Responses of heat shock protein 70 and caspase-3/7 to dietary selenomethionine in juvenile white sturgeon.

An 8-week feeding trial was conducted to investigate the responses of juvenile white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) to elevated dietary selenium (Se) based on the determination of the RNA/DNA ratio in muscle, heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70), and caspase-3/7 in muscle and/or liver tissues. Four semi-purified test diets were prepared by adding different levels of L-selenomethionine (0, 50, 100, and 200 mg/kg diet). The analytical determinations of total Se were 2.2, 19.7, 40.1, and 77.7 mg/kg diet. The sturgeon (initial body weight: 30 ± 2 g; mean ± SEM) were raised in indoor tanks provided with flow through freshwater (18-19 °C). There were three replicates for each dietary treatment with 25 fish per replicate. The liver and muscle tissues were collected at 4 and 8 weeks after feeding the test diets. A significant interaction between duration and levels of dietary Se exposures on RNA/DNA ratio in the muscle tissue was detected (P < 0.05). Although there was no significant main effect due to the duration of dietary Se exposures (i.e., 4 weeks versus 8 weeks) on muscle RNA/DNA ratio (P ≥ 0.05), the ratio was significantly decreased with increasing dietary Se levels. Significant main effects were caused by the duration and levels of dietary Se exposures on Hsp70 in both the muscle and liver tissues, with significant increases in Hsp70 due to a longer exposure (8 weeks) and higher levels (40.1 and 77.7 mg Se/kg diet) of dietary Se. The caspase-3/7 activity in the liver were significantly higher in fish fed the diets containing 40.1 and 77.7 mg Se/kg diet than those fed the other diets. The toxic thresholds of Se in the muscle were estimated to be 32.2 and 26.6 mg Se/kg for the depressed specific growth rate and the induced Hsp70 response in muscle, respectively. This result indicated that the Hsp70 response in muscle is a more sensitive biomarker than the SGR of sturgeon for evaluating Se toxicity in white sturgeon. Results of the current study suggest that a mechanism involved with the activation of stress protein production and apoptosis protects white sturgeon from the lethal effect of Se

Lamb wave-based probabilistic fatigue life prediction for riveted lap joints

This study presents a Lamb wave-based probabilistic fatigue life prediction for riveted lap joints. First, a brief introduction is given for the experiment of Lamb wave-based damage detection. Three damage sensitive features (correlation coefficient, amplitude change and phase change) are employed to correlate the fatigue crack size with Lamb wave signal. Then the probability of detection (POD) method is used to couple the actual crack size with the model predictions using Lamb wave signal. Considering the uncertainties of the initial crack size and crack growth parameters, Bayesian method and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation are applied to obtain the probabilistic fatigue life. In order to verify the reliability of the proposed probabilistic fatigue life prediction procedure, one set of experimental data is used for validation purpose

Uncovering Land Value Capture: Stakeholders’ relationships and perceptions within China’s rural land marketization reform

Since land marketization reform triggers a significant change in land value, Land Value Capture among directly involved stakeholders - local governments, land sellers (rural collectives and rural households), and land buyers - attracts widespread attention. Understanding stakeholders’ Land Value Capture in land marketization reform is crucial towards land institutional arrangements, local governments’ revenue, rural revitalization, rural households’ livelihoods and just development, and land buyers’ profits. However, stakeholders relations and perceptions of Land Value Capture in land marketization reform have been extensively debated in the existing body of literature. This thesis attempts to address the main research question: how do the directly involved stakeholders interact and perceive Land Value Capture changes caused by land marketization reform in terms of institutional setting, stakeholder characteristics, time, and space? After comparing the public and private dominant regimes worldwide, our empirical evidence is taken from the latest institutional rural land marketization reform in China. Under the overarching institutional approach, we used different methodological frameworks such as power, interest, justice, and cost for this analysis. The findings indicate that: 1) stakeholders face dilemmas of Land Value Capture in land marketization reform. 2) Local governments hold positive perceptions of Land Value Capture despite their economic loses, because the social and political considerations are more dominant than the economic ones in their interest-balancing acts. 3) Rural collectives are optimistic about their future trends and actively construct the rural land stock cooperation system for Land Value Capture since they focus on long-term interest rather than short-term interest. 4) Rural households are satisfied with land marketization reform concerning procedural justice and the land value distribution over different stakeholders, yet they are critical about their absolute gains and the comparison between rural and urban land values. 5) Despite the low historical costs, the higher future costs significantly impede land buyers to invest in rural land. These shed new light on ongoing debates concerning local governments’ interest-balancing acts, the future trend of collectives, the livelihoods and impoverishments of rural households, and the dilemmas of land buyers in land investments

Stakeholder power relations in Land Value Capture: comparing public (China) and private (U.S.) dominant regimes

Understanding stakeholder power relations—such as between land sellers, land buyers, and local governments—is crucial to understanding Land Value Capture (LVC). While scholars have focused on stakeholder relationships through approaches such as stakeholder salience, stakeholder interaction, stakeholder value network, and stakeholder multiplicity, much research either places insufficient focus on power or only stresses partial attributes of power. As a result, the role of power relations among key stakeholders in LVC remains insufficiently explored. Our contribution is a new analytical framework for stakeholder power dynamics surrounding LVC. This provides an empirical analysis by comparing the public (China) and the private (U.S.) dominant regimes, through the perspectives of power direction, strength, and mechanism. To conceptualize the three perspectives of power in LVC, we constructed an analytical matrix and then categorized data in terms of stakeholder, space, and time perspectives. Based on empirical findings, four emerging dilemmas shed light on consequences for LVC policy making as well as areas in need of further researc

Research on Crash Safety Design of Electric Vehicle Power Battery

By expounding the collision conditions of electric vehicles, analyzing the characteristics of battery collision under different collision conditions, and studying the traditional collision safety design of electric vehicle power batteries, a new safety design method based on battery damage tolerance is proposed, which aims to provide help for improving the safety protection of electric vehicle power batteries in collision and improve the safety of power batteries in collision, Meet people's requirements for vehicle safety

Will restricting rural land expropriation reduce rural land value capture? Local government strategies through the lens of policy instruments

The practice of land value capture (LVC) from collectively owned rural land is undergoing changes in rural land marketisation as local governments are constrained in their power to expropriate rural land. Previous studies have either overestimated short-Term rural LVC losses or exaggerated long-Term urban LVC increases, while generally neglecting long-Term rural LVC changes. Here, we present an analytical framework via the prism of policy instruments to make sense of the evolving practice of rural LVC. Our empirical evidence from China considers disparities in practice and outcomes across scales of governance and between inland coastal and urban rural settings, based on 145 semi-structured interviews from 430 transaction cases. We offer insight into discussions concerning stakeholder relationships in rural LVC

MELA: Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability

Recent benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) have mostly focused on application-driven tasks such as complex reasoning and code generation, and this has led to a scarcity in purely linguistic evaluation of LLMs. Against this background, we introduce Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability -- MELA, the first multilingual benchmark on linguistic acceptability with 48K samples covering 10 languages from a diverse set of language families. We establish baselines of commonly used LLMs along with supervised models, and conduct cross-lingual transfer and multi-task learning experiments with XLM-R. In pursuit of multilingual interpretability, we analyze the weights of fine-tuned XLM-R to explore the possibility of identifying transfer difficulty between languages. Our results show that ChatGPT benefits much from in-context examples but still lags behind fine-tuned XLM-R, while the performance of GPT-4 is on par with fine-tuned XLM-R even in zero-shot setting. Cross-lingual and multi-task learning experiments show that unlike semantic tasks, in-language training data is crucial in acceptability judgements. Results in layerwise probing indicate that the upper layers of XLM-R become a task-specific but language-agnostic region for multilingual acceptability judgment. We also introduce the concept of conflicting weight, which could be a potential indicator for the difficulty of cross-lingual transfer between languages. Our data will be available at https://github.com/sjtu-compling/MELA.Comment: Work in progres