Utjecaj turizma na aktivnost ugljika, dušika i enzima u tlu u urbanom parku u Kini

This study investigated the effects of different tourism disturbance intensities on carbon, nitrogen, and enzyme activities of soil in a subtropical urban park, China. The contents of the soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), dissolved organic nitrogen (DON), nitrate nitrogen (NO3-–N), and ammonium nitrogen (NH4+–N) in the soil were significantly reduced by tourism disturbance. The activities of some soil enzymes, including sucrase, catalase, urease, and chitinase, were also reduced. Except for NH4+–N, the soil carbon–nitrogen indicators all exhibited significant positive correlations with the four soil enzyme activities. The results indicated that tourism disturbance caused soil degradation in the subtropical urban park. Therefore, the soil in damaged areas should be frequently turned up, and more organic fertilizers should be added.U ovom se radu istražuju učinci različitih intenziteta turističke djelatnosti na aktivnost ugljika, dušika i enzima u tlu u suptropskom urbanom parku u Kini. Udjel organskog ugljika tla (SOC), ukupnog ili totalnog ugljika (TN), otopljenog organskog ugljika (DOC), otopljenog organskog ugljika (DON), nitratni oblik dušika (NO3-–N) i amonijski oblik dušika (NH4+–N). SOC, TN, DOC, NO3-–N i NH4+–N u tlu značajno je reduciran kao posljedica turističkih djelatnosti. Aktivnost pojedinih enzima, uključujući sukrazu, katalazu, ureazu i hitinazu, također je reducirana. S iznimkom NH4+-N, svi indikatori ugljika-dušika u tlu pokazali su pozitivnu korelaciju s aktivnosti četiri enzima u tlu. Rezultati ukazuju da turistička djelatnost dovodi do degradacije tla u suptropskom urbanom parku te da je tlo u oštećenim područjima potrebno često preokretati i dodavati više organskih gnojiva

Memristor-Based HTM Spatial Pooler with On-Device Learning for Pattern Recognition

This article investigates hardware implementation of hierarchical temporal memory (HTM), a brain-inspired machine learning algorithm that mimics the key functions of the neocortex and is applicable to many machine learning tasks. Spatial pooler (SP) is one of the main parts of HTM, designed to learn the spatial information and obtain the sparse distributed representations (SDRs) of input patterns. The other part is temporal memory (TM) which aims to learn the temporal information of inputs. The memristor, which is an appropriate synapse emulator for neuromorphic systems, can be used as the synapse in SP and TM circuits. In this article, a memristor-based SP (MSP) circuit structure is designed to accelerate the execution of the SP algorithm. The presented MSP has properties of modeling both the synaptic permanence and the synaptic connection state within a single synapse, and on-device and parallel learning. Simulation results of statistic metrics and classification tasks on several real-world datasets substantiate the validity of MSP

Delving into E-Commerce Product Retrieval with Vision-Language Pre-training

E-commerce search engines comprise a retrieval phase and a ranking phase, where the first one returns a candidate product set given user queries. Recently, vision-language pre-training, combining textual information with visual clues, has been popular in the application of retrieval tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel V+L pre-training method to solve the retrieval problem in Taobao Search. We design a visual pre-training task based on contrastive learning, outperforming common regression-based visual pre-training tasks. In addition, we adopt two negative sampling schemes, tailored for the large-scale retrieval task. Besides, we introduce the details of the online deployment of our proposed method in real-world situations. Extensive offline/online experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method on the retrieval task. Our proposed method is employed as one retrieval channel of Taobao Search and serves hundreds of millions of users in real time.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted to SIRIP 202

Differential expression analysis of miRNAs in macrophage-derived exosomes in the tuberculosis-infected bone microenvironment

BackgroundMacrophages play an important role in regulating the course of spinal tuberculosis within the bone microenvironment. This study aimed to investigate the differential expression of miRNA in macrophage-derived exosomes within the tuberculosis-infected bone microenvironment, to identify miRNAs that hold potential as diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets.MethodsWe established study cohorts for spinal tuberculosis, collected bone marrow blood samples, isolated macrophage exosomes, and performed exosome miRNA sequencing. A miRNA-mRNA co-expression network was constructed using WGCNA analysis. Gene GO analysis and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis were performed using KOBAS software. Target miRNAs were selected based on fold change, P-value, and false discovery rate, and their validation was carried out using qRT-PCR and ROC curve studies. Subsequently, we constructed a target gene network for these miRNAs and performed KEGG pathway enrichment analysis to explore the potential signaling mechanisms involved in regulating the disease course of spinal tuberculosis.ResultsOur findings revealed that macrophages from the tuberculosis-infected bone microenvironment exhibited an M1 phenotype. The successful extraction of exosomes from macrophage supernatants was confirmed through electron microscopy, particle size analysis, and protein blot analysis. Exosome miRNA-seq demonstrated that 28 miRNAs were up-regulated, while 34 miRNAs were down-regulated in individuals with spinal tuberculosis. GO analysis and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis indicated that the differentially expressed miRNAs were involved in various biological processes, cell components, molecular functions, and signaling pathways, which collectively contribute to the regulation of the disease course of spinal tuberculosis. Notably, miRNA-125b-5p was successfully selected based on fold change, p-value, and false discovery rate. qRT-PCR validation further confirmed the significant up-regulation of miRNA-125b-5p in spinal tuberculosis. The ROC curve revealed that miR-125b-5p is a potential diagnostic biomarker for spinal tuberculosis. Moreover, construction of the miRNA-125b-5p target gene network and subsequent KEGG enrichment analysis highlighted the importance of MAPK, TNF, Ras, Rap1, and the PI3K-Akt signaling pathways in the regulation of the disease course of spinal tuberculosis.ConclusionOur study demonstrates differential expression of miRNAs in macrophage-derived exosomes in the tuberculosis-infected bone microenvironment. Specifically, MiRNA-125b-5p is significantly up-regulated in spinal tuberculosis and shows potential as a diagnostic biomarker for spinal tuberculosis