7,455 research outputs found
Lipidomic profiling in Crohn's disease: abnormalities in phosphatidylinositols, with preservation of ceramide, phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylserine composition.
Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory condition largely affecting the terminal ileum and large bowel. A contributing cause is the failure of an adequate acute inflammatory response as a result of impaired secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines by macrophages. This defective secretion arises from aberrant vesicle trafficking, misdirecting the cytokines to lysosomal degradation. Aberrant intestinal permeability is also well-established in Crohn's disease. Both the disordered vesicle trafficking and increased bowel permeability could result from abnormal lipid composition. We thus measured the sphingo- and phospholipid composition of macrophages, using mass spectrometry and stable isotope labelling approaches. Stimulation of macrophages with heat-killed Escherichia coli resulted in three main changes; a significant reduction in the amount of individual ceramide species, an altered composition of phosphatidylcholine, and an increased rate of phosphatidylcholine synthesis in macrophages. These changes were observed in macrophages from both healthy control individuals and patients with Crohn's disease. The only difference detected between control and Crohn's disease macrophages was a reduced proportion of newly-synthesised phosphatidylinositol 16:0/18:1 over a defined time period. Shotgun lipidomics analysis of macroscopically non-inflamed ileal biopsies showed a significant decrease in this same lipid species with overall preservation of sphingolipid, phospholipid and cholesterol composition
A Novel Power-Band based Data Segmentation Method for Enhancing Meter Phase and Transformer-Meter Pairing Identification
This paper presents a novel power-band-based data segmentation (PBDS) method
to enhance the identification of meter phase and meter-transformer pairing.
Meters that share the same transformer or are on the same phase typically
exhibit strongly correlated voltage profiles. However, under high power
consumption, there can be significant voltage drops along the line connecting a
customer to the distribution transformer. These voltage drops significantly
decrease the correlations among meters on the same phase or supplied by the
same transformer, resulting in high misidentification rates. To address this
issue, we propose using power bands to select highly correlated voltage
segments for computing correlations, rather than relying solely on correlations
computed from the entire voltage waveforms. The algorithm's performance is
assessed by conducting tests using data gathered from 13 utility feeders. To
ensure the credibility of the identification results, utility engineers conduct
field verification for all 13 feeders. The verification results unequivocally
demonstrate that the proposed algorithm surpasses existing methods in both
accuracy and robustness.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery. arXiv admin
note: text overlap with arXiv:2111.1050
Electronic Spin Transport in Dual-Gated Bilayer Graphene
The elimination of extrinsic sources of spin relaxation is key in realizing
the exceptional intrinsic spin transport performance of graphene. Towards this,
we study charge and spin transport in bilayer graphene-based spin valve devices
fabricated in a new device architecture which allows us to make a comparative
study by separately investigating the roles of substrate and polymer residues
on spin relaxation. First, the comparison between spin valves fabricated on
SiO2 and BN substrates suggests that substrate-related charged impurities,
phonons and roughness do not limit the spin transport in current devices. Next,
the observation of a 5-fold enhancement in spin relaxation time in the
encapsulated device highlights the significance of polymer residues on spin
relaxation. We observe a spin relaxation length of ~ 10 um in the encapsulated
bilayer with a charge mobility of 24000 cm2/Vs. The carrier density dependence
of spin relaxation time has two distinct regimes; n<4 x 1012 cm-2, where spin
relaxation time decreases monotonically as carrier concentration increases, and
n>4 x 1012 cm-2, where spin relaxation time exhibits a sudden increase. The
sudden increase in the spin relaxation time with no corresponding signature in
the charge transport suggests the presence of a magnetic resonance close to the
charge neutrality point. We also demonstrate, for the first time, spin
transport across bipolar p-n junctions in our dual-gated device architecture
that fully integrates a sequence of encapsulated regions in its design. At low
temperatures, strong suppression of the spin signal was observed while a
transport gap was induced, which is interpreted as a novel manifestation of
impedance mismatch within the spin channel
Dynamic shear fracture toughness and failure characteristics of Ti–6Al–4V alloy under high loading rates
A novel 2-bar/double-shear impact (2B/2SI) loading technique is used to study the dynamic mode II (shear) fracture characteristics of Ti–6Al–4V. The new specimen design, to be used in combination with a standard split Hopkinson pressure bar, circumvent classical limitations associated with conventional one-point impact methods. This paper presents a combined experimental-numerical approach to determining the mode II fracture toughness of Ti–6Al–4V for a broad range of loading rates between 1.10 × 10^{−2}- 4.98 × 10^{7} (MPa, m^{1/2}s^{−1}). Results showed only a slight initial increase in toughness, which increases abruptly with loading rates beyond 10^{6} (MPa, m^{1/2}s^{−1}). Fractographic examination showed distinctively different mechanisms in operation at the microscale, depending on the rate of loading. Failure is through a brittle-ductile, mixed-mode fracture under quasi-static conditions; by contrast, the fracture surface exhibited fractographic features of adiabatic shear bands (ASB) and material melting/re-solidification under dynamic conditions. High-speed photography showed that both dynamic shear fracture (DSF) and ASB occurred during the same loading process. Interactions between DSF and ASB were observed to influence the dominant failure mechanism of the material at high loading rates
Picosecond photoisomerization and rotational reorientation dynamics in solution
The trans-cis isomerization rates for stiff-diphenylbutadiene (S-DPB) in n-alkane solvents were measured using single photon counting methods and the rotational reorientation times τR for S-DPB and trans stilbene were obtained by picosecond polarization spectroscopy. In neither case did τR VS viscosity show Stokes-Einstein-Debye (SED) behavior. The values of τR were used to calculate the angular velocity correlation frequencies β using the Hubbard relation. The variation of isomerization rate with β was found to be predicted well by the Kramers equation when barrier frequencies of 154 cm-1 for stilbene and 16 cm-1 for S-DPB were used. This Kramers-Hubbard fit finesses questions regarding the validity of the one dimensional Kramers model and focuses attention on the SED equation. The dynamical relationship between the torsional friction, important in isomerization, and rotational friction, which determines the overall angular motion of the molecules, is discussed
Towards Spatial Word Embeddings
Leveraging textual and spatial data provided in spatio-textual objects (eg., tweets), has become increasingly important in real-world applications, favoured by the increasing rate of their availability these last decades (eg., through smartphones). In this paper, we propose a spatial retrofitting method of word embeddings that could reveal the localised similarity of word pairs as well as the diversity of their localised meanings. Experiments based on the semantic location prediction task show that our method achieves significant improvement over strong baselines
An ICA-Based HVAC Load Disaggregation Method Using Smart Meter Data
This paper presents an independent component analysis (ICA) based
unsupervised-learning method for heat, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC)
load disaggregation using low-resolution (e.g., 15 minutes) smart meter data.
We first demonstrate that electricity consumption profiles on mild-temperature
days can be used to estimate the non-HVAC base load on hot days. A residual
load profile can then be calculated by subtracting the mild-day load profile
from the hot-day load profile. The residual load profiles are processed using
ICA for HVAC load extraction. An optimization-based algorithm is proposed for
post-adjustment of the ICA results, considering two bounding factors for
enhancing the robustness of the ICA algorithm. First, we use the hourly HVAC
energy bounds computed based on the relationship between HVAC load and
temperature to remove unrealistic HVAC load spikes. Second, we exploit the
dependency between the daily nocturnal and diurnal loads extracted from
historical meter data to smooth the base load profile. Pecan Street data with
sub-metered HVAC data were used to test and validate the proposed
methods.Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed method is
computationally efficient and robust across multiple customers
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