A Coverage Control-based Idle Vehicle Rebalancing Approach for Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems

As an emerging mode of urban transportation, Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems show the potential in improving mobility in cities through timely and door-to-door services. However, the spatiotemporal imbalances between mobility demand and supply may lead to inefficiencies and a low quality of service. Vehicle rebalancing (i.e., dispatching idle vehicles to high-demand areas), is a potential solution for efficient AMoD fleet management. In this paper, we formulate the vehicle rebalancing problem as a coverage control problem for the deployment of a fleet of mobile agents for AMoD operation in urban areas. Performance is demonstrated via microscopic simulations representing a large urban road network of Shenzhen, China. Results reveal the potential of the proposed method in improving service rates and decreasing passenger waiting times

Cullin4 E3 ubiquitin ligases regulate male gonocyte migration, proliferation and blood-testis barrier homeostasis

Ubiquitination, an essential posttranslational modification, plays fundamental roles during mammalian spermatogenesis. We previously reported the requirement of two Cullin 4 ubiquitin ligase family genes, Cullin 4a

Observation of strong attenuation within the photonic band gap of multiconnected networks

We theoretically and experimentally study a photonic band gap (PBG) material made of coaxial cables. The coaxial cables are waveguides for the electromagnetic waves and provide paths for direct wave interference within the material. Using multiconnected coaxial cables to form a unit cell, we realize PBGs via (i) direct interference between the waveguides within each cell and (ii) scattering among different cells. We systematically investigate the transmission of EM waves in our PBG materials and discuss the mechanism of band gap formation. We observe experimentally for the first time the wide band gap with strong attenuation caused by direct destructive interference

LKCA: Large Kernel Convolutional Attention

We revisit the relationship between attention mechanisms and large kernel ConvNets in visual transformers and propose a new spatial attention named Large Kernel Convolutional Attention (LKCA). It simplifies the attention operation by replacing it with a single large kernel convolution. LKCA combines the advantages of convolutional neural networks and visual transformers, possessing a large receptive field, locality, and parameter sharing. We explained the superiority of LKCA from both convolution and attention perspectives, providing equivalent code implementations for each view. Experiments confirm that LKCA implemented from both the convolutional and attention perspectives exhibit equivalent performance. We extensively experimented with the LKCA variant of ViT in both classification and segmentation tasks. The experiments demonstrated that LKCA exhibits competitive performance in visual tasks. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/CatworldLee/LKCA

Epirubicin and gait apraxia: a real-world data analysis of the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System database

Introduction: Epirubicin is widely used in many malignancies with good efficacy and tolerability. However, investigations about adverse events (AEs) using real-world information are still insufficient.Methods: We extracted Epirubicin-related reports submitted between the first quarter of 2014 and first quarter of 2023 from FAERS database. Four algorithms were utilized to evaluate whether there was a significant correlation between Epirubicin and AEs.Results: After de-duplicating, a total of 3919 cases were extracted. Among the 3919 cases, we identified 1472 AEs, 253 of which were found to be adverse drug reactions (ADRs) associated with Epirubicin. We analysed the occurrence of Epirubicin-induced ADRs and found several unexpected significant ADRs, such as hepatic artery stenosis, hepatic artery occlusion, intestinal atresia and so on. Interestingly, we found gait apraxia, a neurological condition, was also significantly associated with Epirubicin. To our knowledge, there haven't studies that have reported an association between gait disorders and the usage of epirubicin.Discussion: Our study identified new unexpected significant ADRs related to Epirubicin, providing new perspectives to the clinical use of Epirubicin

Study on the Factors Influencing on the Carbon Emissions of Shaanxi Province’s Transportation Industry in China

Carbon peaking in the transportation industry is of great significance to achieving the goals of carbon peaks and carbon neutrality. By correcting the energy consumption data of Shaanxi province’s transportation industry in China, adding the energy consumption data of non-operating vehicles to the total energy consumptions and building a more accurate calculation model for the carbon emissions of provincial transportation industry, this paper studies the contribution of the population size, the economic growth, the energy intensity, the energy structure, and the industrial scale of transportation to the carbon emissions, respectively, through the construction of a Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) model. The result shows that the carbon emissions of Shaanxi province’s transportation industry in China increased from 15.730 million tons to 24.652 million tons from 2009 to 2019. Among them, the carbon emissions of the non-operating activities grew rapidly, increasing from 2.694 million tons to 10.334 million tons in the past 10 years. Within the research range, the economic growth effect is the most important factor driving the growth of the carbon emissions of Shaanxi province’s transportation industry in China, increasing total carbon emissions by 22.701 million tons. The energy intensity effect and the industrial scale effect of transportation play the main role in inhibiting the carbon emissions of Shaanxi province’s transportation industry in China, with a cumulative reduction in the total carbon emissions by 13.869 million tons