Cyclic performance evaluation of a polyethylenimine/silica adsorbent with steam regeneration using simulated NGCC flue gas and actual flue gas of a gas-fired boiler in a bubbling fluidized bed reactor

To accelerate the deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) based on the solid amine adsorbents towards a practical scale application relevant to Natural Gas Combined Cycle (NGCC) power plants, this study has evaluated the cyclic performance of a polyethylenimine/silica adsorbent of kg scale in a laboratory scale bubbling fluidized bed reactor. A high volumetric concentration 80?90 vol% of steam mixed with N2 and CO2 has been used as the stripping gas during a typical temperature swing adsorption (TSA) cycle. Both the simulated NGCC flue gas and the actual flue gas from a domestic gas boiler have been used as the feed gas of the CO2 capture tests with the solid adsorbent. Various characterization has been carried out to elucidate the possible reasons for the initial capacity decline under the steam regeneration conditions. The effect of presence of CO2 in the stripping gas has also been studied by comparing the working capacities using different regeneration strategies. It has been demonstrated that the breakthrough and equilibrium CO2 adsorption capacities can be stabilized at approximately 5.9 wt% and 8.6 wt%, respectively, using steam regeneration for both the simulated and actual natural gas boiler flue gases. However, using a concentration of 15 vol% CO2 in the stripping gas has resulted in a significantly low working capacity at a level of 1.5 wt%, most likely due to the incomplete C

Herb Target Prediction Based on Representation Learning of Symptom related Heterogeneous Network.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has received increasing attention as a complementary approach or alternative to modern medicine. However, experimental methods for identifying novel targets of TCM herbs heavily relied on the current available herb-compound-target relationships. In this work, we present an Herb-Target Interaction Network (HTINet) approach, a novel network integration pipeline for herb-target prediction mainly relying on the symptom related associations. HTINet focuses on capturing the low-dimensional feature vectors for both herbs and proteins by network embedding, which incorporate the topological properties of nodes across multi-layered heterogeneous network, and then performs supervised learning based on these low-dimensional feature representations. HTINet obtains performance improvement over a well-established random walk based herb-target prediction method. Furthermore, we have manually validated several predicted herb-target interactions from independent literatures. These results indicate that HTINet can be used to integrate heterogeneous information to predict novel herb-target interactions

Directional Spin Wave in Spin-Torque Oscillators Induced by Interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya Interaction

Spin torque oscillators (STOs) are currently of great interest due to its wide tunable frequencies, low energy consumption and high quality factors compared with traditional oscillators. Here, we report the characteristics of the nanocontact-(NC-)STO in the presence of interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), using micromagnetic simulations. We find that the DMI can decrease the STO frequency by around 2 GHz. More importantly, the DMI is able to break the isotropy of the spin-wave spectrum and turn the emitted microwave into directional spin-wave beams potentially facilitating the synchronization of multiple STOs

Induction of cytoprotective autophagy in PC-12 cells by cadmium

AbstractLaboratory data have demonstrated that cadmium (Cd) may induce neuronal apoptosis. However, little is known about the role of autophagy in neurons. In this study, cell viability decreased in a dose- and time-dependent manner after treatment with Cd in PC-12 cells. As cells were exposed to Cd, the levels of LC3-II proteins became elevated, specific punctate distribution of endogenous LC3-II increased, and numerous autophagosomes appeared, which suggest that Cd induced a high level of autophagy. In the late stages of autophagy, an increase in the apoptosis ratio was observed. Likewise, pre-treatment with chloroquine (an autophagic inhibitor) and rapamycin (an autophagic inducer) resulted in an increased and decreased percentage of apoptosis in contrast to other Cd-treated groups, respectively. The results indicate that autophagy delayed apoptosis in Cd-treated PC-12 cells. Furthermore, co-treatment of cells with chloroquine reduced autophagy and cell activity. However, rapamycin had an opposite effect on autophagy and cell activity. Moreover, class III PI3 K/beclin-1/Bcl-2 signaling pathways served a function in Cd-induced autophagy. The findings suggest that Cd can induce cytoprotective autophagy by activating class III PI3 K/beclin-1/Bcl-2 signaling pathways. In sum, this study strongly suggests that autophagy may serve a positive function in the reduction of Cd-induced cytotoxicity

Investigation into the Influence of Physician for Treatment Based on Syndrome Differentiation

Background. The characteristics of treatment based on syndrome differentiation (TBSD) cause great challenges to evaluate the effectiveness of the clinical methods. Objectives. This paper aims to evaluate the influence of physician to personalized medicine in the process of TBSD. Methods. We performed a randomized, triple-blind trial involving patients of primary insomnia treated by 3 physicians individually and independently. The patients (n=30) were randomly assigned to receive treatments by the 3 physicians for every visit. However, they always received the treatment, respectively, prescribed by the physician at the first visit. The primary outcome was evaluated, respectively, by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and the TCM symptoms measuring scale. The clinical practices of the physicians were recorded at every visit including diagnostic information, syndrome differentiation, treating principles, and prescriptions. Results. All patients in the 3 groups (30 patients) showed significant improvements (>66%) according to the PSQI and TCM symptoms measuring scale. Conclusion. The results indicate that although with comparable effectiveness, there exist significant differences in syndrome differentiation, the treating principles, and the prescriptions of the approaches used by the 3 physicians. This means that the physician should be considered as an important factor for individualized medicine and the related TCM clinical research

Weather Support for the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Sailing Events

The Beijing 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Sailing Competitions (referred to as OPSC hereafter) were held at Qingdao during August 9–23 and September 7–13 2008, respectively. The Qingdao Meteorological Bureau was the official provider of weather support for the OPSC. Three-dimensional real-time information with high spatial-temporal resolution was obtained by the comprehensive observation system during the OPSC, which included weather radars, wind profile radars, buoys, automated weather stations, and other conventional observations. The refined forecasting system based on MM5, WRF, and statistical modules provided point-specific hourly wind forecasts for the five venues, and the severe weather monitoring and forecasting system was used in short-term forecasts and nowcasts for rainstorms, gales, and hailstones. Moreover, latest forecasting products, warnings, and weather information were communicated conveniently and timely through a synthetic, speedy, and digitalized network system to different customers. Daily weather information briefings, notice boards, websites, and community short messages were the main approaches for regatta organizers, athletes, and coaches to receive weather service products at 8:00 PM of each day and whenever new updates were available. During the period of OPSC, almost one hundred people were involved in the weather service with innovative service concept, and the weather support was found to be successful and helpful to the OPSC

Femtosecond laser-heating effect on the magnetization dynamics in perpendicularly magnetized Ta/CoFeB/MgO film

We have studied the effect of ultrafast laser-heating on the magnetization dynamics of perpendicularly magnetized CoFeB film by means of the time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr rotation effect. The effective perpendicular magnetic anisotropy field HK is significantly decreased with enhancing the pump laser-fluence in a moderate range of 5-12 mJ cm-2. The Gilbert damping, however, is found to be independent of the pump fluence. These findings provide a new method of separately manipulating the Gilbert damping and perpendicular magnetic anisotropy

Observation of Small Polaron and Acoustic Phonon Coupling in Ultrathin La0.7Sr0.3MnO3/SrTiO3 Structures

Understanding the underlying physics of interactions among various quasi-particles is a fundamental issue for the application of spintronics and photonics. Here the observation of a coupling between the small polarons in the nanoscale ultrathin La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 (LSMO) films and the acoustic phonons in the SrTiO3 (STO) substrate using ultrafast pump–probe spectroscopy has been reported. According to the temperature- and wavelength-dependent measurements, the amplitudes of the acoustic phonons are suppressed by tuning the small polarons absorption. This shows a coupled relationship between the acoustic phonons and the small polarons. At the probe photon energy of 1.55 eV where the polaron absorption is dominant, the acoustic phonons become unobservable. Furthermore, by performing the pump fluence dependent measurements on the LSMO films with different thicknesses, smaller acoustic phonon amplitudes are found in the thinner film with stronger small polaron binding energy. Such a coupled nature can be utilized to manipulate the small polarons using the acoustic phonons or vice versa, which is of great importance in device applications of colossal magnetoresistance materials