5G network deployment and the associated energy consumption in the UK: A complex systems’ exploration

Investing in the communication infrastructure transition requires significant scientific consideration of challenges, prioritisation, risks and uncertainties. To address these challenges, a bottom-up approach was used to demonstrate the future of wireless network transmission and deployment. This study developed an agent-based model to explore the future deployment of non-standalone 5G networks, synthesizing multi-dimensional data visualization. In particular, this research took the UK as an example to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamic characteristics of 5G evolution, and further analysed the energy consumption and carbon footprint of 5G networks, as well as the consequent change in the operating expenses pattern. The simulation results show that 700 MHz and 26 GHz will play an important role in 5G deployment in the UK, which allow base stations to meet short-term and long-term data traffic demands respectively. Furthermore, due to the geopolitical restrictions and embargos, telecommunications may face additional costs of £0.63bn to £1.19bn when deploying 5G radio access networks. Network densification may cause some environmental and economic problems. Take a medium demand scenario as an example, it is found that the electricity consumed by the 5G radio access network will account for more than 2.1% of the total electricity generation, and indirectly lead to 990,404 tonnes carbon emissions in 2030

Near-field Thermal Radiation Between Two Closely Spaced Glass Plates Exceeding Planck’s Blackbody Radiation Law

This work reports experimental studies on radiative heat flux between two parallel glass surfaces. Small polystyrene particles are used as spacers to maintain a micron-sized gap between two optical flats. By carefully choosing the number of particles and performing the measurement in a high-vacuum environment, the experiment is designed to ensure that the radiative heat flux is the dominant mode of heat transfer. The experimental results clearly demonstrate that the radiative heat flux across micron-sized gaps can exceed the far-field upper limit given by Planck’s law of blackbody radiation. The measured radiative heat flux shows reasonable agreement with theoretical predictions

Changes of Intracellular Porphyrin, Reactive Oxygen Species, and Fatty Acids Profiles During Inactivation of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus by Antimicrobial Blue Light

Antimicrobial blue light (aBL) has attracted increasing interest for its antimicrobial properties. However, the underlying bactericidal mechanism has not yet been verified. One hypothesis is that aBL causes the excitation of intracellular chromophores; leading to the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the resultant oxidization of various biomolecules. Thus, monitoring the levels of redox-sensitive intracellular biomolecules such as coproporphyrins, as well as singlet oxygen and various ROS may help to uncover the physiological changes induced by aBL and aid in establishing the underlying mechanism of action. Furthermore, the identification of novel targets of ROS, such as fatty acids, is of potential significance from a therapeutic perspective. In this study, we sought to investigate the molecular impact of aBL treatment on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The results showed that aBL (5–80 J/cm2) exhibited a bactericidal effect on MRSA, and almost no bacteria survived when 80 J/cm2 had been delivered. Further studies revealed that the concentrations of certain intracellular molecules varied in response to aBL irradiation. Coproporphyrin levels were found to decrease gradually, while ROS levels increased rapidly. Moreover, imaging revealed the emergence and increase of singlet oxygen molecules. Concomitantly, the lipid peroxidation product malondialdehyde (MDA) increased in abundance and intracellular K+ leakage was observed, indicating permeability of the cell membrane. Atomic force microscopy showed that the cell surface exhibited a coarse appearance. Finally, fatty acid profiles at different illumination levels were monitored by GC-MS. The relative amounts of three unsaturated fatty acids (C16:1, C20:1, and C20:4) were decreased in response to aBL irradiation, which likely played a key role in the aforementioned membrane injuries. Collectively, these data suggest that the cell membrane is a major target of ROS during aBL irradiation, causing alterations to membrane lipid profiles, and in particular to the unsaturated fatty acid component

Efficient Cross-Lingual Transfer for Chinese Stable Diffusion with Images as Pivots

Diffusion models have made impressive progress in text-to-image synthesis. However, training such large-scale models (e.g. Stable Diffusion), from scratch requires high computational costs and massive high-quality text-image pairs, which becomes unaffordable in other languages. To handle this challenge, we propose IAP, a simple but effective method to transfer English Stable Diffusion into Chinese. IAP optimizes only a separate Chinese text encoder with all other parameters fixed to align Chinese semantics space to the English one in CLIP. To achieve this, we innovatively treat images as pivots and minimize the distance of attentive features produced from cross-attention between images and each language respectively. In this way, IAP establishes connections of Chinese, English and visual semantics in CLIP's embedding space efficiently, advancing the quality of the generated image with direct Chinese prompts. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several strong Chinese diffusion models with only 5%~10% training data

Perspective of monochromatic gamma-ray line detection with the High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection (HERD) facility onboard China's Space Station

HERD is the High Energy cosmic-Radiation Detection instrument proposed to operate onboard China's space station in the 2020s. It is designed to detect energetic cosmic ray nuclei, leptons and photons with a high energy resolution ($\sim1\%$ for electrons and photons and $20\%$ for nuclei) and a large geometry factor ($>3\,{ m^2\,sr}$ for electrons and diffuse photons and $>2\,{ m^2\,sr}$ for nuclei). In this work we discuss the capability of HERD to detect monochromatic $\gamma$-ray lines, based on simulations of the detector performance. It is shown that HERD will be one of the most sensitive instruments for monochromatic $\gamma$-ray searches at energies between $\sim10$ to a few hundred GeV. Above hundreds of GeV, Cherenkov telescopes will be more sensitive due to their large effective area. As a specific example, we show that a good portion of the parameter space of a supersymmetric dark matter model can be probed with HERD.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, matches version published in Astropart.Phy

Genome-Wide Identification, Evolutionary Expansion, and Expression Profile of Homeodomain-Leucine Zipper Gene Family in Poplar (Populus trichocarpa)

BACKGROUND: Homeodomain-leucine zipper (HD-ZIP) proteins are plant-specific transcriptional factors known to play crucial roles in plant development. Although sequence phylogeny analysis of Populus HD-ZIPs was carried out in a previous study, no systematic analysis incorporating genome organization, gene structure, and expression compendium has been conducted in model tree species Populus thus far. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In this study, a comprehensive analysis of Populus HD-ZIP gene family was performed. Sixty-three full-length HD-ZIP genes were found in Populus genome. These Populus HD-ZIP genes were phylogenetically clustered into four distinct subfamilies (HD-ZIP I-IV) and predominately distributed across 17 linkage groups (LG). Fifty genes from 25 Populus paralogous pairs were located in the duplicated blocks of Populus genome and then preferentially retained during the sequential evolutionary courses. Genomic organization analyses indicated that purifying selection has played a pivotal role in the retention and maintenance of Populus HD-ZIP gene family. Microarray analysis has shown that 21 Populus paralogous pairs have been differentially expressed across different tissues and under various stresses, with five paralogous pairs showing nearly identical expression patterns, 13 paralogous pairs being partially redundant and three paralogous pairs diversifying significantly. Quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis performed on 16 selected Populus HD-ZIP genes in different tissues and under both drought and salinity stresses confirms their tissue-specific and stress-inducible expression patterns. CONCLUSIONS: Genomic organizations indicated that segmental duplications contributed significantly to the expansion of Populus HD-ZIP gene family. Exon/intron organization and conserved motif composition of Populus HD-ZIPs are highly conservative in the same subfamily, suggesting the members in the same subfamilies may also have conservative functionalities. Microarray and qRT-PCR analyses showed that 89% (56 out of 63) of Populus HD-ZIPs were duplicate genes that might have been retained by substantial subfunctionalization. Taken together, these observations may lay the foundation for future functional analysis of Populus HD-ZIP genes to unravel their biological roles

Fluorescence-activated cell sorting and directed evolution of α-N-acetylgalactosaminidases using a quenched activity-based probe (qABP)

10.1039/C3CC42836BChemical Communications49657237-723

Relationship of strength, joint kinesthesia, and plantar tactile sensation to dynamic and static postural stability among patients with anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction

Objective: Postural stability is essential for high-level physical activities after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). This study was conducted to investigate the relationship of muscle strength, joint kinesthesia, and plantar tactile sensation to dynamic and static postural stability among patients with anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.Methods: Forty-four patients over 6 months post anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (age: 27.9 ± 6.8 years, height: 181.7 ± 8.7 cm, weight: 80.6 ± 9.4 kg, postoperative duration: 10.3 ± 3.6 months) participated in this study. Their static and dynamic postural stability, muscle strength, hamstring/quadriceps ratio, joint kinesthesia, and plantar tactile sensation were measured. Partial correlations were used to determine the correlation of the above-mentioned variables with time to stabilization (TTS) and root mean square of the center of pressure (COP-RMS) in anterior-posterior (AP) and mediolateral (ML) directions.Results: Both TTSAP and TTSML were related to muscle strength and joint kinesthesia of knee flexion and extension; COP-RMSAP was correlated with plantar tactile sensations at great toe and arch, while COP-RMSML was correlated with joint kinesthesia of knee flexion, and plantar tactile sensation at great toe and heel. Dynamic stability was sequentially correlated with strength and joint kinesthesia, while static stability was sequentially correlated with plantar tactile sensation and joint kinesthesia.Conclusion: Among patients with anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, strength is related to dynamic postural stability, joint kinesthesia is related to dynamic and static postural stability, and plantar tactile sensation is related to static postural stability. Strength has a higher level of relationship to dynamic stability than joint kinesthesia, and plantar tactile sensation has a higher level of relationship to static stability than joint kinesthesia

Physiological Hypoxia Enhances Stemness Preservation, Proliferation, and Bidifferentiation of Induced Hepatic Stem Cells

Induced hepatic stem cells (iHepSCs) have great potential as donors for liver cell therapy due to their self-renewal and bipotential differentiation properties. However, the efficiency of bidifferentiation and repopulation efficiency of iHepSCs is relatively low. Recent evidence shows that physiological hypoxia, a vital factor within stem cell “niche” microenvironment, plays key roles in regulating tissue stem cell biological behaviors including proliferation and differentiation. In this study, we found that physiological hypoxia (10% O2) enhanced the stemness properties and promoted the proliferation ability of iHepSCs by accelerating G1/S transition via p53-p21 signaling pathway. In addition, short-term hypoxia preconditioning improved the efficiency of hepatic differentiation of iHepSCs, and long-term hypoxia promoted cholangiocytic differentiation but inhibited hepatic differentiation of iHepSCs. These results demonstrated the potential effects of hypoxia on stemness preservation, proliferation, and bidifferentiation of iHepSCs and promising perspective to explore appropriate culture conditions for therapeutic stem cells