The Lyrics of Chu : Qu Yuan and his poetic allegories : Spiritual and imaginary journeys in Lisao or “On Encountering Trouble”

This episode continues our previous discussion of the Li sao or On Encountering Trouble. It focuses on two failed spiritual/supernatural trips or flights in search of Qu Yuan’s ideal and his final decision to commit suicide as the result of his disillusionment with his ruler and society

Evaluation of Anti-Fatigue Activity of Flavonoids from Tartary Buckwheat in Mice

Background: Flavonoids are the major biological activities components of tartary buckwheat which has multifunctional bioactivities. However, there are a limited number of studies on the effect of flavonoids from tartary buckwheat (TBF) on physical fatigue at present. This study aimed to investigate the anti-fatigue activity of TBF in mice. Materials and Methods: The mice were divided into four groups: control (C), low-dose TBF-treated (LFT), middle-dose TBF-treated (MFT) and high-dose TBF-treated (HFT). The treated groups received TBF (100, 200 and 400 mg/kg), while the control group received physiological saline. After 28 days' treatment, the mice performed exhaustive running exercise on the treadmill, along with the measure of exhaustive running times, blood lactic acid (BLA), serum urea nitrogen (SUN), serum creatine kinase (SCK), liver glycogen, superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and catalase (CAT). Results: TBF prolonged the exhaustive running time of the mice. It sub-served to remove the accumulated products of metabolism by decreasing the levels of BLA and SUN. It ameliorated the muscle damage by decreasing the SCK levels. It improved the metabolic control of exercise and activated the energy metabolism by increasing the liver glycogen contents, as well as improving endogenous cellular antioxidant enzymes in mice by increasing the SOD, GPx and CAT activities. Conclusion: TBF has significant anti‑fatigue activity.Key words: anti-fatigue, flavonoids, tartary buckwheat, exhaustive running exercise, mic

The Lyrics of Chu : Qu Yuan and his poetic allegories : A general introduction to Chuci

This episode provides a brief general introduction to Chuci; it also discusses a poem in this repertoire, Xian jun(“The Lord of the Xiang River), and its influence on Li sao (“On Encountering Trouble”) that will be discussed in the next two episodes

The Lyrics of Chu : Qu Yuan and his poetic allegories : The poetic persona in Lisao or “On Encountering Trouble”

This episode discusses Li sao or On Encountring Trouble,” the crowning achievement in the Chu ci repertoire. This poem evolves around the life of Qu Yuan, a poetic persona who is the alleged author of the poem. In the first part of the poem, Qu Yuan talks at length about his glorious family history and his own self-cultivation

A Novel Discipline in Embryology — Animal Embryo Breeding

The modern animal biotechnologies, such as animal cloning, transgenesis, sex determination, stem cells, designing new livestock, must be performed on animal gametes including sperm and oocytes, and embryos based on embryology theory. Currently, some key biotechnologies in embryology have become the most powerful tool for animal scientists and breeders to improve genetic construction of animal herds. Here, authors put forward a new concept of Animal Embryo Breeding Science to describe this discipline formation, development, and application in animal genetic improvement and breeding. The relationship of embryo breeding with other disciplines has been profiled. Thus, animal scientists and breeders can easily understand and apply embryo breeding theory and related key techniques to accelerate animal improvement speed, to modify genetic construction of animal population, and to design and create new animal individual or breed

Coronavirus accessory protein ORF3 biology and its contribution to viral behavior and pathogenesis

Coronavirus porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) is classified in the genu

Quantitative prediction of palaeo-uplift reservoir control and favorable reservoir formation zones in Lufeng Depression

In this paper, taking the Lufeng Depression as the study object, the distribution characteristics and reservoir-controlling conditions of palaeo-uplift are analyzed from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. The distribution characteristics of the three-level palaeo-uplift structural pattern are elucidated, which show that the palaeo-uplifts went through three structural evolutionary stages: Eocene, Early-Middle Miocene, and Late Miocene, with long-term inherited development characteristics. Palaeo-uplift controls the distribution of hydrocarbon planes, the direction of dominant hydrocarbon transport, the development of various traps, and the types of hydrocarbon reservoirs. Applying the principle and method of “multi-element matching reservoir formation model”, the corresponding geological and mathematical models are established, which indicate that 86.29% of the number of reservoirs are distributed on the top and slope of the palaeo-uplift, and the reserves and number decrease with the distance to the top of the palaeo-uplift. Based on the palaeo-uplift control model, four high-probability areas for palaeo-uplift control in the Wenchang and Enping Fms are predicted, which are mainly located in the Lufeng middle-low uplift, the Dongsha uplift, and uplifts within the depression.Cited as: Guo, B., Yu, F., Wang, Y., Li, H., Li, H., Wu, Z. Quantitative prediction of palaeo-uplift reservoir control and favorable reservoir formation zones in Lufeng Depression. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2022, 6(5): 426-437. https://doi.org/10.46690/ager.2022.05.0

Towards Complex Real-World Safety Factory Inspection: A High-Quality Dataset for Safety Clothing and Helmet Detection

Safety clothing and helmets play a crucial role in ensuring worker safety at construction sites. Recently, deep learning methods have garnered significant attention in the field of computer vision for their potential to enhance safety and efficiency in various industries. However, limited availability of high-quality datasets has hindered the development of deep learning methods for safety clothing and helmet detection. In this work, we present a large, comprehensive, and realistic high-quality dataset for safety clothing and helmet detection, which was collected from a real-world chemical plant and annotated by professional security inspectors. Our dataset has been compared with several existing open-source datasets, and its effectiveness has been verified applying some classic object detection methods. The results demonstrate that our dataset is more complete and performs better in real-world settings. Furthermore, we have released our deployment code to the public to encourage the adoption of our dataset and improve worker safety. We hope that our efforts will promote the convergence of academic research and industry, ultimately contribute to the betterment of society.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

EVALUATION OF ANTI-FATIGUE ACTIVITY OF FLAVONOIDS FROM TARTARY BUCKWHEAT IN MICE

Background: Flavonoids are the major biological activities components of tartary buckwheat which has multifunctional bioactivities. However, there are a limited number of studies on the effect of flavonoids from tartary buckwheat (TBF) on physical fatigue at present. This study aimed to investigate the anti-fatigue activity of TBF in mice. Materials and Methods: The mice were divided into four groups: control (C), low-dose TBF-treated (LFT), middle-dose TBF-treated (MFT) and high-dose TBF-treated (HFT). The treated groups received TBF (100, 200 and 400 mg/kg), while the control group received physiological saline. After 28 days' treatment, the mice performed exhaustive running exercise on the treadmill, along with the measure of exhaustive running times, blood lactic acid (BLA), serum urea nitrogen (SUN), serum creatine kinase (SCK), liver glycogen, superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and catalase (CAT). Results: TBF prolonged the exhaustive running time of the mice. It sub-served to remove the accumulated products of metabolism by decreasing the levels of BLA and SUN. It ameliorated the muscle damage by decreasing the SCK levels. It improved the metabolic control of exercise and activated the energy metabolism by increasing the liver glycogen contents, as well as improving endogenous cellular antioxidant enzymes in mice by increasing the SOD, GPx and CAT activities. Conclusion: TBF has significant anti‑fatigue activity

Human-imperceptible, Machine-recognizable Images

Massive human-related data is collected to train neural networks for computer vision tasks. A major conflict is exposed relating to software engineers between better developing AI systems and distancing from the sensitive training data. To reconcile this conflict, this paper proposes an efficient privacy-preserving learning paradigm, where images are first encrypted to become ``human-imperceptible, machine-recognizable'' via one of the two encryption strategies: (1) random shuffling to a set of equally-sized patches and (2) mixing-up sub-patches of the images. Then, minimal adaptations are made to vision transformer to enable it to learn on the encrypted images for vision tasks, including image classification and object detection. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and COCO show that the proposed paradigm achieves comparable accuracy with the competitive methods. Decrypting the encrypted images requires solving an NP-hard jigsaw puzzle or an ill-posed inverse problem, which is empirically shown intractable to be recovered by various attackers, including the powerful vision transformer-based attacker. We thus show that the proposed paradigm can ensure the encrypted images have become human-imperceptible while preserving machine-recognizable information. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/FushengHao/PrivacyPreservingML.