Atmospheric Pollution and Microecology of Respiratory Tract

This chapter elaborates the source and ingredients of atmospheric pollutants, the microecology of respiratory tract in animals and humans and the effect of atmospheric pollution on it and thus clarifies the relationship between air pollution and microecology of the respiratory tract based on the experiments

Construction Technology and Strategy of Natural Light Environment in Urban Underground Space

In underground space, daylighting plays an important role in increasing the spacious sense, improving the ventilation effect, and more importantly, reducing the negative visual and psychological effects brought by the underground space, such as enclosed monotony, unknown direction and isolation. In this paper, the technical means of utilizing natural light in underground space were elaborated from the two aspects of passive daylighting method and active daylighting method, aiming to bring natural light into the underground as much as possible so as to fully satisfy people's longing for nature for those who work and live in the underground space

Design of variable screw pitch rib snapping roller and residue cutter for corn harvesters

The blocking between two snapping rollers will seriously constrict the harvesting efficiency for corn harvester. A variable screw pitch rib snapping roller was developed to solve this problem. The comparative experiment between fixed screw pitch rib snapping rollers and variable screw pitch rib snapping rollers illustrated that variable screw pitch ribs can avoid corn-stalk blocking effectively, and it can improve working efficiency by 56.7%. Conservation tillage with standing corn residue was testified that it had a strong control of soil wind erosion. In order to implement this mode of conservation tillage at a production scale, a cutter was developed in this study. Subsequently, two experiments were conducted, one was to test the cutting ratio (defined as the totally cut off stalk population divided by total stalk population), and the other one was to test standing-residue height

Pixel Adapter: A Graph-Based Post-Processing Approach for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

Current Scene text image super-resolution approaches primarily focus on extracting robust features, acquiring text information, and complex training strategies to generate super-resolution images. However, the upsampling module, which is crucial in the process of converting low-resolution images to high-resolution ones, has received little attention in existing works. To address this issue, we propose the Pixel Adapter Module (PAM) based on graph attention to address pixel distortion caused by upsampling. The PAM effectively captures local structural information by allowing each pixel to interact with its neighbors and update features. Unlike previous graph attention mechanisms, our approach achieves 2-3 orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency and memory utilization by eliminating the dependency on sparse adjacency matrices and introducing a sliding window approach for efficient parallel computation. Additionally, we introduce the MLP-based Sequential Residual Block (MSRB) for robust feature extraction from text images, and a Local Contour Awareness loss ($\mathcal{L}_{lca}$) to enhance the model's perception of details. Comprehensive experiments on TextZoom demonstrate that our proposed method generates high-quality super-resolution images, surpassing existing methods in recognition accuracy. For single-stage and multi-stage strategies, we achieved improvements of 0.7\% and 2.6\%, respectively, increasing the performance from 52.6\% and 53.7\% to 53.3\% and 56.3\%. The code is available at https://github.com/wenyu1009/RTSRN

Case Report: Giant left atrial cystic tumor: myxoma or intracardiac blood cyst?

BackgroundPrimary cardiac tumors are uncommon, with the majority being benign myxomas. Cystic myxoma, a particularly rare type of benign cardiac tumor, demands cautious differential diagnosis from other cardiac tumors.Case summaryA 43-year-old male patient presenting with intermittent dyspnea was referred to our department for surgical evaluation. Transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) and transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) unveiled an intra-left atrial cyst, which was subsequently found to be blood-filled during a video-assisted microinvasive heart surgery. Pathological examination depicted a cyst wall filled with small stellate and fat spindle cells, along with a mucoid matrix, indicating a diagnosis of cystic myxoma.ConclusionsWe herein presented a rare case of an adult patient with cystic myxoma, initially misdiagnosed as an intracardiac blood cyst (CBC) prior to surgery, and ultimately verified via pathological findings

Mechanism of bubble action in backfill slurry and the evolution of its rheological properties

Cemented paste backfill is a suspension composed of solid-liquid-gas three-phase. For a long time, the focus has been mostly on the rheological behavior of solid-liquid two-phase, while the effect of gas phase on slurry with complex rheological behavior remains obscure. The gaseous phase components can significantly reduce the yield stress and viscosity of high-concentration backfilling slurry, which plays a significant role on improving pipeline transportation performance and reducing pipeline wear. In order to reveal the mechanism of bubbles to its rheological properties of slurry, the gas content of slurry was controlled by adjusting the content of air entrainment agent (TTAB), and tests such as surface tension, air content and rheological properties were carried out to find out the influence of bubbles on the rheological behavior of slurry, and capillary force (Fcay) and the bubble evolution model of dimensionless yield stress (\begin{document}${\tau }_{{\mathrm{ref}}}/{\tau }_{{\mathrm{y}}}$\end{document}) were introduced to analyze the bubble evolution characteristics in the slurry and reveal the mechanism of bubbles on the rheological properties of slurry. The results showed that under the low gas content ( < 12.5%), the gas phase had little effect on the rheological behavior of the suspended slurry. As the increase of gas content, the effect of bubbles on the rheological behavior of backfilling slurry was immense. Under the action of the air-entraining, the bubble surface had a repulsive force on the fine particles in the slurry, and could reduce the adsorption capacity of cement and solid waste, resulting in a decreasing trend of slurry yield stress and increasing fluidity. Based on capillary force (Fcay) and dimensionless yield stress theory (\begin{document}${\tau }_{{\mathrm{ref}}}/{\tau }_{{\mathrm{y}}}$\end{document}), evolutional mechanism of rheological properties of slurry in different gas content was analyzed. It could be seen that as the gas content increased (12.5%−27.7%), the surface tension and yield stress of slurry decreased, and the bubble would be deformed by extrusion. When the gas content (28.6%) was high, the bubbles in the slurry were easy to burst. In addition, bubbles, retained inside the backfilling body, leading to strength degradation, so the effect of bubbles on the mechanical properties of the backfilling body and its solution were explored and three effective measures were proposed. By revealing the effect of bubbles on the rheological properties of suspension slurry and its evolution characteristics, it provides theoretical support for the development of high bubble filling, which can achieve the goal of drag reduction and friction reduction

Lack of Trehalose Accelerates H2O2-Induced Candida albicans Apoptosis through Regulating Ca2+ Signaling Pathway and Caspase Activity

Trehalose is a non-reducing disaccharide and can be accumulated in response to heat or oxidative stresses in Candida albicans. Here we showed that a C. albicans tps1Δ mutant, which is deficient in trehalose synthesis, exhibited increased apoptosis rate upon H2O2 treatment together with an increase of intracellular Ca2+ level and caspase activity. When the intracellular Ca2+ level was stimulated by adding CaCl2 or A23187, both the apoptosis rate and caspase activity were increased. In contrast, the presence of two calcium chelators, EGTA and BAPTA, could attenuate these effects. Moreover, we investigated the role of Ca2+ pathway in C. albicans apoptosis and found that both calcineurin and the calcineurin-dependent transcription factor, Crz1p, mutants showed decreased apoptosis and caspase activity upon H2O2 treatment compared to the wild-type cells. Expression of CaMCA1, the only gene found encoding a C. albicans metacaspase, in calcineurin-deleted or Crz1p-deleted cells restored the cell sensitivity to H2O2. Our results suggest that Ca2+ and its downstream calcineurin/Crz1p/CaMCA1 pathway are involved in H2O2 -induced C. albicans apoptosis. Inhibition of this pathway might be the mechanism for the protective role of trehalose in C. albicans

Development of online monitor for substation 10 kV MOA

Metal oxide arresters (MOA) are widely used for over-voltage protection of power facilities in 10 kV distribution networks, and it is hard to determine the failure ones. This study presented an online monitor for 10 kV MOA used in substation. Firstly, with simulation on electromagnetic transient program (EMTP), the authors found that the resistive component of leakage current flowing through the MOA could reflect its health status. Then the principle of detecting the resistive leakage current flowing MOA by the harmonic analysis method is introduced. Finally, a remote monitoring system for MOA based on wireless communication technology is built and testing experiments of monitoring the health status of MOA has been done