THE KINEMATIC ANALYSIS ON THOMAS ENQVIST’S FOREHAND TOPSPIN TECHNIQUE

This paper presents knowledge on kinematic feature of an outstanding athlete who uses forehand topspin technique during a tennis match. Thomas Enqvist had used forehand topspin technique to receive for three times in the ATP Championship Round-robin Tournament Semifinal, which was held in Chengdu, China. The technique of forehand topspin has been further analyzed by three-dimensional video. Through study, the kinematic technical feature has been obtained, resulting in not only providing referential statistics for the technical training of the athletes, but also enriching the technical theory of tennis

Huntington's like conditions in China, A review of published Chinese cases

Background: Knowledge about HD in China is lacking in the international literature. We have therefore analyzed the Chinese literature to thoroughly explore the clinical characteristics of Huntington disease in China. Methods: A computer-based online search of China National Knowledge Infrastructure was performed to review case reports concerning HD published between January 1980 and April of 2011, and the clinical characteristics were extracted. Results: A total of 92 studies involving 279 patients (157 males and 122 females) were collected, 82.0% of which were from provinces of North China. Most of the cases (97.8%) had a family history of HD, and paternal inheritance (65.5%) was higher than maternal inheritance (34.5%). Onset age was 35.8 (± 11.8) years, death occurred with 45.6 (± 13.5) years after a course of 11.6 (± 5.6) years. Involuntary movements were the most frequent reported presentation (found in 52.3%, including 64.4% in the entire body, 19.8% in the upper limbs, and 13.7% in the head and face). Psychiatric symptoms at onset were reported in 16.1%, and cognitive impairment in 1.8%. With disease progression, 99.6% of patients had abnormal movements, 67.9% cognitive impairment, and 35.0% suffered psychiatric symptoms. Of the reported patients, only 22 underwent IT15 gene testing with positive results. Conclusion: HD is a well-reported entity in Chinese medical literature, however, only a small number of instances have been proven by molecular diagnosis. Most of the features resemble what is known in other countries. The highly predominant motor presentation, and the higher male prevalence as well as the apparent concentration in Northern China may be due to observational bias. There is therefore a need to prospectively examine cohorts of patients with appropriate comprehensive assessment tools including genetic testing

Stock Trading Optimization through Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Normalizing Fl

With the fast development of quantitative portfolio optimization in financial engineering, lots of promising algorithmic trading strategies have shown competitive advantages in recent years. However, the environment from real financial markets is complex and hard to be fully simulated, considering non-stationarity of the stock data, unpredictable hidden causal factors and so on. Fortunately, difference of stock prices is often stationary series, and the internal relationship between difference of stocks can be linked to the decision-making process, then the portfolio should be able to achieve better performance. In this paper, we demonstrate normalizing flows is adopted to simulated high-dimensional joint probability of the complex trading environment, and develop a novel model based reinforcement learning framework to better understand the intrinsic mechanisms of quantitative online trading. Second, we experiment various stocks from three different financial markets (Dow, NASDAQ and S&P 500) and show that among these three financial markets, Dow gets the best performance results on various evaluation metrics under our back-testing system. Especially, our proposed method even resists big drop (less maximum drawdown) during COVID-19 pandemic period when the financial market got unpredictable crisis. All these results are comparatively better than modeling the state transition dynamics with independent Gaussian Processes. Third, we utilize a causal analysis method to study the causal relationship among different stocks of the environment. Further, by visualizing high dimensional state transition data comparisons from real and virtual buffer with t-SNE, we uncover some effective patterns of betComment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.1505

Impact coefficient analysis on long-span beam bridge

This paper presents a numerical study on the impact coefficient calculation of a straight-line π-shaped composite beam and a curved box girder beam. A numerical model of vehicle-bridge coupling system is established, where the random irregularity of bridge surface is considered in the model. The effect of lane numbers, bridge surface flatness, vehicle speed, vehicle weight and primary beam stiffness on the impact coefficient are considered. The results indicate that the lane numbers have certain influence on the impact coefficient; the impact coefficient presents nonlinear increment as the bridge surface flatness becomes from grade A to grade D; the vehicle-bridge coupling system can resonate at both low speed and high speed; the vehicle weight has little influence on the impact coefficient; whilst the displacement impact coefficient is decreased with an increment in the primary beam stiffness. Besides, the local and global impact coefficients, the displacement, moment and shear force impact coefficients are also comprehensively discussed

Identifying and decoupling many-body interactions in spin ensembles in diamond

We simulate the dynamics of varying density quasi-two-dimensional spin ensembles in solid-state systems, focusing on the nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond. We consider the effects of various control sequences on the averaged dynamics of large ensembles of spins, under a realistic "spin-bath" environment. We reveal that spin locking is efficient for decoupling spins initialized along the driving axis, both from coherent dipolar interactions and from the external spin-bath environment, when the driving is two orders of magnitude stronger than the relevant coupling energies. Since the application of standard pulsed dynamical decoupling sequences leads to strong decoupling from the environment, while other specialized pulse sequences can decouple coherent dipolar interactions, such sequences can be used to identify the dominant interaction type. Moreover, a proper combination of pulsed decoupling sequences could lead to the suppression of both interaction types, allowing additional spin manipulations. Finally, we consider the effect of finite-width pulses on these control protocols and identify improved decoupling efficiency with increased pulse duration, resulting from the interplay of dephasing and coherent dynamics

Evaluation of multicomponent recombinant vaccines against Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae in mice

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Porcine contagious pleuropneumonia (PCP) is a highly contagious disease that is caused by <it>Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae </it>(APP) and characterized by severe fibrinous necrotizing hemorrhagic pleuropneumonia, which is a severe threat to the swine industry. In addition to APP RTX-toxins I (ApxI), APP RTX-toxin II (ApxII), APP RTX-toxin III (ApxIII) and Outer membrane protein (OMP), there may be other useful antigens that can contribute to protection. In the development of an efficacious vaccine against APP, the immunogenicities of multicomponent recombinant subunit vaccines were evaluated.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Six major virulent factor genes of APP, i.e., <it>apxI</it>, <it>apxII</it>, <it>apxIII</it>, APP RTX-toxins IV (<it>apxIV</it>), <it>omp </it>and type 4 fimbrial structural (<it>apfa</it>) were expressed. BALB/c mice were immunized with recombinant ApxI ( rApxI), recombinant ApxII (rApxII), recombinant ApxIII (rApxIII) and recombinant OMP (rOMP) (Group I); rApxI, rApxII, rApxIII, recombinant ApxIV (rApxIV), recombinant Apfa (rApfa) and rOMP (Group II); APP serotype 1 (APP1) inactivated vaccine (Group III); or phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) (Control group), respectively. After the first immunization, mice were subjected to two booster immunizations at 2-week intervals, followed by challenge with APP1 Shope 4074 and APP2 S1536.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The efficacy of the multicomponent recombinant subunit vaccines was evaluated on the basis of antibody titers, survival rates, lung lesions and indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) detection of APP. The antibody level of Group I was significantly higher than those of the other three groups (<it>P </it>< 0.05). The survival rate of Group I was higher than that of Groups II and III (<it>P </it>< 0.05) and the control (<it>P </it>< 0.01). Compared with the other three groups, the lungs of Group I did not exhibit obvious hemorrhage or necrosis, and only showed weak and scattered fluorescent dots by IIF detection.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The result indicates that the multicomponent recombinant subunit vaccine composed of rApxI, rApxII, rApxIII and rOMP can provide effective cross-protection against homologous and heterologous APP challenge.</p

Characterization of Bovidae sex-determining gene SRY

In mammals, testis determination is under the control of the sex-determining gene SRY. This Y-linked gene encodes a protein with a DNA binding domain similar to those found in high-mobility-group proteins. Here we report the cloning and sequences of the SRY genes of yak and Chinese native cattle. Our data show that SRY genes in Bovidae are less divergent, especially in the coding and 3' regions

An efficient procedure for protein extraction from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissues for reverse phase protein arrays

INTRODUCTION: Protein extraction from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues is challenging due to extensive molecular crosslinking that occurs upon formalin fixation. Reverse-phase protein array (RPPA) is a high-throughput technology, which can detect changes in protein levels and protein functionality in numerous tissue and cell sources. It has been used to evaluate protein expression mainly in frozen preparations or FFPE-based studies of limited scope. Reproducibility and reliability of the technique in FFPE samples has not yet been demonstrated extensively. We developed and optimized an efficient and reproducible procedure for extraction of proteins from FFPE cells and xenografts, and then applied the method to FFPE patient tissues and evaluated its performance on RPPA. RESULTS: Fresh frozen and FFPE preparations from cell lines, xenografts and breast cancer and renal tissues were included in the study. Serial FFPE cell or xenograft sections were deparaffinized and extracted by six different protein extraction protocols. The yield and level of protein degradation were evaluated by SDS-PAGE and Western Blots. The most efficient protocol was used to prepare protein lysates from breast cancer and renal tissues, which were subsequently subjected to RPPA. Reproducibility was evaluated and Spearman correlation was calculated between matching fresh frozen and FFPE samples. The most effective approach from six protein extraction protocols tested enabled efficient extraction of immunoreactive protein from cell line, breast cancer and renal tissue sample sets. 85% of the total of 169 markers tested on RPPA demonstrated significant correlation between FFPE and frozen preparations (p < 0.05) in at least one cell or tissue type, with only 23 markers common in all three sample sets. In addition, FFPE preparations yielded biologically meaningful observations related to pathway signaling status in cell lines, and classification of renal tissues. CONCLUSIONS: With optimized protein extraction methods, FFPE tissues can be a valuable source in generating reproducible and biologically relevant proteomic profiles using RPPA, with specific marker performance varying according to tissue type

Assessment of Vegetation Dynamics and Ecosystem Resilience in the Context of Climate Change and Drought in the Horn of Africa

Understanding the response of vegetation and ecosystem resilience to climate variability and drought conditions is essential for ecosystem planning and management. In this study, we assessed the vegetation changes and ecosystem resilience in the Horn of Africa (HOA) since 2000 and detected their drivers based mainly on analysis of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products. We found that the annual and seasonal trends of NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) generally increased during the last two decades over the Horn of Africa particularly in western parts of Ethiopia and Kenya. The weakest annual and seasonal NDVI trends were observed over the grassland cover and tropical arid agroecological zones. The NDVI variation negatively correlated with Land Surface Temperature (LST) and positively correlated with precipitation at a significant level (p < 0.05) account for 683,197 km2 and 533,385 km2 area, respectively. The ecosystem Water Use Efficiency (eWUE) showed overall increasing trends with larger values for the grassland biome. The precipitation had the most significant effect on eWUE variation compared to LST and annual SPEI (Standardized Evapotranspiration Index). There were about 54.9% of HOA resilient to drought disturbance, whereas 32.6% was completely not-resilient. The ecosystems in the humid agroecological zones, the cropland, and wetland were slightly not-resilient to severe drought conditions in the region. This study provides useful information for policy makers regarding ecosystem and dryland management in the context of climate change at both national and regional levels