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

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

Simulation and partial discharge detection for typical defects of 10 kV cable the joint

In order to explore the partial discharge characteristics of 10 kV XLPE insulated cable (hereinafter referred to as ‘XLPE cable’), first six typical defects are made on the main insulation according to the requirements of the installation process and the key process in which quality problem easily occur. They are: The main insulation has a dent, the main insulation has a knife wound, the main insulation has a metal tip, the main insulation surface has impurities, the high voltage end has a metal tip, and the stripping of the semi-conductive fracture is irregular. Then, the voltage step up test is carried out, and the test is monitored by the local discharge detection system. The test results show that the typical defects caused by the installation of 10 kV XLPE cable joint will produce serious local discharge phenomenon, and the initial discharge voltage is low and the stable discharge quantity is large