A QoS-Based Fairness-Aware BBR Congestion Control Algorithm Using QUIC

Congestion control is a fundamental technology to balance the traffic load and the network. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol has flexible congestion control and at the same time possesses the advantages of high efficiency, low latency, and easy deployment at the application layer. Bottleneck bandwidth and round-trip propagation time (BBR) is an optional congestion control algorithm adopted by QUIC. BBR can significantly increase throughput and reduce latency, in particular over long-haul paths. However, BBR results in high packet loss in low bandwidth and low fairness in multi-stream scenarios. In this article, we propose the enhanced BBR congestion control (eBCC) algorithm, which improves the BBR algorithm in two aspects: (1) 10.87% higher throughput and 74.58% lower packet loss rate in the low-bandwidth scenario and (2) 8.39% higher fairness in the multi-stream scenario. This improvement makes eBCC very suitable for IoT communications to provide better QoS services

Uncertainty Evaluation of Indicative Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Fish by Gas Chromatography

In order to ensure the accuracy of laboratory test results, the uncertainty of the determination of indicative polychlorinated biphenyls in fish by gas chromatography was evaluated. According to the national Food Safety standard, National Food Safety Standard Maximum Levels of Contaminants in Foods (GB 2762-2022), the content of PCB28, PCB52, PCB101, PCB118, PCB138, PCB153 and PCB180) in the "measured" samples was determined as the total content of PCBs. Then, the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) measurement model was re-established according to the "measured" and detection standard, and then the weight of uncertainty affected by the measurement model on test results were analyzed and evaluated. After evaluation, the measurement result of PCBs in quality control fish samples was 149.1 μg/kg, and the relative extended uncertainty was Ur=2.9%, k=2. The contribution of uncertainty was measurement repeatability 70.8%, sample weight 0.025%, internal standard volume 1.8%, sum of concentration ratios of each target in sample solution 27.3%

Fusaric acid instigates the invasion of banana by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense TR4

CITATION: Liu, S. et al. 2020. Fusaric acid instigates the invasion of banana by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense TR4. New Phytologist, 225:913–929, doi:10.1111/nph.16193.The original publication is available at https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.comFusaric acid (FSA) is a phytotoxin produced by several Fusarium species and has been associated with plant disease development, although its role is still not well understood. Mutation of key genes in the FSA biosynthetic gene (FUB) cluster in Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense tropical race 4 (Foc TR4) reduced the FSA production, and resulted in decreased disease symptoms and reduced fungal biomass in the host banana plants. When pretreated with FSA, both banana leaves and pseudostems exhibited increased sensitivity to Foc TR4 invasion. Banana embryogenic cell suspensions (ECSs) treated with FSA exhibited a lower rate of O2 uptake, loss of mitochondrial membrane potential, increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation, and greater nuclear condensation and cell death. Consistently, transcriptomic analysis of FSA-treated ECSs showed that FSA may induce plant cell death through regulating the expression of genes involved in mitochondrial functions. The results herein demonstrated that the FSA from Foc TR4 functions as a positive virulence factor and acts at the early stage of the disease development before the appearance of the fungal hyphae in the infected tissues.https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.16193Publisher's versio

Geographic and urban–rural disparities in dietary energy and macronutrient composition among women of childbearing age: findings from the China health and nutrition survey,1991–2015

Abstract Background Understanding nutritional status among women of childbearing age (WCA) is of increasing concern, as nutrient intakes may affect the health of WCA and well-being of their offspring. This study aimed to investigate secular trends of dietary energy and macronutrients intakes and access longitudinally the urban-rural and geographic disparities among Chinese WCA. Methods A total of 10,219 participants were involved in three rounds of the Chinese Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS:1991, 2004, and 2015). Average macronutrients intakes were compared against the Chinese Dietary Reference Intakes Standard (DRIs) to better assess adequacy. Mixed effect models were used to estimate the secular trends of dietary intake. Results A total of 10,219 participants were involved. Dietary fat, the percentage of energy (%E) from fat, and the proportion with more than 30% of energy from fat and less than 50% from carbohydrates increased notably over time (p < 0.001). In 2015, urban western WCA had the most dietary fat (89.5 g/d), %E from fat (41.4%), with the highest proportion of energy from fat (81.7%) and carbohydrate (72.1%) out the range of DRIs. From 1991 to 2015, the average urban-rural differences in dietary fat decreased from 15.7 g/d to 3.2 g/d among eastern WCA. However, it increased to 16.4 g/d and 6.3 g/d among central and western WCA, respectively. Conclusion WCA was experiencing a rapid transformation to a high-fat diet. Temporal variation with obvious urban-rural and geographic disparities in dietary. energy and macronutrient composition persistently existed among Chinese WCA.These findings have implications of future public strategies to strengthen the nutrition propaganda and education of balanced diet for WCA to help them to improve their nutritional status, especially for those living in western China

Joint Network Combining Dual-Attention Fusion Modality and Two Specific Modalities for Land Cover Classification Using Optical and SAR Images

Optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images provide various complementary information on land properties, which can substantially improve the accuracy of land cover classification because of the fusion of their multisource information. However, excellent extraction of the discriminative information of optical and SAR images and effective integration of the interpretation information of multisource data remain challenging issues. In this study, we have proposed a novel joint network that combines a dual-attention fusion modality and two specific modalities to achieve superior land cover classification maps, which has two modes of encoding-level fusion (JoiTriNet-e) and decoding-level fusion (JoiTriNet-d). We first proposed a strategy for the fusion modality and specific modalities joint learning, the goal of which was to simultaneously find three mapping functions that project optical and SAR images separately and together into semantic maps. Two architectures were constructed using the proposed strategy, which improved the performance of multisource and single-source land cover classification. To aggregate the heterogeneous features of optical and SAR images more reasonably, we designed a multimodal dual-attention fusion module. Experiments were conducted on two multisource land cover datasets, among which comparison experiments highlighted the superiority and robustness of our model, and ablation experiments verified the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and module

Gradient Histogram Estimation and Preservation for Texture Enhanced Image Denoising

Natural image statistics plays an important role in image denoising, and various natural image priors, including gradient based, sparse representation based and nonlocal selfsimilarity based ones, have been widely studied and exploited for noise removal. In spite of the great success of many denoising algorithms, they tend to smooth the fine scale image textures when removing noise, degrading the image visual quality. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a texture enhanced image denoising method by enforcing the gradient histogram of the denoised image to be close to a reference gradient histogram of the original image. Given the reference gradient histogram, a novel gradient histogram preservation (GHP) algorithm is developed to enhance the texture structures while removing noise. Two region-based variants of GHP are proposed for the denoising of images consisting of regions with different textures. An algorithm is also developed to effectively estimate the reference gradient histogram from the noisy observation of the unknown image. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GHP algorithm can well preserve the texture appearance in the denoised images, making them look more natural

Engineering tumor-oxygenated nanomaterials: advancing photodynamic therapy for cancer treatment

Photodynamic therapy (PDT), a promising treatment modality, employs photosensitizers to generate cytotoxic reactive oxygen species (ROS) within localized tumor regions. This technique involves administering a photosensitizer followed by light activation in the presence of oxygen (O2), resulting in cytotoxic ROS production. PDT’s spatiotemporal selectivity, minimally invasive nature, and compatibility with other treatment modalities make it a compelling therapeutic approach. However, hypoxic tumor microenvironment (TME) poses a significant challenge to conventional PDT. To overcome this hurdle, various strategies have been devised, including in-situ O2 generation, targeted O2 delivery, tumor vasculature normalization, modulation of mitochondrial respiration, and photocatalytic O2 generation. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of recent developments in designing tumor-oxygenated nanomaterials to enhance PDT efficacy. Furthermore, we delineate ongoing challenges and propose strategies to improve PDT’s clinical impact in cancer treatment

The Involvement of p53-miR-34a-CDK4 Signaling During the Development of Cervical Cancer

Aim: The aim was to explore the epigenetic mechanisms underlying cervical oncogenesis, we compared the level of microRNA-34a (miR-34a), p53, and cell cycle-related protein CDK4 within normal cervical tissue, cervical intraepithelial neoplasia III (CINIII) tissue, and cervical cancer tissue. Methods: Fresh normal cervical tissue, CINIII tissue, and cervical cancer tissue specimens were collected from patients not receiving chemotherapy, radiotherapy or immunotherapy prior to surgery. Stem-loop real-time polymerase chain reaction was employed to analyze the level of miR-34a. p53 was detected by immunohistochemistry, and cell cycle-related protein CDK4 was detected by Western blot. Results: The positive rates of p53 in CINIII and cervical cancer tissues were 35% and 68%, respectively (P < 0.01) while no p53 was detected in normal cervical tissue. miR-34a levels in CINIII and cervical cancer tissues were significantly down-regulated (0.53 ± 0.13-fold and 0.11 ± 0.07-fold, compared with normal cervical tissue, P < 0.01). CDK4 level in CINIII (0.31 ± 0.02) and cervical cancer (0.64 ± 0.04) tissue were significantly higher than that of normal cervical tissue (0.18 ± 0.01, P < 0.01). Meanwhile, the differences between the levels of these molecules in cervical cancer tissue and in CINIII tissue were notable (P < 0.05). Conclusion: With the progression of cervical cancer lesions, the positive rate of p53 was greatly increased which may indicate its mutation, while miR-34a was down-regulated and CDK4 was up-regulated, which suggested that all these factors might be involved in the process of cervical oncogenesis

Experimental Vortex Flow Patterns in the Primary and Secondary Pump Intakes of a Model Underground Pumping Station

In order to provide specific references and suggestions for the design and operation of underground pumping stations, in this paper, an experimental model of an underground pumping station, including 4 pumps and 2 pump intakes (primary and secondary), was obtained through similitude of fluid mechanics. The phase diagrams of various vortices, in terms of different dimensionless numbers are presented, which can reveal their appearance and evolution process. Three specific cases with different vortex flows were analyzed. The experiment results may provide a reference for the current design guidelines for underground pumping stations