Styrene-assisted maleic anhydride grafted poly(lactic acid) as an effective compatibilizer for wood flour/poly(lactic acid) bio-composites

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of styrene-assisted maleic anhydride-grafted poly(lactic acid) (PLA-g-St/MAH) on the interfacial properties of wood flour/poly(lactic acid) (PLA) bio-composites. PLA-g-St/MAH was synthesized by free-radical melt grafting using styrene as a comonomer and dicumyl peroxide as an initiator. The structure of PLA-g-St/MAH was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Wood flour/PLA composites were prepared by compression molding using PLA-g-St/MAH as a compatibilizer. The effects of PLA-g-St/MAH on the rheological and mechanical properties, as well as on the fractured surface morphology of the composites were investigated. Results indicated that storage modulus, complex viscosity, equilibrium torque, and shear heat were significantly increased. The mechanical properties of the wood flour/PLA composites were also significantly increased after the addition of PLA-g-St/MAH. The maximum values were achieved at the loading rate of 3 wt % because of the improved interfacial adhesion between the wood flour and the PLA matrix

A Novel Clustering Method Combining ART with Yu’s Norm for Fault Diagnosis of Bearings

Clustering methods have been widely applied to the fault diagnosis of mechanical system, but the characteristic that the number of cluster needs to be determined in advance limits the application range of the method. In this paper, a novel clustering method combining the adaptive resonance theory (ART) with the similarity measure based on the Yu’s norm is presented and applied to the fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings, which can be adaptive to generate the number of cluster by the vigilance parameter test. Time-domain features, frequency-domain features, and time series model parameters are extracted to demonstrate the fault-related information about the bearings, and then considering the irrelevance or redundancy of some features many salient features are selected by an improved distance discriminant technique and input into the proposed clustering method to diagnose the faults of bearings. The experiment results confirmed that the proposed clustering method can diagnose the fault categories accurately and has better diagnosis performance compared with fuzzy ART and Self-Organizing Feature Map (SOFM)

Decreased fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase-2 expression promotes glycolysis and growth in gastric cancer cells

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that cancer is a metabolic disease. Here, we investigated the potential role of fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase-2 (FBP2), the enzyme that catalyses the hydrolysis of fructose-1,6-bisphosphate to fructose-6-phosphate and inorganic phosphate in glucose metabolism, in gastric cancer (GC) development. Results: Our data indicated that FBP2 was downregulated in GC tissues (86.2%, 100/116), and absent or low FBP2 expression in GC tissues was correlated with poor survival of GC patients (P = 0.019). Conversely, ectopic expression of FBP2 in GC cells activated AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) signalling, inhibited the Akt-mTOR pathway, suppressed glucose metabolism, enhanced apoptosis, and reduced cell proliferation. Bisulphite genomic sequencing (BGS) in gastric cancer cell lines revealed that the FBP2 promoter region was densely methylated, and treatment of GC cells with the demethylation reagent, 5-aza-2-deoxycytidine (5-Aza), led to an increase in FBP2 expression. Importantly, forced expression of FBP2 abrogated tumour formation of these GC cells in nude mice. Conclusion: Our results indicate that FBP2 does negatively regulate cell growth, and reduced expression of FBP2 may contribute to carcinogenesis for GC. These findings suggest that restoration of FBP2 expression can be a promising strategy for the target therapy of GC.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000325138200001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Biochemistry & Molecular BiologyOncologySCI(E)PubMed13ARTICLE11101

Crop Diversity for Yield Increase

Traditional farming practices suggest that cultivation of a mixture of crop species in the same field through temporal and spatial management may be advantageous in boosting yields and preventing disease, but evidence from large-scale field testing is limited. Increasing crop diversity through intercropping addresses the problem of increasing land utilization and crop productivity. In collaboration with farmers and extension personnel, we tested intercropping of tobacco, maize, sugarcane, potato, wheat and broad bean – either by relay cropping or by mixing crop species based on differences in their heights, and practiced these patterns on 15,302 hectares in ten counties in Yunnan Province, China. The results of observation plots within these areas showed that some combinations increased crop yields for the same season between 33.2 and 84.7% and reached a land equivalent ratio (LER) of between 1.31 and 1.84. This approach can be easily applied in developing countries, which is crucial in face of dwindling arable land and increasing food demand

Interaction of cylindrical polymer brushes in dilute and semi-dilute solution

We present a systematic study of flexible cylindrical brush-shaped macromolecules in a good solvent by small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), static light scattering (SLS), and by dynamic light scattering (DLS) in dilute and semi-dilute solution. The SLS and SANS data extrapolated to infinite dilution lead to the shape of the polymer that can be modeled in terms of a worm-like chain with a contour length of 380 nm and a persistence length of 17.5 nm. SANS data taken at higher polymer concentration were evaluated by using the polymer reference interaction site model (PRISM). We find that the persistence length reduce from 17.5 nm at infinite dilution to 5.3 nm at the highest concentration (volume fraction 0.038). This is comparable with the decrease of the persistence length in semi-dilute concentration predicted theoretically for polyelectrolytes. This finding reveals a softening of stiffness of the polymer brushes caused by their mutual interaction