44 research outputs found
A cluster-based baseline load calculation approach for individual industrial and commercial customer
Demand response (DR) in the wholesale electricity market provides an economical and efficient way for customers to participate in the trade during the DR event period. There are various methods to measure the performance of a DR program, among which customer baseline load (CBL) is the most important method in this regard. It provides a prediction of counterfactual consumption levels that customer load would have been without a DR program. Actually, it is an expected load profile. Since the calculation of CBL should be fair and simple, the typical methods that are based on the average model and regression model are the two widely used methods. In this paper, a cluster-based approach is proposed considering the multiple power usage patterns of an individual customer throughout the year. It divides loads of a customer into different types of power usage patterns and it implicitly incorporates the impact of weather and holiday into the CBL calculation. As a result, different baseline calculation approaches could be applied to each customer according to the type of his power usage patterns. Finally, several case studies are conducted on the actual utility meter data, through which the effectiveness of the proposed CBL calculation approach is verified
Relationships between structure and antioxidant capacity and activity of glycosylated flavonols
The antioxidant capacity (AC) and antioxidant activity (AA) of three flavonols (FLV), aglycones and their glycosylated derivatives were evaluated using 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2âČ-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) (ABTS) assays in various solvents. Findings confirmed that the glycosylation at the 3-position (3-glycosylation) always decreased the AC under most conditions due to substitution of the 3-position hydroxyl group and glycoside disruption in the molecular planarity. The 7-glycosylated derivatives did not have the above effects, thus generally exhibited ACs similar to their aglycones. Glycosylation decreased the AA of kaempferol and isorhamnetin for both assays in methanol, 3-glycosylation inhibited quercetin AA in the ABTS assay. In the DPPH assay, the AA of 3-glycosylated quercetin was significantly higher than quercetin. Using LCâMS/MS analysis, we found that quercetin and quercetin-7-glucoside underwent dimerization during the antioxidant reaction, potentially leading to a decline in AAs. However, 3-glycoside substitution may have hindered dimer formation, thereby allowing the FLVs to retain strong free radical scavenging abilities.National Key Research and Development Program of China | Ref. 2019YFC160670
Mapping the potential distribution of major tick species in China
Ticks are known as the vectors of various zoonotic diseases such as Lyme borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis. Though their occurrences are increasingly reported in some parts of China, our understanding of the pattern and determinants of ticksâ potential distribution over the country remain limited. In this study, we took advantage of the recently compiled spatial dataset of distribution and diversity of ticks in China, analyzed the environmental determinants of ten frequently reported tick species and mapped the spatial distribution of these species over the country using the MaxEnt model. We found that presence of urban fabric, cropland, and forest in a place are key determents of tick occurrence, suggesting ticks were likely inhabited close to where people live. Besides, precipitation in the driest month was found to have a relatively high contribution in mapping tick distribution. The model projected that theses ticks could be widely distributed in the Northwest, Central North, Northeast, and South China. Our results added new evidence on the potential distribution of a variety of major tick species in China and pinpointed areas with a high potential risk of tick bites and tick-borne diseases for raising public health awareness and prevention response
Identification of Characteristic Flavor Substances of Jingyang Fu Brick Tea by Gas Chromatography-Ion Mobility Spectrometry and Headspace Solid Phase Microextraction-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry
In order to determine the characteristic flavor of Jingyang Fu brick tea, a national geographical indication product, the volatile compounds of Jingyang Fu brick tea, Anhua Fu brick tea and four other dark teas were analyzed by gas chromatography-ion mobility spectrometry (GC-IMS) and headspace solid-phase microextraction-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC-MS) in this study. The results showed that in total 154 compounds were identified by GC-IMS and HS-SPME-GC-MS, and the flavor composition of Jingyang Fu brick tea was clearly distinguished from that of Anhua Fu-brick tea and that of the other dark teas. Totally 12 characteristic substances of Jingyang Fu brick tea were obtained by comparative analysis with the other dark tea, seven of which were validated by GC-IMS, including 1-octen-3-one, n-hexanol, guaiacol, ÎČ-pinene, methyl butyrate, n-propanol and 2-heptanone, and the remaining five were characterized by HS-SPME-GC-MS based on aroma activity values, including hexanal, decanal, (E,E)-3,5-octadien-2-one, methyl salicylate and α-viologenone. The identification of characteristic flavor substances can provide a theoretical basis for the identification, origin tracing and processing optimization of Jingyang Fu brick tea
The Fungal Exopolysaccharide Galactosaminogalactan Mediates Virulence by Enhancing Resistance to Neutrophil Extracellular Traps
Of the over 250 Aspergillus species, Aspergillus fumigatus accounts for up to 80% of invasive human infections. A. fumigatus produces galactosaminogalactan (GAG), an exopolysaccharide composed of galactose and N-acetyl-galactosamine (GalNAc) that mediates adherence and is required for full virulence. Less pathogenic Aspergillus species were found to produce GAG with a lower GalNAc content than A. fumigatus and expressed minimal amounts of cell wall-bound GAG. Increasing the GalNAc content of GAG of the minimally pathogenic A. nidulans, either through overexpression of the A. nidulans epimerase UgeB or by heterologous expression of the A. fumigatus epimerase Uge3 increased the amount of cell wall bound GAG, augmented adherence in vitro and enhanced virulence in corticosteroid-treated mice to levels similar to A. fumigatus. The enhanced virulence of the overexpression strain of A. nidulans was associated with increased resistance to NADPH oxidase-dependent neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) in vitro, and was not observed in neutropenic mice or mice deficient in NADPH-oxidase that are unable to form NETs. Collectively, these data suggest that cell wall-bound GAG enhances virulence through mediating resistance to NETs
PaLI-3 Vision Language Models: Smaller, Faster, Stronger
This paper presents PaLI-3, a smaller, faster, and stronger vision language
model (VLM) that compares favorably to similar models that are 10x larger. As
part of arriving at this strong performance, we compare Vision Transformer
(ViT) models pretrained using classification objectives to contrastively
(SigLIP) pretrained ones. We find that, while slightly underperforming on
standard image classification benchmarks, SigLIP-based PaLI shows superior
performance across various multimodal benchmarks, especially on localization
and visually-situated text understanding. We scale the SigLIP image encoder up
to 2 billion parameters, and achieves a new state-of-the-art on multilingual
cross-modal retrieval. We hope that PaLI-3, at only 5B parameters, rekindles
research on fundamental pieces of complex VLMs, and could fuel a new generation
of scaled-up models
A CsI hodoscope on CSHINE for Bremsstrahlung {\gamma}-rays in Heavy Ion Reactions
Bremsstrahlung production in heavy ion reactions at Fermi energies
carries important physical information including the nuclear symmetry energy at
supra-saturation densities. In order to detect the high energy Bremsstrahlung
rays, a hodoscope consisting of 15 CsI(Tl) crystal read out by photo
multiplier tubes has been built, tested and operated in experiment. The
resolution, efficiency and linear response of the units to rays have
been studied using radioactive source and reactions. The
inherent energy resolution of is obtained.
Reconstruction method has been established through Geant 4 simulations,
reproducing the experimental results where comparison can be made. Using the
reconstruction method developed, the whole efficiency of the hodoscope is about
against the emissions at the target position,
exhibiting insignificant dependence on the energy of incident rays
above 20 MeV. The hodoscope is operated in the experiment of Kr +
Sn at 25 MeV/u, and a full energy spectrum up to 80 MeV has
been obtained.Comment: 9 pages, 19 figure