Comprehensive Evaluation of Emergency Shelters in Wuhan City Based on GIS

Emergency shelters, which reflect the city's ability to respond to and deal with major public emergencies to a certain extent, are essential to a modern urban emergency management system. This paper is based on spatial analysis methods, using Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze the suitability of the 28 emergency shelters in Wuhan City. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution is further used to evaluate the accommodation capacity of emergency shelters in central urban areas, which provides a reference for the optimization of existing shelters and the site selection of new shelters, and provides a basis for improving the service capacity of shelters. The results show that the overall situation of emergency shelters in Wuhan is good, with 96\% of the places reaching the medium level or above, but the suitability level needs to be further improved, especially the effectiveness and accessibility. Among the seven central urban areas in Wuhan, Hongshan District has the strongest accommodation capacity while Jianghan District has the weakest, with noticeable differences.Comment: the 29th International Conference on Geoinformatics, E

Reliability Analysis of Correlated Competitive and Dependent Components Considering Random Isolation Times

Funding Information: Funding Statement: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 62172058) and the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 2022JJ10052, 2022JJ30624). Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Correlation between dietary patterns and cognitive function in older Chinese adults: A representative cross-sectional study

ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between dietary patterns and cognitive function in older adults (≥60 years old).MethodsFood intake was quantitatively assessed by the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ), and cognitive function was assessed by the Chinese version of the Simple Mental State Examination Scale (MMSE). Four major dietary patterns were identified by the factor analysis (FA) method. The relationship between dietary patterns and cognitive function was evaluated by logistic regression.ResultsA total of 884 participants were included in the study. Four dietary patterns (vegetable and mushroom, oil and salt, seafood and alcohol, and oil tea dietary patterns) were extracted. In the total population, Model III results showed that the fourth quartile of dietary pattern factor scores for the vegetable and mushroom pattern was 0.399 and 7.056. The vegetable and mushroom dietary pattern may be a protective factor for cognitive function, with p-value = 0.033, OR (95% CI): 0.578 (0.348, 0.951) in Model III (adjusted for covariates: sex, ethnic, marital, agricultural activities, smoking, drinking, hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, BMI, and dietary fiber). In the ethnic stratification analysis, the scores of dietary pattern factors of the vegetable and mushroom among the Yao participants were 0.333 and 5.064. The Vegetable and mushroom diet pattern may be a protective factor for cognitive function, p-value = 0.012, OR (95% CI): 0.415 (0.206, 0.815).ConclusionThe fourth quartile of the vegetable and mushroom dietary pattern scores showed dose-dependent and a strong correlation with cognitive function. Currently, increasing vegetable and mushroom intake may be one of the effective ways to prevent and mitigate cognitive decline. It is recommended to increase the dietary intake of vegetables and mushroom foods

Enzyme Kinetics Studies of Nucleoside Diphosphate Kinase in Human Erythrocytes and Frequency Distribution in Healthy Subjects and Transplant Recipients in Chinese Han Population

ABSTRACT Nucleoside diphosphate kinase (NDPK), as a house-keeping protein, involves in various molecular processes including signal transduction, energy and drug metabolism. The main objective was to investigate NDPK kinetics in human erythrocytes and to monitor the frequency distribution of NDPK activity levels in Chinese healthy subjects and transplant recipients. METHODS: NDPK activity in erythrocytes was detected by a validated ion-pair high-performance liquid chromatogram method. NDPK kinetics studies were carried out systematically. NDPK activity levels were determined in 500 healthy subjects, 250 kidney and 250 liver transplant recipients in Chinese Han population. RESULTS: Thermal and pH stability studies indicated NDPK was relatively stable at temperature 30-45ºC and pH 6.0-9.0. In substrate dependency study, the apparent Michaelis-Menten constant (K m ) and maximum velocity of enzymatic reaction (V max ) increased with concentration of substrates. Meanwhile, in product inhibition study, with the increasing concentration of dATP, the V max of dADP decreased with constant K m and K m of dGTP increased with constant V max . NDPK activity levels revealed a 7-fold variability and were not normally distributed in all groups. NDPK activity levels were significantly (P<0.05) higher in transplant group than those in health group. Additionally, much higher NDPK activity levels had been shown (P<0.001) in liver transplant recipients when compared to kidney transplant cases. CONCLUSIONS: NDPK kinetics studies indicated substrate dependency of NDPK and a "ping-pong" mechanism for production inhibition. Skewness distributions of NDPK activity levels were shown in the study population. The transplant recipients showed higher NDPK activity levels when compared to healthy subjects

Machine learning-based early diagnosis of autism according to eye movements of real and artificial faces scanning

BackgroundStudies on eye movements found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) had abnormal gaze behavior to social stimuli. The current study aimed to investigate whether their eye movement patterns in relation to cartoon characters or real people could be useful in identifying ASD children.MethodsEye-tracking tests based on videos of cartoon characters and real people were performed for ASD and typically developing (TD) children aged between 12 and 60 months. A three-level hierarchical structure including participants, events, and areas of interest was used to arrange the data obtained from eye-tracking tests. Random forest was adopted as the feature selection tool and classifier, and the flattened vectors and diagnostic information were used as features and labels. A logistic regression was used to evaluate the impact of the most important features.ResultsA total of 161 children (117 ASD and 44 TD) with a mean age of 39.70 ± 12.27 months were recruited. The overall accuracy, precision, and recall of the model were 0.73, 0.73, and 0.75, respectively. Attention to human-related elements was positively related to the diagnosis of ASD, while fixation time for cartoons was negatively related to the diagnosis.ConclusionUsing eye-tracking techniques with machine learning algorithms might be promising for identifying ASD. The value of artificial faces, such as cartoon characters, in the field of ASD diagnosis and intervention is worth further exploring

Experimental kinetic studies on the effects of organic additives on ammonia-based selective non-catalytic reduction process

The effect of organic components including ethanol, acetic acid, and benzene on ammonia-based selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR) process has been investigated. Experiments were performed through a quartz tube reactor with simulated flue gas and conducted from 973 to 1373 K. The combustion and pyrolysis properties of organic components were carried out first, it was found that all the combustion processes were completed ahead of the pyrolysis, and the combustion and pyrolysis temperatures for benzene are the highest among the three organic components. Ethanol addition promoted the removal of NO in the temperature range of 973 to 1073 K, and the NO reaction temperature window was broadened, while NO removal was greatly inhibited under a higher temperature over 1100 K. With regard to the effect of addition of multiple organic components on NO removal, the combination of C2H6O and C(2)H(4)O(2)significantly promoted this process, while the combination of C2H6O/C(2)H(4)O(2)and C(6)H(6)showed a negative effect on NO removal. The mechanism based on the radicals' reaction has been illustrated, showing the competition of these reactions under different situations

Adsorption Species Distribution and Multicomponent Adsorption Mechanism of SO2, NO, and CO2 on Commercial Adsorbents

Adsorption is a commonly used method for gas pollutant removal. The adsorption performances of four commercial adsorbents have been compared in this work through a fixed-bed reactor. The single gas adsorption results show that zeolite is more effective for SO2, NO, and CO, removal among the four adsorbents. SO2, NO, and CO2 are mainly monolayer adsorbed on adsorbents. Physically adsorbed SO2 is the main adsorption species on 13X zeolite, SA zeolite, and mesoporous alumina according to TPD-MS, while SO2 is more easily oxidized on activated carbon than the other adsorbents. NO can be oxidized more easily on zeolite than activated carbon. Only physically adsorbed CO2 is detected on these adsorbents. Multicomponent adsorption is investigated on 13X zeolite and activated carbon. For gas adsorption on 13X zeolite, the inhibitive effect of NO on SO2 is 26.3% higher than that of CO2 on SO2 indicating that NO plays a dominant role in SO2 adsorption. Physically adsorbed NO is the only NO adsorption species on 13X when SO2 exists, showing NO oxidation on 13X is greatly inhibited by SO2. For gas adsorption on activated carbon, chemically adsorbed SO2 increases largely after NO is put in, showing that the promotive effect of NO on SO2 is mainly for the chemically adsorbed SO2. In the presence of SO2 chemically adsorbed NO almost disappeared, which indicates that SO2 mainly dominates chemically adsorbed NO on activated carbon. The effects of adsorbent performance on multicomponent gas adsorption are reflected by the gas adsorption mechanism. These findings provide considerable specific information for industrial flue gas purification.</p

Catalytic Degradation of Ortho-Chlorophenol Using Activated Carbon Modified by Different Methods

The performance of activated carbon (AC) modified by different methods was compared for its catalytic degradation of ortho-chlorophenol (o-CP). For the chemically treated AC, the catalytic effect of AC–NH3·H2O was superior to the other catalysts examined, having an o-CP removal efficiency of 82.2% at 330 °C. For the metal-modified catalysts, AC–V and AC–Co showed similar removal performances of 93.2% at 330 °C. N2 adsorption-desorption isotherms, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and gas chromatography—mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analyses were used to characterize the reaction products, and different reaction mechanisms were proposed for both AC–NH3·H2O and AC–V according to the results. Complete oxidative degradation of o-CP was achieved by AC–V, with AC–NH3·H2O leading to the formation of additional dioxins. It can be deduced that a risk of dioxin synthesis and escape during the regeneration process is possible when nitrogen-modified carbon is used in selective catalytic reduction (SCR) denitrification reactions, especially in the presence of chlorine atoms, benzene rings, and oxygen