Optical Pressure Measurement Principle System

Surface pressure measurements are critical to aerodynamic testing in wind tunnel. A new pressure measurement technique is being developed to augment current capabilities that are an optical-based technique using pressure sensitive paint (PSP). Compared with the traditional surface pressure measurement, an important feature of optical pressure measurement is much more complete surface information with relatively simple procedures and instrumentation. So optical pressure measurement technique will provide an alternative to conventional methods for the pressure measurement. After studying the chapter of “Optical Pressure Measurement System”, readers are expected to grasp the measurement principle and know how to establish the corresponding measurement system. In this chapter, the measurement principle, measurement system, component characteristics and its application of optical pressure measurement technique are introduced based on the authors’ research

Inhibiting Aspergillus flavus growth and degrading aflatoxin B1 by combined beneficial microbes

Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) is a type of toxin produced by Aspergillus flavus, which has a negative effect on animal production and economic profits. In order to inhibit A. flavus growth and degrade aflatoxin, the optimal  proportion of beneficial microbes such as Lactobacillus casei, Bacillus subtilis and Pichia anomala were selected. The results show that AFB1 production and mycelium weight of A. flavus was decreased by more than 34 folds (161.05 vs. 4.69 µ/L) and 7.7 folds (6.98 vs. 0.90 mg/ml) with the free-cell supernatants of L. casei and B. subtilis (P<0.05), respectively. The optimal proportion of L. casei, B. subtilis and P. anomala was 2:1:2 for inhibiting A. flavus growth determined by 3x3 orthogonal design. Based on the optimal proportion of three microbial species, the maximum AFB1 degradation was during 24 to 48 h incubation (P<0.05). When three species of beneficial microbes were mixed with yeast cell wall and oligosaccharide, both of them could not help the microbes in AFB1 degradation. The combined microbial incubation showed that AFB1 contents in the supernatant and cells were 10.25 (P<0.05) and 3.34 µg/L, lower than the control group (68.55 µg/L), indicating that most of the AFB1 were degraded by the microbes and only a little of them were absorbed and deposited in microbial cells.Key words: Aspergillus flavus, aflatoxin B1 detoxification, beneficial microbes, yeast cell wall, oligosaccharide

Detecting Depression from Speech through an Attentive LSTM Network

Depression endangers people's health conditions and affects the social order as a mental disorder. As an efficient diagnosis of depression, automatic depression detection has attracted lots of researcher's interest. This study presents an attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for depression detection to make full use of the difference between depression and non-depression between timeframes. The proposed model uses frame-level features, which capture the temporal information of depressive speech, to replace traditional statistical features as an input of the LSTM layers. To achieve more multi-dimensional deep feature representations, the LSTM output is then passed on attention layers on both time and feature dimensions. Then, we concat the output of the attention layers and put the fused feature representation into the fully connected layer. At last, the fully connected layer's output is passed on to softmax layer. Experiments conducted on the DAIC-WOZ database demonstrate that the proposed attentive LSTM model achieves an average accuracy rate of 90.2% and outperforms the traditional LSTM network and LSTM with local attention by 0.7% and 2.3%, respectively, which indicates its feasibility

Vascular architecture characters and risk factors analysis of unstable moyamoya disease

BackgroundIn some MMD patients, the digital subtraction angiography (DSA) examination found, occlusion in the ipsilateral internal carotid artery or middle cerebral artery, accompanied by the formation of numerous moyamoya vessels. Conversely, the contralateral internal carotid artery or middle cerebral artery shows signs of stenosis without the presence of moyamoya vessels. Notably, cerebral perfusion studies reveal a similar or even more severe reduction in perfusion on the occluded side compared to the stenotic side. Importantly, clinical symptoms in these patients are typically attributed to ischemia caused by the stenotic side. This condition is referred to as unstable moyamoya disease (uMMD).ObjectiveThis clinical research focuses on evaluating risk factors related to MMD and developing strategies to minimize postoperative complications. The study aims to analyze vascular characteristics and identify potential risk factors in patients with uMMD.MethodsThe authors reviewed consecutive cases with complete clinical and radiological documentation of patients who underwent surgery between January 2018 and June 2023. Univariate analysis and multivariate logistic regression analysis were employed to understand the risk factors and prognosis of postoperative complications in uMMD.ResultsPostoperative complications were retrospectively analyzed in 1481 patients (aged 14 to 65). Among them, 1,429 patients were assigned to the conventional treatment group, while 52 were in the unstable moyamoya disease group. The uMMD treatment group showed a significantly higher incidence of early postoperative complications such as RIND, cerebral infarction, and cerebral hemorrhage (p < 0.05). Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted on the postoperative complications of 52 uMMD patients. Initial symptoms of stenosis ≤50% (univariate: p = 0.008, multivariate: p = 0.015; OR [95% CI] =23.149 [1.853–289.217]) and choosing occluded side surgery (univariate: p = 0.043, multivariate: p = 0.018; OR [95% CI] =0.059 [0.006–0.617]) were identified as significant risk factors for postoperative neurological complications.ConclusionCompared to the conventional treatment group, uMMD has higher complication rates, with vascular stenosis degree and surgical side selection identified as significant risk factors. A comprehensive understanding of preoperative clinical symptoms and vascular characteristics in moyamoya disease patients, coupled with the formulation of rational surgical plans, contributes positively to decreasing postoperative mortality and disability rates in uMMD

Comparative genomics analysis of Stenotrophomonas maltophilia strains from a community

BackgroundStenotrophomonas maltophilia is a multidrug-resistant (MDR) opportunistic pathogen with high resistance to most clinically used antimicrobials. The dissemination of MDR S. maltophilia and difficult treatment of its infection in clinical settings are global issues.MethodsTo provide more genetic information on S. maltophilia and find a better treatment strategy, we isolated five S. maltophilia, SMYN41–SMYN45, from a Chinese community that were subjected to antibiotic susceptibility testing, biofilm formation assay, and whole-genome sequencing. Whole-genome sequences were compared with other thirty-seven S. maltophilia sequences.ResultsThe five S. maltophilia strains had similar antibiotic resistance profiles and were resistant to β-lactams, aminoglycosides, and macrolides. They showed similar antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes, including various efflux pumps, β-lactamase resistance genes (blaL1/2), aminoglycoside resistance genes [aac(6’), aph(3’/6)], and macrolide-resistant gene (MacB). Genome sequencing analysis revealed that SMYN41-SMYN45 belonged to sequence type 925 (ST925), ST926, ST926, ST31, and ST928, respectively, and three new STs were identified (ST925, ST926, and ST928).ConclusionThis study provides genetic information by comparing genome sequences of several S. maltophilia isolates from a community of various origins, with the aim of optimizing empirical antibiotic medication and contributing to worldwide efforts to tackle antibiotic resistance

Association between vitamin D receptor gene polymorphisms and susceptibility to tuberculosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis

ObjectiveTuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of mortality worldwide. Previous studies have reported that TB susceptibility can be caused by vitamin D deficiency, which is affected by polymorphisms in the vitamin D receptor (VDR) gene. However, these results have been inconsistent. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to investigate the association between VDR polymorphisms and TB susceptibility.MethodsWe systematically searched for relevant literature in PubMed, Embase, and Medline databases through December 31st, 2022. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were made to ensure that HIV-negative population is the targeted subjects. The pooled odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were then used to assess the strength of the association, and the quality of the included articles was evaluated using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale. Potential sources of heterogeneity were evaluated based on subgroup and meta-regression analyses.ResultsIn our meta-analysis, we found that the FokI polymorphism in the VDR gene was associated with increased TB susceptibility in the allele and recessive genotype models (OR f vs. F = 1.235, 95%CI: 1.035–1.475; OR ff vs. Ff + FF = 1.317, 95%CI: 1.005–1.727. Further subgroup analysis based on ethnicity demonstrated the association with the risk of TB in all genotype models of the FokI polymorphism for Han population. Meta-regression analysis also indicated that ethnicity could be a potential source of heterogeneity in the FokI and BsmI polymorphisms in the VDR gene. However, publication year was another source of heterogeneity for the TaqI polymorphism.ConclusionIn summary, the FokI polymorphism in the VDR gene was found to increase the risk of TB in the HIV-negative population, both overall and in Asian populations. The findings presented in this paper could provide clues for preventing TB from the perspective of vitamin D supplementation, which is a controversial topic in the field of medicine and health

TeleChat Technical Report

In this technical report, we present TeleChat, a collection of large language models (LLMs) with parameters of 3 billion, 7 billion and 12 billion. It includes pretrained language models as well as fine-tuned chat models that is aligned with human preferences. TeleChat is initially pretrained on an extensive corpus containing a diverse collection of texts from both English and Chinese languages, including trillions of tokens. Subsequently, the model undergoes fine-tuning to align with human preferences, following a detailed methodology that we describe. We evaluate the performance of TeleChat on various tasks, including language understanding, mathematics, reasoning, code generation, and knowledge-based question answering. Our findings indicate that TeleChat achieves comparable performance to other open-source models of similar size across a wide range of public benchmarks. To support future research and applications utilizing LLMs, we release the fine-tuned model checkpoints of TeleChat's 7B and 12B variant, along with code and a portion of our pretraining data, to the public community.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figure

Advances in shrimp culture in China

Abstract only.Shrimp experimental ecology studies and the shrimp farming industry in China developed rapidly in the 1970's, and great strides have been made in the mass production of shrimp fry and the growing-out of marketable size shrimp since 1978. The total production of artificially reared shrimp fry and cultivated shrimp increased dramatically in the last few years. The improvement of water quality management and feed supply in larval rearing have resulted in increased production of shrimp fry up to 100,000-200,000 or even 300,000 fry/m3. Advances in the nutritional physiology and biochemistry of the digestive enzymes of juvenile and adolescent shrimp have enabled us to develop different kinds of for mulated feeds with high efficiency and low cost. Techniques for the transplantation and propagation of small benthic crustaceans (e.g. Corophium spp.) or polychaetes (e.g. Nereis spp.) to increase the benthos biomass for natural food of juvenile shrimp in nursery ponds have been developed and successfully practised. Improvement of culture techniques including shrimp pond management, has decreased the mortality of juvenile and young shrimp and increased yields of cultivated shrimp in the country. Highest production of 9,000 kg/ha has been achieved in the semi-intensive culture pond