Research on depositing Ni45 alloy on titanium alloy surface by electrospark deposition

Taking Ni45 bar as electrode, a strengthened layer of thickness up to 50 μm was built up on BT20 titanium alloy matrix by means of electrospark deposition. Results of phase analysis by using of X-ray diffraction confirmed that the deposition layer was composed mostly of three phases, NiTi, NiTi2 and Ti. The surface microhardness of the deposition layer was up to 910 HV0.05, about 2.7 times as high as that of the matrix. The hardness at the cross-section of the entire deposition layer showed a gradient distribution. The effects of capacitance and deposition time on thickness of deposition layer were also studied, and results showed that with relatively low capacity and short deposition time the deposition layer without cracks can be obtained

HydrothermalFoam v1.0: a 3-D hydrothermal transport model for natural submarine hydrothermal systems

Herein, we introduce HydrothermalFoam, a three dimensional hydro-thermo-transport model designed to resolve fluid flow within submarine hydrothermal circulation systems. HydrothermalFoam has been developed on the OpenFOAM platform, which is a Finite Volume based C++ toolbox for fluid-dynamic simulations and for developing customized numerical models that provides access to state-of-the-art parallelized solvers and to a wide range of pre- and post-processing tools. We have implemented a porous media Darcy-flow model with associated boundary conditions designed to facilitate numerical5 simulations of submarine hydrothermal systems. The current implementation is valid for single-phase fluid states and uses a pure water equation-of-state (IAPWS-97). We here present the model formulation, OpenFOAM implementation details, and a sequence of 1-D, 2-D and 3-D benchmark tests. The source code repository further includes a number of tutorials that can be used as starting points for building specialized hydrothermal flow models. The model is published under the GNU General Public License v3.0

Hydrothermal plume detection dataset from Chinese cruises to the equatorial East Pacific Rise

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Chen, S., Tao, C., & German, C. R. . Hydrothermal plume detection dataset from Chinese cruises to the equatorial East Pacific Rise. Data in Brief, 33, (2020): 106540, doi:10.1016/j.dib.2020.106540.In this data article, a dataset from hydrothermal plume investigations on East Pacific Rise collected during Chinese cruises from 2008 to 2011 is reported. The dataset is related to the research article entitled “Abundance of low-temperature axial venting at the equatorial East Pacific Rise” published in the journal Deep-Sea Research I by Chen et al. (2020). In the dataset, continuous strings of time-series sensor data were obtained by Miniature Autonomous Plume Recorders (MAPR) and an Oxidation-Reduction Potential (ORP) sensor, while the underwater position data was derived using Ultra Short Base Line (USBL) navigation. In this contribution, general characteristics of the data are summarized and showed here. All the data are stored in separate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that are available for researchers and a link is provided to the full data at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/jckyj5vyjx.1. The data will be of comparative value to those investigating hydrothermal activities along mid-ocean ridges, worldwide.We acknowledge the science parties and crew of Dayang YiHao expedition DY17 in 2005, DY20 in 2008, DY21 in 2009 and DY22 in 2011 for data collection. Fieldwork for this study was funded by National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFC0309901), China Ocean Mineral Resources R & D Association (COMRA) Project (DY135-S1-1-01, 02, 09) and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LQ19D060008). SC recognizes financial support from China Scholarship Council which supported her visit to WHOI where the data analysis for this paper occurred (201808330070); CG recognizes financial support from US National Science Foundation grant OCE-1755571 and from WHOI. We are grateful to the contributions made by Guanghai Wu, Yongshun John Chen, Jianyu Ni, Jian Lin, Xin Su, Jianping Zhou and Yuan Wang - both for overseeing the cruises during which the ORP and MAPR sensor data reported here were collected but also for their thoughtful suggestions during those cruises

Abundant off-axis hydrothermal activity in the 29–30 ridge segment of the Southwest Indian Ridge: evidence from ferromanganese crusts

In the ultra-slow spreading mid-ocean ridge, seafloor hydrothermal ventings mostly occur in the off-axis region. The plume of hydrothermal venting provides Fe, Mn and other metal materials for the growth of ferromanganese crust in the surrounding seamounts, showing unique geochemical characteristics that are different from that of hydrogenetic crust. Based on five samples of ferromanganese crusts, major, trace and rare earth element analysis was carried out to identify their material sources. Combined with the investigation data of water column and seafloor camera photos by deep towed hydrothermal detection system, the potential of hydrothermal activity in the 29–30 ridge segment of the Southwest Indian ridge was evaluated. The results showed that the ferromanganese crust in the study area had significantly higher Fe/Mn value (average 1.9), relatively higher Si and Al contents, and significantly higher Ca/P value (average 9.3),without significant phosphorylation. ferromanganese crust in the study area have significantly lower Co and Ni contents (about 1600 mg/kg on average), and relatively lower Sr, Ba, Pb, Cu, Zr and Mo contents (between 100-1000 mg/kg on average). The contents of W, Th and Te are also relatively low (average content between 10–50 mg/kg); The total rare earth element content of the crust in the study area is relatively low (about 928 mg/kg on average), and the light rare earth is relatively enriched. The standardized rare earth curve of the shale shows a left-leaning pattern as a whole, showing the enrichment of heavy rare earth relative to the shale. The Co content and rare earth element content of the ferromanganese crusts in this area are significantly lower than those of hydrogenetic crusts. The discrimination diagrams of ternary and bivariate material sources reveal that they have mixed hydrothermal and hydrogenetic origins. The three crust samples of S1, S2, and S5 are located within 2 km of the known hydrothermal fields, indicating a correlation between ferromanganese crust and the location of hydrothermal activity. There is no known hydrothermal field near the S3 and S4 stations. Altered rocks and water column turbidity anomalies were found near S3 station, and large areas of altered rocks and suspected hydrothermal biological remains were also found near S4 station, indicating that hydrothermal activity may exist in both areas. In addition to the two new hydrothermal fields identified in this article, the spatial frequency of hydrothermal activity in the study area reaches 15 sites/100 km, which is significantly higher than other well investigated oceanic ridges. Out of the eight hydrothermal fields in the study area, seven are located in the off axis region, mainly because the hydrothermal activity in this area is controlled by high angle and large offset normal faults and one-way detachment faults. This also indicates that the off-axis region of the Southwest Indian Ridge has high potential for hydrothermal activity

Short communication: Melatonin implantation during the non-growing period of cashmere increases the cashmere yield of female Inner Mongolian cashmere goats by increasing fiber length and density

This study aimed to evaluate if melatonin implantation at the end of April and June was able to increase cashmere production in female Inner Mongolian cashmere goats and to search for contributing factors accounting for the melatonin increasing in cashmere production. One hundred and fifty female Inner Mongolian cashmere goats (initial body weight 37.2 ± 3.3 kg) were randomly assigned to either a control (n=75) or a treatment (n=75) group. Goats in the treatment group were implanted with melatonin (2 mg/kg of body weight) on April 30 and June 30, 2014 while goats in the control received no treatment. Melatonin implantation increased cashmere yield by 23.4% while increasing the length and density of the cashmere fiber by 19.8% and 11.4%, whereas it decreased cashmere fiber diameter by 4.4%. Melatonin treatment had no effect on doe growth, litter size or birth and weaning weights of kid. Melatonin implantation promoted cashmere yield by increasing fiber length and density without impacting the performance of goats and their offspring. Therefore, melatonin implantation during the cashmere non-growing period (late April and June) is an effective way to increase cashmere yield and improve cashmere characteristics of goats

Expedited Training of Visual Conditioned Language Generation via Redundancy Reduction

In this paper, we introduce $\text{EVL}_{\text{Gen}}$, a streamlined framework designed for the pre-training of visually conditioned language generation models with high computational demands, utilizing frozen pre-trained large language models (LLMs). The conventional approach in vision-language pre-training (VLP) typically involves a two-stage optimization process: an initial resource-intensive phase dedicated to general-purpose vision-language representation learning, focused on extracting and consolidating relevant visual features. This is followed by a subsequent phase that emphasizes end-to-end alignment between visual and linguistic modalities. Our novel one-stage, single-loss framework bypasses the computationally demanding first training stage by gradually merging similar visual tokens during training, while avoiding model collapse caused by single-stage training of BLIP-2 type models. The gradual merging process effectively condenses visual information while preserving semantic richness, resulting in rapid convergence without compromising performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that our approach accelerates the training of vision-language models by a factor of 5 without a noticeable impact on overall performance. Furthermore, we illustrate that our models significantly narrow the performance gap to current vision-language models using only 1/10 of the data. Finally, we showcase how our image-text models can seamlessly adapt to video-conditioned language generation tasks through novel soft attentive temporal token contextualizing modules. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yiren-jian/EVLGen}

PD-1 expression on peripheral CD8+ TEM/TEMRA subsets closely correlated with HCV viral load in chronic hepatitis C patients

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Tight correlation between host circulating CD8+ T cell-mediated immune response and control of viral replication is classical characteristic of long-term HCV infection. CD8+ T cell maturation/activation markers are expected to be associated with viral replication and disease progression in chronic HCV infection. The aim of the present study was to explore novel markers on CD8+ T cells with ability to evaluate HCV viral replication and disease progression.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>PBMCs were isolated from 37 chronic HCV-infected patients and 17 healthy controls. Distributed pattern of CD8+ T cells subsets and expression of PD-1, CD38, HLA-DR and CD127 were analyzed by flow cytometry. The correlation between expression of surface markers and HCV viral load or ALT was studied.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Declined naïve and increased TEMRA CD8+ T subsets were found in HCV-infected individuals compared with healthy controls. Percentage and MFI of PD-1, CD38 and HLA-DR on all CD8+ T cell subsets were higher in HCV-infected patients than healthy controls. In contrast, CD127 expression on CD8+ TCM showed an opposite trend as PD-1, CD38 and HLA-DR did. In chronic HCV infection, MFI of PD-1 on CD8+ TEM (p < 0.0001) and TEMRA (p = 0.0015) was positively correlated with HCV viral load while HLA-DR expression on non-naive CD8+ T cell subsets (p < 0.05) was negatively correlated with HCV viral load.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>PD-1 level on peripheral CD8+ TEM/TEMRA was highly correlated with HCV viral load in chronic HCV-infected patients, which made PD-1 a novel indicator to evaluate HCV replication and disease progression in chronic hepatitis C patients.</p

Molecular Evolution of GDP-D-Mannose Epimerase (GME), a Key Gene in Plant Ascorbic Acid Biosynthesis

The widespread ascorbic acid (AsA) plays a vital role in plant development and abiotic stress tolerance, but AsA concentration varies greatly among different plants. GDP-D-mannose epimerase (GME), which catalyzes GDP-D-mannose to GDP-L-galactose or GDP-L-gulose, is a key enzyme in plant AsA biosynthesis pathway. Functions and expression patterns of GME have been well studied in previous works, however, little information is known about the evolutionary patterns of the gene. In this study, GME gene structure, corresponding conserved protein motifs and evolutionary relationships were systematically analyzed. A total of 111 GME gene sequences were retrieved from 59 plant genomes, which representing almost all the major lineages of Viridiplantae: dicotyledons, monocotyledons, gymnosperms, pteridophytes, bryophytes, and chlorophytes. Results showed that homologs of GME were widely present in Viridiplantae. GME gene structures were conservative in higher plants, while varied greatly in the basal subgroups of the phylogeny including lycophytes, bryophytes, and chlorophytes, suggesting GME gene structure might have undergone severe differentiation at lower plant and then gradually fixed as plant evolution. The basic motifs of GME were strongly conserved throughout Viridiplantae, suggesting the conserved function of the protein. Molecular evolution analysis showed that strong purifying selection was the predominant force in the evolution of GME. A few branches and sites under episodic diversifying selection were identified and most of the branches located in the subgroup of chlorphytes, indicating episodic diversifying selection at a few branches and sites may play a role in the evolution of GME and diversifying selection may have occurred at the early stage of Viridiplantae. Our results provide novel insights into functional conservation and the evolution of GME