Determination of fifty-six elements in three distinct types of geological materials by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry

This study evaluated results obtained from two routinely used sample preparation methods: microwave digestion and lithium fusion. Three different microwave digestion procedures and a lithium metaborate fusion method were examined. Forty trace elements in addition to 16 rare earth elements were determined in three distinct rock types and one standard reference material by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Lithium fusion resulted in excellent recovery of rare earth and some trace elements including Be, V, Sr, U, Hf, Nb and Ta, but the some elements Pb, Cr, Zn were lost. Two of the microwave digestion procedures produced similar results and proved suitable for the determination of most elements in different rock types. In addition, this study examined the potential interferences of the suspected major components (Si, Cl, Sr, Fe and Ba) of the rock on minor elements and the interferences of the light rare earth elements oxides on the heavy rare earth elements. The chemical compositions of three rock types (Volcanic, carbonate and shale) collected from the Nevada Test Site, the Fossil Ridge and Frenchman Mountain were compared. Since the rock type may determine the chemical composition of the associated groundwater, the water collected from springs thought to flow from carbonate, volcanic and shale aquifers were compared with each of the three whole rock chemical compositions

Existence and Multiplicity of Solutions for Discrete Nonlinear Two-Point Boundary Value Problems

By using Morse theory, the critical point theory, and the character of 1/2, we consider the existence and multiplicity results of solutions to the following discrete nonlinear two-point boundary value problem −Δ2(−1)=(,()),∈ℤ(1,) subject to (0)=0=Δ(), where is a positive integer, ℤ(1,)={1,2,…,},Δ is the forward difference operator defined by Δ()=(+1)−(), and ∶ℤ(1,)×ℝ→ℝ is continuous. In argument, Morse inequalities play an important role

Design and Synthesis Functional Selective Catalytic Reduction Catalyst for NOx Removal

AbstractMeOx-Cu-SSZ-13 (Me=Mn, Ce) was synthesized by physically mixing mental oxide and ion-exchanged zeolite. The composite catalyst showed highly efficient for the NOx removal using NH3-SCR method. And the NO conversion is 98% for MnOx-CeO2/Cu-SSZ-13 at 150°C and 97% for MnOx/Cu-SSZ-13 at 175°C. Meanwhile, the N2 selectivity remains more than 98%. The catalysts are characterized by using XRD and SEM. The XRD patterns show that all samples are highly crystallized and without impurities. The SEM demonstrates all samples have uniform crystal size. Composite catalyst especially combined with Cu-SSZ-13 has considerable potential as a catalyst in the area of NOx conversion

The Role of XPG in Processing (CAG)n/(CTG)n DNA Hairpins

BACKGROUND: During DNA replication or repair, disease-associated (CAG)n/(CTG)n expansion can result from formation of hairpin structures in the repeat tract of the newly synthesized or nicked DNA strand. Recent studies identified a nick-directed (CAG)n/(CTG)n hairpin repair (HPR) system that removes (CAG)n/(CTG)n hairpins from human cells via endonucleolytic incisions. Because the process is highly similar to the mechanism by which XPG and XPF endonucleases remove bulky DNA lesions during nucleotide excision repair, we assessed the potential role of XPG in conducting (CAG)n/(CTG)n HPR. RESULTS: To determine if the XPG endonuclease is involved in (CAG)n/(CTG)n hairpin removal, two XPG-deficient cell lines (GM16024 and AG08802) were examined for their ability to process (CAG)n/(CTG)n hairpins in vitro. We demonstrated that the GM16024 cell line processes all hairpin substrates as efficiently as HeLa cells, and that the AG08802 cell line is partially defective in HPR. Analysis of repair intermediates revealed that nuclear extracts from both XPG-deficient lines remove CAG/CTG hairpins via incisions, but the incision products are distinct from those generated in HeLa extracts. We also show that purified recombinant XPG protein greatly stimulates HPR in XPG-deficient extracts by promoting an incision 5\u27 to the hairpin. CONCLUSIONS: Our results strongly suggest that 1) human cells possess multiple pathways to remove (CAG)n/(CTG)n hairpins located in newly synthesized (or nicked) DNA strand; and 2) XPG, although not essential for (CAG)n/(CTG)n hairpin removal, stimulates HPR by facilitating a 5\u27 incision to the hairpin. This study reveals a novel role for XPG in genome-maintenance and implicates XPG in diseases caused by trinucleotide repeat expansion

VISinger 2: High-Fidelity End-to-End Singing Voice Synthesis Enhanced by Digital Signal Processing Synthesizer

End-to-end singing voice synthesis (SVS) model VISinger can achieve better performance than the typical two-stage model with fewer parameters. However, VISinger has several problems: text-to-phase problem, the end-to-end model learns the meaningless mapping of text-to-phase; glitches problem, the harmonic components corresponding to the periodic signal of the voiced segment occurs a sudden change with audible artefacts; low sampling rate, the sampling rate of 24KHz does not meet the application needs of high-fidelity generation with the full-band rate (44.1KHz or higher). In this paper, we propose VISinger 2 to address these issues by integrating the digital signal processing (DSP) methods with VISinger. Specifically, inspired by recent advances in differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP), we incorporate a DSP synthesizer into the decoder to solve the above issues. The DSP synthesizer consists of a harmonic synthesizer and a noise synthesizer to generate periodic and aperiodic signals, respectively, from the latent representation z in VISinger. It supervises the posterior encoder to extract the latent representation without phase information and avoid the prior encoder modelling text-to-phase mapping. To avoid glitch artefacts, the HiFi-GAN is modified to accept the waveforms generated by the DSP synthesizer as a condition to produce the singing voice. Moreover, with the improved waveform decoder, VISinger 2 manages to generate 44.1kHz singing audio with richer expression and better quality. Experiments on OpenCpop corpus show that VISinger 2 outperforms VISinger, CpopSing and RefineSinger in both subjective and objective metrics.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202

Toxic Effects of Silica Nanoparticles on Zebrafish Embryos and Larvae

Silica nanoparticles (SiNPs) have been widely used in biomedical and biotechnological applications. Environmental exposure to nanomaterials is inevitable as they become part of our daily life. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the possible toxic effects of SiNPs exposure. In this study, zebrafish embryos were treated with SiNPs (25, 50, 100, 200 μg/mL) during 4-96 hours post fertilization (hpf). Mortality, hatching rate, malformation and whole-embryo cellular death were detected. We also measured the larval behavior to analyze whether SiNPs had adverse effects on larvae locomotor activity. The results showed that as the exposure dosages increasing, the hatching rate of zebrafish embryos was decreased while the mortality and cell death were increased. Exposure to SiNPs caused embryonic malformations, including pericardial edema, yolk sac edema, tail and head malformation. The larval behavior testing showed that the total swimming distance was decreased in a dose-dependent manner. The lower dose (25 and 50 μg/mL SiNPs) produced substantial hyperactivity while the higher doses (100 and 200 μg/mL SiNPs) elicited remarkably hypoactivity in dark periods. In summary, our data indicated that SiNPs caused embryonic developmental toxicity, resulted in persistent effects on larval behavior. © 2013 Duan et al.published_or_final_versio

Serum lactate dehydrogenase activities as systems biomarkers for 48 types of human diseases

Most human diseases are systems diseases, and systems biomarkers are better fitted for diagnostic, prognostic, and treatment monitoring purposes. To search for systems biomarker candidates, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), a housekeeping protein expressed in all living cells, was investigated. To this end, we analyzed the serum LDH activities from 172,933 patients with 48 clinically defined diseases and 9528 healthy individuals. Based on the median values, we found that 46 out of 48 diseases, leading by acute myocardial infarction, had significantly increased (p  0.8) for hepatic encephalopathy and lung fibrosis