Monitoring Crop Carotenoids Concentration by Remote Sensing

Assessment of carotenoids (Car) content provides a valuable insight into clarifying the mechanisms of plant photoprotection and light-adaption and is critical for stress diagnoses in plants. Due to their small proportion in the overall total pigment content and to the overlapping of spectral absorption features with chlorophylls (Chl) in the blue region of the spectrum, accurate estimation of Car content in plants, from remotely sensed data, is challenging. Previous studies made progress in Car content estimation at both the leaf and canopy level with remote sensing techniques. However, established spectral indices and methods for Car estimation in most studies that generally rely on specific and limited measured data might lack predictive accuracy for Car estimation and lack sensitivity to low or high Car content in various species and at different growth stages. In this chapter, a new carotenoid index (CARI) was proposed for foliar Car assessment with abundant simulated leaf data and various measured leaf reflectances. Detailed analysis on the mechanism, formation and performance of the new spectral index on Car retrieval was presented. Analysis results suggested that accurate nondestructive estimation of foliar Car content with CARI could be achieved at the leaf scale, through remote sensing techniques

MBTFNet: Multi-Band Temporal-Frequency Neural Network For Singing Voice Enhancement

A typical neural speech enhancement (SE) approach mainly handles speech and noise mixtures, which is not optimal for singing voice enhancement scenarios. Music source separation (MSS) models treat vocals and various accompaniment components equally, which may reduce performance compared to the model that only considers vocal enhancement. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-band temporal-frequency neural network (MBTFNet) for singing voice enhancement, which particularly removes background music, noise and even backing vocals from singing recordings. MBTFNet combines inter and intra-band modeling for better processing of full-band signals. Dual-path modeling are introduced to expand the receptive field of the model. We propose an implicit personalized enhancement (IPE) stage based on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation, which further improves the performance of MBTFNet. Experiments show that our proposed model significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art SE and MSS models

Maternal dietary fat during lactation shapes single nucleus transcriptomic profile of postnatal offspring hypothalamus in a sexually dimorphic manner in mice

Peer reviewe

Secure Communication Scheme Based on Asymptotic Model of Deterministic Randomness

We propose a new cryptosystem by combing the Lissajous map, which is the asymptotic model of deterministic randomness, with the one-way coupled map lattice (OCML) system. The key space, the encryption efficiency, and the security are investigated. We find that the parameter sensitivity can reach the computational precision when the system size is only three, all the lattice outputs can be treated as key stream parallelly, and the system is resistible against various attacks including the differential-like chosen cipher attack. The findings of this paper are a strong indication of the importance of deterministic randomness in secure communications.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Infection of inbred BALB/c and C57BL/6 and outbred Institute of Cancer Research mice with the emerging H7N9 avian influenza virus

A new avian-origin influenza virus A (H7N9) recently crossed the species barrier and infected humans; therefore, there is an urgent need to establish mammalian animal models for studying the pathogenic mechanism of this strain and the immunological response. In this study, we attempted to develop mouse models of H7N9 infection because mice are traditionally the most convenient models for studying influenza viruses. We showed that the novel A (H7N9) virus isolated from a patient could infect inbred BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice as well as outbred Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) mice. The amount of bodyweight lost showed differences at 7 days post infection (d.p.i.) (BALB/c mice 30%, C57BL/6 and ICR mice approximately 20%), and the lung indexes were increased both at 3 d.p.i. and at 7 d.p.i.. Immunohistochemistry demonstrated the existence of the H7N9 viruses in the lungs of the infected mice, and these findings were verified by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and 50% tissue culture infectious dose (TCID50) detection at 3 d.p.i. and 7 d.p.i.. Histopathological changes occurred in the infected lungs, including pulmonary interstitial inflammatory lesions, pulmonary oedema and haemorrhages. Furthermore, because the most clinically severe cases were in elderly patients, we analysed the H7N9 infections in both young and old ICR mice. The old ICR mice showed more severe infections with more bodyweight lost and a higher lung index than the young ICR mice. Compared with the young ICR mice, the old mice showed a delayed clearance of the H7N9 virus and higher inflammation in the lungs. Thus, old ICR mice could partially mimic the more severe illness in elderly patients. </p