The Effects of FIT Taijipao on Heart Rate: A Case Study

As an American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) initiative known as Exercise Is Medicine (EIM) is becoming more and more popular globally, FIT Taijipao has been proposed as a new approach to exercise. FIT Taijipao has been introduced as an individualized and dynamic exercise. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of FIT Taijipao on Heart Rate (HR) at different speeds including peak (YANG) and minimum (YIN) points every three months across 15 months of continuous FIT Taijipao exercise, concluding with a follow-up retention test to examine the effects of an 18-month detraining. The participant of the case study was recruited in a college-wide mind & health program. A 48-year-old sedentary Asian female volunteered for this pilot longitudinal study. The participant performed FIT Taijipao on a treadmill two to three times per week in the exercise lab. A Polar HR Monitor (M400 + H10 chest unit) was used to record HR data. According to FIT Taijipao guidelines, HR Average per 200m was used for data analysis. The Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale was used to monitor the participant’s subjective effort and controlled to be no higher than 15. YANG Speed (peak) is attained as RPE reaches 15 or less when HR reaches 145 bpm. The running speed was adjusted according to FIT Taijipao established speed profile. Weekly HR average of YANG (peak) speed decreased by 25.3 bpm (146.3 to 121.0 bpm) after first 3 months of FIT Taijipao; Weekly HR average at the same speed continuously decreased to 117.3, 120.0, 116.0, and 116.3 bpm at 4.5 mph speed. YANG (peak) speed increased gradually from 4.5 mph, to 5.7, 6.0, 6.1, 6.3, and 6.3 mph every three months. After 18 months of detraining, a retention FIT Taijipao test was done to examine the HR change. Weekly HR average at 6.3 mph was 160.6 bpm, and the lap average speed was 5.7 mph when HR was around 145 bpm. The RPE reported was 13. This case study illustrates that regular FIT Taijipao leads to a decreased HR, a useful index for exercise intensity and cardio-respiratory fitness. The participant enjoyed FIT Taijipao, a 40-45 minutes run. FIT Taijipao has a great potential to help general population to gain the benefits of exercise and physical activity without being over stressed

Developing Sustainable Snow Sports Education Programs for Adolescent Participation

Following Beijing’s winning bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, winter sports have ushered in a great development opportunity for adolescents in China. Beijing initiated the Ice and Snow Sports on Campus Program in 2016, however, one of the challenges is that the lack of quality snow sports instructors and access to ski resorts is limiting sustainable programs. Greek Peak Ski Resort, located in upstate NY, has a successful history of running snow sport educational programs that Beijing may be able to learn from. The purpose of this study was to assess and compare the Ice and Snow Sports on Campus Program in Beijing with the snow sports programs at Greek Peak Ski Resort, having a goal to explore sustainable education programs for adolescents. Literature research, program reports, field observation, and interviews with program directors and experts were used in this study to assess and compare the programs in Beijing and Greek Peak Ski Resort. The findings indicated that with the Ice and Snow Sports on Campus Program initiated in 2016 by the Beijing Municipal Education Commission, about 2.1 million K-12 students’ participation counts in ice and snow sports have been recorded. In 2021, more than 200 K-12 schools with ice and snow sports specialties were certified in Beijing. A total of 60 model courses with the topic in winter sports and Olympics have been developed to improve ice and snow sports teaching. The strong and historical school skiing program at Greek Peak Ski Resort includes about 55-57 K-12 school programs and 5 college PE programs each year, with an estimated student participation count of 20,000 per year. The collaboration between Greek Peak Ski Resort and local schools/ colleges/universities offers sustainable educational programs, benefitting generations of students and all parties involved and efficiently sharing resources. The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics provides a rare historical opportunity for multi-level and multi-dimensional cooperation between the sports and educational departments in Beijing. With supporting policies and guidance, the strategic goal of cultivating more young people to participate in winter sports is being achieved. Education programs provide opportunities for adolescents to learn winter sports skills and promote active healthy behavior. The collaboration between local schools, colleges/universities and Greek Peak Resort can be a good solution for Beijing to resolve the critical challenge of lack of quality instructors and easy access to winter sports facilities

Mini-Margin Nephron Sparing Surgery for Renal Cell Carcinoma 4 cm or Less

Objectives. To explore the safety and efficacy of mini-margin nephron sparing surgery (NSS) for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) 4 cm or less. Methods. Total of 389 cases of RCC 4 cm or less with normal contralateral kidneys were included in the study, including 135 cases treated by mini-margin NSS, 98 by 1 cm-NSS and 156 by radical nephrectomy (RN). The clinical results were followed-up and comparatively analyzed. Results. The mean and median margin width for mm-NSS was 2.2 and 2.0 mm (range 0 to 5). Of them, 112 (83.0%) cases had margins of 3 mm or less, and 26 had margins of 0 mm (19.3%). The mean width of margin for 1 cm-NSS was 11.6 mm (median 12, range 10~15). None of the NSS patients had positive surgical margins. The mean follow-up for mm-NSS, 1 cm-NSS and RN patients was 69, 82 and 82 months, respectively. Three mm-NSS patients, two 1 cm- NSS and four RN patients died of non-cancer related causes. Two mm-NSS patient (1.6%) experienced local recurrence. No distant metastasis was detected in all the patients. The over all 5-year survivals for NSS and RN patients were 100%, 100% and 98.7%, respectively (P = .950). Conclusions. Mini-margin NSS is as safe and effective as 1 cm-NSS and RN in treating early localized RCC 4 cm or less

Assessing the size, stability, and utility of isotropically tumbling bicelle systems for structural biology

AbstractAqueous phospholipid mixtures that form bilayered micelles (bicelles) have gained wide use by molecular biophysicists during the past 20 years for spectroscopic studies of membrane-bound peptides and structural refinement of soluble protein structures. Nonetheless, the utility of bicelle systems may be compromised by considerations of cost, chemical stability, and preservation of the bicelle aggregate organization under a broad range of temperature, concentration, pH, and ionic strength conditions. In the current work, 31P nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) have been used to monitor the size and morphology of isotropically tumbling small bicelles formed by mixtures of 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DMPC) or 1,2-di-O-tetradecyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DIOMPC) with either 1,2-dihexanoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DHPC) or 1,2-di-O-hexyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DIOHPC), testing their tolerance of variations in commonly used experimental conditions. 1H-15N 2D NMR has been used to demonstrate the usefulness of the robust DMPC–DIOHPC system for conformational studies of a fatty acid-binding protein that shuttles small ligands to and from biological membranes

A Semantic-aware Attention and Visual Shielding Network for Cloth-changing Person Re-identification

Cloth-changing person reidentification (ReID) is a newly emerging research topic that aims to retrieve pedestrians whose clothes are changed. Since the human appearance with different clothes exhibits large variations, it is very difficult for existing approaches to extract discriminative and robust feature representations. Current works mainly focus on body shape or contour sketches, but the human semantic information and the potential consistency of pedestrian features before and after changing clothes are not fully explored or are ignored. To solve these issues, in this work, a novel semantic-aware attention and visual shielding network for cloth-changing person ReID (abbreviated as SAVS) is proposed where the key idea is to shield clues related to the appearance of clothes and only focus on visual semantic information that is not sensitive to view/posture changes. Specifically, a visual semantic encoder is first employed to locate the human body and clothing regions based on human semantic segmentation information. Then, a human semantic attention module (HSA) is proposed to highlight the human semantic information and reweight the visual feature map. In addition, a visual clothes shielding module (VCS) is also designed to extract a more robust feature representation for the cloth-changing task by covering the clothing regions and focusing the model on the visual semantic information unrelated to the clothes. Most importantly, these two modules are jointly explored in an end-to-end unified framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods, and more robust features can be extracted for cloth-changing persons. Compared with FSAM (published in CVPR 2021), this method can achieve improvements of 32.7% (16.5%) and 14.9% (-) on the LTCC and PRCC datasets in terms of mAP (rank-1), respectively.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2108.0452

Changes in global climate heterogeneity under the 21st century global warming

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s)Variations in climate types are commonly used to describe changes in natural vegetation cover in response to global climate change. However, few attempts have been made to quantify the heterogeneous dynamics of climate types. In this study, based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) historical and representative concentration pathway (RCP) runs from 18 global climate models, we used Shannon's Diversity Index (SHDI) and Simpson's Diversity Index (SIDI) to characterise of global climate heterogeneity from a morphological perspective. Our results show that global climate heterogeneity calculated by the SHDI/SIDI indices decreased from 1901 to 2095 at a significance level of 0.01. As radiative forcing intensified from RCP 2.6 to 8.5, the SHDI/SIDI decreased significantly. Furthermore, we observed that the spatial distribution of global climate heterogeneity was significantly reduced, with a pronounced latitudinal trend. Sensitivity analysis indicated that the temperature increase played a more significant role in reducing global climate heterogeneity than precipitation under the three warming scenarios, which is possibly attributed to anthropogenic forcing. Our findings suggest that the dynamics of global climate heterogeneity can be an effective means of quantifying global biodiversity loss.Peer reviewe

Intensification of the dispersion of the global climatic landscape and its potential as a new climate change indicator

Increases and decreases in the areas of climatic types have become one of the most important responses to climate warming. However, few attempts have been made to quantify the complementary relationship between different climate types or to further assess changes in the spatial morphology. In this study, we used different observed datasets to reveal a dispersion phenomenon between major global climate types in 1950-2010, which is significantly consistent with the increasing trend of global temperatures. As the standard deviation of the area of major climate zones strengthened in 1950-2010, the global climatic landscape underwent notable changes. Not only did the area change, but the shape of the overall boundary became regular, the aggregation of climatic patches strengthened, and the climatic diversity declined substantially. However, changes in the global climatic landscapes are not at equilibrium with those on the continental scale. Interpreting these climatic morphological indices can deepen our understanding of the redistribution response mechanisms of species to climate change and help predict how they will be impacted by long-term future climate change.Peer reviewe

Observed Changes of Koppen Climate Zones Based on High-Resolution Data Sets in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Emerging and disappearing climate zones are frequently used to diagnose and project climate change. However, little attempt has been made to quantify shifts of climate zones in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) based on the high-resolution data sets. Our results show that highland climate was decreased substantially during 1961–2011 and were mainly replaced by boreal climate. We also found that the mean elevation of boreal and highland climate continues to rise, with obvious longitudinal geographical characteristics over the study period. Furthermore, we found that the climate spaces (a climate space defined as the volume of 10°C × 500 mm here) of both boreal and highland climate types tend to be warm and humid ones, which may provide more suitable climate conditions for species to maintain and promote diversity. Characterization of changes in QTP climate types deepens our understanding of regional climate and its biological impacts.Emerging and disappearing climate zones are frequently used to diagnose and project climate change. However, little attempt has been made to quantify shifts of climate zones in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) based on the high-resolution data sets. Our results show that highland climate was decreased substantially during 1961-2011 and were mainly replaced by boreal climate. We also found that the mean elevation of boreal and highland climate continues to rise, with obvious longitudinal geographical characteristics over the study period. Furthermore, we found that the climate spaces (a climate space defined as the volume of 10 degrees C x 500 mm here) of both boreal and highland climate types tend to be warm and humid ones, which may provide more suitable climate conditions for species to maintain and promote diversity. Characterization of changes in QTP climate types deepens our understanding of regional climate and its biological impacts. Plain Language Summary Climate classification is the key to simplifying complex climate and helps to deepen the understanding of regional climate change. Based on the high-resolution data set (LZ0025), the sharp climatic gradient features and their potential biological impact on Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) was quantified. With the temperature increase, the spatial distribution of highland tundra climate was gradually replaced by boreal climate. More importantly, the contraction of highland climate and the expansion of boreal climate has obvious elevation characteristics. In addition, climate spaces of highland and boreal climate types tend to warm and humid ones, which may provide more climatic niches for different species and contribute to regional biodiversity.Peer reviewe

From a Spatial Structure Perspective : Spatial-Temporal Variation of Climate Redistribution of China Based on the Köppen–Geiger Classification

https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL099319Shifting climate zones are widely used to diagnose and predict regional climate change. However, few attempts have been made to measure the spatial redistribution of these climate zones from a spatial structure perspective. We investigated changes in spatial structure of Köppen climate landscape in China between 1963 and 2098 with a landscape aggregation index. Our results reveal an apparent signal from fragmentation to aggregation, accompanied by the intensification of areal dispersion between cold and warm climate types. Our attribution analysis indicates that anthropogenic forcings have a larger influence on changes of spatial structure than natural variation. We also found that topographical heterogeneity is likely to contribute to the regional spatial fragmentation, especially in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. However, we also found that the spatial fragmentation will be weakened around the mid-2040s. We argue that biodiversity is likely to be mediated by spatial structure of future climate landscapes in China.Peer reviewe

Analysis and prediction of UAV-assisted mobile edge computing systems

As the demand for the internet of things (IoT) continues to grow, there is an increasing need for low-latency networks. Mobile edge computing (MEC) provides a solution to reduce latency by offloading computational tasks to edge servers. However, this study primarily focuses on the integration of back propagation (BP) neural networks into the realm of MEC, aiming to address intricate network challenges. Our innovation lies in the fusion of BP neural networks with MEC, particularly for optimizing task scheduling and processing. Firstly, we introduce a drone-assisted MEC model that categorizes computation offloading into synchronous and asynchronous modes based on task scheduling. Secondly, we employ Markov chains and probability-generation functions to accurately compute parameters such as average queue length, cycle time, throughput, and average delay in the synchronous mode. We also derive the first and second-order derivatives of the probability-generation function to support these computations. Finally, we establish a BP neural network to solve for the average queue length and latency in the asynchronous mode. Our results from the BP neural network closely align with the theoretical values obtained through the probability-generation function, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Additionally, our proposed UAV-assisted MEC model outperforms the synchronous mode. Overall, our MEC scheduling approach significantly reduces latency, enhances speed, and improves throughput, with our model reducing latency by approximately 11.72$\%$ and queue length by around 9.45$\%$