Brain mechanisms of valuable scientific problem finding inspired by heuristic knowledge

related heuristic knowledge. The authors assumed that the regions in the brain significantly activated by the finding scientific problems with related heuristic knowledge condition compared with the finding normal problems without related heuristic knowledge condition are relevant to the brain mechanisms of scientific problem finding inspired by heuristic knowledge. The first scenario more significantly activated the left precuneus and left angular gyrus than did the second scenario. These findings suggest that the precuneus is relevant to the successful storage and retrieval of heuristic knowledge and that the left angular gyrus is involved in the formation of novel associations between heuristic knowledge and problem situations for finding scientific problems

Bending-Induced Cross-Sectional Deformation of Cold-Formed Steel Channel-Section Beams

In practice, the cold-formed steel structures are widely used, and their geometrical nonlinearity is of great significance in structural design. However, the current analytical solutions are only applied to linear problems, and the nonlinear problems are mostly considered by commercial finite element software. This paper presents an analytical model to describe the bending-induced cross-sectional deformation in cold-formed steel channel-section beams when subjected to transverse bending loads. The nonlinear effect of cross-sectional deformation on the relationship between the overall bending curvature and applied moment is examined. A parametric study is also carried out to examine how the flange width, lip length, and thickness of the section affect the cross-sectional deformation and corresponding nonlinear bending behavior of the beams

A novel detection method based on derivative for thermal defects of electrical equipment

Thermal defects widely occur in electrical equipment and affect its stable operation. This paper proposes a novel detection method based on derivatives for thermal defects of electrical equipment. First, the equivalent models of the equipment are established to analyze the surface temperature formed by different defects. Second, the theoretical foundation of the derivative-based detection method is described, and numerical calculations on thermal defect detection based on derivative characteristic curves are carried out. The results show that the method can detect the position effectively and calculate the depth with an error of 1.6%. Then, the thermal defects in different situations are analyzed, and the results indicate that the method is effective in all cases. Finally, the experiment is conducted by artificially preparing samples with thermal defects, and the achieved calculation error of the experimental results is within 3.3%, which indicates the validity of this method

SARS-CoV-2 spike host cell surface exposure promoted by a COPI sorting inhibitor

Via an insufficient coat protein complex I (COPI) retrieval signal, the majority of SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) is resident in host early secretory organelles and a tiny amount is leaked out in cell surface. Only surface-exposed S can be recognized by B cell receptor (BCR) or anti-S therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that is the trigger step for B cell activation after S mRNA vaccination or infected cell clearance by S mAbs. Now, a drug strategy to promote S host surface exposure is absent. Here, we first combined structural and biochemical analysis to characterize S COPI sorting signals. A potent S COPI sorting inhibitor was then invented, evidently capable of promoting S surface exposure and facilitating infected cell clearance by S antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC). Importantly, with the inhibitor as a probe, we revealed Omicron BA.1 S is less cell surface exposed than prototypes because of a constellation of S folding mutations, possibly corresponding to its ER chaperone association. Our findings not only suggest COPI is a druggable target against COVID-19, but also highlight SARS-CoV-2 evolution mechanism driven by S folding and trafficking mutations