Evaluation and Repair of a Subterranean Parking Garage to Resist Hurricane Flood Levels

Near-surface groundwater levels and high flood levels associated with flooding events impose significant hydrostatic forces on subterranean parking structures in Florida. Unique geologic conditions and the associated high hydraulic conductivities of the subsurface materials have precluded the use of conventional underdrain systems to provide hydrostatic relief. The case history presented here discusses the evaluation and repair of a subterranean parking garage of an existing office building that exhibited signs of distress including severe cracking of the ground floor slab, excessive quantities of water continuously seeping through these cracks and ponding water. Although various rehabilitation alternatives were evaluated, removal, replacement and re-design of the existing slab were chosen in order to provide additional tie-down restraint and implement a relatively maintenance-free, long-term solution. This paper briefly describes geologic conditions, the results of site-specific subsurface investigations, historical groundwater information, and various regional and local subterranean design alternatives. The design and construction aspects of the implemented anchored hydrostatic uplift slab system are presented, including: anchor installation, performance and proof testing, construction dewatering, waterproofing issues, and chemical grouting of joints

MicroRNA-595 promotes osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells by targeting HMGA2

Purpose: To investigate the effect of miR-595 on osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs).Methods: Human BMSCs were osteogenically differentiated, and protein expression of alkaline phosphatase (ALP), osteocalcin (OCN), and Runt-related transcription factor 2 (RUNX2) were evaluated by western blot. Expression of miR-595 was measured by quantitative reverse transcription (qRT-PCR). The effect of miR-595 on viability of BMSCs was determined by MTT assay. Osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs was assessed by ALP and Alizarin red S (ARS) staining. The target gene of miR-595 was predicted by TargetScan analysis and validated by luciferase activity assay.Results: MiR-595 expression was higher in osteogenically differentiated BMSCs than in undifferentiated BMSCs (p < 0.01). Osteogenic ALP, OCN, and RUNX2 were also upregulated (p < 0.01). MiR-595 expression increased the viability of BMSCs, mineralized bone matrix formation, and ALP activity. High mobility group AT-hook 2 (HMGA2) expression was lower in osteogenically differentiated BMSCs and was found to be a target of miR-595. Overexpression of HMGA2 attenuated the miR-595-induced increase in cell viability, ALP activity, mineralized bone matrix formation, and osteogenic gene expression in BMSCs.Conclusion: The miR-595/HMGA2 axis is involved in osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs suggesting that it is a promising therapeutic target for osteoporosis

Semantic Interleaving Global Channel Attention for Multilabel Remote Sensing Image Classification

Multi-Label Remote Sensing Image Classification (MLRSIC) has received increasing research interest. Taking the cooccurrence relationship of multiple labels as additional information helps to improve the performance of this task. Current methods focus on using it to constrain the final feature output of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). On the one hand, these methods do not make full use of label correlation to form feature representation. On the other hand, they increase the label noise sensitivity of the system, resulting in poor robustness. In this paper, a novel method called Semantic Interleaving Global Channel Attention (SIGNA) is proposed for MLRSIC. First, the label co-occurrence graph is obtained according to the statistical information of the data set. The label co-occurrence graph is used as the input of the Graph Neural Network (GNN) to generate optimal feature representations. Then, the semantic features and visual features are interleaved, to guide the feature expression of the image from the original feature space to the semantic feature space with embedded label relations. SIGNA triggers global attention of feature maps channels in a new semantic feature space to extract more important visual features. Multihead SIGNA based feature adaptive weighting networks are proposed to act on any layer of CNN in a plug-and-play manner. For remote sensing images, better classification performance can be achieved by inserting CNN into the shallow layer. We conduct extensive experimental comparisons on three data sets: UCM data set, AID data set, and DFC15 data set. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SIGNA achieves superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. It is worth mentioning that the codes of this paper will be open to the community for reproducibility research. Our codes are available at https://github.com/kyle-one/SIGNA.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

Comparison of electromagnetic performance of scpm wind power generators with different topologies

This paper focuses on the comparison of electromagnetic performance of the superconducting permanent magnet (SCPM) generators with two different topologies. The torque capabilities of the two generators are first investigated. The peak torque is largely restricted by the material characteristics of the superconducting (SC) and the permanent magnet. The SCPM generators with iron-cored rotor and iron-cored stator topology (IRIST) is superior to the one with iron-cored rotor and air-cored stator topology in terms of torque capability. Furthermore, the flux density, line electromotive force, torque and its torque ripple, and the efficiency of the designed generators are evaluated by using numerical model. The simulation results confirm that IRIST has higher output torque and efficiency with the penalty of higher harmonics and torque ripples

Generation of diffuse large B cell lymphoma-associated antigen-specific Vα6/Vβ13+T cells by TCR gene transfer

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Our previous study had amplified antigen-specific full-length TCR α and β genes of clonally expanded T cells in the peripheral blood (PB) of patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). The transfer of T cell receptor (TCR) genes endows T cells with new antigen specificity. Therefore, the aim of this study is to generate diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL)-specific T cells by T cell receptor (TCR) gene transfer.</p> <p>Materials and methods</p> <p>Two different eukaryotic expression plasmids harboring TCR Vα6 and TCR Vβ13 genes specific for DLBCL-associated antigens were constructed and subsequently transferred into human T cells using Nucleofector™ technique. The expression of targeted genes in TCR gene-modified cells was detected by real-time PCR, and western blot using TCR Vβ antibody. The specific cytotoxicity of TCR gene-transferred T cells <it>in vitro </it>was estimated using a lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release assay.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Two different eukaryotic expression plasmids harboring TCR Vα6 and TCR Vβ13 genes specific for DLBCL-associated antigens were constructed and subsequently transferred into T cells from healthy donors. Specific anti-DLBCL cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) could be induced by transduction of specific TCR gene to modify healthy T cells. The transgene cassette of TCR Vβ13-IRES-TCR Vα6 was superior to the other in the function of TCR-redirected T cells.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Specific anti-DLBCL cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) could be inducted by transduction of specific TCR gene to modify healthy T cells.</p