Etude de la croisssance CVD des films minces de 3C-SiC et élaboration du cantilever AFM en 3C-SiC avec pointe Si intégrée

Parmi les polytypes les plus connus du carbure de silicium (SiC), le polytype cubique (3C-SiC), est le seul qui peut croitre sur des substrats silicium. L hétérostructure 3C-SiC/Si est intéressante non seulement pour son faible coût de production mais aussi pour la conception de Systèmes Micro-Electro-Mécaniques ( MEMS ). La valeur élevée du module de Young du 3C-SiC, comparé à celui du silicium, permettrait à des cantilevers submicroniques, fabriqués à partir de films minces de 3C-SiC, de vibrer à ultra-hautes fréquences (>100MHz). Cette haute fréquence de résonance est la clé pour obtenir un système AFM non-contact ultra-sensible et rapide. Cependant, il n existe pas de cantilever en SiC disponible sur le marché en raison de la difficulté à élaborer des films minces de 3C-SiC de bonne qualité, la technique de synthèse la plus utilisée étant le Dépôt Chimique en phase Vapeur (CVD). La raison première de cette difficulté à obtenir un matériau de bonne qualité réside essentiellement dans l important désaccord de maille et la différence de dilatation thermique entre le 3C-SiC et Si qui génèrent des défauts cristallins à l interface et jusqu à la surface du film de 3C-SiC, la zone la plus défectueuse se localisant auprès de l interface .Among aIl the well known polytypes ofihe silicon carbide (SiC), the cubic polytype (3C-SiC) is the only one that min be grown on silicon substrates. This heterostructure 3C SiC/Si ta interesting not only for its low production cost but also for the design of tise Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). The high value ofthe Young s modulis the 3C-SiC, compared to the silicon, allows submicronic cantilevers, fabrmcated from tIse 3C-SiC thin filins, to resonate at ultra-high frequency (>100MHz). The high resonant frequency is the key to obtain s fast, ultra-sensitive non-contact AFM systein.However, there isn t any SiC cantilevers available on the market because of the difficulty to elaborate gond quality 3C-SiC thin films, with tIse Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) technique being tIse most frequently used synthesis technology. Tise first reason of tIse difficulty with the CVD technology to obtain gond quality thin film rests essentially in the important lattice mismatch and the difference in thermal expansion coefficient existing between 3C SiC and Si which generate crystalline defects at the interface and propagating tilI the 3C-SiC filin surface, with the inost defective zone localizing near the interface .TOURS-Bibl.électronique (372610011) / SudocSudocFranceF

Efficient production of pullulan by Aureobasidium pullulans grown on mixtures of potato starch hydrolysate and sucrose

AbstractPullulan is a natural exopolysaccharide with many useful characteristics. However, pullulan is more costly than other exopolysaccharides, which limits its effective application. The purpose of this study was to adopt a novel mixed-sugar strategy for maximizing pullulan production, mainly using potato starch hydrolysate as a low-cost substrate for liquid-state fermentation by Aureobasidium pullulans. Based on fermentation kinetics evaluation of pullulan production by A. pullulans 201253, the pullulan production rate of A. pullulans with mixtures of potato starch hydrolysate and sucrose (potato starch hydrolysate:sucrose=80:20) was 0.212h−1, which was significantly higher than those of potato starch hydrolysate alone (0.146h−1) and mixtures of potato starch hydrolysate, glucose, and fructose (potato starch hydrolysate:glucose:fructose=80:10:10, 0.166h−1) with 100gL−1 total carbon source. The results suggest that mixtures of potato starch hydrolysate and sucrose could promote pullulan synthesis and possibly that a small amount of sucrose stimulated the enzyme responsible for pullulan synthesis and promoted effective potato starch hydrolysate conversion effectively. Thus, mixed sugars in potato starch hydrolysate and sucrose fermentation might be a promising alternative for the economical production of pullulan

Statistical Analysis of Radio Propagation Channel in Ruins Environment

The cellphone based localization system for search and rescue in complex high density ruins has attracted a great interest in recent years, where the radio channel characteristics are critical for design and development of such a system. This paper presents a spatial smoothing estimation via rotational invariance technique (SS-ESPRIT) for radio channel characterization of high density ruins. The radio propagations at three typical mobile communication bands (0.9, 1.8, and 2 GHz) are investigated in two different scenarios. Channel parameters, such as arrival time, delays, and complex amplitudes, are statistically analyzed. Furthermore, a channel simulator is built based on these statistics. By comparison analysis of average excess delay and delay spread, the validation results show a good agreement between the measurements and channel modeling results

Protection effect of sanguinarine on whole-body exposure of X radiation in BALB/c mice

To investigate the effects of sanguinarine (SAN) on acute radiation induced injury in mice, 45 mice were randomly divided into control, 10 Gy and SAN+10 Gy groups. Mice in the 10 Gy and SAN+10 Gy groups were exposed to single X-ray radiation with an accumulated dose of 10 Gy. Mice in the SAN+10 Gy group were administered intraperitoneally with 2.5 mg/kg body weight of SAN before radiation. Five days after radiation exposure, 5 mice from each group were sacrificed and samples of the small intestine, lung, spleen and liver were fixed for histopathological examinations. Compared with the 10 Gy group, radiation sickness was obviously delayed or attenuated in the SAN+10 Gy group. Survival analysis showed a significant difference between 2 radiation groups (PPara investigar os efeitos da sanguinarina (SAN) em lesões induzidas em ratos por radiação aguda, 45 ratos foram aleatoriamente divididos em grupo controle, grupo 10 Gy e grupo SAN+10 Gy. Os ratos dos grupos 10 Gy e SAN+10 Gy foram expostos à radiação de raio-X simples com uma dose acumulada de 10 Gy. Aos ratos do grupo SAN+10 Gy administraram-se, intraperitonealmente, 2.5 mg/kg de peso de SAN antes da radiação. Aos 5 dias de exposição à radiação, sacrificaram-se 5 ratos de cada grupo e retiraram-se amostras do intestino delgado, pulmões, baço e fígado para exames histopatológicos. Comparando com o grupo 10 Gy, a doença por radiação foi claramente atrasada e atenuada no grupo SAN+10 Gy. A análise de sobrevivência mostrou diferença significativa entre os dois grupos de radiação (

Sliding Window Based Feature Extraction and Traffic Clustering for Green Mobile Cyberphysical Systems

Both the densification of small base stations and the diversity of user activities bring huge challenges for today’s heterogeneous networks, either heavy burdens on base stations or serious energy waste. In order to ensure coverage of the network while reducing the total energy consumption, we adopt a green mobile cyberphysical system (MCPS) to handle this problem. In this paper, we propose a feature extractionmethod using sliding window to extract the distribution feature of mobile user equipment (UE), and a case study is presented to demonstrate that the method is efficacious in reserving the clustering distribution feature. Furthermore, we present traffic clustering analysis to categorize collected traffic distribution samples into a limited set of traffic patterns, where the patterns and corresponding optimized control strategies are used to similar traffic distributions for the rapid control of base station state. Experimental results show that the sliding window is more superior in enabling higher UE coverage over the grid method. Besides, the optimized control strategy obtained from the traffic pattern is capable of achieving a high coverage that can well serve over 98% of all mobile UE for similar traffic distributions

Horizontal Spatial Metaphors for Morality: A Cross-Cultural Study of Han Chinese Students and Ethnic Minority Hui Students in China

Metaphor is a bridge for understanding abstract concepts (the target domain) from concrete concepts (the source domain). This study, with two experiments, aimed to investigate the cultural differences of the horizontal spatial metaphors for morality between two groups of students: Han Chinese, the ethnic majority, and Hui Chinese, an ethnic minority in China. Experiment 1 adopted a spatial Stroop task. It showed that neither Hui nor Han students exhibited horizontal spatial metaphors for morality. Experiment 2 adopted a modified implicit association test paradigm to enhance the association between the moral concepts and the horizontal spatial positions. In Experiment 2, we found horizontal spatial metaphors for morality in Hui students, but not in Han students. These results indicated that the differences of horizontal spatial metaphors between Hui and Han participants were influenced by the different cultures they live in. Moreover, this study also found that the association between the source domain and the target domain was an important factor for metaphor formations

Overproduction of Mitochondrial Fission Proteins in Membranous Nephropathy in Children

Background/Aims: The molecules involved in nephrotic syndrome (NS) have not been fully clarified. Mitochondrial fission proteins are found to be involved in podocyte injury in vitro. Increased glomerular expression of mitochondrial fission proteins was found in adriamycin nephropathy in our previous study. Whether or not mitochondrial fission proteins are involved in podocyte injury in NS is not clear. This study explored the glomerular expression and possible pathological significance of mitochondrial fission-associated proteins, including dynamin-related protein 1 (Drp1) and mitochondrial fission protein 1 (Fis1), in children with NS. Methods: Eighteen children with primary NS, including 6 with minimal change disease, 6 with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, 6 with membranous nephropathy, 6 children with isolated haematuria and 3 normal controls were included. The glomerular expression of Drp1, phospho-Drp1 (Ser616) and Fis1, urinary protein measurements, and podocyte mitochondrial density under electron microscopy were investigated and compared. Results: Glomerular expression of Drp1, phospho-Drp1 (Ser616) and Fis1 was mainly increased in children with NS with membranous nephropathy. No relationship was found between glomerular expression of Drp1, phospho-Drp1 (Ser616) and Fis1 and podocyte mitochondrial density or urinary protein measurements. Conclusion: Glomerular overproduction of Drp1, phospho-Drp1 (Ser 616) and Fis1 occurred mainly in children with membranous nephropathy. The pathological significance deserves further investigation

Automatic analysis of facilitated taste-liking

This paper focuses on: (i) Automatic recognition of taste-liking from facial videos by comparatively training and evaluating models with engineered features and state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, and (ii) analysing the classification results along the aspects of facilitator type, and the gender, ethnicity, and personality of the participants. To this aim, a new beverage tasting dataset acquired under different conditions (human vs. robot facilitator and priming vs. non-priming facilitation) is utilised. The experimental results show that: (i) The deep spatiotemporal architectures provide better classification results than the engineered feature models; (ii) the classification results for all three classes of liking, neutral and disliking reach F1 scores in the range of 71%-91%; (iii) the personality-aware network that fuses participants’ personality information with that of facial reaction features provides improved classification performance; and (iv) classification results vary across participant gender, but not across facilitator type and participant ethnicity.EPSR

Apolipoprotein M Gene (APOM) Polymorphism Modifies Metabolic and Disease Traits in Type 2 Diabetes

This study aimed at substantiating the associations of the apolipoproein M gene (APOM) with type 2 diabetes (T2D) as well as with metabolic traits in Hong Kong Chinese. In addition, APOM gene function was further characterized to elucidate its activity in cholesterol metabolism. Seventeen APOM SNPs documented in the NCBI database were genotyped. Five SNPs were confirmed in our study cohort of 1234 T2D and 606 control participants. Three of the five SNPs rs707921(C+1871A), rs707922(G+1837T) and rs805264(G+203A) were in linkage disequilibrium (LD). We chose rs707922 to tag this LD region for down stream association analyses and characterized the function of this SNP at molecular level. No association between APOM and T2D susceptibility was detected in our Hong Kong Chinese cohort. Interestingly, the C allele of rs805297 was significantly associated with T2D duration of longer than 10 years (OR = 1.245, p = 0.015). The rs707922 TT genotype was significantly associated with elevated plasma total- and LDL- cholesterol levels (p = 0.006 and p = 0.009, respectively) in T2D patients. Molecular analyses of rs707922 lead to the discoveries of a novel transcript APOM5 as well as the cryptic nature of exon 5 of the gene. Ectopic expression of APOM5 transcript confirmed rs707922 allele-dependent activity of the transcript in modifying cholesterol homeostasis in vitro. In conclusion, the results here did not support APOM as a T2D susceptibility gene in Hong Kong Chinese. However, in T2D patients, a subset of APOM SNPs was associated with disease duration and metabolic traits. Further molecular analysis proved the functional activity of rs707922 in APOM expression and in regulation of cellular cholesterol content

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference