Analyses and Discussions of the Blackout in Indian Power Grid

Widespread blackouts of “7.30” and “7.31” occurred in India in 2012. Severe problems in the infrastructure, operation and management in India power grid have come to light after the successive blackouts. The fundamental reason and trigger factors are analyzed in this paper first. Based on the similar characteristics between China power grid and India power grid, in the case of Chinese grid, lessons of preventing blackout of large power grid were discussed by analysis and comparison, mainly on harmonious development and interactive operation of source-grid-load, and construction of wide-area protection system. Suggestions are proposed to improve the security and stability of large power grid with coordinated control system

Serotonin-mediated modulation of Na+/K+ pump current in rat hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The aim of this study was to investigate whether serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) can modulate Na⁺/K⁺pump in rat hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>5-HT (0.1, 1 mM) showed Na⁺/K⁺pump current (Ip) densities of 0.40 ± 0.04, 0.34 ± 0.03 pA/pF contrast to 0.63 ± 0.04 pA/pF of the control of 0.5 mM strophanthidin (Str), demonstrating 5-HT-induced inhibition of Ip in a dose-dependent manner in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons. The effect was partly attenuated by ondasetron, a 5-HT₃receptor (5-HT₃R) antagonist, not by WAY100635, a 5-HT_1AR antagonist, while 1-(3-Chlorophenyl) biguanide hydrochloride (m-CPBG), a 5-HT₃R specific agonist, mimicked the effect of 5-HT on Ip.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>5-HT inhibits neuronal Na⁺/K⁺pump activity via 5-HT₃R in rat hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons. This discloses novel mechanisms for the function of 5-HT in learning and memory, which may be a useful target to benefit these patients with cognitive disorder.</p

Methods used to study the oligomeric structure of G protein-coupled receptors

G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), which constitute the largest family of cell surface receptors, were originally thought to function as monomers, but are now recognized as being able to act in a wide range of oligomeric states and indeed, it is known that the oligomerization state of a GPCR can modulate its pharmacology and function. A number of experimental techniques have been devised to study GPCR oligomerization including those based upon traditional biochemistry such as blue-native polyacrylamide gel-electrophoresis (BN-PAGE), co-immunoprecipitation and protein-fragment complementation assays, those based upon resonance energy transfer, fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), time-resolved FRET, FRET spectrometry and bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET). Those based upon microscopy such as fluorescence recovery after photo-bleaching (FRAP), total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRF), spatial intensity distribution analysis (SpIDA) and various single molecule imaging techniques. Finally with the solution of a growing number of crystal structures, X-ray crystallography must be acknowledged as an important source of discovery in this field. A different, but in many ways complementary approach to the use of more traditional experimental techniques, are those involving computational methods which possess obvious merit in the study of the dynamics of oligomer formation and function. Here we summarize the latest developments which have been made in the methods used to study GPCR oligomerization and give an overview of their application

Investigation of hemorheological and analgesic properties of Qing-Nao tablets

Purpose: To investigate the hemorheological and analgesic potentials of Qing-Nao tablet (QNT).Methods: Sixty animals were divided into 6 groups (n = 10 for each group): normal, control, positive and 3 QNT-treated groups (QNT-H, QNT-M, QNT-L). Animals in normal and control groups received normal saline orally, while those in positive and QNT groups were orally administered either a suspension of the contents of Nao-luo-tong capsules or QNT. Hemorheological indices, including blood viscosity, plasma viscosity, activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT), thrombin time (TT), prothrombin time (PT) and fibrinogen (FIB), were determined. Acetic acid-induced writhing, tail tenderness and hot plate tests, as well as tests on microcirculation and balance/coordination were also carried out.Results: Acute toxicity results showed that QNT is a safe drug. Whole blood and plasma viscosities of the 3 QNT-treated groups significantly decreased (p &lt; 0.05). However, TT levels of the 3 QNT-treated animals significantly increased (p &lt; 0.05), whereas APTT and FIB values decreased significantly (p &lt; 0.01). Moreover, QNT significantly increased analgesia in three animal models (p &lt; 0.05). QNT-H also significantly improved balance and coordination abilities of mice (p &lt; 0.05).Conclusion: These results demonstrate that QNT improves microcirculation and analgesia, and may be a source of promising candidate drugs for the treatment of brain concussion sequelae.Keywords: Qing-Nao tablet, Hemorheological, Analgesic effects, Brain concussion sequelae, Microcirculation, Balance and coordination abilitie

Multi-Modal Automatic Prosody Annotation with Contrastive Pretraining of SSWP

In the realm of expressive Text-to-Speech (TTS), explicit prosodic boundaries significantly advance the naturalness and controllability of synthesized speech. While human prosody annotation contributes a lot to the performance, it is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, often resulting in inconsistent outcomes. Despite the availability of extensive supervised data, the current benchmark model still faces performance setbacks. To address this issue, a two-stage automatic annotation pipeline is novelly proposed in this paper. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose contrastive text-speech pretraining of Speech-Silence and Word-Punctuation (SSWP) pairs. The pretraining procedure hammers at enhancing the prosodic space extracted from joint text-speech space. In the second stage, we build a multi-modal prosody annotator, which consists of pretrained encoders, a straightforward yet effective text-speech feature fusion scheme, and a sequence classifier. Extensive experiments conclusively demonstrate that our proposed method excels at automatically generating prosody annotation and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Furthermore, our novel model has exhibited remarkable resilience when tested with varying amounts of data.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202