Formulation of Corrosion Inhibitors

Corrosion inhibitors are widely used in the production process due to their significant effect. In this chapter, the formulation of typical corrosion inhibitors in acid solution, near-neutral solution, alkaline solution, and oil and gas systems will be discussed, respectively. Firstly, the importance of pickling corrosion inhibitors for thermal equipment in industrial production in different situations is discussed in the “Inhibitors for acid solution” section, and the types of pickling inhibitors are mainly applied in different kinds of acid media, such as sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, phosphoric acid, hydrofluoric acid, citric acid, and sulfamic acid. Secondly, in the “Inhibitors for near-neutral solution” section, the cooling water inhibitors principally include chromate, stabilized phosphate, alkaline zinc/organic, molybdate, all organic, soft and lean water, and environmental and closed-loop programs. The hot-water inhibitor is also mentioned here. Then in the “Inhibitors for alkaline solution” section, boiler water inhibitor, oxygen scavenger, and corrosion inhibitors for condensate line are talked over. Finally, in the “Inhibition for oil and gas systems” section, drilling fluid, fracturing acidizing, oil and gas well, and oil field which produced water treatment inhibitors are introduced here. The corrosion inhibition mechanism and development trend of inhibitors are also discussed

Case-Aware Adversarial Training

The neural network (NN) becomes one of the most heated type of models in various signal processing applications. However, NNs are extremely vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs). To defend AEs, adversarial training (AT) is believed to be the most effective method while due to the intensive computation, AT is limited to be applied in most applications. In this paper, to resolve the problem, we design a generic and efficient AT improvement scheme, namely case-aware adversarial training (CAT). Specifically, the intuition stems from the fact that a very limited part of informative samples can contribute to most of model performance. Alternatively, if only the most informative AEs are used in AT, we can lower the computation complexity of AT significantly as maintaining the defense effect. To achieve this, CAT achieves two breakthroughs. First, a method to estimate the information degree of adversarial examples is proposed for AE filtering. Second, to further enrich the information that the NN can obtain from AEs, CAT involves a weight estimation and class-level balancing based sampling strategy to increase the diversity of AT at each iteration. Extensive experiments show that CAT is faster than vanilla AT by up to 3x while achieving competitive defense effect

First detection of small hive beetle Aethina tumida Murray (Coleoptera: Nitidulidae) infesting eastern honeybee, Apis cerana Fabricius (Hymenoptera: Apidae), in China

We report the infestation of small hive beetle, Aethina tumida, in a honeybee, Apis cerana, in South China. This is the first record for domestic Chinese honey bee infested with small hive beetle

Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) controls magnesium gatekeeper TRPM6 activity

TRPM6 is crucial for human Mg2+ homeostasis as patients carrying TRPM6 mutations develop hypomagnesemia and secondary hypocalcemia (HSH). However, the activation mechanism of TRPM6 has remained unknown. Here we demonstrate that phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphophate (PIP2) controls TRPM6 activation and Mg2+ influx. Stimulation of PLC-coupled M1-receptors to deplete PIP2 potently inactivates TRPM6. Translocation of over-expressed 5-phosphatase to cell membrane to specifically hydrolyze PIP2 also completely inhibits TRPM6. Moreover, depolarization-induced-activation of the voltage-sensitive-phosphatase (Ci-VSP) simultaneously depletes PIP2 and inhibits TRPM6. PLC-activation induced PIP2-depletion not only inhibits TRPM6, but also abolishes TRPM6-mediated Mg2+ influx. Furthermore, neutralization of basic residues in the TRP domain leads to nonfunctional or dysfunctional mutants with reduced activity by PIP2, suggesting that they are likely to participate in interactions with PIP2. Our data indicate that PIP2 is required for TRPM6 channel function; hydrolysis of PIP2 by PLC-coupled hormones/agonists may constitute an important pathway for TRPM6 gating, and perhaps Mg2+ homeostasis

KL-6 levels in the connective tissue disease population: typical values and potential confounders–a retrospective, real-world study

BackgroundKrebs von den Lungen 6 (KL-6) is a potential biomarker for determining the severity of interstitial lung disease (ILD) in patients with connective tissue disease (CTD). Whether KL-6 levels can be affected by potential confounders such as underlying CTD patterns, patient-associated demographics, and comorbidities needs further investigation.MethodsFrom the database created by Xiangya Hospital, 524 patients with CTD, with or without ILD, were recruited for this retrospective analysis. Recorded data included demographic information, comorbidities, inflammatory biomarkers, autoimmune antibodies, and the KL-6 level at admission. Results of CT and pulmonary function tests were collected one week before or after KL-6 measurements. The percent of predicted diffusing capacity of the lung for carbon monoxide (DLCO%) and computed tomography (CT) scans were used to determine the severity of ILD.ResultsUnivariate linear regression analysis showed that BMI, lung cancer, TB, lung infections, underlying CTD type, white blood cell (WBC) counts, neutrophil (Neu) counts, and hemoglobin (Hb) were related to KL-6 levels. Multiple linear regression confirmed that Hb and lung infections could affect KL-6 levels independently; the β were 9.64 and 315.93, and the P values were 0.015 and 0.039, respectively. CTD-ILD patients had higher levels of KL-6 (864.9 vs 463.9, P < 0.001) than those without ILD. KL-6 levels were closely correlated to the severity of ILD assessed both by CT and DLCO%. Additionally, we found that KL-6 level was an independent predictive factor for the presence of ILD and further constructed a decision tree model to rapidly determine the risk of developing ILD among CTD patients.ConclusionKL-6 is a potential biomarker for gauging the incidence and severity of ILD in CTD patients. To use this typical value of KL-6, however, doctors should take Hb and the presence of lung infections into account

Augmenting Pathologists with NaviPath: Design and Evaluation of a Human-AI Collaborative Navigation System

Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings advancements to support pathologists in navigating high-resolution tumor images to search for pathology patterns of interest. However, existing AI-assisted tools have not realized this promised potential due to a lack of insight into pathology and HCI considerations for pathologists' navigation workflows in practice. We first conducted a formative study with six medical professionals in pathology to capture their navigation strategies. By incorporating our observations along with the pathologists' domain knowledge, we designed NaviPath -- a human-AI collaborative navigation system. An evaluation study with 15 medical professionals in pathology indicated that: (i) compared to the manual navigation, participants saw more than twice the number of pathological patterns in unit time with NaviPath, and (ii) participants achieved higher precision and recall against the AI and the manual navigation on average. Further qualitative analysis revealed that navigation was more consistent with NaviPath, which can improve the overall examination quality.Comment: Accepted ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23