Miraculous Survival of Three Trapping Miners by Drinking High Mineral Mine Water for 25

Little is known that how long a human been can survive a complete starvation. There were dozens of miners who lost their lives in a coal mine disaster at Qinglong,Guizhou,China in June 2009, only three of them were rescued 25 days later after they had been trapped in a coal mine 600 meters underground. They maintained their lives only by drinking mineral water in the mine, which created a miracle of life. We reported here on this life miracle in relation to high mineral mine water

Bottom-up computation using trees of sublists (Functional Pearl)

Some top-down problem specifications, if executed directly, may compute sub-problems repeatedly. Instead, we may want a bottom-up algorithm that stores solutions of sub-problems in a table to be reused. It can be tricky, however, to figure out how the table can be represented and efficiently maintained. We study a special case: computing a function $h$ taking lists as inputs such that $h~xs$ is defined in terms of all immediate sublists of $xs$. Richard Bird studied this problem in 2008, and presented a concise but cryptic algorithm without much explanation. We give this algorithm a proper derivation, and discover a key property that allows it to work. The algorithm builds trees that have certain shapes -- the sizes along the left spine is a diagonal in Pascal's triangle. The crucial function we derive transforms one diagonal to the next.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Functional Programmin

The magnetic and electronic structure of vanadyl pyrophosphate from density functional theory

We have studied the magnetic structure of the high symmetry vanadyl pyrophosphate ((VO)_(2)P_(2)O)7, VOPO), focusing on the spin exchange couplings, using density functional theory (B3LYP) with the full three-dimensional periodicity. VOPO involves four distinct spin couplings: two larger couplings exist along the chain direction (a-axis), which we predict to be antiferromagnetic, J_(OPO) = −156.8 K and J_O = −68.6 K, and two weaker couplings appear along the c (between two layers) and b directions (between two chains in the same layer), which we calculate to be ferromagnetic, J_layer = 19.2 K and J_chain = 2.8 K. Based on the local density of states and the response of spin couplings to varying the cell parameter a, we found that J_(OPO) originates from a super-exchange interaction through the bridging –O–P–O– unit. In contrast, J_O results from a direct overlap of 3d_(x^2 − y^2) orbitals on two vanadium atoms in the same V_(2)O_8 motif, making it very sensitive to structural fluctuations. Based on the variations in V–O bond length as a function of strain along a, we found that the V–O bonds of V–(OPO)_(2)–V are covalent and rigid, whereas the bonds of V–(O)_(2)–V are fragile and dative. These distinctions suggest that compression along the a-axis would have a dramatic impact on J_O, changing the magnetic structure and spin gap of VOPO. This result also suggests that assuming J_O to be a constant over the range of 2–300 K whilst fitting couplings to the experimental magnetic susceptibility is an invalid method. Regarding its role as a catalyst, the bonding pattern suggests that O_2 can penetrate beyond the top layers of the VOPO surface, converting multiple V atoms from the +4 to +5 oxidation state, which seems crucial to explain the deep oxidation of n-butane to maleic anhydride

Synthesizing and characterization of hole doped nickel based layer superconductor (La1−x_{1-x}Srx_{x})ONiAs

We report the synthesizing and characterization of the hole doped Ni-based superconductor ($La_{1-x}Sr_{x})ONiAs$. By substituting La with Sr, the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ is increased from 2.75 K of the parent phase $LaONiAs$ to 3.7 K at the doping levels x= 0.1 - 0.2. The curve $T_c$ versus hole concentration shows a symmetric behavior as the electron doped samples $La(O_{1-x}F_{x})NiAs$. The normal state resistivity in Ni-based samples shows a good metallic behavior and reveals the absence of an anomaly which appears in the Fe-based system at about 150 K, suggesting that this anomaly is not a common feature for all systems. Hall effect measurements indicate that the electron conduction in the parent phase $LaONiAs$ is dominated by electron-like charge carriers, while with more Sr doping, a hole-like band will emerge and finally prevail over the conduction, and accordingly the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ increases.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

A greedy algorithm for dropping digits (Functional Pearl)

Consider the puzzle: given a number, remove $k$ digits such that the resulting number is as large as possible. Various techniques were employed to derive a linear-time solution to the puzzle: predicate logic was used to justify the structure of a greedy algorithm, a dependently-typed proof assistant was used to give a constructive proof of the greedy condition, and equational reasoning was used to calculate the greedy step as well as the final, linear-time optimisation

Caulis Lonicerae Japonicae extract shows protective effect on osteoporosis in rats

Purpose: To investigate the effect of Caulis lonicerae Japonicae extract (CLJE) on ovariectomyinduced osteoporosis in rats.Methods: Female Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned to a control group (normal rats) and five ovariectomy (OVX) subgroups: OVX with vehicle (OVX), OVX with 17ß-estradiol (E2, 25μg/kg/day), and OVX with CLJE doses (150, 300, and 600 mg/kg/day). Daily oral administration of E2 or CLJE started 4 weeks after OVX and lasted for 16 weeks. The bone mineral density (BMD) of L4 vertebrae and right femurs was determined. The length of each femur was measured with a micrometer, and the center of the diaphysis was determined. Three representative L4 vertebrae were selected to evaluate trabecular microarchitecture. Serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP), urinary calcium (U-Ca), urinary phosphorus (U-P), urinary creatinine (Cr) and osteocalcin (OC) levels were measured using a diagnostic reagent kit.Result: The results show that a high-dose of CLJE (600 mg/kg) significantly inhibited bone mineral density (BMD) reduction of L4 vertebrae (0.24 ± 0.02, p < 0.05) and femur (0.24 ± 0.03, p < 0.05) caused by OVX, and prevented the deterioration of trabecular microarchitecture (p < 0.05). High-dose CLJE also improved morphometric parameters, viz, trabecular number (Tb-N) (4.6 ± 0.3, p < 0.05), trabecular thickness (Tb-Th, 0.084 ± 0.012, p < 0.05) and trabecular separation (Tb-Sp, 0.14 ± 0.02, p < 0.05) in L4 vertebrae significantly.Conclusion: The results indicate that CLJE prevents OVX-induced osteoporosis in rats. Thus, CLJE is a potential natural alternative for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis in future.Keywords: Caulis Lonicerae Japonicae, Post-menopausal osteoporosis, Ovariectomy, Bone mineral density, Trabecular microarchitecture, Diaphysi

S4Net: Single Stage Salient-Instance Segmentation

We consider an interesting problem-salient instance segmentation in this paper. Other than producing bounding boxes, our network also outputs high-quality instance-level segments. Taking into account the category-independent property of each target, we design a single stage salient instance segmentation framework, with a novel segmentation branch. Our new branch regards not only local context inside each detection window but also its surrounding context, enabling us to distinguish the instances in the same scope even with obstruction. Our network is end-to-end trainable and runs at a fast speed (40 fps when processing an image with resolution 320x320). We evaluate our approach on a publicly available benchmark and show that it outperforms other alternative solutions. We also provide a thorough analysis of the design choices to help readers better understand the functions of each part of our network. The source code can be found at \url{https://github.com/RuochenFan/S4Net}