Ethical Dilemma and Nihilism in Munro\u27s Passion

In their article Ethical Dilemma and Nihilism in Munro\u27s \u27Passion\u27 Xiying Liu and Hongbin Dai discuss ethical issues in Alice Munro\u27s short story Passion. When attempting to escape the shackles of multiple ethical identities, the short story\u27s protagonist Grace encounters dilemmas and in consequence makes wrong decisions with regard to the principle of ethics. The other protagonist of the story, Neil, commits suicide demonstrating that he breaks off all relationship with the world. Liu and Dai argue that Neil\u27s death deconstructs Grace\u27s ethical dilemmas and thus the narrative constructs a sense of nihilism. Liu and Dai posit that Munro\u27s short story reveals the humility, fragility, and complexity of human nature

The Art of the Nouveau Roman in The Driver’s Seat

This article focuses on Muriel Spark’s art of the nouveau roman in The Driver’s Seat. It probes into the nature of the nouveau roman, the major concerns of its advocates, and the relation between the nouveau roman and postmodernism. Then it tackles with the presentation of the protagonist, the descriptions of the places, monotonous behaviour of the characters and the purposeful design of the lack of syntactical variety. Finally, it discusses the disruption of the sequential plot. With the impersonal narration and the rejection of the sequential plot, Spark’s The Driver’s Seat shows the typical features of the nouveau roman as well as the postmodernist fiction and turns out to be a brilliant success

Smart Meters Integration in Distribution System State Estimation with Collaborative Filtering and Deep Gaussian Process

The problem of state estimations for electric distribution system is considered. A collaborative filtering approach is proposed in this paper to integrate the slow time-scale smart meter measurements in the distribution system state estimation, in which the deep Gaussian process is incorporated to infer the fast time-scale pseudo measurements and avoid anomalies. Numerical tests have demonstrated the higher estimation accuracy of the proposed method

Effects of Tert-Butylhydroquinone on Intestinal Inflammatory Response and Apoptosis following Traumatic Brain Injury in Mice

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can induce intestinal inflammatory response and mucosal injury. Antioxidant transcription factor nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) has been shown in our previous studies to prevent oxidative stress and inflammatory response in gut after TBI. The objective of this study was to test whether tert-butylhydroquinone (tBHQ), an Nrf2 inducer, can protect against TBI-induced intestinal inflammatory response and mucosal injury in mice. Adult male ICR mice were randomly divided into three groups: (1) sham + vehicle group, (2) TBI + vehicle group, and (3) TBI + tBHQ group (n = 12 per group). Closed head injury was adopted using Hall's weight-dropping method. Intestinal mucosa apoptosis and inflammatory-related factors, such as nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-1β (IL-1β), interleukin-6 (IL-6) and intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), were investigated at 24 h after TBI. As a result, we found that oral treatment with 1% tBHQ prior to TBI for one week markedly decreased NF-κB activation, inflammatory cytokines production, and ICAM-1 expression in the gut. Administration of tBHQ also significantly attenuated TBI-induced intestinal mucosal apoptosis. The results of the present study suggest that tBHQ administration could suppress the intestinal inflammation and reduce the mucosal damage following TBI

Intelligent Control and Parameter Calculation of Highway Truck Escape Ramp

To reduce the probability of secondary accidents caused by the direction deviation, body rollover, and excessive deceleration of runaway vehicles during braking on a truck escape ramp (TER), the safety of the occupants and the vehicles must be ensured. Based on the momentum theorem, an intelligent control method for a TER is proposed. In the method, a slope aggregate with a small rolling resistance coefficient is used on the original escape lane, and the information acquisition, braking device control, and braking modules are established. Through these modules, the operation parameters and control parameters of the out-of-control vehicle are obtained in advance, to control the operation state of the runaway vehicle. Achieve the purpose of reducing the braking effect of the slope bed aggregate and ensuring maximum utilization of the braking ramp. Finally, the proposed control method is simulated on the MATLAB/Simulink simulation platform. The results show that the control method can realize safe braking of an out-of-control vehicle at various speeds and different mass conditions, and it can play a highly significant role in the braking of high-speed and heavy-duty vehicles

Effect of Kinetin on Physiological and Biochemical Properties of Maize Seedlings under Arsenic Stress

The effects of different levels of kinetin (KT) application on the growth, biomass, contents of chlorophyll (Chl a, Chl b, and carotenoid), arsenic uptake, and activities of antioxidant enzymes in maize seedlings under arsenic (As) stress were investigated by a hydroponic experiment. The results showed that KT supplementation increased the biomass in terms of root length, root number, fresh weight, and seedling length, and KT treatments also improved the contents of Chl a, As uptake, and Chl a : b ratio compared to cases with As treatment alone. However, no significant changes were observed in carotenoid content, and a reduction was found in Chl b content of seedlings. KT also increased the activities of catalase (CAT), peroxidase (POD), and superoxide dismutase (SOD) in the leaves of maize seedlings when 0.1 mg/L KT and As were applied, which decreased the content of malondialdehyde (MDA). These results suggested that KT could alleviate the toxicity of As to maize seedlings by keeping the stability of chlorophyll, enhancing the activities of antioxidant enzymes, and inhibiting the lipid peroxidation. In conclusion, the alleviation effect of KT in maize seedlings exposed to As stress was clearly observed in the present study

A highly efficient rice green tissue protoplast system for transient gene expression and studying light/chloroplast-related processes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Plant protoplasts, a proven physiological and versatile cell system, are widely used in high-throughput analysis and functional characterization of genes. Green protoplasts have been successfully used in investigations of plant signal transduction pathways related to hormones, metabolites and environmental challenges. In rice, protoplasts are commonly prepared from suspension cultured cells or etiolated seedlings, but only a few studies have explored the use of protoplasts from rice green tissue.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here, we report a simplified method for isolating protoplasts from normally cultivated young rice green tissue without the need for unnecessary chemicals and a vacuum device. Transfections of the generated protoplasts with plasmids of a wide range of sizes (4.5-13 kb) and co-transfections with multiple plasmids achieved impressively high efficiencies and allowed evaluations by 1) protein immunoblotting analysis, 2) subcellular localization assays, and 3) protein-protein interaction analysis by bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) and firefly luciferase complementation (FLC). Importantly, the rice green tissue protoplasts were photosynthetically active and sensitive to the retrograde plastid signaling inducer norflurazon (NF). Transient expression of the GFP-tagged light-related transcription factor OsGLK1 markedly upregulated transcript levels of the endogeneous photosynthetic genes <it>OsLhcb1</it>, <it>OsLhcp</it>, <it>GADPH </it>and <it>RbcS</it>, which were reduced to some extent by NF treatment in the rice green tissue protoplasts.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We show here a simplified and highly efficient transient gene expression system using photosynthetically active rice green tissue protoplasts and its broad applications in protein immunoblot, localization and protein-protein interaction assays. These rice green tissue protoplasts will be particularly useful in studies of light/chloroplast-related processes.</p

Application of nanopore adaptive sequencing in pathogen detection of a patient with Chlamydia psittaci infection

IntroductionNanopore sequencing has been widely used in clinical metagenomic sequencing for pathogen detection with high portability and real-time sequencing. Oxford Nanopore Technologies has recently launched an adaptive sequencing function, which can enrich on-target reads through real-time alignment and eject uninteresting reads by reversing the voltage across the nanopore. Here we evaluated the utility of adaptive sequencing in clinical pathogen detection.MethodsNanopore adaptive sequencing and standard sequencing was performed on a same flow cell with a bronchoalveolar lavage fluid sample from a patient with Chlamydia psittacosis infection, and was compared with the previous mNGS results.ResultsNanopore adaptive sequencing identified 648 on-target stop receiving reads with the longest median read length(688bp), which account for 72.4% of all Chlamydia psittaci reads and 0.03% of total reads in enriched group. The read proportion matched to C. psittaci in the stop receiving group was 99.85%, which was much higher than that of the unblock (&lt;0.01%) and fail to adapt (0.02%) groups. Nanopore adaptive sequencing generated similar data yield of C. psittaci compared with standard nanopore sequencing. The proportion of C. psittaci reads in adaptive sequencing is close to that of standard nanopore sequencing and mNGS, but generated lower genome coverage than mNGS.DiscussionNanopore adaptive sequencing can effectively identify target C. psittaci reads in real-time, but how to increase the targeted data of pathogens still needs to be further evaluated

Deciphering the phase transition-induced ultrahigh piezoresponse in (K,Na)NbO3_{3}-based piezoceramics

Here, we introduce phase change mechanisms in lead-free piezoceramics as a strategy to utilize attendant volume change for harvesting large electrostrain. In the newly developed (K,Na)NbO$_{3}$ solid-solution at the polymorphic phase boundary we combine atomic mapping of the local polar vector with in situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction and density functional theory to uncover the phase change and interpret its underlying nature. We demonstrate that an electric field-induced phase transition between orthorhombic and tetragonal phases triggers a dramatic volume change and contributes to a huge effective piezoelectric coefficient of 1250 pm V$^{-1}$ along specific crystallographic directions. The existence of the phase transition is validated by a significant volume change evidenced by the simultaneous recording of macroscopic longitudinal and transverse strain. The principle of using phase transition to promote electrostrain provides broader design flexibility in the development of high-performance piezoelectric materials and opens the door for the discovery of high-performance future functional oxides