Turquoise Ornaments and Inlay Technology in Ancient China

Most turquoise objects from early Neolithic sites in China are pendants made of a single material. From the later Neolithic period, however, people started to create turquoise ornaments with two or more composite materials. Ornaments were inlaid with turquoise and other materials using new techniques. In the Early Bronze Age, the turquoise production process reached its peak. At the Erlitou site, archaeologists found a large dragon-shaped turquoise mosaic, a variety of animal-shaped turquoise decorations, and turquoise workshops. The purpose of this paper is to understand the importance of turquoise products in the formation process of early state formation in China by analyzing the following topics: the technological evolution of turquoise manufacture, the combination of composite materials, the use of adhesive in turquoise inlay, and the associated production processes as they developed from the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age

Global analyses of mRNA translational control during early Drosophila embryogenesis

The polysomal profiles of over 15,000 transcripts during the first ten hours after egg laying have been determined

Antibacterial sensitizers from natural plants: A powerful weapon against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a drug-resistant bacterium that can cause a range of infections with high morbidity and mortality, including pneumonia, etc. Therefore, development of new drugs or therapeutic strategies against MRSA is urgently needed. Increasing evidence has shown that combining antibiotics with “antibacterial sensitizers” which itself has no effect on MRSA, is highly effective against MRSA. Many studies showed the development of antibacterial sensitizers from natural plants may be a promising strategy against MRSA because of their low side effects, low toxicity and multi-acting target. In our paper, we first reviewed the resistance mechanisms of MRSA including “Resistance to Beta-Lactams”, “Resistance to Glycopeptide antibiotics”, “Resistance to Macrolides, Aminoglycosides, and Oxazolidinones” etc. Moreover, we summarized the possible targets for antibacterial sensitizers against MRSA. Furthermore, we reviewed the synergy effects of active monomeric compounds from natural plants combined with antibiotics against MRSA and their corresponding mechanisms over the last two decades. This review provides a novel approach to overcome antibiotic resistance in MRSA

Radar Coincidence Imaging for Off-Grid Target Using Frequency-Hopping Waveforms

Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a high-resolution staring imaging technique without the limitation of the target relative motion. To achieve better imaging performance, sparse reconstruction is commonly used. While its performance is based on the assumption that the scatterers are located at the prediscretized grid-cell centers, otherwise, off-grid emerges and the performance of RCI degrades significantly. In this paper, RCI using frequency-hopping (FH) waveforms is considered. The off-grid effects are analyzed, and the corresponding constrained Cramér-Rao bound (CCRB) is derived based on the mean square error (MSE) of the “oracle” estimator. For off-grid RCI, the process is composed of two stages: grid matching and off-grid error (OGE) calibration, where two-dimension (2D) band-excluded locally optimized orthogonal matching pursuit (BLOOMP) and alternating iteration minimization (AIM) algorithms are proposed, respectively. Unlike traditional sparse recovery methods, BLOOMP realizes the recovery in the refinement grids by overwhelming the shortages of coherent dictionary and is robust to noise and OGE. AIM calibration algorithm adaptively adjusts the OGE and, meanwhile, seeks the optimal target reconstruction result

Waveform Analysis and Optimization for Radar Coincidence Imaging with Modeling Error

RCI is a novel superresolution staring imaging technique based on the idea of wavefront modulation and temporal-spatial stochastic radiation field. For RCI, the reference matrix should be known accurately, and the imaging performance depends on the incoherence property of the reference matrix. Unfortunately, the modeling error, which degrades the performance significantly, exists generally. In this paper, RCI using frequency-hopping waveforms (FH-RCI) is considered, and a FH code design method aiming to increase the robustness of RCI to modeling error is proposed. First, we derive the upper bound of imaging error for RCI with modeling error and conclude that the condition number of the reference matrix determines the imaging performance. Then the object function for waveform design which minimizes the condition number of the reference matrix is achieved, and the quantum simulated annealing (QSA) is employed to optimize the FH code. Numerical simulations show that the optimized FH code could decrease the condition number of the reference matrix and improve the imaging performance of RCI with modeling error