The central inflammatory regulator IκBζ: induction, regulation and physiological functions

IκBζ (encoded by NFKBIZ) is the most recently identified IkappaB family protein. As an atypical member of the IkappaB protein family, NFKBIZ has been the focus of recent studies because of its role in inflammation. Specifically, it is a key gene in the regulation of a variety of inflammatory factors in the NF-KB pathway, thereby affecting the progression of related diseases. In recent years, investigations into NFKBIZ have led to greater understanding of this gene. In this review, we summarize the induction of NFKBIZ and then elucidate its transcription, translation, molecular mechanism and physiological function. Finally, the roles played by NFKBIZ in psoriasis, cancer, kidney injury, autoimmune diseases and other diseases are described. NFKBIZ functions are universal and bidirectional, and therefore, this gene may exert a great influence on the regulation of inflammation and inflammation-related diseases

Superconducting properties of SmO1-xFxFeAs wires with Tc = 52 K prepared by the powder-in-tube method

We demonstrate that Ta sheathed SmO1-xFxFeAs wires were successfully fabricated by the powder-in-tube (PIT) method for the first time. Structural analysis by mean of x-ray diffraction shows that the main phase of SmO1-xFxFeAs was obtained by this synthesis method. The transition temperature of the SmO0.65F0.35FeAs wires was confirmed to be as high as 52 K. Based on magnetization measurements, it is found that a globe current can flow on macroscopic sample dimensions with Jc of ~3.9x10^3 A/cm^2 at 5 K and self field, while a high Jc about 2x10^5 A/cm^2 is observed within the grains, suggesting that a significant improvement in the globle Jc is possible. It should be noted that the Jc exhibits a very weak field dependence behavior. Furthermore, the upper critical fields (Hc2) determined according to the Werthamer-Helfand-Hohenberg formula are (T= 0 K) = 120 T, indicating a very encouraging application of the new superconductors.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

A Novel Disturbance Rejection Control of Roll Channel for Small Air-to-Surface Missiles

In this paper, the issue of roll channel for attitude control for small air-to-surface missiles suffering from multiple disturbances is investigated. The dynamic model of roll channel is established and the roll controller of roll channel based on the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is designed. Based on the extended state observer, the disturbance is observed and compensated to track the roll rate accurately. Then, simulations and verification are carried out for rudder efficiency, barycenter location deviation, steering gear stuck, wind disturbance, drift error of inertial measurement unit (IMU) and other disturbances. The control effect is also compared with proportional integral derivative (PID) control and other ADRC algorithms. The results demonstrate that the algorithm has a good ability to suppress multiple disturbances. It can meet the control performance requirements of small air-to-surface missiles

Spatial distribution and ecological risks of neonicotinoid insecticides for an urban tidal stream of Guangzhou City, South China

Neonicotinoid insecticides (NEOs) are widely used in many urban regions. Studies on NEOs residues in urban tidal streams and the associated ecological risks are limited. In this study, the occurrence, spatiotemporal distribution, and ecological risks of seven selected NEOs in the Wuchong Stream in Guangzhou, China were investigated. Moreover, the correlation between typical urban factors and the ecological risk of NEOs was discussed. In the Wuchong Stream, the concentrations of NEOs in the water samples ranged from 0.97 to 175.92 ng. L-1 in the dry season and 3.15 to 312.92 ng. L-1 in the wet season.The most commonly used neonicotionoids were acetamiprid and imidacloprid in the Wuchong Sream basin. The concentrations of NEOs in the midstream were higher than that in the downstream and upstream. The results of the ecological risk indicated that NEOs were likely to biologically impair the urban stream ecosystem, especially in the dry season. For three typical aquatic organisms, the current concentrations of NEOs posed a significant threat to aquatic insects. Compared to other urban factors, residentidal district and farmland area were the main socioeconomic factors affecting the ecological risk of NEOs in the Wuchong Stream basin. Therefore, the correct and reasonable application of NEOs and continuous improvement of the applicant methods can reduce the environmental risks of urban streams

A Wrinkled Ag/CNTs-PDMS Composite Film for a High-Performance Flexible Sensor and Its Applications in Human-Body Single Monitoring

In this paper, a flexible Ag/CNTs-PDMS (polydimethylsi-loxane) composite film sensor based on the novel design philosophy was prepared. Its force-electric effect mechanism is based on the generation of micro-cracks in the Ag film during external forcing, leading to resistance variation. Experimental results find that Ag film thickness has a strong influence on the sensor’s sensitivity, which exhibits a tendency of first increasing and then decreasing the Ag film thickness, and also has an optimal thickness of 4.9 μm for the maximum sensitivity around 30. The sensitive mechanism can be theoretically explained by using the quantum tunneling effect. Due to the use of the wrinkled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) film, this sensor has advantages, such as high sensitivity, large strain range, good stability and durability, cheap price, and suitability for large-scale production. Preliminary applications on human-body monitoring reveal that the sensor can detect weak tremors and breathe depth and rate, and the corresponding heartbeat response. It provides possibilities to diagnose early Parkinson’s disease and exploit an early warning system for sudden infant death syndrome and sleep apnea in adults. In addition, as a force-electric effect sensor, it is expected to have broad application areas, such as a man-machine cooperation, and a robotic system

Fusion of multi-light source illuminated images for effective defect inspection on highly reflective surfaces

It is observed that a human inspector can obtain better visual observations of surface defects via changing the lighting/viewing directions from time to time. Accordingly, we first build a multi-light source illumination/acquisition system to capture images of workpieces under individual lighting directions and then propose a multi-stream CNN model to process multi-light source illuminated images for high-accuracy surface defect classification on highly reflective metal. Moreover, we present two effective techniques including individual stream deep supervision and channel attention (CA) based feature re-calibration to generate and select the most discriminative features on multi-light source illuminated images for the subsequent defect classification task. Comparative evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of generating more accurate recognition results via the fusion of complementary features extracted on images illuminated by multi-light sources. Furthermore, our proposed light-weight CNN model can process more than 20 input frames per second on a single NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPU (24G RAM) and is faster than a human inspector. Source codes and the newly constructed multi-light source illuminated dataset will be accessible to the public

Spontaneous Symmetry-Breaking in the Corrosion Transformation of Ancient Bronzes

In general, during long-term museum conservation, ancient bronzes will generate new corrosion products also called the “secondary corrosion” on the surface of the unearthed “primary corrosion” products due to various environmental conditions. In this paper, the corrosion stages of several ancient Chinese bronzes are characterized by using optical microscope (OM), scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman spectrometer (Raman). It is found that there exist phase transformation relationships in between the “primary corrosion” and the “secondary corrosion” stages (i.e., (1) the crystal lattice type tends to transform from a high symmetry system to a low symmetry system; (2) in case of the same crystal lattice type, the corrosions exhibit an inter-transformation or symbiosis). It is interesting to note that these transformation rules are very consistent with the well-known physical law of “spontaneous symmetry-breaking”, which won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics and also has been considered to be general law of nature, in addition to the principle of Gibbs free energy reduction. The significance of this discovery allows us to achieve the predictability and controllability of the bronze corrosion products (i.e., to predict the corrosive trends in advance and control the “second corrosion” by adjusting the conservation conditions. This research provides a novel conservation concept of ancient bronzes