Improving the indoor thermal environment with ceiling radiant terminals

A CFD (computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation model of the porous ceiling radiant air-conditioning system was established to study the influence of the ceiling temperature and envelope temperature (including the temperature of the walls and the floor of a room) on the thermal environment in the room equipped with such a system. The results showed that, for the summer condition, higher ceiling temperatures would result in higher indoor air temperature and higher Predicted Percentage Dissatisfied (PPD), which meant potential discomfort of occupants in the room. For the winter condition, however, a higher ceiling temperature within 28°C would result in a lower PPD, thus improved the thermal comfort. Considering the energy-conservation, the thermal comfort could be assured if the ceiling temperature was not more than 28°C. As for the effect of envelope temperature, the result showed that the increase in the envelope temperature during summer could result in a higher indoor air temperature, but the thermal comfort of occupants could still be ensured under such condition. Considering both the thermal comfort and the energyconservation, a ceiling temperature of 18°C (underside surface temperature of the ceiling) and an envelope temperature between 26°C and 32°C were proved appropriate for the summer. Similarly, based on the simulation results, a ceiling temperature of 26°C, and an envelope temperature between 8°C and 11°C were found appropriate for the winter. The results indicated that for the porous ceiling radiant air-conditioning system, ceiling temperature should be controlled to increase the ratio of radiant heat transfer in the summer, and the envelope temperature should be lowered to improve the energy-conservation of the system. In the winter, the heat transfer by radiation of the porous ceiling would account for a larger ratio, therefore the system showed good heating capacity and energyconservation performance in winter.publishedVersio

Genetic immunization with Hantavirus vaccine combining expression of G2 glycoprotein and fused interleukin-2

In this research, we developed a novel chimeric HTNV-IL-2-G2 DNA vaccine plasmid by genetically linking IL-2 gene to the G2 segment DNA and tested whether it could be a candidate vaccine. Chimeric gene was first expressed in eukaryotic expression system pcDNA3.1 (+). The HTNV-IL-2-G2 expressed a 72 kDa fusion protein in COS-7 cells. Meanwhile, the fusion protein kept the activity of its parental proteins. Furthermore, BALB/c mice were vaccinated by the chimeric gene. ELISA, cell microculture neutralization test in vitro were used to detect the humoral immune response in immunized BALB/c mice. Lymphocyte proliferation assay was used to detect the cellular immune response.- The results showed that the chimeric gene could simultaneously evoke specific antibody against G2 glycoprotein and IL-2. And the immunized mice of every group elicited neutralizing antibodies with different titers. Lymphocyte proliferation assay results showed that the stimulation indexes of splenocytes of chimeric gene to G2 and IL-2 were significantly higher than that of other groups. Our results suggest that IL-2-based HTNV G2 DNA can induce both humoral and cellular immune response specific for HTNV G2 and can be a candidate DNA vaccine for HTNV infection

Examination on the wear process of polyformaldehyde gears under dry and lubricated conditions

This study presents the results of detailed wear process examination on polyformaldehyde gears under both dry and lubricated conditions. A multi-purpose durability test rig was employed to study the wear performance of polyformaldehyde gear pairs. The wear behaviors of polyformaldehyde gears under dry and oil-lubricated operating conditions were characterized via measurements of gear tooth surface micro-topography and tooth profile deviation. Under the dry running condition, a hump and a gully appear on the tooth surface in the pitch line area of the driving gear and the driven wheel, respectively. The largest amount of wear was observed around the tooth root of the driving gear. However, the gear tooth wear pattern with lubrication is different from that under the dry running condition

Laboratory Study on Properties of Diatomite and Basalt Fiber Compound Modified Asphalt Mastic

In order to improve the performance of asphalt mastic, some researchers have added diatomite or basalt fiber as a modifier to the asphalt mastic, and the results show that some properties of the asphalt mastic were improved. For the simultaneous addition of diatomite and basalt fiber, two kinds of modifier, compound modified asphalt mastic had not been reported; in this paper, thirteen groups of diatomite and basalt fiber (DBFCMAM) compound modified asphalt mastic with different content were prepared to study the performance. Softening point, cone penetration, viscosity, and DSR tests were conducted, for the high temperature performance evaluation of DBFCMAM, whereas force ductility and BBR tests were used in the low temperature performance study of the DBFCMAM. The results demonstrated that the high temperature performance of DBFCMAM was increased; moreover, the low temperature performance of DBFCMAM improved by diatomite and basalt fiber according to the results of the force ductility test; however, the conclusion of the BBR test data was inconsistent with the force ductility test. In summary, the high temperature and low temperature properties of DBFCMAM had been improved

Category-Specific CNN for Visual-aware CTR Prediction at JD.com

As one of the largest B2C e-commerce platforms in China, JD com also powers a leading advertising system, serving millions of advertisers with fingertip connection to hundreds of millions of customers. In our system, as well as most e-commerce scenarios, ads are displayed with images.This makes visual-aware Click Through Rate (CTR) prediction of crucial importance to both business effectiveness and user experience. Existing algorithms usually extract visual features using off-the-shelf Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and late fuse the visual and non-visual features for the finally predicted CTR. Despite being extensively studied, this field still face two key challenges. First, although encouraging progress has been made in offline studies, applying CNNs in real systems remains non-trivial, due to the strict requirements for efficient end-to-end training and low-latency online serving. Second, the off-the-shelf CNNs and late fusion architectures are suboptimal. Specifically, off-the-shelf CNNs were designed for classification thus never take categories as input features. While in e-commerce, categories are precisely labeled and contain abundant visual priors that will help the visual modeling. Unaware of the ad category, these CNNs may extract some unnecessary category-unrelated features, wasting CNN's limited expression ability. To overcome the two challenges, we propose Category-specific CNN (CSCNN) specially for CTR prediction. CSCNN early incorporates the category knowledge with a light-weighted attention-module on each convolutional layer. This enables CSCNN to extract expressive category-specific visual patterns that benefit the CTR prediction. Offline experiments on benchmark and a 10 billion scale real production dataset from JD, together with an Online A/B test show that CSCNN outperforms all compared state-of-the-art algorithms

Cost-effectiveness analysis of nivolumab combination therapy in the first-line treatment for advanced esophageal squamous-cell carcinoma

ObjectiveWe aimed to investigate the cost-effectiveness of nivolumab plus chemotherapy and nivolumab plus ipilimumab versus chemotherapy in the first-line treatment for advanced esophageal squamous-cell carcinoma (ESCC) patients from a healthcare system perspective in China.MethodsOn the basis of the CheckMate 648 trial, a partitioned survival model was constructed to estimate economic costs and health outcomes among overall and PD-L1-positive advanced ESCC patients over a 10-year lifetime horizon. The health-related costs and utilities were obtained from the local charges and published literature. The lifetime costs, life-years, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) were measured. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses (PSA) were performed to assess the robustness of the model.ResultsIn the base-case analysis, in overall and PD-L1-positive advanced ESCC patients, the ICERs were $415,163.81/QALY and$216,628.00/QALY for nivolumab plus chemotherapy, and$430,704.11/QALY and$185,483.94/QALY for nivolumab plus ipilimumab, respectively, compared with chemotherapy. One-way sensitivity analyses revealed that patients’ weight was the most influential parameter on ICER. The PSA demonstrated that the probability of nivolumab combination therapy being cost-effective was 0% over chemotherapy at the current price and willingness-to-pay threshold ($38,351.20/QALY). When the price of nivolumab and ipilimumab decreased 80%, the cost-effective probability of nivolumab plus ipilimumab increased to 40.44% and 86.38% in overall and PD-L1-positive advanced ESCC patients, respectively.ConclusionNivolumab combination therapy could improve survival time and health benefits over chemotherapy for advanced ESCC patients, but it is unlikely to be a cost-effective treatment option in China

Model-based analysis uncovers mutations altering autophagy selectivity in human cancer

Autophagy can selectively target protein aggregates, pathogens, and dysfunctional organelles for the lysosomal degradation. Aberrant regulation of autophagy promotes tumorigenesis, while it is far less clear whether and how tumor-specific alterations result in autophagic aberrance. To form a link between aberrant autophagy selectivity and human cancer, we establish a computational pipeline and prioritize 222 potential LIR (LC3-interacting region) motif-associated mutations (LAMs) in 148 proteins. We validate LAMs in multiple proteins including ATG4B, STBD1, EHMT2 and BRAF that impair their interactions with LC3 and autophagy activities. Using a combination of transcriptomic, metabolomic and additional experimental assays, we show that STBD1, a poorly-characterized protein, inhibits tumor growth via modulating glycogen autophagy, while a patient-derived W203C mutation on LIR abolishes its cancer inhibitory function. This work suggests that altered autophagy selectivity is a frequently-used mechanism by cancer cells to survive during various stresses, and provides a framework to discover additional autophagy-related pathways that influence carcinogenesis

Preparation and In Vitro

For preventing premature drug release in neutral environment and avoiding them being trapped into the endosomal/lysosomal system, we developed a novel iron silicate@liposome hybrid (ILH) formulation, which can be used as a carrier to transport doxorubicin (DOX) in a pH-sensitive manner and to escape from endosomal/lysosomal trapping through “proton-sponge” effect. The high intensity of photoacoustic signal from in vitro photoacoustic imaging (PAI) experiments suggests that it is a promising candidate for PAI agent, providing the potential for simultaneously bioimaging and cancer-targeting drug delivery. Cytotoxicity of our formulation toward tumor cells was remarkably higher than free DOX (48.4±7.7% and 26.2±8.4%, P<0.001). Confocal laser scanning microscopy experiments showed the enhanced transportation and enrichment process of DOX in QSG-7703 cells. Taking together, we developed an easy approach to construct a multifunctional anticancer drug delivery/imaging system with a potency as a PAI agent. The strategy of combining drug carrier and imaging agent is an emerging platform for further construction of nanoparticle and may play a significant role in cancer therapy and diagnosis

Effect of steam reinjection mass flow rate on the SOFC–GT system with steam reinjection

A solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is regarded as the first choice of high-efficiency and clean power generation technology in the 21st century due to its characteristics of high power generation efficiency and low pollutant emission. In this paper, hydrogen is used as a fuel for SOFCs using the EBSILON platform. A sensitivity analysis of the solid oxide fuel cell–gas turbine (SOFC–GT) system with steam reinjection is carried out to investigate the effect of the steam reinjection mass flow rate on the improvement of the electrical efficiency of the system and on the values of the other parameters. The results show that the variation in the steam reinjection mass flow rate has an effect on other parameters. Changes in several parameters affect the electrical efficiency of the system, which reaches 74.11% at a pressure ratio of 10, SOFC inlet temperature of 783.15 K, turbine back pressure of 70 kPa, and steam reinjection mass flow rate of 6.16 kg/s. Future research can optimize the overall parameter selection of the system in terms of economy and other aspects