Rethinking Dalian New International Airport: The Exploration of a Net-Zero Airport Powered by Tidal Power Energy on an Artificial Island.

Fossil fuel is still the number one energy resource in China, and among the fossil fuel, coal is the primary resource to generate electricity and heat during heating days. Fossil fuel will result in global warming, sea level rising, but we may not perceive these because of the relatively subtle changes. Nevertheless, China got the punishment from the natural in recent years, most of the mainland China is experiencing the terrible smog, which gets worse in the winter. The cause of the smog is same to London, a huge amount of coal has been consumed in last few decades. To stop the smog spreading in China, the energy resource transformation is imperative. Oceans cover almost 70% of the earth’s surface which have a tremendous amount of energy in the form of a wave, tidal, ocean current, thermal resources and salinity gradients. Ocean energy is one of the renewable energy that human ancho’s their hope on, and researchers are seeking approaches to capture that energy and convert it to electricity more and more efficiently. As buildings consuming about 40% of global energy consumption, the architects need to emphasize more on energy saving aspect compare to the past. Dalian has sea area about 29000 square kilometers. It is reasonable to invest and develop on ocean energy. Among different types of ocean energy, tidal energy, which is created by the gravitational forces of the moon and the sun and the rotation of the moon, is one of the most predictable efficient and developed ocean energy. The New Dalian Airport locates in Jinzhou Bay Area, which provides more opportunities for integrating the tidal power to generate energy on site. With the thought of incorporating tidal energy, this thesis will develop a proposal for Dalian Jinzhou Bay International Airport, which aims at being a sustainable, educational, and Net-Zero airport on an artificial island that powered by tidal energy

Human retinal dark adaptation tracked in vivo with the electroretinogram: insights into processes underlying recovery of cone- and rod-mediated vision

The substantial time taken for regaining visual sensitivity (dark adaptation) following bleaching exposures has been investigated for over a century. Psychophysical studies yielded the classic biphasic curve representing recovery of cone-driven and rod-driven vision. The electroretinogram (ERG) permits direct assessment of recovery at the level of the retina (photoreceptors, bipolar cells), with the first report over 70 years ago. Over the last two decades, ERG studies of dark adaptation have generated insights into underlying physiological processes. After large bleaches, rod photoreceptor circulating current, estimated from the rod-isolated bright-flash ERG a-wave, takes 30 min to recover, indicating that products of bleaching, thought to be free opsin (unbound to 11-cis-retinal), continue to activate phototransduction, shutting off rod circulating current. In contrast, cone current, assessed with cone-driven bright-flash ERG a-waves, recovers within 100 ms following similar exposures, suggesting that free opsin is less able to shut off cone current. The cone-driven dim-flash a-wave can be used to track recovery of cone photopigment, showing regeneration is 'rate-limited' rather than first order. Recoveries of the dim-flash ERG b-wave are consistent also with rate-limited rod photopigment regeneration (where free opsin, desensitising the visual system as an 'equivalent background', is removed by rate-limited delivery of 11-cis-retinal). These findings agree with psychophysical and retinal densitometry studies, although there are unexplained points of divergence. Post-bleach ERG recovery has been explored in age-related macular degeneration and in trials of visual cycle inhibitors for retinal diseases. ERG tracking of dark adaptation may prove useful in future clinical contexts

Negative electroretinograms: genetic and acquired causes, diagnostic approaches and physiological insights.

Funder: Moorfields Eye CharityThe dark-adapted human electroretinogram (ERG) response to a standard bright flash includes a negative-going a-wave followed by a positive-going b-wave that crosses the baseline. An electronegative waveform (or negative ERG) results when the b-wave is selectively reduced such that the ERG fails to cross the baseline following the a-wave. In the context of a normally sized a-wave, it indicates a site of retinal dysfunction occurring after phototransduction (commonly at the photoreceptor to bipolar cell synapse). This is an important finding. In genetic disease, the pattern of ERG abnormality can point to variants in a small group of genes (frequently those associated with congenital stationary night blindness and X-linked retinoschisis, but negative ERGs can also be seen in other conditions including syndromic disease). In acquired disease, there are numerous causes, but specific features may point to melanoma-associated retinopathy (MAR). In some cases, the visual symptoms precede the diagnosis of the melanoma and so the ERG findings can initiate investigations facilitating early detection and treatment. Negative ERGs can occur in other paraneoplastic conditions, and in a range of other diseases. This review will outline the physiological basis for the negative ERG, report prevalences in the literature from different cohorts, discuss the range of causes, displaying examples of a number of ERG phenotypes, highlight features of a clinical approach to patients, and briefly discuss further insights relating to current flows shaping the a-wave trough and from single-cell transcriptome analysis

The single-cell landscape of cystic echinococcosis in different stages provided insights into endothelial and immune cell heterogeneity

IntroductionHydatid cysts and angiogenesis are the key characteristics of cystic echinococcosis, with immune cells and endothelial cells mediating essential roles in disease progression. Recent single-cell analysis studies demonstrated immune cell infiltration after Echinococcus granulosus infection, highlighting the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of targeting certain cell types in the lesion microenvironment. However, more detailed immune mechanisms during different periods of E. granulosus infection were not elucidated.MethodsHerein, we characterized immune and endothelial cells from the liver samples of mice in different stages by single-cell RNA sequencing.ResultsWe profiled the transcriptomes of 45,199 cells from the liver samples of mice at 1, 3, and 6 months after infection (two replicates) and uninfected wild-type mice. The cells were categorized into 26 clusters with four distinct cell types: natural killer (NK)/T cells, B cells, myeloid cells, and endothelial cells. An SPP1+ macrophage subset with immunosuppressive and pro-angiogenic functions was identified in the late infection stage. Single-cell regulatory network inference and clustering (SCENIC) analysis suggested that Cebpe, Runx3, and Rora were the key regulators of the SPP1+ macrophages. Cell communication analysis revealed that the SPP1+ macrophages interacted with endothelial cells and had pro-angiogenic functions. There was an obvious communicative relationship between SPP1+ macrophages and endothelial cells via Vegfa–Vegfr1/Vegfr2, and SPP1+ macrophages interacted with other immune cells via specific ligand–receptor pairs, which might have contributed to their immunosuppressive function.DiscussionOur comprehensive exploration of the cystic echinococcosis ecosystem and the first discovery of SPP1+ macrophages with infection period specificity provide deeper insights into angiogenesis and the immune evasion mechanisms associated with later stages of infection

High expression of ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme 2C (UBE2C) correlates with nasopharyngeal carcinoma progression

BACKGROUND: Overexpression of ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme 2C (UBE2C) has been detected in many types of human cancers, and is correlated with tumor malignancy. However, the role of UBE2C in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is unclear. In this study, we investigated the role of aberrant UBE2C expression in the progression of human NPC. METHODS: Immunohistochemical analysis was performed to detect UBE2C protein in clinical samples of NPC and benign nasopharyngeal tissues, and the association of UBE2C expression with patient clinicopathological characteristics was analyzed. UBEC2 expression profiles were evaluated in cell lines representing varying differentiated stages of NPC and immortalized nasopharyngeal epithelia NP-69 cells using quantitative RT-PCR, western blotting and fluorescent staining. Furthermore, UBE2C was knocked down using RNA interference in these cell lines and proliferation and cell cycle distribution was investigated. RESULTS: Immunohistochemical analysis revealed that UBE2C protein expression levels were higher in NPC tissues than in benign nasopharyngeal tissues (P<0.001). Moreover, high UBE2C protein expression was positively correlated with tumor size (P=0.017), lymph node metastasis (P=0.016) and distant metastasis (P=0.015) in NPC patients. In vitro experiments demonstrated that UBE2C expression levels were inversely correlated with the degree of differentiation of NPC cell lines, whereas UBE2C displayed low level of expression in NP-69 cells. Knockdown of UBE2C led to significant arrest at the S and G2/M phases of the cell cycle, and decreased cell proliferation was observed in poorly-differentiated CNE2Z NPC cells and undifferentiated C666-1 cells, but not in well-differentiated CNE1 and immortalized NP-69 cells. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that high expression of UBE2C in human NPC is closely related to tumor malignancy, and may be a potential marker for NPC progression

UADB: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Booster

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) is a key data mining problem owing to its wide real-world applications. Due to the complete absence of supervision signals, UAD methods rely on implicit assumptions about anomalous patterns (e.g., scattered/sparsely/densely clustered) to detect anomalies. However, real-world data are complex and vary significantly across different domains. No single assumption can describe such complexity and be valid in all scenarios. This is also confirmed by recent research that shows no UAD method is omnipotent. Based on above observations, instead of searching for a magic universal winner assumption, we seek to design a general UAD Booster (UADB) that empowers any UAD models with adaptability to different data. This is a challenging task given the heterogeneous model structures and assumptions adopted by existing UAD methods. To achieve this, we dive deep into the UAD problem and find that compared to normal data, anomalies (i) lack clear structure/pattern in feature space, thus (ii) harder to learn by model without a suitable assumption, and finally, leads to (iii) high variance between different learners. In light of these findings, we propose to (i) distill the knowledge of the source UAD model to an imitation learner (booster) that holds no data assumption, then (ii) exploit the variance between them to perform automatic correction, and thus (iii) improve the booster over the original UAD model. We use a neural network as the booster for its strong expressive power as a universal approximator and ability to perform flexible post-hoc tuning. Note that UADB is a model-agnostic framework that can enhance heterogeneous UAD models in a unified way. Extensive experiments on over 80 tabular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UADB

Validation of the Chinese version of PedsQL™ brain tumor module

BackgroundThe study introduced the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory™ (PedsQL™) brain tumor module for the first time in China. Further, the Chinese version of the PedsQL™ brain tumor module was developed and its feasibility, reliability, and validity were investigated.MethodsA total 129 cases completed the assessment. Feasibility was evaluated according to the percentage of missing items and the time required to complete the questionnaire. Internal consistency, retest reliability, and split-half reliability were tested to confirm reliability. We evaluated validity by testing content validity, construct validity, and criterion-related validity. The consistency between the child-self and parent-proxy reports was analyzed by calculating the correlation coefficient (r value) between them.ResultsThe Cronbach's alpha values for all subscales were above 0.7 and many subscales scored more than 0.9. The intra-class correlation coefficients of retest reliability were higher than 0.9. The split-half reliability scores for all subscales were higher than 0.6. The factor-item correlations ranged between 0.575–0.922 in the child report and 0.492–0.949 in the parent report. Exploratory factor analyses produced five factors corresponding to each subscale in the child report and six factors in the parent report.ConclusionThe feasibility, reliability, and validity of the Chinese PedsQL™ brain tumor module were ascertained through this study. This module can be used to effectively monitor children with brain tumors and conduct descriptive or exploratory studies to determine the risk factors affecting their quality of life. This would help develop a new basis for formulating measures to improve patient prognosis and quality of life

Cone-driven strong flash electroretinograms in healthy adults: Prevalence of negative waveforms

Purpose Both rod and cone-driven signals contribute to the electroretinogram (ERG) elicited by a standard strong flash in the dark. Negative ERGs usually reflect inner retinal dysfunction. However, in diseases where rod photoreceptor function is selectively lost, a negative waveform might represent the response of the dark-adapted cone system. To investigate the dark-adapted cone-driven waveform in healthy individuals, we delivered flashes on a dim blue background, designed to saturate the rods, but minimally adapt the cones. Methods ERGs were recorded, using conductive fibre electrodes, in adults from the TwinsUK cohort. Responses to 13 cd m−2 s white xenon flashes (similar to the standard DA 10 flash), delivered on a blue background, were analysed. Photopic and scotopic strengths of the background were 1.3 and 30 cd m−2, respectively; through a dilated pupil, this is expected to largely saturate the rods, but adapt the cones much less than the standard ISCEV background. Results Mean (SD) participant age was 62.5 (11.3) years (93% female). ERGs from 203 right and 204 left eyes were included, with mean (SD) b/a ratios of 1.22 (0.28) and 1.18 (0.28), respectively (medians, 1.19 and 1.17). Proportions with negative waveforms were 23 and 26%, respectively. Right and left eye b/a ratios were strongly correlated (correlation coefficient 0.74, p &lt; 0.0001). We found no significant correlation of b/a ratio with age. Conclusions Over 20% of eyes showed b/a ratios less than 1, consistent with the notion that dark-adapted cone-driven responses to standard bright flashes can have negative waveforms. The majority had ratios greater than 1. Thus, whilst selective loss of rod function can yield a negative waveform (with reduced a-wave) in some, our findings also suggest that loss of rod function can occur without necessarily yielding a negative ERG. One potential limitation is possible mild cone system adaptation by the background