Study on Greenway Plant Landscape Based on Bird Habitat Conservation - A Case Study of Wenyu River - North Canal Greenway in Beijing

In recent years, rapid urbanization is leading to a sharp decrease of bird diversity in city. The plant landscape in the greenway plays an important role in habitat conservation. This paper aims to explore the effects of plant landscape planning for the bird habitat conservation in urban greenway, and to study the design methods of greenway plant landscapes based on bird habitats conservation. Wenyu River - North Canal, a river located in the east of Beijing with uninterrupted green spaces along the coast, has the potential to become the migration channel for migratory birds. Dongjiao Wetland Park is an important node. At the macro level, the program investigated the vegetation pattern of Wenyu River-North Canal by using GIS technology and analyzed the distribution and ecological connectivity of different bird habitat types in the greenway. The results show that along the Wenyu River-North Canal, the distribution of habitats for some bird groups is uneven and some habitat types are poorly connected. At the micro level, a field study was conducted in Dongjiao Wetland Park in combination with actual projects, in which the forest form distribution and plant species composition were analyzed and the bird biotope was mapped. The results show that in the Dongjiao Wetland Park, the plant community is dominated by arbor-herb type; evergreen plants, shrubs and food plants are lacking; grasslands habitats and wetlands habitats were small and the area disturbed by human is large. According to the analysis results, aiming at bird habitat conservation, a vegetation landscape optimization plan of Wenyu River-North Canal Greenway and a plant landscape reconstruction design of the Northern Park of Dongjiao Wetland Park were proposed, including protecting important habitat patches, optimizing plant community structure and selecting plant species

Experimental and theoretical analysis of microstructural evolution and deformation behaviors of CuW composites during equal channel angular pressing

CuW composites were synthesized using an equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) technique. Microstructural evolution during sintering process was investigated using both optical microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and their deformation mechanisms were studied using finite element analysis (FEA). Results showed severe plastic deformation of the CuW composites and effective refinement of W grains after the ECAP process. TEM observation revealed that the ECAP process resulted in lamellar bands with high densities dislocations inside the composites. Effects of extrusion temperature and extrusion angles on stress-strain relationship and sizes of deformation zones after the ECAP process were investigated both theoretically and experimentally. When the extrusion angle was 90°, a maximum equivalent stress of ~1001 MPa was obtained when the extrusion test was done at room temperature of 22 °C, and this value was lower than compression strength of the CuW composites (1105.43 MPa). The maximum equivalent strains were varied between 0.5 and 0.7. However, when the extrusion temperature was increased to 550 °C and further to 900 °C, the maximum equivalent stresses were decreased sharply, with readings of 311 MPa and 68 MPa, respectively. When the extrusion angle was increased to 135°, the maximum equivalent stresses were found to be 716.9 MPa, 208 MPa, and 32 MPa for the samples extruded at temperatures of 22 °C, 550 °C and 900 °C, respectively. Simultaneously, the maximum equivalent strains were decreased to 0.2–0.4. Furthermore, results showed that the maximum equivalent stress was located on the sample's external surface and the stress values were gradually decreased from the surface to the center of samples, and the magnitudes of plastic deformation zones at the surface were much larger than those at the central part of the sintered samples. FEA simulation results were in good agreements with experimentally measured ones

Microstructure evolution and enhanced properties of Cu–Cr–Zr alloys through synergistic effects of alloying, heat treatment and low-energy cyclic impact

In this paper, CuCr–Zr alloys prepared by vacuum melting with adding La and Ni elementswere heat-treated and aged, followed by plastic deformation using low-energy cyclic impact tests, to simultaneously improve their mechanical and electrical properties. Results showed that the grain size of the casted Cu–Cr–Zr alloys was significantly reduced after the solid-solution aging and plastic deformation process. There were a lot of dispersed Cr and Cu5Zr precipitates formed in the alloys, and the numbers of dislocations were significantly increased. Accordingly, the hardness was increased from 78 to 232 HV, and the tensile strength was increased from 225 to 691 MPa. Electrical conductivity has not been significantly affected after these processes. The enhancement of overall performance is mainly attributed to the combined effects of solid-solution hardening, fine grain hardening, and precipitation/dislocation strengthening

Concept for a Future Super Proton-Proton Collider

Following the discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC, new large colliders are being studied by the international high-energy community to explore Higgs physics in detail and new physics beyond the Standard Model. In China, a two-stage circular collider project CEPC-SPPC is proposed, with the first stage CEPC (Circular Electron Positron Collier, a so-called Higgs factory) focused on Higgs physics, and the second stage SPPC (Super Proton-Proton Collider) focused on new physics beyond the Standard Model. This paper discusses this second stage.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures, 5 table

Vitamin E stabilizes iron and mitochondrial metabolism in pulmonary fibrosis

Introduction: Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) is a fatal chronic lung disease that causes structural damage and decreased lung function and has a poor prognosis. Currently, there is no medicine that can truly cure PF. Vitamin E (VE) is a group of natural antioxidants with anticancer and antimutagenic properties. There have been a few reports about the attenuation of PF by VE in experimental animals, but the molecular mechanisms are not fully understood.Methods: Bleomycin-induced PF (BLM-PF) mouse model, and cultured mouse primary lung fibroblasts and MLE 12 cells were utilized. Pathological examination of lung sections, immunoblotting, immunofluorescent staining, and real-time PCR were conducted in this study.Results: We confirmed that VE significantly delayed the progression of BLM-PF and increased the survival rates of experimental mice with PF. VE suppressed the pathological activation and fibrotic differentiation of lung fibroblasts and epithelial-mesenchymal transition and alleviated the inflammatory response in BLM-induced fibrotic lungs and pulmonary epithelial cells in vitro. Importantly, VE reduced BLM-induced ferritin expression in fibrotic lungs, whereas VE did not exhibit iron chelation properties in fibroblasts or epithelial cells in vitro. Furthermore, VE protected against mitochondrial dysmorphology and normalized mitochondrial protein expression in BLM-PF lungs. Consistently, VE suppressed apoptosis in BLM-PF lungs and pulmonary epithelial cells in vitro.Discussion: Collectively, VE markedly inhibited BLM-induced PF through a complex mechanism, including improving iron metabolism and mitochondrial structure and function, mitigating inflammation, and decreasing the fibrotic functions of fibroblasts and epithelial cells. Therefore, VE presents a highly potential therapeutic against PF due to its multiple protective effects with few side effects

SRFR1 Negatively Regulates Plant NB-LRR Resistance Protein Accumulation to Prevent Autoimmunity

Plant defense responses need to be tightly regulated to prevent auto-immunity, which is detrimental to growth and development. To identify negative regulators of Resistance (R) protein-mediated resistance, we screened for mutants with constitutive defense responses in the npr1-1 background. Map-based cloning revealed that one of the mutant genes encodes a conserved TPR domain-containing protein previously known as SRFR1 (SUPPRESSOR OF rps4-RLD). The constitutive defense responses in the srfr1 mutants in Col-0 background are suppressed by mutations in SNC1, which encodes a TIR-NB-LRR (Toll Interleukin1 Receptor-Nucleotide Binding-Leu-Rich Repeat) R protein. Yeast two-hybrid screens identified SGT1a and SGT1b as interacting proteins of SRFR1. The interactions between SGT1 and SRFR1 were further confirmed by co-immunoprecipitation analysis. In srfr1 mutants, levels of multiple NB-LRR R proteins including SNC1, RPS2 and RPS4 are increased. Increased accumulation of SNC1 is also observed in the sgt1b mutant. Our data suggest that SRFR1 functions together with SGT1 to negatively regulate R protein accumulation, which is required for preventing auto-activation of plant immunity

A survey on heterogeneous face recognition: Sketch, infra-red, 3D and low-resolution

Heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) refers to matching face imagery across different domains. It has received much interest from the research community as a result of its profound implications in law enforcement. A wide variety of new invariant features, cross-modality matching models and heterogeneous datasets are being established in recent years. This survey provides a comprehensive review of established techniques and recent developments in HFR. Moreover, we offer a detailed account of datasets and benchmarks commonly used for evaluation. We finish by assessing the state of the field and discussing promising directions for future research

A Partition Based Method For Finding Highly Correlated Pairs

The problem of finding highly correlated pairs is to output all item pairs whose (Pearson) correlation coefficients are greater than a user-specified correlation threshold. Effective discovery of such item pairs is of primary importance in many real data mining applications. Algorithm and Taper algorithm are special cases of our new algorithm with respect to the number of segments. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of our algorithm. Recently, the Taper algorithm is developed to discover the set of highly correlated item pairs. In this paper, we present a generalised Taper algorithm to find strongly correlated pairs between items by partitioning the collection of transactions into different segments, so as to achieve better pruning effect and less running time. Consequently, it can be proved that both are naïve. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd

Synergistic enhancing effect for mechanical and electrical properties of tungsten copper composites using spark plasma infiltrating sintering of copper-coated graphene

Successful applications of WCu alloys in high voltage electrical switches require their high strength and excellent conductivity. Unfortunately, the strategies for increasing their strength such as doping with fine particles and alloying often significantly decrease their conductivity. In this paper, we developed a new pathway for fabricating WCu alloys using spark plasma infiltrating sintering of copper-coated graphene (Cu@Gr) composite powders. Cu@Gr was found to partially prevent the formation of WC after sintering, and graphene was uniformly distributed on the surfaces of network Cu phases. Electrical conductivity of 38.512 M·S/m, thermal conductivity of 264 W·m−1·K−1 and microhardness of 278 HV were achieved for the sintered WCu composites doped with only 0.8 wt.% Cu@Gr powders, which showed 95.3%, 24.3%, 28% enhancement compared with those from the conventional sintering using the undoped WCu powders