Analyzing 16S rRNA sequences from Vietnamese pathogenic Leptospira strains and in-silico prediction of potential antigenic epitopes on LipL21, LipL32 outer membrane lipoproteins

Leptospirosis, a zoonosis caused by Leptospira, is recognized as an emergent infectious disease. In currently, the lack of adequate diagnostic tools, vaccines are an attractive intervention strategy. In this experiment, a 550 bp fragment of large ribosomal RNA gene (16S rRNA) was sequenced and constructed phylogenetic tree from a panel of six Vietnamese pathogenic strains of Leptospira spirochetes (e.g., Pomona, Canicola, Mitis, Ictero haemohagiae, Bataviae, and Grippotyphosa). The results showed a close relationship of L.Pomona_VN and L.Hardjo (bootstrap: 99%). L.Canicola_VN and L.Ictero haemohagiae_VN appeared to be weak related to the classic L.Canicola, L. Grippotyphosa, these assemblage have a bootstrap support of 62%. The other strains (L.Mitis_VN and L.Grippotyphosa_VN) were appeared monophyletic, while their sister group (L.Bataviae_VN) relationship found only weak support (bootstrap: 62%). We also selected six genes [e.g. the immunoglobulin like proteins A and B (LigA and LigB genes), outer membrane protein (OmpL1 gene), and lipopolysaccharide (LipL32, LipL41, and LipL21 genes)] and checked gene expression in these Leptospira strains by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. There were three genes (e.g., LipL32, LipL21, and LigA genes) expressed in all strains, OmpL1 gene occured in 4 strains (L.Bataviae_VN, L.Canicola_VN, L.Grippotyphosa_VN and L.Mitis_VN), whereas LipL41 and LigB genes did not appear in any Leptospira strains. A multi-antigenic epitope potential of two gene (Lip L21 and Lip L32) was predicted by bioinformatic tools for designing a recombinant vaccine against leptospirosis. There were 3 multi-epitope regions (1 region and 95 antigenic epitope for B and T cells of LipL21 peptide; 2 regions and 124 antigenic epitope for both B and T cells of LipL32 peptide). It should be more of the deeply molecular biology studies to confirm the level agglutinating, antigen cleavage, peptide specificity matrices as well as neutralizing antibodies in the immune responses of DNA vaccine of these genes

Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection using Knowledge Distillation and Text-Point Correlation

Affordance detection presents intricate challenges and has a wide range of robotic applications. Previous works have faced limitations such as the complexities of 3D object shapes, the wide range of potential affordances on real-world objects, and the lack of open-vocabulary support for affordance understanding. In this paper, we introduce a new open-vocabulary affordance detection method in 3D point clouds, leveraging knowledge distillation and text-point correlation. Our approach employs pre-trained 3D models through knowledge distillation to enhance feature extraction and semantic understanding in 3D point clouds. We further introduce a new text-point correlation method to learn the semantic links between point cloud features and open-vocabulary labels. The intensive experiments show that our approach outperforms previous works and adapts to new affordance labels and unseen objects. Notably, our method achieves the improvement of 7.96% mIOU score compared to the baselines. Furthermore, it offers real-time inference which is well-suitable for robotic manipulation applications.Comment: 8 page

US-China rivalry in Southeast Asia region: a study on the South China Sea case

Southeast Asia is one of the places where fierce rivalry is taking place between the two leading powers in the world today - the US and China. The US-China rivalry in this region takes place in key fields, from politics - diplomacy, economy, security - defense to "soft power", the most prominent of which is the South China Sea issue. This article analyzes the strategic importance of the South China Sea in the policy of the US and China, the competition between the US and China in Southeast Asia in general, and the South China Sea in particular. To achieve this goal, the authors use research methods in international relations to analyze the main issues of the study. In addition to reviewing previous scholarly research and reviews, the authors use a comparative approach to assess the interactions between theory and data. The authors believe the data is important for accurately assessing the strategic competition between the US and China in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. The rise of China in the early years of the XXI century strongly influenced the adjustment of the US policy in Southeast Asia and the powerful US-China rivalry in this region and the South China Sea. This rivalry is becoming increasingly complicated, and geopolitical conflicts between major powers are possible in the following years

Language-Conditioned Affordance-Pose Detection in 3D Point Clouds

Affordance detection and pose estimation are of great importance in many robotic applications. Their combination helps the robot gain an enhanced manipulation capability, in which the generated pose can facilitate the corresponding affordance task. Previous methods for affodance-pose joint learning are limited to a predefined set of affordances, thus limiting the adaptability of robots in real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a new method for language-conditioned affordance-pose joint learning in 3D point clouds. Given a 3D point cloud object, our method detects the affordance region and generates appropriate 6-DoF poses for any unconstrained affordance label. Our method consists of an open-vocabulary affordance detection branch and a language-guided diffusion model that generates 6-DoF poses based on the affordance text. We also introduce a new high-quality dataset for the task of language-driven affordance-pose joint learning. Intensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method works effectively on a wide range of open-vocabulary affordances and outperforms other baselines by a large margin. In addition, we illustrate the usefulness of our method in real-world robotic applications. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://3DAPNet.github.ioComment: Project page: https://3DAPNet.github.i

Application of the cut-off projection to solve a backward heat conduction problem in a two-slab composite system

The main goal of this paper is applying the cut-off projection for solving one-dimensional backward heat conduction problem in a two-slab system with a perfect contact. In a constructive manner, we commence by demonstrating the Fourier-based solution that contains the drastic growth due to the high-frequency nature of the Fourier series. Such instability leads to the need of studying the projection method where the cut-off approach is derived consistently. In the theoretical framework, the first two objectives are to construct the regularized problem and prove its stability for each noise level. Our second interest is estimating the error in -norm. Another supplementary objective is computing the eigen-elements. All in all, this paper can be considered as a preliminary attempt to solve the heating/cooling of a two-slab composite system backward in time. Several numerical tests are provided to corroborate the qualitative analysis.Peer reviewe

The Effect of ENSO on Hydrological Structure and Environment in the South Central Coast – Vietnam

ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) phenomena have impacted on the hydrodynamic regime and environmental factors of the tropical ocean in general. In case of Vietnamese South-Central Waters, impacts of ENSO only focused on issues of changing seasonal wind, seawater temperature anomalies, changing of water masses as the air-sea interaction. Based on several data sets collecting in the period of 2003-2017, new finding of seawater temperature, salinity and environmental factors was identified in the water masses of Vietnamese South-Central Waters. The highest salinity was 35.4 ‰. During the El Nino event, increasing water temperature and salinity caused to move the deeper water masses to be closer to the sea surface than that initial depth in the neutral period. During the La Nina event, the temperature of most water masses reduced by 0.1-3°C, and then these water masses could be affected to the deeper layer. During the phase from strong ENSO event towards the neutral time, nutrient salts of the 4 water masses were lower concentration in the neutral year, causing the lack of phosphorus in sea surface water masses

Research of Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithms for Processing Radiometry Data

Since 2012, the experts of Space Technology Institute  have carried out the field experiments to obtain a high-resolution dataset  of microwave radiometers for land surface parameters (soil moisture, soil  temperature, vegetation water content), in order to improve the soil  moisture retrieval methodology. L-band radiometers were used for measuring  the brightness temperature of the bare soil. Field experiments for passive  microwave remote sensing of soil moisture were carried out in Hoai Duc  District in 2012. L-band microwave radiometers were used for measuring the  microwave emission of bare agricultural fields. The radiometers, which are  used for soil moisture measurement, worked well during the experimental  campaign and produced volumetric soil moisture estimates that compared well  with the ground-truth measurements. Explanations for the observed  discrepancies are presented. The experimental results showed that the model  of Choudhury et al. for surface roughness correction provides a better fit  to radiometric data over the angular range between 20° and 50° for  $n = 0$ (i.e., the $\cos ^{2}\theta$  factor in the exponential in (15) is suppressed).  Based on the results of the experiments conducted over two experimental  sites with different soils, namely sandy loam at Hoai Duc Agrometeorologyl  Center, it may be concluded that the testing of both the radiometric  equipment and the method for soil moisture retrieval was very successful,  and the main goal of the experiments was fulfilled

Customer satisfaction and corporate investment policies

This paper examines the effect of satisfaction with firms’ products and services on their capital investment policies. Using data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index from 1994 to 2013, the results of the regression models show that firms with higher customer satisfaction will invest more heavily in capital expenditures in the future. The results further show that this positive effect is more pronounced for firms with less growth opportunities or a high cost of capital. This would include those firms with low market-to-book ratios, young and small firms, or firms in more competitive industries. Overall, this study argues that customer satisfaction is an important factor affecting the firm’s investment policy. The findings provide a better understanding of the role of customer satisfaction which can generate growth opportunities, reduce cost and motivate a firm to invest more in capital

CONTRIBUTION ESTIMATE OF PAHS TOXIC COMPOUNDS IN AIR ENVIRONMENT AT MAJOR TRAFFIC JOINTS OF HANOI, VIETNAM

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart