An Investigation of Chinese Historical Grey Bricks of Soochow, Jiangsu and the Effect of Tung Oil Treatment

The grey brick is one of the key materials to Chinese traditional architecture. While brick-making in Europe and North America is well documented in sufficient literature, the kiln, firing and properties of the Chinese grey brick is to be explored more in detail. The process gives the bricks a different character and color. Bunches of Chinese literature and informal records show the outstanding character of Chinese grey bricks. And it is why historical grey bricks were commonly used in architectural buildings, city walls, mausoleum. This thesis is aimed to verify the good properties of Chinese grey brick through experiments, and investigate the effect of Tung oil in the treatment of brick materials, especially grey bricks

Cloning and function analysis of a Saussurea involucrata LEA4 gene

Late embryogenesis abundant proteins (LEA) help adapt to adverse low-temperature environments. The Saussurea involucrate SiLEA4, which encodes a membrane protein, was significantly up-regulated in response to low temperature stress. Escherichia coli expressing SiLEA4 showed enhanced low-temperature tolerance, as evident from the significantly higher survival numbers and growth rates at low temperatures. Moreover, tomato strains expressing SiLEA4 had significantly greater freezing resistance, due to a significant increase in the antioxidase activities and proline content. Furthermore, they had higher yields due to higher water utilization and photosynthetic efficiency under the same water and fertilizer conditions. Thus, expressing SiLEA4 has multiple advantages: (1) mitigating chilling injury, (2) increasing yields, and (3) water-saving, which also indicates the great potential of the SiLEA4 for breeding applications

Improved Progressive BKZ with Lattice Sieving and a Two-Step Mode for Solving uSVP

The unique Shortest Vector Problem (uSVP) is one of the core hard problems in lattice-based cryptography. In NIST PQC standardization (Kyber, Dilithium), leaky-LWE-Estimator is used to estimate the hardness of LWE-based cryptosystems by reducing LWE to uSVP and considers the primal attack using Progressive BKZ (ProBKZ). ProBKZ trivially increases blocksize β and lifts the shortest vector in the final BKZ block to find the unique shortest vector in the full lattice. In this paper, we show that a ProBKZ algorithm as above (we call it a BKZ-only mode) is not the best way to solve uSVP. So we present a two-step mode to solve it, where the ProBKZ algorithm is followed by a sieving algorithm with the dimension larger than the blocksize of BKZ. While instantiating our two-step mode with the sieving algorithm Pump and Pump-and-jump BKZ (PnjBKZ) presented in G6K, which are the state-of-art sieving and BKZ implementations, we show that our algorithm is not only better than the BKZ-only mode but also better than the heuristic uSVP solving algorithm in G6K. However, a ProBKZ with the heuristic parameter selection in leaky-LWE-Estimator or the optimized parameter selection in the literature (Yoshinori Aono et al. at Asiacrypt 2016), is insufficient in optimizing the efficiency of a two-step solving algorithm. To find the best param- eters, we design a PnjBKZ simulator which allows the choice of value jump to be more than 1. Based on the newly designed simulator, we give a blocksize and jump strategy selection algorithm, which can achieve the best simulated efficiency in solving uSVP instances. Combining all the things above, we get a new lattice solving algorithm called Improved Progressive PnjBKZ (ProPnjBKZ for short). We test the efficiency of our ProPnjBKZ with the TU Darmstadt LWE Challenge. The experiment result shows that our ProPnjBKZ is 7.6∼12.9 times more efficient than the heuristic uSVP solving algorithm in G6K. Besides, we break the TU Darmstadt LWE Challenges with (n, α) ∈{(40, 0.035), (40, 0.040), (50, 0.025), (55, 0.020), (90, 0.005)}. Finally, we give a newly refined security estimator of LWE. The evaluation results indicate that the concrete hardness of the lattice-based NIST candidate schemes from LWE primal attack will decrease by 1.9∼4.2 bits when using our optimized blocksize and jump selection strategy and two-step solving mode. In addition, when using the list-decoding technology proposed by MATZOV in 2022, it further decreased by 8∼10.7 bits

Sleeve resection with end-to-end anastomosis in the reconstruction of tracheal defects exceeding six rings: a clinical feasibility study and safety assessment

ObjectivesReconstruction is always required for tracheal defects and sleeve resection with end-to-end anastomosis is the most common used. The aim of the study was to present surgical techniques and evaluate the outcomes of sleeve resection with end-to-end anastomosis in the reconstruction of tracheal defects exceeding six rings.MethodsThe study included patients with primary or secondary malignancies and tracheal stenosis from 2014 to 2019, who were treated with sleeve resection exceeding six tracheal rings, and reconstructed with end-to-end anastomosis. Airway status and patient outcomes were the principal follow-up measures.ResultsA total of 16 patients were enrolled in the study including three primary tracheal malignancies, 12 invasive thyroid carcinomas and one with tracheal stenosis. The extent of tracheal resection ranged from seven to nine rings, and the primary end-to-end anastomosis was performed in all 16 patients. Performance of tracheostomy or cricothyroidotomy was done in 6 patients with decannulation at a median of 42 days (range, 28–56). No anastomotic dehiscence, infection or bleeding occurred postoperatively, and all 16 patients maintained an unobstructed airway through the end of follow-up.ConclusionsSleeve resection reconstructed with end-to-end anastomosis can serve as an appropriate therapeutic strategy for the tracheal defects even exceeding six rings. Adequate laryngeal release is the key to surgical success

Serum hsa-miR-98-5p and RORC may be new biomarkers related to esophageal cancer

This study aims to use bioinformatics methods to discover new serum miRNA markers for esophageal cancer, and provide a theoretical basis for early diagnosis of esophageal cancer. We used GEO2R to analyze the differential serum miRNAs in esophageal cancer based on GSE112264 from the GEO database. Then target genes of top 10 differential miRNAs were predicted. Obtain RNA-Seq data of esophageal cancer from the TCGA database, and use R software for analysis of differential expression. Overlap the predicted target genes with the differentially down-regulated genes, then perform analysis of GO and KEGG enrichment. Use GEPIA and UALCAN databases to perform verification of expression and prognostic analysis of key genes in the pathway. The results showed there are 2565 differential miRNAs in the serum of esophageal cancer patients. The top 10 up-regulated miRNAs predicted 1676 target genes, then 63 overlapped genes were obtained from target genes and 1642 down-regulated genes. GO enrichment obtained 14 biological processes, and KEGG enrichment obtained the circadian rhythm pathway. Only RORC is related to the poor prognosis of patients with esophageal cancer. Our study concluded serum hsa-miR-98-5p and its target gene RORC may be new biological markers for early diagnosis and treatment of esophageal cancer

Improved Pump and Jump BKZ by Sharp Simulator

The General Sieve Kernel (G6K) implemented a variety of lattice reduction algorithms based on sieving algorithms. One of the representative of these lattice reduction algorithms is Pump and jump-BKZ (pnj-BKZ) algorithm which is currently considered as the fastest lattice reduction algorithm. The pnj-BKZ is a BKZ-type lattice reduction algorithm which includes the jump strategy, and uses Pump as the SVP Oracle. Here, Pump which was also proposed in G6K, is an SVP sloving algorithm that combines progressive sieve technology and dimforfree technology. However unlike classical BKZ, there is no simulator for predicting the behavior of the pnj-BKZ algorithm when jump greater than 1, which is helpful to find a better lattice reduction strategy. There are two main differences between pnj-BKZ and the classical BKZ algorithm: one is that after pnj-BKZ performs the SVP Oracle on a certain projected sublattice, it won\u27t calling SVP Oracle for the next nearest projected sublattice. Instead, pnj-BKZ jumps to the corresponding projected sublattice after J indexs to run the algorithm for solving the SVP. By using this jump technique, the number of times that the SVP algorithm needs to be called for each round of pnj-BKZ will be reduced to about 1/J times of original. The second is that pnj-BKZ uses Pump as the SVP Oracle on the projected sublattice. Based on the BKZ2.0 simulator, we proposes a pnj-BKZ simulator by using the properties of HKZ reduction basis. Experiments show that our proposed pnj-BKZ simulator can well predicate the behavior of pnj-BKZ with jump greater than 1. Besides, we use this pnj-BKZ simulator to give the optimization strategy for choosing jump which can improve the reducing efficiency of pnj-BKZ. Our optimized pnj-BKZ is 2.9 and 2.6 times faster in solving TU LWE challenge ( n=75,alpha=0.005 ) and TU LWE challenge ( n=60,alpha=0.010 ) than G6K\u27s default LWE sloving strategy