Maps!: Living with Ghosts

The scene is set along Heilongjiang. The river feeds populations in the Russian Far East and Northeastern China, while simultaneously delineating the long and winding national border between contemporary Russia and China. The Chinese Northeast has been flattened and re-established as a cultural icon, yet when we peel off the pictures from streaming media, what kind of marks does the northeast- once called the eldest son of the Republic for its rapid industrial development in the last century- leave on the land? Infrastructure - such as collective farms in fields, tree farms in forests, road and electric towers- becomes a device for the government to exercise control from a distance, and between the network formed by these structures lie scattered villages and towns among untamed wilderness. The project traces over the river downstream, investigating specific man-made landscapes in the forms of nomad camps, temporary settlements, villages, towns, and cities in this borderland far from the state\u27s central power - looking into the natural landscape and environment, the presence of the authority, and the resulting forms of living

Complete mitochondrial genome sequence and phylogenetic analysis of Procambarus clarkii and Cambaroides dauricus from China

To enhance the management and protection of crayfish genetic diversity and germplasm resources in Cambaroides dauricus (C. dauricus), a common species of Procambarus clarkii (P. clarkii) was used as a control group to compare the whole mitochondrial genome sequence using Illumina sequencing technology. This study found that the mitochondrial genome of C. dauricus is 15580 bp in length, with a base composition of A (31.84%), G (17.66%), C (9.42%), and T (41.08%) and a C + G content of 27.08%. The C + G in the D-loop is rich in 17.06%, indicating a significant preference. The mitochondrial genome of C. dauricus contains 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, and 2 rRNA genes, with most of the genes labeled in the negative direction, except for a few genes that are labeled in the positive direction. The start codons of the ten coding sequences are ATG, and the quintessential TAA and TAG are the stop codons. This study also found that the Ka/Ks ratios of most protein-coding genes in the mitochondria of both shrimps are lower than 1, indicating weak natural selection, except for nad 2, nad 5, and cox 1. The Ka/Ks ratio of cox 3 is the lowest (less than 0.1), indicating that this protein-coding gene bears strong natural selection pressure and functional constraint in the process of mitochondrial genetic evolution of both shrimps. Furthermore, we constructed phylogenetic analyses based on the entire sequence, which effectively distinguishes the high body from other shrimp species of the genus based on the mitochondrial genome. This study provides molecular genetic data for the diversity investigation and protection of fishery resources with Chinese characteristics and a scientific reference for the evolutionary study of Procambarus.This research was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (NO. LH2023C058) and the Central Public-interest Scientific Institution Basal Research Fund, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences (NO. 2020TD56)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Relationship between Central Arterial Stiffness and Insulin Resistance in Chinese Community-Dwelling Population without Diabetes Mellitus

Objective. Insulin resistance (IR) is a pathological condition present not only in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM), but also in community-dwelling population without DM. Both central arterial stiffness and IR are closely correlated with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. The relationship between central arterial stiffness and IR has not been described in Chinese community-dwelling population without DM. The current analysis was designed to investigate the relationship between central arterial stiffness and IR in Chinese community-dwelling population without DM. Methods. There were 1150 participants fully assessed for not only homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) but also carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV). Results. Median age was 39 (18–80) years, and 69.7% were men. Bivariate correlation analysis showed that cfPWV was significantly related to HOMA-IR (P<0.05). Logistic regression analysis indicated that cfPWV was independently associated with HOMA-IR (P<0.05). Conclusions. This community-based analysis testified that the relationship between central arterial stiffness and IR was evident as early as during nondiabetic stage. Early interventions in Chinese community-dwelling population without DM to improve the IR are also important in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases

Influence of wheel axle stiffness character to the wheel/rail dynamic contact on the straight track

The influence of the wheel axle bending stiffness to the wheel/rail contact dynamic force and wheelset vertical vibration of the linear metro vehicle on a straight track was investigated. Based on a vehicle dynamic model and two kinds of elastic wheelset models, a comparison was carried out between the wheelset vertical vibration and the wheel/rail vertical force. Simulation results showed that the wheelset vibration and the wheel/rail vertical force of the elastic wheelset model were different with that of the rigid wheelset model; this was due to the BM3000 type wheelset not having high enough bending stiffness. In contrast, the result of the elastic wheelset model of the wheelset of the Beijing metro railway vehicle was quite similar to the results of the rigid model since a larger bending stiffness was used. Consequently, the wheelset vibration and wheel/rail vertical force can be decreased by increasing the wheel axle bending stiffness which will improve wheel/rail dynamic contact conditions. First published online: 16 Oct 201

Nonlinear dynamic analysis on maglev train system with flexible guideway and double time-delay feedback control

In this paper, the dynamic behavior of time-delayed feedback control for maglev train system with double discrete time delays is considered with flexible guideway. Considering the maglev guideway as Beroulli-Euler beam, the mathematical model of maglev system with flexible guideway is constructed. The time delay of the two state feedback signals in the maglev system occurs simultaneously, and the values are different. The present treatment method only considers one single feedback delay, which are insufficiency. Thus, the Hopf bifurcation with double time-delay feedback of maglev train running on the flexible guideway is analyzed considering time-delayed position feedback signal τ1 and velocity feedback signal τ2. A novel method is presented to develop the double-parametric Hopf bifurcation diagram in relation to τ1 and τ2. Sufficient numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the complex dynamical behavior of the discrete delays τ1 and τ2 for maglev system and we verify the obtained theoretical analysis. Finally, the field experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the Hopf bifurcation analytical method preliminarily

A T3SS Regulator Mutant of Vibrio alginolyticus Affects Antibiotic Susceptibilities and Provides Significant Protection to Danio rerio as a Live Attenuated Vaccine

Vibrio alginolyticus is a major cause of Vibriosis in farmed marine aquatic animals and has caused large economic losses to the Asian aquaculture industry in recent years. Therefore, it is necessary to control V. alginolyticus effectively. The virulence mechanism of V. alginolyticus, the Type III secretion system (T3SS), is closely related to its pathogenicity. In this study, the T3SS gene tyeA was cloned from V. alginolyticus wild-type strain HY9901 and the results showed that the deduced amino acid sequence of V. alginolyticus tyeA shared 75–83% homology with other Vibrio spp. The mutant strain HY9901ΔtyeA was constructed by Overlap-PCR and homologous recombination techniques. The HY9901ΔtyeA mutant exhibited an attenuated swarming phenotype and an ~40-fold reduction in virulence to zebrafish. However, the HY9901ΔtyeA mutant showed no difference in growth, biofilm formation and ECPase activity. Antibiotic susceptibility test was observed that wild and mutant strains were extremely susceptible to Amikacin, Minocycline, Gentamicin, Cefperazone; and resistant to oxacillin, clindamycin, ceftazidime. In contrast wild strains are sensitive to tetracycline, chloramphenicol, kanamycin, doxycycline, while mutant strains are resistant to them. qRT-PCR was employed to analyze the transcription levels of T3SS-related genes, the results showed that compared with HY9901 wild type, ΔtyeA had increased expression of vscL, vscK, vscO, vopS, vopN, vscN, and hop. Following vaccination with the mutant strain, zebrafish had significantly higher survival than controls following infection with the wild-type HY9901 (71.2% relative percent survival; RPS). Analysis of immune gene expression by qPCR showed that vaccination with HY9901ΔtyeA increased the expression of IgM, IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α in zebrafish. This study provides evidence of protective efficacy of a live attenuated vaccine targeting the T3SS of V. alginolyticus which may be facilitated by up-regulated pro-inflammatory and immunoglobulin-related genes

Full-body human motion reconstruction with sparse joint tracking using flexible sensors

Human motion tracking is a fundamental building block for various applications including computer animation, human-computer interaction, healthcare, etc. To reduce the burden of wearing multiple sensors, human motion prediction from sparse sensor inputs has become a hot topic in human motion tracking. However, such predictions are non-trivial as i) the widely adopted data-driven approaches can easily collapse to average poses. ii) the predicted motions contain unnatural jitters. In this work, we address the aforementioned issues by proposing a novel framework which can accurately predict the human joint moving angles from the signals of only four flexible sensors, thereby achieving the tracking of human joints in multi-degrees of freedom. Specifically, we mitigate the collapse to average poses by implementing the model with a Bi-LSTM neural network that makes full use of short-time sequence information; we reduce jitters by adding a median pooling layer to the network, which smooths consecutive motions. Although being bio-compatible and ideal for improving the wearing experience, the flexible sensors are prone to aging which increases prediction errors. Observing that the aging of flexible sensors usually results in drifts of their resistance ranges, we further propose a novel dynamic calibration technique to rescale sensor ranges, which further improves the prediction accuracy. Experimental results show that our method achieves a low and stable tracking error of 4.51 degrees across different motion types with only four sensors