GENERATION OF CRACKS IN HIGHWAY EMBANKMENT ON BLACK COTTON SOIL

This research revealed the crack generation of the highway embankment from the water losing shrinkage of the wet black cotton soil (BCS), which is a type of soil with high swell-shrink potential. The road seepage meter was used to test the permeability of filling materials, which was used to replace BCS. The moisture content and embankment deflection of BCS foundation were measured after the rainy season. Based on the coupled consolidation theory for unsaturated soil, the change in additional tension stress of the embankment induced by water loss shrinkage of BCS was simulated by Abaqus. The results indicated that the rainfall seeped into the foundation through highly permeable refill materials to result in BCS expansion and decrease the embankment strength. After the rainy season, the additional tensile stress caused by water loss shrinkage of BCS induces cracking of highway embankment, and the maximum cracking depth often appears at the shoulder of highway. The deep and wide cracks are easy to appear in the low embankment constructed on a thick BCS foundation under strong evaporation

Frame-wise Cross-modal Matching for Video Moment Retrieval

Video moment retrieval targets at retrieving a moment in a video for a given language query. The challenges of this task include 1) the requirement of localizing the relevant moment in an untrimmed video, and 2) bridging the semantic gap between textual query and video contents. To tackle those problems, early approaches adopt the sliding window or uniform sampling to collect video clips first and then match each clip with the query. Obviously, these strategies are time-consuming and often lead to unsatisfied accuracy in localization due to the unpredictable length of the golden moment. To avoid the limitations, researchers recently attempt to directly predict the relevant moment boundaries without the requirement to generate video clips first. One mainstream approach is to generate a multimodal feature vector for the target query and video frames (e.g., concatenation) and then use a regression approach upon the multimodal feature vector for boundary detection. Although some progress has been achieved by this approach, we argue that those methods have not well captured the cross-modal interactions between the query and video frames. In this paper, we propose an Attentive Cross-modal Relevance Matching (ACRM) model which predicts the temporal boundaries based on an interaction modeling. In addition, an attention module is introduced to assign higher weights to query words with richer semantic cues, which are considered to be more important for finding relevant video contents. Another contribution is that we propose an additional predictor to utilize the internal frames in the model training to improve the localization accuracy. Extensive experiments on two datasets TACoS and Charades-STA demonstrate the superiority of our method over several state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies have been also conducted to examine the effectiveness of different modules in our ACRM model.Comment: 12 pages; accepted by IEEE TM

Quality Change of Postharvest Okra at Different Storage Temperatures

In order to analyze the influence of temperature on the storability and postharvest quality properties of okra, the postharvest okra was stored at 4 or 25°C and the changes of weight loss rate, firmness, and the contents of soluble protein, chlorophyll and vitamin C were determined. For 5 days, the weight loss of okra was about 0.94% and 13.74% stored at 4 and 25°C, respectively. The firmness of the fruit at 25°C declined by 36.04% after 5 days storage and decreased by 17.59% at 4°C. Soluble protein of okra at stored 4 and 25°C was 0.97 mg/g and 0.67 mg/g after 5 days, respectively. The chlorophyll content at 4°C was 7.76 mg/100 g after 5 days, compared with that at 25°C, decreased from the initial 16.32 to 4.54 mg/100 g. The vitamin C of okra fell by 35.60 mg/100 g after 5 days of storage at 4°C, which is significantly higher than that stored at 25°C, declining 17.97 mg/100 g by 5 days. Therefore, cold storage at 4°C play an important role in the maintenance of okra edible quality

Ag-Mg antisite defect induced high thermoelectric performance of α-MgAgSb

Engineering atomic-scale native point defects has become an attractive strategy to improve the performance of thermoelectric materials. Here, we theoretically predict that Ag-Mg antisite defects as shallow acceptors can be more stable than other intrinsic defects under Mg-poor-Ag/Sb-rich conditions. Under more Mg-rich conditions, Ag vacancy dominates the intrinsic defects. The p-type conduction behavior of experimentally synthesized ¿-MgAgSb mainly comes from Ag vacancies and Ag antisites (Ag on Mg sites), which act as shallow acceptors. Ag-Mg antisite defects significantly increase the thermoelectric performance of ¿-MgAgSb by increasing the number of band valleys near the Fermi level. For Li-doped ¿-MgAgSb, under more Mg-rich conditions, Li will substitute on Ag sites rather than on Mg sites and may achieve high thermoelectric performance. A secondary valence band is revealed in ¿-MgAgSb with 14 conducting carrier pockets

Genetically engineering Crambe abyssinica- A potentially high-value oil crop for salt land improvement

Crambe abyssinica (crambe) is a new industrial oil crop that can grow on saline soil and tolerates salty water irrigation. Genetically engineered crambe in which the seed‐oil composition is manipulated for more erucic acid and less polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) would be highly beneficial to industry. In this research, lysophosphatidic acid acyltransferase 2 RNA interference (CaLPAT2‐RNAi) was introduced into the crambe genome to manipulate its oil composition. The result showed in comparison with wild type, CaLPAT2‐RNAi could significantly reduce linoleic and linolenic acid content, simultaneously increasing erucic acid content. Systematic metabolism engineering was then carried out to further study CaLPAT2‐RNAi, combined with the overexpression of Brassica napus fatty acid elongase (BnFAE), Limnanthes douglasii LPAT (LdLPAT), and RNAi of endogenous fatty acid desaturase 2 (CaFAD2‐RNAi). Oil composition analysis on the tranformants' seeds showed that (a) with CaFAD2‐RNAi, PUFA content could be dramatically decreased, in comparison with BnFAE + LdLPAT + CaFAD2‐RNAi, and BnFAE + LdLPAT + CaFAD2‐RNAi + CaLPAT2‐RNAi seeds showed lower linolenic acid content; (b) BnFAE + LdLPAT + CaFAD2‐RNAi + CaLPAT2‐RNAi could increase the erucic acid content in crambe seed oil from less than 66.6% to 71.6%, whereas the highest erucic acid content of BnFAE + LdLPAT + CaFAD2‐RNAi was 79.2%; (c) although the four‐gene combination could not increase the erucic acid content of seed oil to a higher level than the others, it led to increased carbon resource deposited into C22:1 and C18:1 moieties and lower PUFA. Summarily, the present research indicates that suppression of LPAT2 is a new, promising strategy for seed‐oil biosynthesis pathway engineering, which would increase the value of crambe oil

Crucial Roles of 5-HT and 5-HT2 Receptor in Diabetes-Related Lipid Accumulation and Pro-Inflammatory Cytokine Generation in Hepatocytes

Background/Aims: Previously, we confirmed that liver-synthesized 5-HT rather than non-liver 5-HT, acting on the 5-HT2 receptor (5-HT2R), modulates lipid-induced excessive lipid synthesis (ELS). Here, we further revealed the effects of the hepatocellular 5-HT system in diabetes-related disorders. Methods: Studies were conducted in male ICR mice, human HepG2 cells, and primary mouse hepatocytes (PMHs) under gene or chemical inhibition of the 5-HT system, key lipid metabolism, and inflammation-related factors. Protein and messenger RNA expression and levels of the factors were determined via western blotting, reverse transcription PCR, and quantitative assay kits, respectively. Hepatic steatosis with inflammation and fibrosis, intracellular lipid droplet accumulation (LDA), and reactive oxygen species (ROS) location were determined via hematoxylin and eosin, Masson’s trichrome, Oil red O, and fluorescent-specific staining, respectively. Results: Palmitic acid induced the activation of the 5-HT system: the activation of 5-HT2R, primarily 5-HT2AR, in addition to upregulating monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) expression and 5-HT synthesis, by activating the G protein/ phospholipase C pathway modulated PKCε activation, resulting in ELS with LDA; the activation of NF-κB, which mediates the generation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, was primarily due to ROS generation in the mitochondria induced by MAO-A–catalyzed 5-HT degradation, and secondarily due to the activation of PKCε. These effects of the 5-HT system were also detected in palmitic acid- or high glucose-treated PMHs and regulated multiple inflammatory signaling pathways. In diabetic mice, co-treatment with antagonists of both 5-HT synthesis and 5-HT2R significantly abolished hepatic steatosis, inflammation, and fibrosis as well as hyperglycemia and dyslipidemia. Conclusion: Activation of the hepatocellular 5-HT system plays a crucial role in inducing diabetes-related hepatic dysfunction and is a potential therapeutic target

Novel Strategies for Drug Discovery Based on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs)

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are proteins that usually do not adopt well-defined native structures when isolated in solution under physiological conditions. Numerous IDPs have close relationships with human diseases such as tumor, Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, and so on. These disease-associated IDPs commonly play principal roles in the disease-associated protein-protein interaction networks. Most of them in the disease datasets have more interactants and hence the size of the disease-associated IDPs interaction network is simultaneously increased. For example, the tumor suppressor protein p53 is an intrinsically disordered protein and also a hub protein in the p53 interaction network; α-synuclein, an intrinsically disordered protein involved in Parkinson diseases, is also a hub of the protein network. The disease-associated IDPs may provide potential targets for drugs modulating protein-protein interaction networks. Therefore, novel strategies for drug discovery based on IDPs are in the ascendant. It is dependent on the features of IDPs to develop the novel strategies. It is found out that IDPs have unique structural features such as high flexibility and random coil-like conformations which enable them to participate in both the “one to many” and “many to one” interaction. Accordingly, in order to promote novel strategies for drug discovery, it is essential that more and more features of IDPs are revealed by experimental and computing methods

Novel variation and <i>de novo </i>mutation rates in population-wide <i>de novo</i> assembled Danish trios

Building a population-specific catalogue of single nucleotide variants (SNVs), indels and structural variants (SVs) with frequencies, termed a national pan-genome, is critical for further advancing clinical and public health genetics in large cohorts. Here we report a Danish pan-genome obtained from sequencing 10 trios to high depth (50 × ). We report 536k novel SNVs and 283k novel short indels from mapping approaches and develop a population-wide de novo assembly approach to identify 132k novel indels larger than 10 nucleotides with low false discovery rates. We identify a higher proportion of indels and SVs than previous efforts showing the merits of high coverage and de novo assembly approaches. In addition, we use trio information to identify de novo mutations and use a probabilistic method to provide direct estimates of 1.27e−8 and 1.5e−9 per nucleotide per generation for SNVs and indels, respectively