catches in laboratory bioassays. Adding this chemical lure mixture when CO2 was present increased the trap catches compared with traps baited with CO2 alone, whereas adding heat did not significantly increase trap catches when CO2 was present. Results suggest a combination of chemical lure and CO2 is essential for designing effective bed bug monitors

Performance Evaluation and Control Strategy Comparison of Supercapacitors for a Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Electrification of powertrain system is a great technical progress of traditional vehicle, leading to a significant reduction of fuel consumption and emission pollution. Energy storage system (ESS) normally consisting of batteries is a key component of an electric vehicle or hybrid electric vehicle. An ESS can recover braking energy during the regenerative braking process. Currently, lithium-ion batteries are the main energy storage device due to their high energy density. However, sometimes, a sudden large increase of operation current is required during acceleration or regenerative braking processes, which will jeopardize the operation life of batteries. A supercapacitor takes advantage of high power density and can tolerate large current in a short time. Application of supercapacitor in an ESS can reduce the peak current of batteries effectively, and the life time of batteries can be extended. Meanwhile, the braking energy can also be recovered sufficiently. Supercapacitors can be used solely in some hybrid electric vehicles. In this chapter, the application of supercapacitors in electric vehicles or hybrid electric vehicles is reviewed briefly. Then, the performance of a series hybrid transit bus, which uses a compressed natural gas engine and supercapacitors as power sources, is analyzed

Channel Attention Separable Convolution Network for Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin cancer is a frequently occurring cancer in the human population, and it is very important to be able to diagnose malignant tumors in the body early. Lesion segmentation is crucial for monitoring the morphological changes of skin lesions, extracting features to localize and identify diseases to assist doctors in early diagnosis. Manual de-segmentation of dermoscopic images is error-prone and time-consuming, thus there is a pressing demand for precise and automated segmentation algorithms. Inspired by advanced mechanisms such as U-Net, DenseNet, Separable Convolution, Channel Attention, and Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP), we propose a novel network called Channel Attention Separable Convolution Network (CASCN) for skin lesions segmentation. The proposed CASCN is evaluated on the PH2 dataset with limited images. Without excessive pre-/post-processing of images, CASCN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PH2 dataset with Dice similarity coefficient of 0.9461 and accuracy of 0.9645.Comment: Accepted by ICONIP 202