Online Energy Generation Scheduling for Microgrids with Intermittent Energy Sources and Co-Generation

Microgrids represent an emerging paradigm of future electric power systems that can utilize both distributed and centralized generations. Two recent trends in microgrids are the integration of local renewable energy sources (such as wind farms) and the use of co-generation (i.e., to supply both electricity and heat). However, these trends also bring unprecedented challenges to the design of intelligent control strategies for microgrids. Traditional generation scheduling paradigms rely on perfect prediction of future electricity supply and demand. They are no longer applicable to microgrids with unpredictable renewable energy supply and with co-generation (that needs to consider both electricity and heat demand). In this paper, we study online algorithms for the microgrid generation scheduling problem with intermittent renewable energy sources and co-generation, with the goal of maximizing the cost-savings with local generation. Based on the insights from the structure of the offline optimal solution, we propose a class of competitive online algorithms, called CHASE (Competitive Heuristic Algorithm for Scheduling Energy-generation), that track the offline optimal in an online fashion. Under typical settings, we show that CHASE achieves the best competitive ratio among all deterministic online algorithms, and the ratio is no larger than a small constant 3.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures. It will appear in Proc. of ACM SIGMETRICS, 201

Morphing and Sampling Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion

3D point cloud completion, the task of inferring the complete geometric shape from a partial point cloud, has been attracting attention in the community. For acquiring high-fidelity dense point clouds and avoiding uneven distribution, blurred details, or structural loss of existing methods' results, we propose a novel approach to complete the partial point cloud in two stages. Specifically, in the first stage, the approach predicts a complete but coarse-grained point cloud with a collection of parametric surface elements. Then, in the second stage, it merges the coarse-grained prediction with the input point cloud by a novel sampling algorithm. Our method utilizes a joint loss function to guide the distribution of the points. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method and demonstrate that it outperforms the existing methods in both the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and the Chamfer Distance (CD).Comment: 8pages, 7 figures, AAAI202

Improvement of Environmental Monitoring Technology on the basis of Carbon Mass Balance during CO2-enhanced Oil Recovery and Storage

AbstractThis study reviewed the emission inventory of carbon injection, production, storage, and emission. Results indicated that only approximately 95% of injected CO2 can be measured. Approximately 92% to 95% of carbon was stored, 0.01% was leaked from soil, and the residual 5% may have come from leak paths or may have leaked from near-surface sources, such as underground water, through biological metabolism. To develop a carbon mass balance model for CO2 enhanced oil recovery projects, the emission part from soil and underground water, as well as the fixation by vegetation, should be carefully measured. The residual 5% that remains unmeasured should be proven, i.e., whether such amount is derived along leak paths or is emitted from near-surface sources. Findings could highlight the fate of carbon, provide some suggestions to guide the selection of environmental monitoring technology, and aid in establishing a common methodology to identify leak risks for carbon storage projects

Cell–cell contact promotes Ebola virus GP-mediated infection

AbstractEbola virus (EBOV) is a highly pathogenic filovirus that causes hemorrhagic fever in humans and animals. Here we provide evidence that cell–cell contact promotes infection mediated by the glycoprotein (GP) of EBOV. Interestingly, expression of EBOV GP alone, even in the absence of retroviral Gag-Pol, is sufficient to transfer a retroviral vector encoding Tet-off from cell to cell. Cell-to-cell infection mediated by EBOV GP is blocked by inhibitors of actin polymerization, but appears to be less sensitive to KZ52 neutralization. Treatment of co-cultured cells with cathepsin B/L inhibitors, or an entry inhibitor 3.47 that targets the receptor NPC1 for virus binding, also blocks cell-to-cell infection. Cell–cell contact also enhances spread of rVSV bearing GP in monocytes and macrophages, the primary targets of natural EBOV infection. Altogether, our study reveals that cell–cell contact promotes EBOV GP-mediated infection, and provides new insight into understanding EBOV spread and viral pathogenesis

Liao ning virus in China

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Liao ning virus is in the genus Seadornavirus within the family Reoviridae and has a genome composed of 12 segments of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). It is transmitted by mosquitoes and only isolated in China to date and it is the only species within the genus Seadornavirus which was reported to have been propagated in mammalian cell lines. In the study, we report 41 new isolates from northern and southern Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in China and describe the phylogenetic relationships among all 46 Chinese LNV isolates.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>The phylogenetic analysis indicated that all the isolates evaluated in this study can be divided into 3 different groups that appear to be related to geographic origin based on partial nucleotide sequence of the 10th segment which is predicted to encode outer coat proteins of LNV. Bayesian coalescent analysis estimated the date of the most recent common ancestor for the current Chinese LNV isolates to be 318 (with a 95% confidence interval of 30-719) and the estimated evolutionary rates is 1.993 × 10^-3substitutions per site per year.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results indicated that LNV may be an emerging virus at a stage that evaluated rapidly and has been widely distributed in the north part of China.</p

Liao ning virus in China

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Liao ning virus is in the genus Seadornavirus within the family Reoviridae and has a genome composed of 12 segments of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). It is transmitted by mosquitoes and only isolated in China to date and it is the only species within the genus Seadornavirus which was reported to have been propagated in mammalian cell lines. In the study, we report 41 new isolates from northern and southern Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in China and describe the phylogenetic relationships among all 46 Chinese LNV isolates.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>The phylogenetic analysis indicated that all the isolates evaluated in this study can be divided into 3 different groups that appear to be related to geographic origin based on partial nucleotide sequence of the 10th segment which is predicted to encode outer coat proteins of LNV. Bayesian coalescent analysis estimated the date of the most recent common ancestor for the current Chinese LNV isolates to be 318 (with a 95% confidence interval of 30-719) and the estimated evolutionary rates is 1.993 × 10^-3substitutions per site per year.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results indicated that LNV may be an emerging virus at a stage that evaluated rapidly and has been widely distributed in the north part of China.</p

Remediation of soil contaminated with decabrominated diphenyl ether using white rot fungi

Biodegradation of decabrominated diphenyl ether (BDE-209) in soil by white rot fungi under various experimental conditions was investigated in this study. It was found that BDE-209 in soil could be rapidly and efficiently degraded by white rot fungi, and the biodegradation fits the pseudo-first-order kinetics during a 15-day incubation period. The residues of BDE-209 in soil decreased with the increased amount of white rot fungi addition. It can be seen from the results that white rot fungi have a good degradation ability with one-step and two-step addition method. In native soil, the degradation of BDE-209 reached 52.65%, which was higher than that in sterilized soil. About 37.76–53.74% of BDE-209 degradation was observed in different soil types after 15 days. In addition, it was confirmed in this study that the presence of Cu2+, Cd2+ could enhance the remediation of soil contaminated with BDE-209, and the residues decreased by 69.20% and 54.65% for Cu2+ and Cd2+ treatment, respectively. However, the superior ability of white rot fungi to degrade BDE-209 was not obvious at low pollution level (<0.5 mg kg−1). First published online: 08 Feb 201

Everything of Thoughts: Defying the Law of Penrose Triangle for Thought Generation

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized decision-making by breaking down complex problems into more manageable language sequences referred to as ``thoughts''. An effective thought design should consider three key perspectives: performance, efficiency, and flexibility. However, existing thought can at most exhibit two of these attributes. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel thought prompting approach called ``Everything of Thoughts'' (XoT) to defy the law of ``Penrose triangle of existing thought paradigms. XoT leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to incorporate external domain knowledge into thoughts, thereby enhancing LLMs' capabilities and enabling them to generalize to unseen problems efficiently. Through the utilization of the MCTS-LLM collaborative thought revision framework, this approach autonomously produces high-quality comprehensive cognitive mappings with minimal LLM interactions. Additionally, XoT empowers LLMs to engage in unconstrained thinking, allowing for flexible cognitive mappings for problems with multiple solutions. We evaluate XoT on several challenging multi-solution problem-solving tasks, including Game of 24, 8-Puzzle, and Pocket Cube. Our results demonstrate that XoT significantly outperforms existing approaches. Notably, XoT can yield multiple solutions with just one LLM call, showcasing its remarkable proficiency in addressing complex problems across diverse domains.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure