124 research outputs found
The impacts of air pollution on human and natural capital in China: A look from a provincial perspective
Abstract Air quality has a significant impact on human health and natural systems worldwide. China, as one of the largest developing countries, faces very much serious air pollution and requires much attention. While the influences of air pollution on human or nature have been extensively investigated, few scholars considered the two effects of air pollution on human health and nature simultaneously based on the same framework. Indeed, human and nature coexist in the same biosphere on which they depend for their development and the impacts of air pollution on human health and nature occur at the same time with different and synergic effects. Only by considering both impacts we can develop a more comprehensive understanding of air pollution impacts, in particular including SO2, NO2, CO, PM10 and PM2.5. Impacts can be looked at from the point of view of damage provided and damage repair (health recovery, replacement cost). Therefore, considering the different pollutants and sectors, the influences of air pollution on human health and nature are accounted for in this study by applying the Emergy Accounting and Life Cycle Assessment Eco-indicator 99 methods under a unified framework in 31 provinces of China taken as case study. While LCA provides an accurate assessment of the direct consequences of pollution on human and natural capital (human health and biodiversity losses), the Emergy Accounting approach quantifies the biosphere work associated to repair or replace such losses over time. Furthermore, the spatial agglomeration characteristics of emissions, human and natural capital losses analyzed by means of Moran's I index. Results show that: (1) Concerning human capital losses, the amount of emissions of PM10 and PM2.5 only account for 10% of total impacts, compared to SO2, NO2, and CO emissions, but in some provinces cause more than 70% of human capital losses. And more than 80% of PM2.5 and PM10 that cause human capital losses come from the industrial and civil sectors. (2) As far as natural capital losses are concerned, compared with SO2, the losses caused by NO2 account for 80% in most provinces. And the power, industrial and transportation sectors are the three major sources of NO2 causing natural capital losses. (3) The spatial agglomeration characteristics, such as high-high cluster, high-low cluster, low-low cluster and low–high cluster, are different for air pollution emissions, human and natural capital losses. A comprehensive and detailed understanding of the impacts of air pollution is crucial for policy makers to take informed decisions
Protective effect of astragalus injection against myocardial injury in septic young rats via inhibition of JAK/STAT signal pathway and regulation of inflammation
Purpose: To investigate the protective effect of astragalus injection against myocardial injury in septic young rats, and the underlying mechanism of action.
Methods: Seventy-two healthy Sprague Dawley (SD) rats were randomly selected and used to establish a young rat model of sepsis. The young rats were randomly divided into 3 groups: sham, model and astragalus injection groups. Each group had 24 young rats. Serum cardiac troponin I (cTnI), IL-10, IL-6, JAK2 and STAT3 were measured after op.
Results: Compared with sham group, serum cTnI level in the model group was significantly higher, while serum cTnI level of the drug group was significantly lower than that of the model group (p < 0.05). Compared with model group, the level of IL-10 in the myocardial tissue of the drug group was significantly elevated, while IL-6 level was lower (p < 0.05). Relative to sham rats, myocardial JAK2 and STAT3 protein levels in model rats were high. However, myocardial JAK2 and STAT3 proteins in the drug-treated rats were significantly downregulated, relative to model rats (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: Astragalus injection upregulates IL-10 and IL-6 in rats by inhibiting the activation of JAK/STAT signal pathway, and via maintenance of pro-inflammation/anti-inflammation balance. Thus, astragalus exerts protective effect against myocardial injury in sepsis, and can potentially be developed for use as such in clinical practice.
Keywords: Astragalus injection, JAK/STAT signal pathway, Pro-inflammatory/anti-inflammatory imbalance, Sepsis, Myocardial injur
Deeply Coupled Cross-Modal Prompt Learning
Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models (e.g., CLIP) have
excelled in zero-shot generalization. Prompt tuning involved in the knowledge
transfer from foundation models to downstream tasks has gained significant
attention recently. Existing prompt-tuning methods in cross-modal learning,
however, either solely focus on language branch, or learn vision-language
interaction in a shallow mechanism. In this context, we propose a Deeply
coupled Cross-modal Prompt learning (DCP) method based on CLIP. DCP flexibly
accommodates the interplay between vision and language with a Cross-Modal
Prompt Attention (CMPA) mechanism, which enables the mutual exchange of
respective representation through a well-connected multi-head attention module
progressively and strongly. We then conduct comprehensive few-shot learning
experiments on 11 image classification datasets and analyze the robustness to
domain shift as well. Thorough experimental analysis evidently demonstrates the
superb few-shot generalization and compelling domain adaption capacity of a
well-executed DCP. The code can be found at https://github.com/GingL/CMPA.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2023 finding
What Large Language Models Bring to Text-rich VQA?
Text-rich VQA, namely Visual Question Answering based on text recognition in
the images, is a cross-modal task that requires both image comprehension and
text recognition. In this work, we focus on investigating the advantages and
bottlenecks of LLM-based approaches in addressing this problem. To address the
above concern, we separate the vision and language modules, where we leverage
external OCR models to recognize texts in the image and Large Language Models
(LLMs) to answer the question given texts. The whole framework is training-free
benefiting from the in-context ability of LLMs. This pipeline achieved superior
performance compared to the majority of existing Multimodal Large Language
Models (MLLM) on four text-rich VQA datasets. Besides, based on the ablation
study, we find that LLM brings stronger comprehension ability and may introduce
helpful knowledge for the VQA problem. The bottleneck for LLM to address
text-rich VQA problems may primarily lie in visual part. We also combine the
OCR module with MLLMs and pleasantly find that the combination of OCR module
with MLLM also works. It's worth noting that not all MLLMs can comprehend the
OCR information, which provides insights into how to train an MLLM that
preserves the abilities of LLM
Bright solitons in a spin-orbit-coupled dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate trapped within a double-lattice
By effectively controlling the dipole-dipole interaction, we investigate the
characteristics of the ground state of bright solitons in a spin-orbit coupled
dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate. The dipolar atoms are trapped within a
double-lattice which consists of a linear and a nonlinear lattice. We derive
the motion equations of the different spin components, taking the controlling
mechanisms of the diolpe-dipole interaction into account. An analytical
expression of dipole-dipole interaction is derived. By adjusting the dipole
polarization angle, the dipole interaction can be adjusted from attraction to
repulsion. On this basis, we study the generation and manipulation of the
bright solitons using both the analytical variational method and numerical
imaginary time evolution. The stability of the bright solitons is also analyzed
and we map out the stability phase diagram. By adjusting the long-range
dipole-dipole interaction, one can achieve manipulation of bright solitons in
all aspects, including the existence, width, nodes, and stability. Considering
the complexity of our system, our results will have enormous potential
applications in quantum simulation of complex systems
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