Quantification of Climate Changes and Human Activities That Impact Runoff in the Taihu Lake Basin, China

Although a fragile climate region, the Taihu Lake Basin is among the most developed regions in China and is subjected to intense anthropogenic interference. In this basin, water resources encounter major challenges (e.g., floods, typhoons, and water pollution). In this study, the impacts of climate changes and human activities on hydrological processes were estimated to aid water resource management in developed regions in China. The Mann-Kendall test and cumulative anomaly curve were applied to detect the turning points in the runoff series. The year of 1982 divides the study period (1956~2008) into a baseline period (1956~1981) and a modified period (1982~2008). The double mass curve method and the hydrological sensitivity method based on the Budyko framework were applied to quantitatively attribute the runoff variation to climate changes and human activities. The results demonstrated that human activities are the dominant driving force of runoff variations in the basin, with a contribution of 83~89%; climate changes contributed to 11~17% of the variations. Moreover, the subregions of the basin indicated that humans severely disturbed the runoff variation, with contributions as high as 95~97%

Capacitive Touch Panel with Low Sensitivity to Water Drop employing Mutual-coupling Electrical Field Shaping Technique

This paper proposes a novel method to reduce the water interference on the touch panel based on mutual-capacitance sensing in human finger detection. As the height of a finger (height >10 mm) is far larger than that of a water-drop (height 10 mm) and low in the low-height space (height <1 mm), the sensing cell can be designed to distinguish the finger from the water-drop. To achieve this density distribution of the electrical field, the mutual-coupling electrical field shaping (MEFS) technique is employed to build the sensing cell. The drawback of the MEFS sensing cell is large parasitic capacitance, which can be overcome by a readout IC with low sensitivity to parasitic capacitance. Experiments show that the output of the IC with the MEFS sensing cell is 1.11 V when the sensing cell is touched by the water-drop and 1.23 V when the sensing cell is touched by the finger, respectively. In contrast, the output of the IC with the traditional sensing cell is 1.32 and 1.33 V when the sensing cell is touched by the water-drop and the finger, respectively. This demonstrates that the MEFS sensing cell can better distinguish the finger from the water-drop than the traditional sensing cell does.National Research Foundation (NRF)Accepted versionThis work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61771363, in part by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) under Grant 201706960042, and in part by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under Grant NRF-CRP11-2012-01

Concept-based short text classification and ranking

ABSTRACT Most existing approaches for text classification represent texts as vectors of words, namely &quot;Bag-of-Words.&quot; This text representation results in a very high dimensionality of feature space and frequently suffers from surface mismatching. Short texts make these issues even more serious, due to their shortness and sparsity. In this paper, we propose using &quot;Bag-of-Concepts&quot; in short text representation, aiming to avoid the surface mismatching and handle the synonym and polysemy problem. Based on &quot;Bag-of-Concepts,&quot; a novel framework is proposed for lightweight short text classification applications. By leveraging a large taxonomy knowledgebase, it learns a concept model for each category, and conceptualizes a short text to a set of relevant concepts. A concept-based similarity mechanism is presented to classify the given short text to the most similar category. One advantage of this mechanism is that it facilitates short text ranking after classification, which is needed in many applications, such as query or ad recommendation. We demonstrate the usage of our proposed framework through a real online application: Channel-based Query Recommendation. Experiments show that our framework can map queries to channels with a high degree of precision (avg. precision = 90.3%), which is critical for recommendation applications

Petrogenesis of middle Okinawa Trough volcanic rocks: Constraints from lead isotopes in olivine-hosted melt inclusions

Olivine-hosted melt inclusions provide crucial information about their parental magma composition and evolution and represent ideal targets for determining the nature of the poorly understood and still-debated magma sources in the Okinawa Trough, a back-arc basin in the western Pacific. We present the first analyses of the lead (Pb) isotope compositions of olivine-hosted melt inclusions to evaluate the mantle properties and petrogenesis of middle Okinawa Trough volcanic rocks. The melt inclusions have more variable major and trace elements and Pb isotope compositions than the host whole-rock samples. We report the discovery of both high-207Pb/206Pb (> 0.865) and low-207Pb/206Pb (< 0.865) isotope compositions in melt inclusions in individual volcanic rocks, even within a single host olivine, indicating a compositionally heterogeneous magma source. The trace element and Pb isotope characteristics of the melt inclusions show that the magma source is affected by enriched components. We modeled the injection of enriched components into a magma source to explain the generation of the magma heterogeneity. The results indicate that the mixing of Pacific Ocean-type mantle (MORB), an EMI-like component from recycled lower continental crust and EMII-like material from subducted sediments can explain the low-207Pb/206Pb isotope values observed in the melt inclusions. The discovery of small proportions of melt inclusions with high 207Pb/206Pb ratios, high K2O, P2O5, Rb and U contents and low Pb and Cu contents in the studied andesites suggests that the andesitic magma may have been formed by the mixing of materials with different elemental and isotopic compositions. Our study results suggest that pervasive magma mixing may have occurred in the magma source prior to eruption in the Okinawa Trough.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 91958213), the National Programme on Global Change and Air-Sea Interaction (Grant No. GASIGEOGE-02), the Open Fund of the Key Laboratory of Marine Geology and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. MGE2019KG07), the International Partnership Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. 133137KYSB20170003), the National Special Fund for the 13th Five Year Plan of COMRA (Grant No. DY135- G2-1-02), the Special Fund for the Taishan Scholar Program of Shandong Province (Grant No. ts201511061), the Qingdao Postdoctoral Applied Research Project, the National Key Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2013CB429700) and Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, China (Grant No. ZR2019BD010)

HYL1 regulates the balance between adaxial and abaxial identity for leaf flattening via miRNA-mediated pathways

HYPONASTIC LEAVES1 (HYL1) is an important regulator of microRNA (miRNA) biogenesis. Incurvature of rosette leaves in loss-of-function mutants of HYL1 implicates the regulation of leaf flatness by HYL1 via miRNA pathways. Recent studies have identified jba-1D, jaw-1D, and oe-160c, the dominant mutants of MIR166g, MIR319a, and MIR160c genes, respectively, which display three types of leaf curvature. However, it remains unclear whether or how HYL1 controls leaf flatness through the pathways mediated by these miRNAs. To define which miRNAs and target genes are relevant to the hyl1 phenotype in terms of leaf incurvature, the effects of three mutated MIRNA genes and their targets on the direction and extent of leaf curvature in hyl1 mutants were examined. The genetic analysis shows that the hyl1 phenotype is strongly rescued by jba-1D, but not by jaw-1D or oe-160c, whereas the mutant phenotypes of jba-1D, jaw-1D, or oe-160c leaves are compromised by the hyl1 allele. Expression analysis indicates that reduced accumulation of miR166, rather than of miR319a or miR160, causes incurvature of hyl1 leaves, and that miR319a-targeted TCP3 positively regulates the adaxial identity gene PHABULOSA while miR160-targeted ARF16 negatively regulates the abaxial identity gene FILAMENTOUS FLOWER. In these cases, the direction and extent of leaf incurvature are associated with the expression ratio of adaxial to abaxial genes (adaxial to abaxial ratio). HYL1 regulates the balance between adaxial and abaxial identity and modulates leaf flatness by preventing leaf incurvature, wavy margins, and downward curvature. It is concluded that HYL1 monitors the roles of miR165/166, miR319a, and miR160 in leaf flattening through the relative activities of adaxial and abaxial identity genes, thus playing an essential role in leaf development

Intermediate-band Surface Photometry of the Edge-on Galaxy: NGC 4565

We present a deep, 42.79 hr image of the nearby, edge-on galaxy NGC 4565 in the Beijing-Arizona-Taipei-Connecticut (BATC) 6660A band using the large-format CCD system on the 0.6m Schmidt telescope at the Xinglong Station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC). we obtain a final image that is calibrated to an accuracy of 0.02 mag in zero point, and for which we can measure galaxy surface brightness to an accuracy of 0.25 mag at a surface brightness at 27.5 mag arcsec^-2 at 6660A, corresponding to a distance of 22 kpc from the center of the disk. The integrated magnitude of NGC4565 in our filter is m6660=8.99 (R magnitude of 9.1) to a surface brightness of 28 mag arcsec-2. We analyze the faint outer parts of this galaxy using a two-dimensional model comprised of three components: an exponential thin disk, an exponential thick disk, and a power-law halo. A total of 12 parameters are included in our model. We determine the best values of our model parameters via 10,000 random initial values, 3,700 of which converge to final values. The thin disk and thick disk parameters we determine here are consistent with those of previous studies of this galaxy. However, our very deep image permits a better determination of the power law fit to the halo, constraining this power law to be between r^-3.2 and r^-4.0, with a best fit value of r^-3.88. We find the axis ratio of the halo to be 0.44 and its core radius to be 14.4 kpc (for an adopted distance of 14.5 Mpc).Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, will appear in March 2002 of A

CMOS-integrated biosensor circuits and systems : FMCW radar sensor for noncontact multimodal vital signs monitoring and coherent photoacoustic sensor for non-invasive in vivo sensing and imaging

For pervasive healthcare monitoring and potential disease diagnosis, biosensors that can be deployed massively with compact size, low power consumption, and efficient and effective near-sensor processing capabilities are required. Synergetic optimizations on multi-physical sensing mechanisms, circuits, and efficient signal processing algorithms are needed to enable efficient and effective operation. In intricate and noisy scenarios, current sensor devices are usually limited by the detecting accuracy, low specificity, and large power consumption. Moreover, current sensors realized by discrete blocks are usually with bulky size, which is inconvenient for the massive deployment for pervasive healthcare monitoring applications. With the rapid development of CMOS technologies, biosensors are on the way to be monolithically integrated into a single chip to enable the highly efficient data acquisition and effective signal processing with low-power consumption and small size. The sensor data is acquired and processed at the edge near-sensor; thus, the data movement's power consumption is eliminated. Moreover, multi-physical sensing mechanisms can be utilized to enhance the biosensor’s capability, achieving multimodal sensor fusion by leveraging the advantages of complementary physical mechanisms, demonstrating the enormous potential to be used for the global COVID-19 pandemic. The CMOS-integrated radar sensor is a suitable candidate to monitor multimodal vital signs and detect specific movements like falling in a noncontact way utilizing electromagnetic (EM) waves. To further enable multimodal biomedical sensing for pervasive healthcare applications, considering that photoacoustic sensor is realized based on light excitation and acoustic sensing, which can be used to achieve the non-invasive monitoring on the in-depth blood core temperature and in vivo imaging on the target tissues. In the thesis, a CMOS-integrated phased-array radar sensor prototype fabricated in the GlobalFoundries 65-nm CMOS process for wide field-of-view (FoV) multimodal vital sign monitoring and falling detection is presented. The co-design of integrated circuit blocks and effective signal processing algorithms is implemented to enable the accuracy, low power consumption, and reliability of the radar sensor for noncontact health applications. Furthermore, to enable in-depth blood core temperature monitoring and in vivo imaging, a high-precision CMOS-integrated mixed-signal coherent lock-in photoacoustic sensor prototype is fabricated in GlobalFoundries 65-nm CMOS process, achieving potential disease diagnosis and health monitoring with compact size. Moreover, a four-channel photoacoustic system-on-chip (SoC) was fabricated in TSMC 65-nm process, which includes the analog front end (AFE), analog-to-digital converter (ADC), digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and the digital processing module implementing coherent lock-in and accurate beamforming on-chip to achieve accurate detection on in-depth target photoacoustic signals with an enhanced signal to noise ratio (SNR), improved sensitivity, and high specificity for the first time. By the optimizations on the mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs) design, energy-efficient sensor signal processing algorithms, and the multi-physical sensing mechanisms including EM, acoustics and optical techniques, the CMOS-based radar sensor, and photoacoustic sensor prototypes have verified their capabilities on accurate multimodal noncontact vital signs monitoring, falling detection, non-invasive temperature monitoring, and in-depth in vivo vessel imaging. The thesis explores the CMOS-integrated mixed-signal circuits and systems leveraging multi-modal sensing techniques for efficient and effective versatile sensing, pervasive healthcare monitoring, and potential disease diagnosis for the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as for the incoming intelligent Internet of Everything (IoE) era.Doctor of Philosoph

Investigation on Microwave Absorption Properties for Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes/Fe/Co/Ni Nanopowders as Lightweight Absorbers

Multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs)/Fe, MWCNTs/Co, and MWCNTs/Ni nanopowders have been prepared conveniently by a simple chemical method. The excellent microwave absorption properties in S-band have been obtained due to proper combination of the complex permeability and permittivity resulting from the magnetic nanoparticles and lightweight MWCNTs. The frequency of microwave absorption obeys the quarter-wavelength matching model. For the most excellent microwave absorption properties in S-band, it is found that the reflection loss exceeds −20 dB from 2.04 to 3.47 GHz for the absorber thickness between 3.36 and 5.57 mm, and a minimum reflection loss value of −39 dB was observed at 2.68 GHz on a specimen with a matching thickness of 4.27 mm for MWCNTs/Fe. The MWCNTs/Fe/Co/Ni nanopowders all can be a promising candidate for lightweight microwave absorption materials in S-band

Recent Developments in Nanoparticle-Based Photo-Immunotherapy for Cancer Treatment.

Phototherapy is an emerging approach for cancer treatment that is effective at controlling the growth of primary tumors. In the presence of light irradiation, photothermal and photodynamic agents that are delivered to tumor sites can induce local hyperthermia and the production of reactive oxygen species, respectively, that directly eradicate cancer cells. Nanoparticles, characterized by their small size and tunable physiochemical properties, have been widely utilized as carriers for phototherapeutic agents to improve their biocompatibility and tumor-targeted delivery. Nanocarriers can also be used to implement various codelivery strategies for further enhancing phototherapeutic efficiency. More recently, there has been considerable interest in augmenting the immunological effects of nanoparticle-based phototherapies, which can yield durable and systemic antitumor responses. This review provides an overview of recent developments in using nanoparticle technology to achieve photo-immunotherapy