237 research outputs found
Flow structure transition in thermal vibrational convection
This study investigates the effect of vibration on the flow structure
transitions in thermal vibrational convection (TVC) systems, which occur when a
fluid layer with a temperature gradient is excited by vibration. Direct
numerical simulations of TVC in a two-dimensional enclosed square box were
performed over a range of dimensionless vibration amplitudes and angular frequencies , with a fixed
Prandtl number of 4.38. The flow visualisation shows the transition behaviour
of flow structure upon the varying frequency, characterising three distinct
regimes, which are the periodic-circulation regime, columnar regime and
columnar-broken regime. Different statistical properties are distinguished from
the temperature and velocity fluctuations at the boundary layer and mid-height.
Upon transition into the columnar regime, columnar thermal coherent structures
are formed, in contrast to the periodic oscillating circulation. These columns
are contributed by merging of thermal plumes near the boundary layer, and the
resultant thermal updrafts remain at almost fixed lateral position, leading to
a decrease in fluctuations. We further find that the critical point of this
transition can be described nicely by the vibrational Rayleigh number
. As the frequency continues to increase, entering the
so-called columnar-broken regime, the columnar structures are broken, and
eventually the flow state becomes a large-scale circulation, characterised by a
sudden increase in fluctuations. Finally, a phase diagram is constructed to
summarise the flow structure transition over a wide range of vibration
amplitude and frequency parameters.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure
Unifying constitutive law of vibroconvective turbulence in microgravity
The emergence of unified constitutive law is a hallmark of convective
turbulence, i.e., with in the classical
and in the ultimate regime, where the Nusselt number measures
the global heat transport and the Rayleigh number quantifies the strength
of thermal forcing. In recent years, vibroconvective flows have been attractive
due to its ability to drive flow instability and generate ``artificial
gravity'', which have potential to effective heat and mass transport in
microgravity. However, the existence of constitutive laws in vibroconvective
turbulence remains unclear. To address this issue, we carry out direct
numerical simulations in a wide range of frequencies and amplitudes, and report
that the heat transport exhibits a universal scaling law where is the vibration amplitude, is
the oscillational Reynolds number, and is the universal exponent. We
find that the dynamics of boundary layers plays an essential role in
vibroconvective heat transport, and the -scaling exponent is
determined by the competition between the thermal boundary layer (TBL) and
vibration-induced oscillating boundary layer (OBL). Then a physical model is
proposed to explain the change of scaling exponent from in the
OBL-dominant regime to in the TBL-dominant regime. We conclude
that vibroconvective turbulence in microgravity defines a distinct universality
class of convective turbulence. This work elucidates the emergence of universal
constitutive laws in vibroconvective turbulence, and opens up a new avenue for
generating a controllable effective heat transport under microgravity or even
microfluidic environment in which gravity is nearly absent.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure
Significance of ST-segment deviation in patients with acute pulmonary embolism and negative T waves
Background: Common electrocardiogram (ECG) manifestations in acute pulmonary emÂbolism (APE) include ST-segment deviation (STDV) along with negative T-waves (NTW). STDV could occur in 3 typical ischemic patterns: (i) the left ventricular (LV) subendocardial ischemic pattern; (ii) the right ventricular (RV) transmural ischemic pattern; and (iii) the LV subendocardial plus RV transmural ischemic pattern. The purpose of this study was to evaluÂate the relationship of STDV and adverse clinical outcomes and to identify the relationship of relatively normal ECG and favorable clinical outcomes.
Methods: Retrospective analysis of electronic charts in APE patients was performed in a tertiary hospital. ECGs on admission were obtained and classified as with or without STDV. Adverse clinical outcomes were defined as need to intensify therapy and 30-day mortality. Relatively normal ECG was defined as without any STDV, abnormal QRS morphology in lead V1 and S1Q3T3.
Results: From a total of 210 patients with NTW, 131 had STDV ≥ 0.1 mV, while 79 did not. Patients with STDV had worse evolution: higher incidence of dyspnea, hypotension, cardiogenÂic shock, intensification of therapy, and death compared to patients without STDV (p = 0.001 for each variable). The majority (89%) of the patients with STDV presented with 1 of the 3 typical ischemic ECG patterns. LV subendocardial ischemic pattern (OR = 4.963, p = 0.004), RV transmural ischemic pattern (OR = 3.128, p = 0.021) and LV subendocardial plus RV transmural ischemic pattern (OR = 3.036, p = 0.017) independently predicted the need to intensify therapy. RV transmural ischemic pattern (OR = 4.227, p = 0.031) and LV subendocardial plus RV transmural ischemic pattern (OR = 4.022, p = 0.032) independently predicted 30-day mortality. Compared to the patients with abnormal ECG, the patients with relatively normal ECG had a significant lower incidence of death (0% vs. 16%; p = 0.001) and need to intensify therapy during hospitalization (6% vs. 30%; p = 0.002).
Conclusions: Ischemic ECG patterns are common ECG manifestations of APE and predict worse evolution and 30-day mortality. Additionally, relatively normal ECGs may associate with favorable clinical outcomes
Refined mapping of loss of heterozygosity in Chinese sporadic gastric carcinoma
The aim of this study is to explore precise deleted regions where the candidate tumor suppressor genes might be located in Chinese sporadic gastric carcinoma. By searching in Genothon, NCBI and GDB databases, 145 polymorphic microsatellite markers were chosen, at a mean density of approximately one marker every 2 - 4 cM, covering 15 chromosomes. These polymorphic microsatellite markers in gastric carcinoma and adjacent tissue were analyzed via PCR. PCR products were submitted to electrophoresis on an ABI 3730 DNA sequencer. Genemapper3.2 software was used for LOH (Loss of Heterozygosity) scanning and analysis. Comparison between LOH frequency and clinicopathological factors was performed by Fisher’s exact test. 26 refined regions were mapped as candidate regions for TSGs (Tumor suppression genes) in Chinese sporadic gastric cancer. Associations between LOH and clinical information indicated that 6 loci was associated with pTNM stage, 5 with Lauren's type, 4 with lymph nodes metastasis and another 2 with distant metastasis. Through refined deletion mapping, 26 candidate regions, where TSGs may be located, were found and 17 loci were proposed to be used as clinical markers in Chinese sporadic gastric cancer.Keywords: Gastric carcinoma, refined mapping, loss of heterozygosity (LOH), tumor suppressor genes (TSGs), tumor markersAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 9(35), pp. 5754-5761, 30 August, 201
Novel anti-thrombotic agent for modulation of protein disulfide isomerase family member ERp57 for prophylactic therapy
published_or_final_versio
A retrospective review of paediatric head injuries in Asia - a Pan Asian Trauma Outcomes Study (PATOS) collaboration
Objective: We aim to examine the mechanisms of head-injured children presenting to participating centres in the Pan Asian Trauma Outcomes Study (PATOS) and to evaluate the association between mechanism of injury and severe outcomes.Design and Setting: We performed a retrospective review of medical records among emergency departments (EDs) of eight PATOS centres, from September 2014 - August 2015.Participants: We included children \u3c16 years old who presented within 24 hours of head injury and were admitted for observation or required a computed tomography (CT) of the brain from the ED. We excluded children with known coagulopathies, neurological co-morbidities or prior neurosurgery. We reviewed the mechanism, intent, location and object involved in each injury, and the patients\u27 physical findings on presentation.Outcomes: Primary outcomes were death, endotracheal intubation or neurosurgical intervention. Secondary outcomes included hospital and ED length of stay. Results: 1438 children were analysed. 953 children (66.3%) were male and the median age was 5.0 years (IQR 1.0-10.0). Falls predominated especially among children younger than 2 years (82.9%), while road traffic injuries were more likely to occur among children 2 years and above compared with younger children (25.8% vs 11.1%). Centres from upper and lower middle-income countries were more likely to receive head injured children from road traffic collisions compared with those from high-income countries (51.4% and 40.9%, vs 10.9%, p\u3c0.0001) and attended to a greater proportion of children with severe outcomes (58.2% and 28.4%, vs 3.6%, p\u3c0.0001). After adjusting for age, gender, intent of injury and gross national income, traffic injuries (adjusted OR 2.183, 95% CI 1.448 to 3.293) were associated with severe outcomes, as compared with falls.Conclusions: Among children with head injuries, traffic injuries are independently associated with death, endotracheal intubation and neurosurgery. This collaboration among Asian centres holds potential for future prospective childhood injury surveillance
Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysis
Building general-purpose robots that can operate seamlessly, in any
environment, with any object, and utilizing various skills to complete diverse
tasks has been a long-standing goal in Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately,
however, most existing robotic systems have been constrained - having been
designed for specific tasks, trained on specific datasets, and deployed within
specific environments. These systems usually require extensively-labeled data,
rely on task-specific models, have numerous generalization issues when deployed
in real-world scenarios, and struggle to remain robust to distribution shifts.
Motivated by the impressive open-set performance and content generation
capabilities of web-scale, large-capacity pre-trained models (i.e., foundation
models) in research fields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
Computer Vision (CV), we devote this survey to exploring (i) how these existing
foundation models from NLP and CV can be applied to the field of robotics, and
also exploring (ii) what a robotics-specific foundation model would look like.
We begin by providing an overview of what constitutes a conventional robotic
system and the fundamental barriers to making it universally applicable. Next,
we establish a taxonomy to discuss current work exploring ways to leverage
existing foundation models for robotics and develop ones catered to robotics.
Finally, we discuss key challenges and promising future directions in using
foundation models for enabling general-purpose robotic systems. We encourage
readers to view our living GitHub repository of resources, including papers
reviewed in this survey as well as related projects and repositories for
developing foundation models for robotics
Laboratory observation of ion acceleration via reflection off laser-produced magnetized collisionless shocks
Fermi acceleration by collisionless shocks is believed to be the primary
mechanism to produce high energy charged particles in the Universe,where
charged particles gain energy successively from multiple reflections off the
shock front.Here,we present the first direct experimental evidence of ion
energization from reflection off a supercritical quasi perpendicular
collisionless shock,an essential component of Fermi acceleration in a laser
produced magnetized plasma. We observed a quasi monoenergetic ion beam with 2,4
times the shock velocity in the upstream flow using time of flight method. Our
related kinetic simulations reproduced the energy gain and showed that these
ions were first reflected and then accelerated mainly by the motional electric
field associated with the shock. This mechanism can also explain the quasi
monoenergetic fast ion component observed in the Earth's bow shock
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