Analysis of Sediment Transport in the Middle Reach of the Yangtze River after Operation of the Three Gorges Project

Sediment Transport and Morphodynamic

Effectiveness of 10 polymorphic microsatellite markers for parentage and pedigree analysis in plateau pika (Ochotona curzoniae)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The plateau pika <it>(Ochotona curzoniae) </it>is an underground-dwelling mammal, native to the Tibetan plateau of China. A set of 10 polymorphic microsatellite loci has been developed earlier. Its reliability for parentage assignment has been tested in a plateau pika population. Two family groups with a known pedigree were used to validate the power of this set of markers.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The error in parentage assignment using a combination of these 10 loci was very low as indicated by their power of discrimination (0.803 - 0.932), power of exclusion (0.351 - 0.887), and an effectiveness of the combined probability of exclusion in parentage assignment of 99.999%.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>All the offspring of a family could be assigned to their biological mother; and their father or relatives could also be identified. This set of markers therefore provides a powerful and efficient tool for parentage assignment and other population analyses in the plateau pika.</p

Impacts of the Three Gorges Project on the Hydrological Regime in the Jingjiang Reach of the Yangtze River

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

Experimental study on the mechanisms of flow and sediment transport in a vegetated channel

Laboratory experiments were conducted in a flume with 3 types of artificial flexible submerged and emergent vegetation. Detailed velocity and sediment concentration in the channel were measured. The results show that submerged and emergent vegetation generates a much greater resistance to flow, and significantly alters the vertical distributions of velocity, especially in the vegetated and downstream regions. In comparison with the non-vegetated case, the turbulence kinetic energy and Reynolds stresses in the vegetated and downstream regions are much higher, indicating strong flow turbulence and momentum exchange in these areas. The high turbulence also results in a nearly constant fine suspended sediment concentration in the water column for all cases, while the increased resistance causes the coarser suspended sediment concentration to decrease. In addition, the sediment retention by the vegetation with small height is insignificant, but for the canopy with large height, the significant sediment deposition is found at the upstream region of the vegetated region

Heatmap Distribution Matching for Human Pose Estimation

For tackling the task of 2D human pose estimation, the great majority of the recent methods regard this task as a heatmap estimation problem, and optimize the heatmap prediction using the Gaussian-smoothed heatmap as the optimization objective and using the pixel-wise loss (e.g. MSE) as the loss function. In this paper, we show that optimizing the heatmap prediction in such a way, the model performance of body joint localization, which is the intrinsic objective of this task, may not be consistently improved during the optimization process of the heatmap prediction. To address this problem, from a novel perspective, we propose to formulate the optimization of the heatmap prediction as a distribution matching problem between the predicted heatmap and the dot annotation of the body joint directly. By doing so, our proposed method does not need to construct the Gaussian-smoothed heatmap and can achieve a more consistent model performance improvement during the optimization of the heatmap prediction. We show the effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive experiments on the COCO dataset and the MPII dataset.Comment: NeurIPS 202

Comparison of Physical Model Predictions and Prototype Measurements of Fluvial Morphodynamics in the Yangtze River Downstream of the Three Gorges Project

River, Estuarine and Coastal Dynamic

The Impact of the Wenchuan Earthquake on Birth Outcomes

Earthquakes and other catastrophic events frequently occurring worldwide can be considered as outliers and cause a growing and urgent need to improve our understanding of the negative effects imposed by such disasters. Earthquakes can intensively impact the birth outcomes upon psychological and morphological development of the unborn children, albeit detailed characteristics remain obscure.We utilized the birth records at Du Jiang Yan and Peng Zhou counties to investigate the birth outcomes as a consequence of a major earthquake occurred in Wenchuan, China on May 12, 2008. Totally 13,003 of neonates were recorded, with 6638 and 6365 for pre- and post- earthquake, respectively. Significant low birthweight, high ratio of low birthweight, and low Apgar scores of post-earthquake group were observed. In contrast, the sex ratio at birth, birth length and length of gestation did not show statistical differences. The overall ratio of birth-defect in the post-earthquake (1.18%) is statistically high than that of pre-earthquake (0.99%), especially for those in the first trimester on earthquake day (1.47%). The birth-defect spectrum was dramatically altered after earthquake, with the markedly increased occurrences of ear malformations. The ratio of preterm birth post-earthquake (7.41%) is significant increased than that of pre-earthquake (5.63%). For the birth outcomes of twins, significant differences of the ratio of twins, birth weight, ratio of low birthweight and birth-defect rate were observed after earthquake.A hospital-based study of birth outcomes impacted by the Wenchuan earthquake shows that the earthquake was associated with significant effects on birth outcomes, indicating it is a major monitor for long-term pregnant outcomes

The role of foam in improving the workability of sand : insights from DEM

Foam as a soil conditioner can transform the mechanical properties of the excavated natural muck and lubricate the interface between the cutting tools and muck, thus reducing the tools’ wear and promoting the efficiency of earth pressure balance (EPB) shield tunneling. This paper aims to explore the meso-mechanism of foam in improving the workability of sand by combining discrete element modeling (DEM) with experimental investigations of slump tests. A “sand-foam” mixture DEM model was generated by simplifying the sand grains and foam as individual particles with different properties. The particle-scale simulated parameters were calibrated based on a series of experimental observations. The effects of foam on the inter-particle contact distribution and the evolution of contact forces during the slumping process were investigated in detail through numerical modeling. It was found that injecting foam into sand specimens could increase the coordination number and the contact number around sand grains. Although the force transmission pattern changes from “sand-sand” into the coexistence of “sand-foam”, “sand-sand” and “foam-foam” contacts, the magnitude of contact forces transferred by foam particles is significantly lower than that by sand particles. The presence of foam reduces contact-scale frictional strength and thus reduces the stability of the microstructures of sand. In addition, the normal direction of inter-particle contact force deflects from the vertical to the horizontal and the magnitude of contact force decreases significantly with the influence of foam

Processing outcomes of the AFM probe-based machining approach with different feed directions

We present experimental and theoretical results to describe and explain processing outcomes when producing nanochannels that are a few times wider than the atomic force microscope (AFM) probe using an AFM. This is achieved when AFM tip-based machining is performed with reciprocating motion of the tip of the AFM probe. In this case, different feed directions with respect to the orientation of the AFM probe can be used. The machining outputs of interest are the chip formation process, obtained machined quality, and variation in the achieved channel depth. A three-sided pyramidal diamond probe was used under load-controlled conditions. Three feed directions were first investigated in detail. The direction parallel to and towards the probe cantilever, which is defined as “edge forward”, was then chosen for further investigation because it resulted in the best chip formation, machining quality, and material removal efficiency. To accurately reveal the machining mechanisms, several feed directions with different included angles for the pure edge-forward direction were investigated. Upon analysis of the chips and the machined nanochannels, it was found that processing with included angles in the range 0–30° led to high-quality channels and high material-removal efficiency. In this case, the cutting angles, such as the rake angle, clearance angle, and shear angle, have an important influence on the obtained results. In addition, a machining model was developed to explain the observed machined depth variation when scratching in different feed directions

Role of Glycol Chitosan-incorporated Ursolic Acid Nanoparticles in the Treatment of Osteosarcoma

Purpose: To investigate the effect of ursolic acid (UA)-incorporated glycol chitosan (GC) nanoparticles on inhibition of human osteosarcoma.Methods: U2OS and Saos-2 osteosarcoma cells were transfected with ursolic acid (UA) incorporated glycol chitosan (GC) nanoparticles. Ultraviolet (UV)  spectrophotometry was used to measure drug contents in nanoparticles at 365 nm with empty GC vehicles as blank. Bicinchoninic acid assay (BCA) method was employed to determine protein concentration. Identification of apoptosis and necrosis in osteosarcoma cells was performed by propidium iodide and FITC-annexin V reagents, respectively. FAC Scan flow cytometry was used to analyse apoptotic cells.Results: Among the range of UA concentrations tested, the minimum effective concentration was 10 μM with half inhibitory concentration IC50 of 25 μM. In U2OS cells, treatment with 10 and 25 μM UAinduced apoptosis in 5.89 ± 3.90 and 60.54 ± 5.40 % cells, respectively, compared to 2.05 ± 1.01 % cells for control. In Saos-2 cells, exposure to 10 and 25 μM UA induced apoptosis in 9.86 ± 8.89 and 47.54 ± 14.5 % cells, respectively, compared to 1.79 ± 0.23 % for control cells. Western blot analysis revealed  translocation of Bax and Bcl-2 proteins from mitochondria to cell cytosol. Increase in UA concentration  from 10 μM to 25 μM led to increase in the proportion of cells in G0/G1 phase and decrease in the number of cells in S and G2/M phases. These results confirm that UA transfection arrests cell cycle in G0/G1 phase in human osteosarcoma cell lines.Conclusion: UA transfection resulted in the inhibition of cell proliferation, Ezh2 expression inhibition, and apoptosis via mitochondrial pathway due to decrease in membrane potential and release of cytochrome C, as well as cell cycle arrest in G0/G1 phase.Keywords: Osteosarcoma, Cell cycle arrest, Palliation, Glycol chitosan, Ursolic aci